opened; by pulling at its chain it succeeds only in stretching it. With
man, consciousness breaks the chain. In man, and in man alone, it sets
itself free. The whole history of life until man has been that of the
effort of consciousness to raise matter, and of the more or less
complete overwhelming of consciousness by the matter which has fallen
back on it. The enterprise was paradoxical, if, indeed, we may speak
here otherwise than by metaphor of enterprise and of effort. It was to
create with matter, which is necessity itself, an instrument of freedom,
to make a machine which should triumph over mechanism, and to use
determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which this
very determinism had spread. But, everywhere except in man,
consciousness has let itself be caught in the net whose meshes it tried
to pass through: it has remained the captive of the mechanisms it has
set up. Automatism, which it tries to draw in the direction of freedom,
winds about it and drags it down. It has not the power to escape,
because the energy it has provided for acts is almost all employed in
maintaining the infinitely subtle and essentially unstable equilibrium
into which it has brought matter. But man not only maintains his
machine, he succeeds in using it as he pleases. Doubtless he owes this
to the superiority of his brain, which enables him to build an unlimited
number of motor mechanisms, to oppose new habits to the old ones
unceasingly, and, by dividing automatism against itself, to rule it. He
owes it to his language, which furnishes consciousness with an
immaterial body in which to incarnate itself and thus exempts it from
dwelling exclusively on material bodies, whose flux would soon drag it
along and finally swallow it up. He owes it to social life, which stores
and preserves efforts as language stores thought, fixes thereby a mean
level to which individuals must raise themselves at the outset, and by
this initial stimulation prevents the average man from slumbering and
drives the superior man to mount still higher. But our brain, our
society, and our language are only the external and various signs of one
and the same internal superiority. They tell, each after its manner, the
unique, exceptional success which life has won at a given moment of its
evolution. They express the difference of kind, and not only of degree,
which separates man from the rest of the animal world. They let us guess
that, while at the en