We see that the intellect, so skillful in dealing with the inert, is awkward at the moment it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigor, the stiffness, and the brutality of the instrument that is not designed for such use. The intellect is characterized by the natural inability to comprehend life. Instinct, on the contrary, is molded on the very form of life. While the intellectual treats everything mechanically, instinct proceeds, so to speak, organically. If the consciousness that slumbers in it should awake, if it were to wound up into knowledge rather than being wound up into action, if we could ask and it could reply, it would give us the most intimate secrets of life, for it only carries out further the work by which life organizes matter--so that we cannot say, as has often been shown, where instinct begins and where organization ends.
All in all, the most essential of the primary instincts are really vital processes. The potential consciousness that accompanies them is generally actualized only at the outset of the act, and leaves the rest of the process to go on by itself. It would only have to expand more widely, and then dive into its own depth completely, to be one of the generative force of life. That which is instinctive in instinct cannot be expressed in terms of intelligence nor, consequently, can it be analyzed.
All in all, the most essential of the primary instincts are really vital processes. The potential consciousness that accompanies them is generally actualized only at the outset of the act, and leaves the rest of the process to go on by itself. It would only have to expand more widely, and then dive into its own depth completely, to be one of the generative force of life. That which is instinctive in instinct cannot be expressed in terms of intelligence nor, consequently, can it be analyzed.
(Photos taken in Hanoi, Vietnam, September 2012)
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