essential in the movement of
evolution.

"By bringing them into connection with one another, and making them
afterwards amalgamate with intelligence, should we not thus obtain a
consciousness co-extensive with life, and capable, by turning sharply
round upon the vital thrust which it feels behind it, of obtaining a
complete, though doubtless vanishing vision?" ("Creative Evolution",
Preface.) It is precisely in this that the act of philosophic intuition
consists. "We shall be told that, even so, we do not get beyond our
intelligence, since it is with our intelligence, and through our
intelligence, that we observe all the other forms of consciousness. And
we should be right in saying so, if we were pure intelligences, if
there had not remained round our conceptual and logical thought a vague
nebula, made of the very substance at the expense of which the luminous
nucleus, which we call intelligence, has been formed. In it reside
certain complementary powers of the understanding, of which we have only
a confused feeling when we remain shut up in ourselves, but which will
become illumined and distinct when they perceive themselves at work, so
to speak, in the evolution of nature. They will thus learn what effort
they have to make to become more intense, and to expand in the actual
direction of life." ("Creative Evolution", Preface.) Does that mean
abandonment to instinct, and descent with it into infra-consciousness
again? By no means. On the contrary, our task is to bring instinct to
enrich intelligence, to become free and illumined in it; and this ascent
towards super-consciousness is possible in the flash of an intuitive
act, as it is sometimes possible for the eye to perceive, as a pale and
fugitive gleam, beyond what we properly term light, the ultra-violet
rays of the spectrum.

Can we say of such a doctrine that it seeks to go, or that it goes
"against intelligence"? Nothing authorises such an accusation, for
limitation of a sphere is not misappreciation of every legitimate
exercise. But intelligence is not the whole of thought, and its natural
products do not completely exhaust or manifest our power of light.

Besides, that intelligence and reason are not things completed, for ever
arrested in their inner structure, that they evolve and expand, is a
fact: the place of discovery is precisely the residual fringe of which
we were speaking above. In this respect, the history of thought would
furnish examples in plent