which come immediately before man, we witness an attempt which is always
foiled and always resumed with more and more art. Man has triumphed;
with difficulty, it is true, and so incompletely that a moment's lapse
and inattention on his part surrender him to automatism again. But
he has triumphed..." ("Report of the French Philosophical Society",
meeting, 2nd May 1901.)

And Mr Bergson adds in another place: ("Creative Evolution", pages
286-287.) "With man consciousness breaks the chain. In man and in man
only it obtains its freedom. The whole history of life, till man, had
been the history of an effort of consciousness to lift matter, and of
the more or less complete crushing of consciousness by matter falling
upon it again. The enterprise was paradoxical; if indeed we can speak
here, except paradoxically, of enterprise and effort. The task was to
take matter, which is necessity itself, and create an instrument of
liberty, construct a mechanical system to triumph over mechanism, to
employ the determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net
it had spread. But everywhere, except in man, consciousness let itself
be caught in the net of which it sought to traverse the meshes. It
remained taken in the mechanisms it had set up. The automatism which it
claimed to be drawing towards liberty enfolds it and drags it down. It
has not the strength to get away, because the energy with which it had
supplied itself for action is almost entirely employed in maintaining
the exceedingly subtile and essentially unstable equilibrium into which
it has brought matter. But man does not merely keep his machine going,
he succeeds in using it as it pleases him.

"He owes it without doubt to the superiority of his brain, which allows
him to construct an unlimited number of motor mechanisms, to oppose new
habits to old time after time, and to master automatism by dividing
it against itself. He owes it to his language, which furnishes
consciousness with an immaterial body in which to become incarnate, thus
dispensing it from depending exclusively upon material bodies, the flux
of which would drag it down and soon engulf it. He owes it to social
life, which stores and preserves efforts as language stores thought,
thereby fixing a mean level to which individuals will rise with
ease, and which, by means of this initial impulse, prevents average
individuals from going to sleep and urges better people to rise higher.
But our brain, our soci