e come to call
the soul is but a ripple, or swirling whirlpool of centripetal ripples,
the answer which Bergson gives is definite enough. "We approach
a duration which _strains_, contracts, and intensifies itself more
and more; at the limit would be eternity. No longer conceptual
eternity, which is an eternity of death, but an eternity of life. A
living, and therefore still moving eternity in which our own
particular duration would be included, as the vibrations are in
light; an eternity which would be the concentration of all duration,
as materiality is its dispersion. Between these two extreme limits
intuition moves, and this movement is the very essence of
metaphysics."

Thus according to Bergson the essential secret of life is to be
found in some peculiar movement of what he calls spirit; a
movement which takes place in some unutterable medium, or upon
some indescribable plane, the name of which is "pure time" or
"duration."

And listening to all this we cannot resist a sigh of dismay. For
here, in these vague de-humanized terms--"tendency," "flux,"
"eternity," "vibration," "duration," "dispersion"--we are once
more, only with a different set of concepts, following the old
metaphysical method, that very method which Bergson himself
sets out to confine to its inferior place. "Tendency" or "flux" or
"duration" is just as much a metaphysical concept as "being" or
"not being" or "becoming."

The only way in which we can really escape from the rigid
conceptualism of rational logic is to accept the judgment of the
totality of man's nature. And the judgment of the totality of man's
nature points unmistakably to the existence of a real substantial
soul. Such a soul is the indispensable implication of personality.
And the most interior and intimate knowledge that we are in
possession of, or shall ever be in possession of, is the knowledge
of personality.

Bergson is perfectly right when he asserts that "the consciousness
which we have of our own self" introduces us "to the interior of a
reality, on the model of which we must represent other realities."
But Bergson is surely departing both from the normal facts of
ordinary introspection and from the exceptional facts of abnormal
illumination when he appends to the words "the consciousness
which we have of our own self" the further words in its continual
"flux." For in our normal moods of human introspection, as well
as in our abnormal moods of superhuman illumination,