we now propose, engendering it
in its form and in its matter. The enterprise is in reality much more
modest, as we are going to show. But let us first say how it differs
from others.

To begin with psychology, we are not to believe that it _engenders_
intelligence when it follows the progressive development of it through
the animal series. Comparative psychology teaches us that the more an
animal is intelligent, the more it tends to reflect on the actions by
which it makes use of things, and thus to approximate to man. But its
actions have already by themselves adopted the principal lines of human
action; they have made out the same general directions in the material
world as we have; they depend upon the same objects bound together by
the same relations; so that animal intelligence, although it does not
form concepts properly so called, already moves in a conceptual
atmosphere. Absorbed at every instant by the actions it performs and the
attitudes it must adopt, drawn outward by them and so externalized in
relation to itself, it no doubt plays rather than thinks its ideas; this
play none the less already corresponds, in the main, to the general plan
of human intelligence.[78] To explain the intelligence of man by that of
the animal consists then simply in following the development of an
embryo of humanity into complete humanity. We show how a certain
direction has been followed further and further by beings more and more
intelligent. But the moment we admit the direction, intelligence is
given.

In a cosmogony like that of Spencer, intelligence is taken for granted,
as matter also at the same time. We are shown matter obeying laws,
objects connected with objects and facts with facts by constant
relations, consciousness receiving the imprint of these relations and
laws, and thus adopting the general configuration of nature and shaping
itself into intellect. But how can we fail to see that intelligence is
supposed when we admit objects and facts? _A priori_ and apart from any
hypothesis on the nature of the matter, it is evident that the
materiality of a body does not stop at the point at which we touch it: a
body is present wherever its influence is felt; its attractive force, to
speak only of that, is exerted on the sun, on the planets, perhaps on
the entire universe. The more physics advances, the more it effaces the
individuality of bodies and even of the particles into which the
scientific imagination began by dec