usness
is not bound up on that account with the destiny of cerebral matter.
Finally, consciousness is essentially free; it is freedom itself; but it
cannot pass through matter without settling on it, without adapting
itself to it: this adaptation is what we call intellectuality; and the
intellect, turning itself back toward active, that is to say free,
consciousness, naturally makes it enter into the conceptual forms into
which it is accustomed to see matter fit. It will therefore always
perceive freedom in the form of necessity; it will always neglect the
part of novelty or of creation inherent in the free act; it will always
substitute for action itself an imitation artificial, approximative,
obtained by compounding the old with the old and the same with the same.
Thus, to the eyes of a philosophy that attempts to reabsorb intellect in
intuition, many difficulties vanish or become light. But such a doctrine
does not only facilitate speculation; it gives us also more power to act
and to live. For, with it, we feel ourselves no longer isolated in
humanity, humanity no longer seems isolated in the nature that it
dominates. As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire
solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent
which is materiality itself, so all organized beings, from the humblest
to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we
are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence a single
impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself
indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the same
tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides
animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one
immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an
overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the
most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 78: We have developed this point in _Matiere et memoire_,
chaps. ii. and iii., notably pp. 78-80 and 169-186.]

[Footnote 79: Faraday, _A Speculation concerning Electric Conduction_
(_Philosophical Magazine_, 3d. series, vol. xxiv.).]

[Footnote 80: Our comparison does no more than develop the content of
the term [Greek: logos], as Plotinus understands it. For while the
[Greek: logos] of this philosopher is a generating and informing power,
an aspect or a fragment of the [Greek: psyche], on the o