nadequate to their object? The concrete explanation,
no longer scientific, but metaphysical, must be sought along quite
another path, not in the direction of intelligence, but in that of
"sympathy."

* * * * *

Instinct is sympathy. If this sympathy could extend its object and also
reflect upon itself, it would give us the key to vital operations--just
as intelligence, developed and disciplined, guides us into matter.
For--we cannot too often repeat it--intelligence and instinct are turned
in opposite directions, the former towards inert matter, the latter
towards life. Intelligence, by means of science, which is its work, will
deliver up to us more and more completely the secret of physical
operations; of life it brings us, and moreover only claims to bring us,
a translation in terms of inertia. It goes all round life, taking from
outside the greatest possible number of views of it, drawing it into
itself instead of entering into it. But it is to the very inwardness of
life that _intuition_ leads us--by intuition I mean instinct that has
become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its
object and of enlarging it indefinitely.

That an effort of this kind is not impossible, is proved by the
existence in man of an aesthetic faculty along with normal perception.
Our eye perceives the features of the living being, merely as assembled,
not as mutually organized. The intention of life, the simple movement
that runs through the lines, that binds them together and gives them
significance, escapes it. This intention is just what the artist tries
to regain, in placing himself back within the object by a kind of
sympathy, in breaking down, by an effort of intuition, the barrier that
space puts up between him and his model. It is true that this aesthetic
intuition, like external perception, only attains the individual. But we
can conceive an inquiry turned in the same direction as art, which would
take life _in general_ for its object, just as physical science, in
following to the end the direction pointed out by external perception,
prolongs the individual facts into general laws. No doubt this
philosophy will never obtain a knowledge of its object comparable to
that which science has of its own. Intelligence remains the luminous
nucleus around which instinct, even enlarged and purified into
intuition, forms only a vague nebulosity. But, in default of knowledge
properly so cal