t three "incomprehensible
substances" should exist in touch with one another without being
in organic relation, but also because all three of them are
dominated, in so far as we can say anything about them at all, by
the same universal space.

It is true that the unappropriated mass of "objective mystery" upon
which no shadow of the creative energy of any soul has yet been
thrown must be considered as utterly "formless and void" and thus
in a sense beyond space and time, yet since immediately we try to
_imagine_ or _visualize_ this mystery, as well as just logically
"consider" it, we are compelled to extend over it our conception of
time and space, it is in a practical sense, although not in a logical
sense, under the real dominion of these.

When therefore the philosophy of the complex vision places its
trump-cards of axiomatic mystery over against the similar cards of
the philosophy of the "elan vital" it will be found that in actual
number Bergson has one more "card" than we have. For Bergson
has not only his "pure spirit" and his "intuitively-felt time," but has
also--for he cannot really escape from that by just asserting that
his "spirit" produces it--the opposing obstinate principle of
"matter" or "solid bodies" or "mechanical brains" upon which his
pure spirit has to work.

It is indeed out of its difficulties with "matter," that is to say with
bodies and brains, that Bergson's "spirit" is forced to forego its
natural element of "intuitive duration" and project itself into the
rigid rationalistic conceptualism of ordinary science and
metaphysic.

The point of our argument in this place is that since the whole
purpose of philosophy is articulation or clarification and
since in this process of clarification the fewer "axiomatic
incomprehensibles" we start with the better; it is decidedly to the
advantage of any philosophy that it should require at the start
nothing more than the mystery of the individual soul confronting
the mystery of the world around it. And it is to the disadvantage of
Bergson's philosophy that it should require at the start, in addition
to "pure spirit" with its assumption of memory and will, and "pure
matter" with its assumption of ordinary space and ordinary time, a
still further axiomatic trump-card, in the theory of intuitive
"durational" time, in which the real process of the life-flow
transcends all reason and logic.

Putting aside however the cosmological aspect of our controver