in which we go on recomposing the same whole with the same parts,
repeating the same movements to obtain the same result. The finality it
understands best is the finality of our industry, in which we work on a
model given in advance, that is to say, old or composed of elements
already known. As to invention properly so called, which is, however,
the point of departure of industry itself, our intellect does not
succeed in grasping it in its _upspringing_, that is to say, in its
indivisibility, nor in its _fervor_, that is to say, in its
creativeness. Explaining it always consists in resolving it, it the
unforeseeable and new, into elements old or known, arranged in a
different order. The intellect can no more admit complete novelty than
real becoming; that is to say, here again it lets an essential aspect of
life escape, as if it were not intended to think such an object.

All our analyses bring us to this conclusion. But it is hardly necessary
to go into such long details concerning the mechanism of intellectual
working; it is enough to consider the results. We see that the
intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment
it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or
the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigor, the stiffness and the
brutality of an instrument not designed for such use. The history of
hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us much in this matter. When we think of
the cardinal, urgent and constant need we have to preserve our bodies
and to raise our souls, of the special facilities given to each of us,
in this field, to experiment continually on ourselves and on others, of
the palpable injury by which the wrongness of a medical or pedagogical
practise is both made manifest and punished at once, we are amazed at
the stupidity and especially at the persistence of errors. We may easily
find their origin in the natural obstinacy with which we treat the
living like the lifeless and think all reality, however fluid, under the
form of the sharply defined solid. We are at ease only in the
discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. _The intellect is
characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life._

* * * * *

Instinct, on the contrary, is molded on the very form of life. While
intelligence treats everything mechanically, instinct proceeds, so to
speak, organically. If the consciousness that slumbers in it should
awake, if it