"We should be forced to do so, if life had employed all the psychic potentialities it contains in making pure understandings; that is to say, in preparing mathematicians. But the line of evolution which ends in man is not the only one. By other divergent ways other forms of consciousness have developed, which have not been able to free themselves from external constraint, nor regain the victory over themselves as intelligence has done, but which, none the less for that, also express something immanent and essential in the movement of evolution. "By bringing them into connection with one another, and making them afterwards amalgamate with intelligence, should we not thus obtain a consciousness co-extensive with life, and capable, by turning sharply round upon the vital thrust which it feels behind it, of obtaining a complete, though doubtless vanishing vision?" ("Creative Evolution", Preface.) It is precisely in this that the act of philosophic intuition consists. "We shall be told that, even so, we do not get beyond our intelligence, since it is with our intelligence, and through our intelligence, that we observe all the other forms of consciousness. And we should be right in saying so, if we were pure intelligences, if there had not remained round our conceptual and logical thought a vague nebula, made of the very substance at the expense of which the luminous nucleus, which we call intelligence, has been formed. In it reside certain complementary powers of the understanding, of which we have only a confused feeling when we remain shut up in ourselves, but which will become illumined and distinct when they perceive themselves at work, so to speak, in the evolution of nature. They will thus learn what effort they have to make to become more intense, and to expand in the actual direction of life." ("Creative Evolution", Preface.) Does that mean abandonment to instinct, and descent with it into infra-consciousness again? By no means. On the contrary, our task is to bring instinct to enrich intelligence, to become free and illumined in it; and this ascent towards super-consciousness is possible in the flash of an intuitive act, as it is sometimes possible for the eye to perceive, as a pale and fugitive gleam, beyond what we properly term light, the ultra-violet rays of the spectrum. Can we say of such a doctrine that it seeks to go, or that it goes "against intelligence"? Nothing authorises such an accusation, for limitation of a sphere is not misappreciation of every legitimate exercise. But intelligence is not the whole of thought, and its natural products do not completely exhaust or manifest our power of light.