o the living being's power of choice; it is
coextensive with the fringe of possible action that surrounds the real
action: consciousness is synonymous with invention and with freedom.
Now, in the animal, invention is never anything but a variation on the
theme of routine. Shut up in the habits of the species, it succeeds, no
doubt, in enlarging them by its individual initiative; but it escapes
automatism only for an instant, for just the time to create a new
automatism. The gates of its prison close as soon as they are opened; by
pulling at its chain it succeeds only in stretching it. With man,
consciousness breaks the chain. In man, and in man alone, it sets itself
free. The whole history of life until man has been that of the effort of
consciousness to raise matter, and of the more or less complete
overwhelming of consciousness by the matter which has fallen back on it.
The enterprise was paradoxical, if, indeed, we may speak here otherwise
than by metaphor of enterprise and of effort. It was to create with
matter, which is necessity itself, an instrument of freedom, to make a
machine which should triumph over mechanism, and to use the determinism
of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which this very
determinism had spread. But, everywhere except in man, consciousness has
let itself be caught in the net whose meshes it tried to pass through:
it has remained the captive of the mechanisms it has set up. Automatism,
which it tries to draw in the direction of freedom, winds about it and
drags it down. It has not the power to escape, because the energy it has
provided for acts is almost all employed in maintaining the infinitely
subtle and essentially unstable equilibrium into which it has brought
matter. But man not only maintains his machine, he succeeds in using it
as he pleases. Doubtless he owes this to the superiority of his brain,
which enables him to build an unlimited number of motor mechanisms, to
oppose new habits to the old ones unceasingly, and, by dividing
automatism against itself, to rule it. He owes it to his language,
which furnishes consciousness with an immaterial body in which to
incarnate itself and thus exempts it from dwelling exclusively on
material bodies, whose flux would soon drag it along and finally swallow
it up. He owes it to social life, which stores and preserves efforts as
language stores thought, fixes thereby a mean level to which individuals
must raise themselves at the outset,