264 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



consciousness is synonymous with invention and with 

 freedom. Now, in the animal, invention is never any- 

 thing but a variation on the theme of routine. Shut up 

 in the habits of the species, it succeeds, no doubt, in en- 

 larging them by its individual initiative; but it escapes 

 automatism only for an instant, for just the time to create 

 a new automatism. The gates of its prison close as soon 

 as they are opened; by pulling at its chain it succeeds only 

 in stretching it. With man, consciousness breaks the 

 chain. In man, and in man alone, it sets itself free. The 

 whole history of life until man has been that of the effort of 

 consciousness to raise matter, and of the more or less com- 

 plete overwhelming of consciousness by the matter which 

 has fallen back on it. The enterprise was paradoxical, 

 if, indeed, we may speak here otherwise than by metaphor 

 of enterprise and of effort. It was to create with matter, 

 which is necessity itself, an instrument of freedom, to 

 make a machine which should triumph over mechanism, 

 and to use the determinism of nature to pass through 

 the meshes of the net which this very determinism had 

 spread. But, everywhere except in man, consciousness 

 has let itself be caught in the net whose meshes it tried 

 to pass through: it has remained the captive of the 

 mechanisms it has set up. Automatism, which it tries 

 to draw in the direction of freedom, winds about it and 

 drags it down. It has not the power to escape, because 

 the energy it has provided for acts is almost all employed 

 in maintaining the infinitely subtle and essentially unstable 

 equilibrium into which it has brought matter. But man 

 not only maintains his machine, he succeeds in using it as 

 he pleases. Doubtless he owes this to the superiority of 

 his brain, which enables him to build an unlimited number 

 of motor mechanisms, to oppose new habits to the old 

 ones unceasingly, and, by dividing automatism against 



