[426] Cf. “We have now enumerated a few of the essential features of human intelligence. But we have hitherto considered the individual in isolation, without taking account of social life. _In reality man is a being who lives in society._ If it be true [even] that the human intellect aims at fabrication, we must add that, for that as well as other purposes, it is associated with _other intellects_. Now it is difficult to imagine a society whose members do not communicate by signs,” etc. etc. (_Creative Evolution_, p. 166). Indeed all readers of Bergson know that he is constantly making use of the social factor and of “co-operation” by way of accounting for the general advance of mankind. It may be appropriate in this same connexion to cite the magnificent passage towards the close of _Creative Evolution_ in which he rises to the very heights of the idea [Schopenhauer and Hartmann had it before him, and also before the socialists and the collectivists] of humanity’s being possibly able to surmount even the greatest of the obstacles that beset it in its onward path: “As the smallest grain of dust [_Creative Evolution_, pp. 285–6] is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself, so all organised beings, from the humblest to the highest, ... do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.” [427] Cf. p. 160 and p. 262. [428] He comes in sight of some of them, as he often does of so many things. “It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will [_C.E._, p. 281], man or superman, had sought to realise himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world, and even by the vegetable world, at least in what these have that is positive and above the accidents of evolution.” [429] From what has been said in this chapter about Bergson, and from the remarks that were made in the second chapter about Renouvier and the French Critical Philosophy, the reader may perhaps be willing to admit that our Anglo-American Transcendental philosophy would perhaps not have been so abstract and so rationalistic had it devoted more attention, than it has evidently given, to some of the more representative French thinkers of the nineteenth century.