Chapter III: On the Meaning of Life--The Order of Nature and the Form of Intelligence (4)

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 personal survival, they are right not to close their ears to its voice; but if there exist "souls" capable of an independent life, whence do they come? When, how and why do they enter into this body which we see arise, quite naturally, from a mixed cell derived from the bodies of its two parents? All these questions will remain unanswered, a philosophy of intuition will be a negation of science, will be sooner or later swept away by science, if it does not resolve to see the life of the body just where it really is, on the road that leads to the life of the spirit. But it will then no longer have to do with definite living beings. Life as a whole, from the initial impulsion that thrust it into the world, will appear as a wave which rises, and which is opposed by the descending movement of matter. On the greater part of its surface, at different heights, the current is converted by matter into a vortex. At one point alone it passes freely, dragging with it the obstacle which will weigh on its progress but will not stop it. At this point is humanity; it is our privileged situation. On the other hand, this rising wave is consciousness, and, like all consciousness, it includes potentialities without number which interpenetrate and to which consequently neither the category of unity nor that of multiplicity is appropriate, made as they both are for inert matter. The matter that it bears along with it, and in the interstices of which it inserts itself, alone can divide it into distinct individualities. On flows the current, running through human generations, subdividing itself into individuals. This subdivision was vaguely indicated in it, but could not have been made clear without matter. Thus souls are continually being created, which, nevertheless, in a certain sense pre-existed. They are nothing else than the little rills into which the great river of life divides itself, flowing through the body of humanity. The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course. Consciousness is distinct from the organism it animates, although it must undergo its vicissitudes. As the possible actions which a state of consciousness indicates are at every instant beginning to be carried out in the nervous centres, the brain underlines at every instant the motor indications of the state of consciousness; but the interdependency of consciousness and brain is limited to this; the destiny of consciousness 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 _Matière et mémoire_, 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: psychê], on the other hand Plotinus sometimes speaks of it as of a _discourse_. More generally, the relation that we establish in the present chapter between "extension" and "detension" resembles in some aspects that which Plotinus supposes (some developments of which must have inspired M. Ravaisson) when he makes extension not indeed an inversion of original Being, but an enfeeblement of its essence, one of the last stages of the procession, (see in particular, _Enn._ IV. iii. 9-11, and III. vi. 17-18). Yet ancient philosophy did not see what consequences would result from this for mathematics, for Plotinus, like Plato, erected mathematical essences into absolute realities. Above all, it suffered itself to be deceived by the purely superficial analogy of duration with extension. It treated the one as it treated the other, regarding change as a degradation of immutability, the sensible as a fall from the intelligible. Whence, as we shall show in the next chapter, a philosophy which fails to recognize the real function and scope of the intellect.]

[Footnote 81: Bastian, _The Brain as an Organ of the Mind_, pp. 214-16.]

[Footnote 82: We have dwelt on this point in a former work. See the _Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience_, Paris, 1889, pp. 155-160.]

[Footnote 83: _Op. cit._ chaps. i. and ii. _passim_.]

[Footnote 84: Cf. especially the profound studies of M. Ed. Le Roy in the _Revue de métaph. et de morale_.]

[Footnote 85: _Matière et mémoire_, chapters iii. and iv.]

[Footnote 86: See in particular, _Phys._, iv. 215 a 2; v. 230 b 12; viii. 255 a 2; and _De Caelo_, iv. 1-5; ii. 296 b 27; iv. 308 a 34.]

[Footnote 87: _De Caelo_, iv. 310 a 34 [Greek: to d' eis ton autou topon pherethai hekaoton to eis to autou eidos esti pheresthai].]

[Footnote 88: On these differences of quality see the work of Duhem, _L'Évolution de la mécanique_, Paris, 1905, pp. 197 ff.]

[Footnote 89: Boltzmann, _Vorlesungen über Gastheorie_, Leipzig, 1898, pp. 253 ff.]

[Footnote 90: In a book rich in facts and in ideas (_La Dissolution opposée a l'évolution_, Paris, 1899), M. André Lalande shows us everything going towards death, in spite of the momentary resistance which organisms seem to oppose.--But, even from the side of unorganized matter, have we the right to extend to the entire universe considerations drawn from the present state of our solar system? Beside the worlds which are dying, there are without doubt worlds that are being born. On the other hand, in the organized world, the death of individuals does not seem at all like a diminution of "life in general," or like a necessity which life submits to reluctantly. As has been more than once remarked, life has never made an effort to prolong indefinitely the existence of the individual, although on so many other points it has made so many successful efforts. Everything is _as if_ this death had been willed, or at least accepted, for the greater progress of life in general.]

[Footnote 91: We have dwelt on this point in an article entitled "Introduction à la métaphysique" (_Revue de métaphysique et de morale_, January, 1903, pp. 1-25).]

[Footnote 92: Cf. a paper written (in Russian) by Serkovski, and reviewed in the _Année biologique_, 1898, p. 317.]

[Footnote 93: Ed. Perrier, _Les Colonies animales_, Paris, 1897 (2nd edition).]

[Footnote 94: Delage, _L'Hérédité_, 2nd edition, Paris, 1903, p. 97. Cf. by the same author, "La Conception polyzoïque des êtres" (_Revue scientifique_, 1896, pp. 641-653).]

[Footnote 95: This is the theory maintained by Kunstler, Delage, Sedgwick, Labbé, etc. Its development, with bibliographical references, will be found in the work of Busquet, _Les êtres vivants_, Paris, 1899.]