174 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



the Ammophila and its victim, which teaches it from 

 within, so to say, concerning the vulnerability of the 

 caterpillar. This feeling of vulnerability might owe noth- 

 ing to outward perception, but result from the mere presence 

 together of the Ammophila and the caterpillar, considered 

 no longer as two organisms, but as two activities. It 

 would express, in a concrete form, the relation of the one 

 to the other. Certainly, a scientific theory cannot appeal 

 to considerations of this kind. It must not put action 

 before organization, sympathy before perception and know- 

 ledge. But, once more, either philosophy has nothing 

 to see here, or its role begins where that of science ends. 



Whether it makes instinct a "compound reflex," or 

 a habit formed intelligently that has become automatism, 

 or a sum of small accidental advantages accumulated 

 and fixed by selection, in every case science claims to 

 resolve instinct completely either into intelligent actions, 

 or into mechanisms built up piece by piece like those 

 combined by our intelligence. I agree indeed that science 

 is here within its function. It gives us, in default of a real 

 analysis of the object, a translation of this object in terms 

 of intelligence. But is it not plain that science itself 

 invites philosophy to consider things in another way? 

 If our biology was still that of Aristotle, if it regarded the 

 series of living beings as unilinear, if it showed us the whole 

 of life evolving towards intelligence and passing, to that 

 end, through sensibility and instinct, we should be right, 

 we, the intelligent beings, in turning back towards the 

 earlier and consequently inferior manifestations of life 

 and in claiming to fit them, without deforming them, into 

 the molds of our understanding. But one of the clearest 

 results of biology has been to show that evolution has 

 taken place along divergent lines. It is at the extremity 

 of two of these lines — the two principal — that we find 



