ii.] LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 177 



by the existence in man of an aesthetic faculty along with 

 normal perception. Our eye perceives the features of 

 the living being, merely as assembled, not as mutually 

 organized. The intention of life, the simple movement 

 that runs through the lines, that binds them together and 

 gives them significance, escapes it. This intention is 

 just what the artist tries to regain, in placing himself 

 back within the object by a kind of sympathy, in breaking 

 down, by an effort of intuition, the barrier that space 

 puts up between him and his model. It is true that this 

 aesthetic intuition, like external perception, only attains 

 the individual. But we can conceive an inquiry turned 

 in the same direction as art, which would take life in general 

 for its object, just as physical science, in following to the 

 end the direction pointed out by external perception, pro- 

 longs the individual facts into general laws. No doubt 

 this philosophy will never obtain a knowledge of its object 

 comparable to that which science has of its own. In- 

 telligence remains the luminous nucleus around which 

 instinct, even enlarged and purified into intuition, forms 

 only a vague nebulosity. But, in default of knowledge 

 properly so called, reserved to pure intelligence, intuition 

 may enable us to grasp what it is that intelligence fails 

 to give us, and indicate the means of supplementing it. 

 On the one hand, it will utilize the mechanism of intelli- 

 gence itself to show how intellectual molds cease to be 

 strictly applicable; and on the other hand, by its own work, 

 it will suggest to us the vague feeling, if nothing more, of 

 what must take the place of intellectual molds. Thus, 

 intuition may bring the intellect to recognize that life 

 does not quite go into the category of the many nor yet 

 into that of the one; that neither mechanical causality 

 nor finality can give a sufficient interpretation of the vital 

 process. Then, by the sympathetic communication which 



