.

* * * * *

Must we then give up fathoming the depths of life? Must we keep to that
mechanistic idea of it which the understanding will always give us--an
idea necessarily artificial and symbolical, since it makes the total
activity of life shrink to the form of a certain human activity which is
only a partial and local manifestation of life, a result or by-product
of the vital process? We should have to do so, indeed, if life had
employed all the psychical potentialities it possesses in producing pure
understandings--that is to say, in making geometricians. But the line of
evolution that ends in man is not the only one. On other paths,
divergent from it, other forms of consciousness have been developed,
which have not been able to free themselves from external constraints or
to regain control over themselves, as the human intellect has done, but
which, none the less, also express something that is immanent and
essential in the evolutionary movement. Suppose these other forms of
consciousness brought together and amalgamated with intellect: would not
the result be a consciousness as wide as life? And such a consciousness,
turning around suddenly against the push of life which it feels behind,
would have a vision of life complete--would it not?--even though the
vision were fleeting.

It will be said that, even so, we do not transcend our intellect, for it
is still with our intellect, and through our intellect, that we see the
other forms of consciousness. And this would be right if we were pure
intellects, if there did not remain, around our conceptual and logical
thought, a vague nebulosity, made of the very substance out of which has
been formed the luminous nucleus that we call the intellect. Therein
reside certain powers that are complementary to the understanding,
powers of which we have only an indistinct feeling when we remain shut
up in ourselves, but which will become clear and distinct when they
perceive themselves at work, so to speak, in the evolution of nature.
They will thus learn what sort of effort they must make to be
intensified and expanded in the very direction of life.

* * * * *

This amounts to saying that _theory of knowledge_ and _theory of life_
seem to us inseparable. A theory of life that is not accompanied by a
criticism of knowledge is obliged to accept, as they stand, the concepts
which the understanding puts at its dispos