brain becomes, thus giving the organism greater choice of possible
actions, the more does consciousness outrun its physical concomitant.
Thus, the recollection of the same spectacle probably modifies in the
same way a dog's brain and a man's brain, if the perception has been the
same; yet the recollection must be very different in the man's
consciousness from what it is in the dog's. In the dog, the recollection
remains the captive of perception; it is brought back to consciousness
only when an analogous perception recalls it by reproducing the same
spectacle, and then it is manifested by the recognition, _acted_ rather
than _thought_, of the present perception much more than by an actual
reappearance of the recollection itself. Man, on the contrary, is
capable of calling up the recollection at will, at any moment,
independently of the present perception. He is not limited to _playing_
his past life again; he _represents_ and _dreams_ it. The local
modification of the brain to which the recollection is attached being
the same in each case, the psychological difference between the two
recollections cannot have its ground in a particular difference of
detail between the two cerebral mechanisms, but in the difference
between the two brains taken each as a whole. The more complex of the
two, in putting a greater number of mechanisms in opposition to one
another, has enabled consciousness to disengage itself from the
restraint of one and all and to reach independence. That things do
happen in this way, that the second of the two hypotheses is that which
must be chosen, is what we have tried to prove, in a former work, by
the study of facts that best bring into relief the relation of the
conscious state to the cerebral state, the facts of normal and
pathological recognition, in particular the forms of aphasia.[75] But it
could have been proved by pure reasoning, before even it was evidenced
by facts. We have shown on what self-contradictory postulate, on what
confusion of two mutually incompatible symbolisms, the hypothesis of
equivalence between the cerebral state and the psychic state rests.[76]

The evolution of life, looked at from this point, receives a clearer
meaning, although it cannot be subsumed under any actual _idea_. It is
as if a broad current of consciousness had penetrated matter, loaded, as
all consciousness is, with an enormous multiplicity of interwoven
potentialities. It has carried matter along to organiz