"But it is caught in the snare. The eddy on which it was poised seizes and
drags it down. It becomes prisoner of the mechanism it has set up.
Automatism lays hold of it, and life, inevitably forgetting the end which
it had determined, which was only to be a means in view of a superior end,
is entirely used up in an effort to preserve itself by itself. From the
humblest of organised beings to the higher vertebrates which come
immediately before man, we witness an attempt which is always foiled and
always resumed with more and more art. Man has triumphed; with difficulty,
it is true, and so incompletely that a moment's lapse and inattention on
his part surrender him to automatism again. But he has triumphed..."
("Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)

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