what we
are conscious of most of all is a sense of integral continuity in the
midst of change, and of identical permanence in the midst of ebb
and flow.

The flux of things does most assuredly rush swiftly by us; and we,
in our inmost selves, are conscious of life's incessant flow. But
how could we be conscious of any of this turbulent movement
across the prow of our voyaging ship, if the ship itself--the
substantial base of our living consciousness--were not an
organized and integral reality, of psycho-chemical material, able to
exert will and to make use of memory and reason in its difficult
struggle with the waves and winds?

The revelation of man's complex vision with regard to the
personality of the soul is a thing of far-reaching issues and
implications. One of these implications is that while we have the
right to the term "the eternal flux" in regard to the changing waves
of sensations and ideas that pass across the horizon of the soul's
vision we have no right to think of this "eternal flux" as anything
else than the pressure upon us of the universe of our own vision
and the pressure upon us of the universe of other visions, as they
seem, for this or that passing moment, to be different from our
own.

The kind of world to which we are thus committed is a world
crowded with living personalities. Each of these personalities
brings with it its own separate universe. But the fact that all these
separate universes find their ideal synthesis or teleological
orientation in "the vision of the immortals," justifies us in
assuming that in a certain eternal sense all these apparently
conflicting universes are in reality one. This unity of ideas, with its
predominant aesthetic idea--the idea of beauty--and its
predominant emotional idea--the idea of love--helps us towards a
synthesis which is after all only a dynamic one, a thing of
movement, growth and creation.

Such a teleological unity, forever advancing to a consummation
never entirely to be attained, demands however some sort of static
"milieu" as well as some sort of static "material" in the midst of
which and out of which it moulds its premeditated future. It is
precisely this static "milieu" or "medium," and this static
"material" or formless "objective mystery," which Bergson's
philosophy, of the _"elan vital" of pure spirit_, spreading out into
a totally indetermined future, denies and eliminates.

In order to justify this double elimination--the elimin