led, reserved to pure intelligence, intuition may enable
us to grasp what it is that intelligence fails to give us, and indicate
the means of supplementing it. On the one hand, it will utilize the
mechanism of intelligence itself to show how intellectual molds cease to
be strictly applicable; and on the other hand, by its own work, it will
suggest to us the vague feeling, if nothing more, of what must take the
place of intellectual molds. Thus, intuition may bring the intellect to
recognize that life does not quite go into the category of the many nor
yet into that of the one; that neither mechanical causality nor finality
can give a sufficient interpretation of the vital process. Then, by the
sympathetic communication which it establishes between us and the rest
of the living, by the expansion of our consciousness which it brings
about, it introduces us into life's own domain, which is reciprocal
interpenetration, endlessly continued creation. But, though it thereby
transcends intelligence, it is from intelligence that has come the push
that has made it rise to the point it has reached. Without intelligence,
it would have remained in the form of instinct, riveted to the special
object of its practical interest, and turned outward by it into
movements of locomotion.

How theory of knowledge must take account of these two faculties,
intellect and intuition, and how also, for want of establishing a
sufficiently clear distinction between them, it becomes involved in
inextricable difficulties, creating phantoms of ideas to which there
cling phantoms of problems, we shall endeavor to show a little further
on. We shall see that the problem of knowledge, from this point of view,
is one with the metaphysical problem, and that both one and the other
depend upon experience. On the one hand, indeed, if intelligence is
charged with matter and instinct with life, we must squeeze them both in
order to get the double essence from them; metaphysics is therefore
dependent upon theory of knowledge. But, on the other hand, if
consciousness has thus split up into intuition and intelligence, it is
because of the need it had to apply itself to matter at the same time as
it had to follow the stream of life. The double form of consciousness is
then due to the double form of the real, and theory of knowledge must be
dependent upon metaphysics. In fact, each of these two lines of thought
leads to the other; they form a circle, and there can be no