were wound up into knowledge instead of being wound off
into action, if we could ask and it could reply, it would give up to us
the most intimate secrets of life. For it only carries out further the
work by which life organizes matter--so that we cannot say, as has often
been shown, where organization ends and where instinct begins. When the
little chick is breaking its shell with a peck of its beak, it is acting
by instinct, and yet it does but carry on the movement which has borne
it through embryonic life. Inversely, in the course of embryonic life
itself (especially when the embryo lives freely in the form of a larva),
many of the acts accomplished must be referred to instinct. The most
essential of the primary instincts are really, therefore, vital
processes. The potential consciousness that accompanies them is
generally actualized only at the outset of the act, and leaves the rest
of the process to go on by itself. It would only have to expand more
widely, and then dive into its own depth completely, to be one with the
generative force of life.

When we see in a living body thousands of cells working together to a
common end, dividing the task between them, living each for itself at
the same time as for the others, preserving itself, feeding itself,
reproducing itself, responding to the menace of danger by appropriate
defensive reactions, how can we help thinking of so many instincts? And
yet these are the natural functions of the cell, the constitutive
elements of its vitality. On the other hand, when we see the bees of a
hive forming a system so strictly organized that no individual can live
apart from the others beyond a certain time, even though furnished with
food and shelter, how can we help recognizing that the hive is really,
and not metaphorically, a single organism, of which each bee is a cell
united to the others by invisible bonds? The instinct that animates the
bee is indistinguishable, then, from the force that animates the cell,
or is only a prolongation of that force. In extreme cases like this,
instinct coincides with the work of organization.

Of course there are degrees of perfection in the same instinct. Between
the humble-bee, and the honey-bee, for instance, the distance is great;
and we pass from one to the other through a great number of
intermediaries, which correspond to so many complications of the social
life. But the same diversity is found in the functioning of
histological elements