ation, but its
movement has been at once infinitely retarded and infinitely divided. On
the one hand, indeed, consciousness has had to fall asleep, like the
chrysalis in the envelope in which it is preparing for itself wings;
and, on the other hand, the manifold tendencies it contained have been
distributed among divergent series of organisms which, moreover, express
these tendencies outwardly in movements rather than internally in
representations. In the course of this evolution, while some beings have
fallen more and more asleep, others have more and more completely
awakened, and the torpor of some has served the activity of others. But
the waking could be effected in two different ways. Life, that is to say
consciousness launched into matter, fixed its attention either on its
own movement or on the matter it was passing through; and it has thus
been turned either in the direction of intuition or in that of
intellect. Intuition, at first sight, seems far preferable to intellect,
since in it life and consciousness remain within themselves. But a
glance at the evolution of living beings shows us that intuition could
not go very far. On the side of intuition, consciousness found itself so
restricted by its envelope that intuition had to shrink into instinct,
that is, to embrace only the very small portion of life that interested
it; and this it embraces only in the dark, touching it while hardly
seeing it. On this side, the horizon was soon shut out. On the contrary,
consciousness, in shaping itself into intelligence, that is to say in
concentrating itself at first on matter, seems to externalize itself in
relation to itself; but, just because it adapts itself thereby to
objects from without, it succeeds in moving among them and in evading
the barriers they oppose to it, thus opening to itself an unlimited
field. Once freed, moreover, it can turn inwards on itself, and awaken
the potentialities of intuition which still slumber within it.

From this point of view, not only does consciousness appear as the
motive principle of evolution, but also, among conscious beings
themselves, man comes to occupy a privileged place. Between him and the
animals the difference is no longer one of degree, but of kind. We shall
show how this conclusion is arrived at in our next chapter. Let us now
show how the preceding analyses suggest it.

A noteworthy fact is the extraordinary disproportion between the
consequences of an invention and