ii.] LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 183 



an instrument in order to become master of it. It is 

 this mastery that profits humanity, much more even than 

 the material result of the invention itself. Though we 

 derive an immediate advantage from the thing made, as 

 an intelligent animal might do, and though this advantage 

 be all the inventor sought, it is a slight matter compared 

 with the new ideas and new feelings that the invention 

 may give rise to in every direction, as if the essential part 

 of the effect were to raise us above ourselves and enlarge 

 our horizon. Between the effect and the cause the dis- 

 proportion is so great that it is difficult to regard the cause 

 as producer of its effect. It releases it, whilst settling, 

 indeed, its direction. Everything happens as though 

 the grip of intelligence on matter were, in its main intention, 

 to let something pass that matter is holding back. 



The same impression arises when we compare the brain 

 of man with that of the animals. The difference at first 

 appears to be only a difference of size and complexity. 

 But, judging by function, there must be something else 

 besides. In the animal, the motor mechanisms that the 

 brain succeeds in setting up, or, in other words, the habits 

 contracted voluntarily, have no other object nor effect 

 than the accomplishment of the movements marked out 

 in these habits, stored in these mechanisms. But, in man, 

 the motor habit may have a second result, out of proportion 

 to the first: it can hold other motor habits in check, and 

 thereby, in overcoming automatism, set consciousness 

 free. We know what vast regions in the human brain 

 language occupies. The cerebral mechanisms that corre- 

 spond to the words have this in particular, that they can 

 be made to grapple with other mechanisms, those, for 

 instance, that correspond to the things themselves, or 

 even be made to grapple with one another. Meanwhile 

 consciousness, which would have been dragged down and 



