that is positive and above
the accidents of evolution.

From this point of view, the discordances of which nature offers us the
spectacle are singularly weakened. The organized world as a whole
becomes as the soil on which was to grow either man himself or a being
who morally must resemble him. The animals, however distant they may be
from our species, however hostile to it, have none the less been useful
traveling companions, on whom consciousness has unloaded whatever
encumbrances 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.

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 underlies 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 towards 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 movement of descent
which is materiality itself, so all organized beings, from the humblest
to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we