nil THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 265 



itself, to rule it. He owes it to his language, which 

 furnishes consciousness with an immaterial body in which 

 to incarnate itself and thus exempts it from dwelling 

 exclusively on material bodies, whose flux would soon 

 drag it along and finally swallow it up. He owes it to 

 social life, which stores and preserves efforts as language 

 stores thought, fixes thereby a mean level to which in- 

 dividuals must raise themselves at the outset, and by this 

 initial stimulation prevents the average man from slum- 

 bering and drives the superior man to mount still higher. 

 But our brain, our society, and our language are only the 

 external and various signs of one and the same internal 

 superiority. They tell, each after its manner, the unique, 

 exceptional success which life has won at a given moment 

 of its evolution. They express the difference of kind, 

 and not only of degree, which separates man from the rest 

 of the animal world. They let us guess that, while at the 

 end of the vast spring-board from which life has taken its 

 leap, all the others have stepped down, finding the cord 

 stretched too high, man alone has cleared the obstacle. 



It is in this quite special sense that man is the "term" 

 and the " end" of evolution. Life, we have said, transcends 

 finality as it transcends the other categories. It is es- 

 sentially a current sent through matter, drawing from it 

 what it can. There has not, therefore, properly speaking, 

 been any project or plan. On the other hand, it is abun- 

 dantly evident that the rest of nature is not for the sake of 

 man: we struggle like the other species, we have struggled 

 against other species. Moreover, if the evolution of life 

 had encountered other accidents in its course, if, thereby, 

 the current of life had been otherwise divided, we should 

 have been, physically and morally, far different from what 

 we are. For these various reasons it would be wrong to 

 regard humanity, such as we have it before our eyes, as 



