ould adapt itself to the
habits of matter and concentrate all its attention on them, in fact
determine itself more especially as intellect. Intuition is there,
however, but vague and above all discontinuous. It is a lamp almost
extinguished, which only glimmers now and then, for a few moments at
most. But it glimmers wherever a vital interest is at stake. On our
personality, on our liberty, on the place we occupy in the whole of
nature, on our origin and perhaps also on our destiny, it throws a light
feeble and vacillating, but which none the less pierces the darkness of
the night in which the intellect leaves us.

These fleeting intuitions, which light up their object only at distant
intervals, philosophy ought to seize, first to sustain them, then to
expand them and so unite them together. The more it advances in this
work, the more will it perceive that intuition is mind itself, and, in a
certain sense, life itself: the intellect has been cut out of it by a
process resembling that which has generated matter. Thus is revealed the
unity of the spiritual life. We recognize it only when we place
ourselves in intuition in order to go from intuition to the intellect,
for from the intellect we shall never pass to intuition.

Philosophy introduces us thus into the spiritual life. And it shows us
at the same time the relation of the life of the spirit to that of the
body. The great error of the doctrines on the spirit has been the idea
that by isolating the spiritual life from all the rest, by suspending it
in space as high as possible above the earth, they were placing it
beyond attack, as if they were not thereby simply exposing it to be
taken as an effect of mirage! Certainly they are right to listen to
conscience when conscience affirms human freedom; but the intellect is
there, which says that the cause determines its effect, that like
conditions like, that all is repeated and that all is given. They are
right to believe in the absolute reality of the person and in his
independence toward matter; but science is there, which shows the
interdependence of conscious life and cerebral activity. They are right
to attribute to man a privileged place in nature, to hold that the
distance is infinite between the animal and man; but the history of life
is there, which makes us witness the genesis of species by gradual
transformation, and seems thus to reintegrate man in animality. When a
strong instinct assures the probability of