years. This being the situation, it is easy to see why Bergson has met with such a welcome. He is not only a tremendous reinforcement in constructive thought, he is one of the greatest of leaders. He has helped us past the fundamental mistake of Kant, which has been so long a great stumbling-block in our intellectual pathway. What Kant called the ideality, but in ordinary language would be called the unreality, of time, many of us have never accepted, but to dispute the authority of the great German philosopher has until recently been to lose credit. It is therefore not without lively emotion that we read the masterly essay on "Time and Free Will," which disposes of all the specious arguments which have been made against the reality of our temporal experience. We will no longer be tempted to deny what we are most certain of, and we can connect philosophy once more with our real life. In his theory of knowledge, Bergson has also shown that mechanism applies only to certain aspects of reality and not to the whole; and on this side, too, he has set thought free. To read the great pages of "Creative Evolution" is to see proved, in the technical fashion of philosophy, what we knew in our heart of hearts all the time; namely, that mechanism and determinism as a metaphysic could not be true, that the time process is real, that evolution is more than a rearrangement of the given, that

it means achievement, and that life in its higher development is free, that it is, in fact, a great spiritual adventure. The end no man can know, for the reason that our ideals advance as we strive toward them, and we pursue a fleeing goal. New prospects are thus opened up before thought, and our spiritual horizon is indefinitely enlarged.

CHAPTER III

THE CONCEPTION OF THE LIFE FORCE

The thoughts of living men are but the thoughts of their ancestors revised, expanded, corrected. The conceptions of the present generation cannot be understood without taking their lineage into account. The mixed and inconsistent nature of some of our more important ideas is in part explained by the fact that we are trying to combine our intellectual inheritance from two very different civilizations. Our answer to the question, What is reality? is influenced by the stream of Hebrew and Christian tradition and by old Greek thinking. The Bible begins with an account of the creation of the world; in fact, with two accounts, that of Genesis i. being several centuries later in date and in stage of development than that of Genesis ii. and iii. The conception of the author of Genesis i. is that the materials of heaven and earth were present in chaotic form and in darkness, and that the Spirit of God was brooding upon the face of the waters.

Early Greek thought reached an analogous

view. Anaxagoras said that originally there was chaos, and then came mind and brought order. In the Timæus of Plato, creation is conceived of as the introduction of order into the primitive disorder. Greek speculation, however, soon arrived at the view that the world is ultimately composed of atoms which, by their mutual attractions and repulsions and consequent groupings, constituted all things. In modern times some thinkers have become frankly agnostic on the subject of the ultimate nature of reality. Herbert Spencer says that the most certain of all things is that we are always in the presence of an infinite and eternal energy whence all things proceed, but he calls this reality the Unknowable. It is true that he professes to know a good deal about it; e. g., that it is one, infinite and eternal; it is the All-Being; it is higher than personality rather than lower; and in referring to it we are nearer the truth in using spiritualistic terms than when we speak the language of the materialist. And, finally, he says that we are compelled to think of the universe as alive, if not in the restricted sense, at least in the general sense. The ultimate reality manifests itself in matter and mind, and these manifestations we know; but what it is in itself he thinks we can never know. It reveals itself in the universe we call material, and it wells up within us in the form of consciousness: we know

these expressions of reality, but nothing more.

Kant, too, said that we know only phenomena, appearances. We see the world as colored, because our eyes react in that way to the light stimulus. We hear sounds, because the air waves excite in our ears movements which we feel as sound. So we experience reality under the forms of time and space because it is our nature to, and we think of the world in scientific terms because we are made that way. We cannot get behind phenomena. What is beyond, it is vain to seek to know. All that we can know is the way reality affects us. Were we differently constituted, all would appear differ

ent.

About a hundred years ago a young German scholar brought forward a new and very brilliant suggestion. He said, it is possible to get behind the scenes if we pursue the right method. For I am not only a knower: I am also of the very substance and stuff of the world, of what is known. It is what I am, and I am what it is. To know the nature of reality I have only to look within myself and discover what is fundamental there. This observation is entirely correct, and the method indicated is most fruitful. But Schopenhauer failed in its application. He looked within, and he saw what many others had failed to see, but his vision was distorted by his unhappy emotional state. Many philosophers