itself. On other lines of evolution there have traveled other tendencies
which life implied, and of which, since everything interpenetrates, man
has, doubtless, kept something, but of which he has kept only very
little. _It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we
will_, man _or_ superman, _had sought to realize himself, and had
succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way_. The losses
are represented by the rest of the animal world, and even by the
vegetable world, at least in what these have 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.

It is true that it has not only abandoned cumbersome baggage on the way;
it has also had to give up valuable goods. Consciousness, in man, is
pre-eminently intellect. It might have been, it ought, so it seems, to
have been also intuition. Intuition and intellect represent two opposite
directions of the work of consciousness: intuition goes in the very
direction of life, intellect goes in the inverse direction, and thus
finds itself naturally in accordance with the movement of matter. A
complete and perfect humanity would be that in which these two forms of
conscious activity should attain their full development. And, between
this humanity and ours, we may conceive any number of possible stages,
corresponding to all the degrees imaginable of intelligence and of
intuition. In this lies the part of contingency in the mental structure
of our species. A different evolution might have led to a humanity
either more intellectual still or more intuitive. In the humanity of
which we are a part, intuition is, in fact, almost completely sacrificed
to intellect. It seems that to conquer matter, and to reconquer its own
self, consciousness has had to exhaust the best part of its power. This
conquest, in the particular conditions in which it has been
accomplished, has required that consciousness sh