in.] THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 267 



to it, have none the less been useful traveling companions, 

 on whom consciousness has unloaded whatever encum- 

 brances it was dragging along, and who have enabled it to 

 rise, in man, to heights from which it sees an unlimited 

 horizon open again before it. 



It is true that it has not only abandoned cumbersome 

 baggage on the way; it has also had to give up valuable 

 goods. Consciousness, in man, is pre-eminently intellect. 

 It might have been, it ought, so it seems, to have been 

 also intuition. Intuition and intellect represent two 

 opposite directions of the work of consciousness: intuition 

 goes in the very direction of life, intellect goes in the in- 

 verse direction, and thus finds itself naturally in accordance 

 with the movement of matter. A complete and perfect 

 humanity would be that in which these two forms of con- 

 scious activity should attain their full development. And, 

 between this humanity and ours, we may conceive any 

 number of possible stages, corresponding to all the degrees 

 imaginable of intelligence and of intuition. In this 

 lies the part of contingency in the mental structure of 

 our species. A different evolution might have led to 

 a humanity either more intellectual still or more intuitive. 

 In the humanity of which we are a part, intuition is, in 

 fact, almost completely sacrificed to intellect. It seems 

 that to conquer matter, and to reconquer its own self, 

 consciousness has had to exhaust the best part of its power. 

 This conquest, in the particular conditions in which it has 

 been accomplished, has required that consciousness should 

 adapt itself to the habits of matter and concentrate all 

 its attention on them, in fact determine itself more espe- 

 cially as intellect. Intuition is there, however, but vague 

 and above all discontinuous. It is a lamp almost ex- 

 tinguished, which only glimmers now and then, for a few 

 moments at most. But it glimmers wherever a vital 



