We will let the philosopher tell us the gist of this in his own words:—
'While we watch the birth of consciousness we are confronted, at the same time, by the apparition of living bodies, capable, even in their simplest forms, of movements spontaneous and unforeseen. The progress of living matter consists in a differentiation of function which leads first to the production and then to the increasing complication of a nervous system capable of canalizing excitations and of organizing actions: the more the higher centres develop, the more numerous become the motor paths among which the same excitation allows the living being to choose in order that it may act. An ever greater latitude left to movement in space—this indeed is what is seen. What is not seen is the growing and accompanying tension of consciousness in time. Not only, by its memory of former experiences, does this consciousness retain the past better and better, so as to organize it with the present in a newer and richer decision; but, living with an intenser life, contracting, by its memory of the immediate experience, a growing number of external moments in its present duration, it becomes more capable of creating acts of which the inner indetermination, spread over as large a multiplicity of the moments of matter as you please, will pass the more easily through the meshes of necessity. Thus, whether we consider it in time or in space, freedom always seems to have its roots deep in necessity and to be intimately organized with it. Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds, and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.'
Any philosopher, after writing or speaking some such words as these, may well ask us to consider—when we have watched the hard-won triumph of life over so great difficulties and so many obstacles, when we have discovered what seems to us clear evidence that it has for age upon age pursued with immeasurable power and resource a purpose which the spiritual consciousness of man is alone competent to fulfil, and that it has thus attained in man a position of supreme advantage for this fulfilment—whether we ought not to regard ourselves as paltering with reason if we expect that pursuit and that attainment both to be in vain. Is life, just where it seems in sight of final triumph, to be overcome at the last by death? Why should it be overcome by this when it has vanquished so much else? Why, if the world is rational, should we expect all the ages of preparation to be brought to naught, and the splendour of man's promise to be laid low in the grave?
