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."

But man is not on that account isolated in nature: "As the smallest grain
of dust forms part of our entire solar system, and is involved along with
it in this undivided downward movement which is materiality itself, so all
organised beings from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins
of life to the times in which we live, and in all places as at all times,
do but demonstrate to our eyes a unique impulse contrary to the movement of
matter, and, in itself, indivisible. All living beings are connected, and
all yield to the same formidable thrust. The animal is supported by the