Thus the development of instinct in man has become subordinate; human consciousness is dominated by intelligence. Hence the universality of the vice of intellectualism in philosophy. Man, because he is dominated by intelligence, supposes intelligence to be coextensive with consciousness, whereas it is only one of the elementary tendencies which consciousness comprises, and the one which is impotent to know the flow of reality. Spencer’s evolutionism affords no acquaintance with the reality of life. His so-called evolution starts with the already evolved. Hence all it reaches is the made, the once-for-all, the timeless. It is merely a biological theory, and no advance over positive science. It is not a philosophy. Having shown the origin of intelligence in the more extensive principle of life, and limited its sphere of operation to inert matter, the author turns to the nature of instinct. The greater part of the psychic life of living beings that are characteristically instinctive Bergson believes to be states which he describes as knowledge in which there is no representation.[127] “Representation is stopped up by action.”[128] A purely instinctive action would be indistinguishable from a mere vital process. When the chick, for example, breaks the shell, it seems merely to keep up the motion that has carried it through the embryonic life. But neither instinct nor intelligence is ever pure, and we have in ourselves a vague experience of what must happen in the consciousness of an animal acting by instinct. We have this experience in phenomena of feeling, in unreflecting sympathies and antipathies. “Instinct is sympathy. If this sympathy could extend its object and also reflect upon itself, it would give us the key to vital operations.... Intuition, to wit, instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely, leads us into the very inwardness of life ... It is true that this æsthetic intuition ... attains only the individual, but we can conceive an inquiry turned in the same direction as art, which would take life _in general_ for its object.”[129] * * * * * In _Matter and Memory_, mind is represented as varying, in its states, between two limits, “pure perception,” which is just action, and “dreaming.” The limit of action is where the rôle of mind ceases, the vanishing-point of knowledge. But at the other limit, dreaming, mind is in full swing, having freed itself, by an inner tension, from the obstructive influence of body. Far from vanishing at this limit, as at the other, knowledge is here at its apogee. It is here “pure.”