helpful, of the thinkers who are among the glories of our race.

About ten years ago the late Prof. William James asked me if I had read Bergson's writings, and, on my confession of ignorance and request for information, he urged me to read "Matière et Mémoire." This proved to be one of the most difficult books I have ever studied, and after repeated readings there are parts of it that I do not understand. And it was only after study of his earlier work, "Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience," translated under the title of "Time and Free Will," that I realized the importance of the contribution he has made to human thought.1

The difficulties we meet in understanding Bergson are not due to any faults of exposition, but rather to the fact that we have to acquire some new categories, since he does not fit into any of the old. He is neither an idealist, realist, pragmatist, nor eclectic. No writer is more lucid, and he would be a bold man who should undertake to make Bergson clearer than he is. Yet so novel and original are

1 Beginners should first read Bergson's latest book, 66 Creative Evolution," as this contains a summary and restatement of his main positions. The more technical and difficult work, "Time and Free Will," should then be mastered, not read in a merely cursory way. After a rereading of "Creative Evolution," one is perhaps prepared to attempt to understand "Matter and Memory."

his suggestions, that I know of no philosopher who professes to understand him completely. Prof. James, who was so enthusiastic about him, said: "I have to confess that Bergson's originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle me entirely. I doubt whether any one understands him all over, so to speak; and I am sure that he would himself be the first to see that this must be, and to confess that things which he himself has not yet thought out clearly had yet to be mentioned and have a tentative place in his philosophy. Many of us are profusely original, in that no man can understand us violently peculiar ways of looking at things are no great rarity. The rarity is when great peculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual command of all the classic expository apparatus. Bergson's resources in the way of erudition are remarkable and in the way of expression they are simply phenomenal. This is why in France, where l'art de bien dire counts for so much and is so sure of appreciation, he has immediately taken so eminent a place in public esteem. Old-fashioned professors, whom his ideas quite fail to satisfy, nevertheless speak of his talents with bated breath, while the youngsters flock to him as to a master. If anything can make hard things easy to follow, it is a style like Bergson's, a straightforward style, an American reviewer lately called

it, failing to see that such straightforwardness means a flexibility of verbal resource that follows the thought without a crease or wrinkle, as elastic silk underclothing follows the movement of one's body. The lucidity of Bergson's way of putting things is what all readers are first struck by. It seduces you and bribes you in advance to become his disciple. It is a miracle, and he is a real magician." ("A Pluralistic Universe," p. 226.)

I have spoken of Bergson as one of the most helpful of thinkers, and to justify this statement it is only necessary to consider the relation of his original ideas to the thought situation of our time. Since the spiritual life is, in one of its aspects, an intellectual life, whatever clarifies and advances thought is a help to the spiritual life. Bergson's contributions to philosophy are, therefore, by no means merely an intellectual luxury. As he himself has truly said, they help us to live. Nor has he come too soon. Philosophic and religious thought seemed to be getting into an impasse, and the need of some guide to lead men back to the great thoroughfare was urgent. There are many, of course, who do not realize this, for the reason that they are able to hold in an habitual and uncritical way the traditions which they have received. They escape both the happiness and the pain of thought. But there are others, an

increasing number, whose minds have been awakened, in whom has arisen the deathless desire to know, and for whom the joy and the difficulties of the intellectual life have begun. Realizing that their mental childhood is past, they are making a serious effort to frame some true and worthy conception of the meaning of their lives and of their place in the great whole.

Those who in recent times have found themselves no longer satisfied with the venerable theory of a three-story universe, heaven above, hell beneath, and the earth between; with the philosophy of history which started with the fall of man in Eden; and with the somber outlook for our race, a few being saved and the rest going to perdition when the earth and its contents perish in the last catastrophe,- those who have outgrown these ideas and have been under the consequent necessity of trying to work out some theory of life that would content the mind and heart have discovered, on looking around for something better, only two general world-views, both of which are profoundly unsatisfactory.

On the one hand, there is materialism, which conceives of reality as consisting of a vast number of material atoms, impelled by physical forces and moving in accord with mechanical laws. In this view all our human interests, our higher values, are mere by-products, epiphe

nomena, with no more real significance than the iridescence of mother-of-pearl or the colors of the rainbow. However satisfying to the intellectual part of us, this general view is profoundly depressing, and all that is best within us revolts against it and what it seems to imply. It not only does not legitimate but actually ignores the aspirations, the hopes, the faith, and the love, which give conscious life its value.

The competing philosophy, which has appeared to be the only alternative, is called by a noble name, "idealism." It seems at first to promise much, to justify faith in God, freedom, and immortality, and to make central the things we care most for; but we soon find that it has little power to help, partly for the reason that it is almost unintelligible to all but trained philosophers, and, secondly, because it starts from assumptions that to the unsophisticated intelligence seem nonsense. The idealism we know most of is called post-Kantian; i. e., it is based on certain conceptions of Kant. One of these fundamental notions is that not only do the color, sound, smell, and taste of objects depend upon the peculiar structure of our sense organs, but that time and space also are subjective; that is, they are not properties or relations which belong to things in themselves, but are modes of perception, forms of intuition. This means that reality is not in time and space.

As the snow