And Mr Bergson adds in another place: ("Creative Evolution", pages 286-287.) "With man consciousness breaks the chain. In man and in man only it obtains its freedom. The whole history of life, till man, had been the history of an effort of consciousness to lift matter, and of the more or less complete crushing of consciousness by matter falling upon it again. The enterprise was paradoxical; if indeed we can speak here, except paradoxically, of enterprise and effort. The task was to take matter, which is necessity itself, and create an instrument of liberty, construct a mechanical system to triumph over mechanism, to employ the determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net it had spread. But everywhere, except in man, consciousness let itself be caught in the net of which it sought to traverse the meshes. It remained taken in the mechanisms it had set up. The automatism which it claimed to be drawing towards liberty enfolds it and drags it down. It has not the strength to get away, because the energy with which it had supplied itself for action is almost entirely employed in maintaining the exceedingly subtile and essentially unstable equilibrium into which it has brought matter. But man does not merely keep his machine going, he succeeds in using it as it pleases him. "He owes it without doubt to the superiority of his brain, which allows him to construct an unlimited number of motor mechanisms, to oppose new habits to old time after time, and to master automatism by dividing it against itself. He owes it to his language, which furnishes consciousness with an immaterial body in which to become incarnate, thus dispensing it from depending exclusively upon material bodies, the flux of which would drag it down and soon engulf it. He owes it to social life, which stores and preserves efforts as language stores thought, thereby fixing a mean level to which individuals will rise with ease, and which, by means of this initial impulse, prevents average individuals from going to sleep and urges better people to rise higher. But our brain, our society, and our language are only the varied outer signs of one and the same internal superiority. Each after its fashion, they tell us the unique and exceptional success which life has won at a given moment of its evolution. They translate the difference in nature, and not in degree only, which separates man from the rest of the animal world. They let us see that if, at the end of the broad springboard from which life took off, all others came down, finding the cord stretched too high, man alone has leapt the obstacle."