CONTINUITY OF BERGSON S THOUGHT 193 



author's point of view, neither of these can claim any particular 

 primacy, because both are natural and both are the usual and funda- 

 mental modes of procedure in evolution. The unity is in the stream of 

 life which would find its way through matter: the division arises from 

 the obstacles that oppose this stream. Supra-consciousness meets 

 matter to act upon it, and the resulting creation is conscious life. 

 In higher animals, everything acts as if the brain produced con- 

 sciousness, but in reality "brain and consciousness correspond 

 because equally they measure, the one by the complexity of its struc- 

 ture, and the other by the intensity of its awareness, the quantity 

 of choice which the living being has at its disposal." The conscious- 

 ness of living being is inseparable from its brain, as the sharp knife 

 from its edge. The human brain differs from others in the number of 

 mechanisms it can set up. Other animals cannot escape from automa- 

 tism, but the human brain is such that consciousness breaks the chain of 

 merely instinctive actions. In the great range of its varied actions, 

 it discovers invention, makes tools, causes matter to react upon itself, 

 and thus extends its bodily powers indefinitely. Language is at 

 once the result, and the further cause of advance, of human freedom. 

 Man alone has leaped from the springboard over the rope; all other 

 species have fallen short. But there was no plan beforehand of all 

 this: the elan vital simply did go farther through the human brain. 

 "It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will, 

 man, or superman, had sought to realize himself, and had succeeded 

 only by abandoning a part of himself on the way." 



Man has gone ahead often by making use of his traveling compan- 

 ions, whether friendly, hostile or merely indifferent. Man, having 

 once discovered intellect, had to cleave to this at all costs, even to the 

 crippling of his sympathetic, or intuitive, knowledge. But philosophy 

 must search out the glimmer of intuition which leads it into unknown 

 paths or it will starve in the region where intellect has devoted knowl- 

 edge entirely to the courting and controlling of material things. 

 Intellect will never bring us true life, or real progress. Only the spirit 

 can carry us onward. The spiritual life is our true destiny, but the 

 word has been too narrowly conceived. It is really the animal life 



