268 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



interest is at stake. On our personality, on our liberty, 

 on the place we occupy in the whole of nature, on our 

 origin and perhaps also on our destiny, it throws a light 

 feeble and vacillating, but which none the less pierces the 

 darkness of the night in which the intellect leaves us. 



These fleeting intuitions, which light up their object 

 only at distant intervals, philosophy ought to seize, first 

 to sustain them, then to expand them and so unite them 

 together. The more it advances in this work, the more 

 will it perceive that intuition is mind itself, and, in a certain 

 sense, life itself: the intellect has been cut out of it by a 

 process resembling that which has generated matter. 

 Thus is revealed the unity of the spiritual life. We recog- 

 nize it only when we place ourselves in intuition in order 

 to go from intuition to the intellect, for from the intellect 

 we shall never pass to intuition. 



Philosophy introduces us thus into the spiritual life. 

 And it shows us at the same time the relation of the life 

 of the spirit to that of the body. The great error of the 

 doctrines on the spirit has been the idea that by isolating 

 the spiritual life from all the rest, by suspending it in space 

 as high as possible above the earth, they were placing it 

 beyond attack, as if they were not thereby simply exposing 

 it to be taken as an effect of mirage! Certainly they are 

 right to listen to conscience when conscience affirms human 

 freedom; but the intellect is there, which says that the 

 cause determines its effect, that like conditions like, that 

 all is repeated and that all is given. They are right to 

 believe in the absolute reality of the person and in his 

 independence toward matter; but science is there, which 

 shows the interdependence of conscious life and cerebral 

 activity. They are right to attribute to man a privileged 

 place in nature, to hold that the distance is infinite be- 

 tween the animal and man; but the history of life is there, 



