270 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 



theless, in a certain sense pre-existed. They are nothing 

 else than the little rills into which the great river of life 

 divides itself, flowing through the body of humanity. 

 The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, 

 although it must adopt its winding course. Consciousness 

 is distinct from the organism it animates, although it 

 must undergo its vicissitudes. As the possible actions 

 which a state of consciousness indicates are at every 

 instant beginning to be carried out in the nervous centres, 

 the brain underlines at every instant the motor indications 

 of the state of consciousness; but the interdependency of 

 consciousness and brain is limited to this; the destiny 

 of consciousness is not bound up on that account with the 

 destiny of cerebral matter. Finally, consciousness is 

 essentially free; it is freedom itself; but it cannot pass 

 through matter without settling on it, without adapting 

 itself to it: this adaptation is what we call intellectuality; 

 and the intellect, turning itself back toward active, that 

 is to say free, consciousness, naturally makes it enter into 

 the conceptual forms into which it is accustomed to see 

 matter fit. It will therefore always perceive freedom 

 in the form of necessity; it will always neglect the part 

 of novelty or of creation inherent in the free act; it will 

 always substitute for action itself an imitation artificial, 

 approximative, obtained by compounding the old with the 

 old and the same with the same. Thus, to the eyes of a 

 philosophy that attempts to reabsorb intellect in intuition, 

 many difficulties vanish or become light. But such a 

 doctrine does not only facilitate speculation; it gives us 

 also more power to act and to live. For, with it, we feel 

 ourselves no longer isolated in humanity, humanity no 

 longer seems isolated in the nature that it dominates. 

 As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire 

 solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided move- 



