182 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 



been turned either in the direction of intuition or in that of 

 intellect. Intuition, at first sight, seems far preferable 

 to intellect, since in it life and consciousness remain within 

 themselves. But a glance at the evolution of living beings 

 shows us that intuition could not go very far. On the 

 side of intuition, consciousness found itself so restricted 

 by its envelope that intuition had to shrink into instinct, 

 that is, to embrace only the very small portion of life that 

 interested it; and this it embraces only in the dark, touch- 

 ing it while hardly seeing it. On this side, the horizon 

 was soon shut out. On the contrary, consciousness, in 

 shaping itself into intelligence, that is to say in concentrat- 

 ing itself at first on matter, seems to externalize itself in 

 relation to itself; but, just because it adapts itself thereby 

 to objects from without, it succeeds in moving among 

 them and in evading the barriers they oppose to it, thus 

 opening to itself an unlimited field. Once freed, more- 

 over, it can turn inwards on itself, and awaken the po- 

 tentialities of intuition which still slumber within it. 



From this point of view, not only does consciousness 

 appear as the motive principle of evolution, but also, 

 among conscious beings themselves, man comes to occupy 

 a privileged place. Between him and the animals the dif- 

 ference is no longer one of degree, but of kind. We shall 

 show how this conclusion is arrived at in our next chapter. 

 Let us now show how the preceding analyses suggest it. 



A noteworthy fact is the extraordinary disproportion 

 between the consequences of an invention and the invention 

 itself. We have said that intelligence is modeled on matter 

 and that it aims in the first place at fabrication. But 

 does it fabricate in order to fabricate or does it not pursue 

 involuntarily, and even unconsciously, something entirely 

 different? Fabricating consists in shaping matter, in 

 making it supple and in bending it, in converting it into 



