Daily Inspiration Quote by Henri Bergson

Bergson’s line pivots on a sly reversal: we assume intelligence is the high-tech, toolmaking crown of evolution, while instinct is brute reflex. He flips that prestige economy. “Instinct perfected” doesn’t just use tools; it “constructs organized instruments” - living, internally coordinated machinery. Think of the bee’s body and its choreography with the hive: the instrument is not a detachable gadget but an integrated system, pre-tuned by life’s long improvisation. Instinct at its zenith becomes biology’s engineering.

Then comes the barb: “intelligence perfected” specializes in “unorganized instruments,” meaning tools that are external, inert, modular. A hammer is powerful precisely because it’s dead matter awaiting a mind’s plan. Intelligence, for Bergson, is a talent for disassembling reality into parts, rearranging them, and exploiting the mechanical. It’s brilliant at the non-living, less fluent with the continuous, self-organizing flow of living experience.

The subtext is Bergson’s wider argument against reducing life to mechanism. Writing in an era intoxicated by industrial progress and scientific determinism, he insists that what looks like “lesser” instinct may actually be closer to life’s own logic - purposive without being conceptual, creative without being explicit. Intelligence wins at fabrication, but it pays a price: it treats the world as a set of objects to manipulate, not a process to inhabit.

The intent isn’t to romanticize animals or dunk on reason. It’s to warn that a culture worshipping external tools can mistake technical mastery for understanding life itself.