ght to name "the immortals."

This is really the place where we part company with Bergson and
James. We agree with the former in his distrust of the old
metaphysic. We agree with the latter in many of his pluralistic
speculations. But we feel that any philosophy which refuses to
take account, at the very beginning, of those regions of human
consciousness which are summed up by the words "beauty" and
"art," is a philosophy that in undertaking to explain life has begun
by eliminating from life one of its most characteristic products.

In Bergson's interpretation of life the stress is laid upon "spirit"
and "intuition." In James' interpretation of life the stress is laid
upon those practical changes in the world and in human nature
which any new idea must produce if it is to prove itself true.

In the view of life we are now trying to make clear, philosophy is
so closely dependent upon the activity of the aesthetic sense that it
might itself be called an art, the most difficult and the most
comprehensive of all the arts, the art of retaining the rhythmic
balance of all man's contradictory energies. What this rhythmic
balance of man's concentrated energies seems to make clear is the
primary importance of the process of discrimination and valuation.

From the profoundest depths of the soul rises the consciousness of
the power of choice; and this power of choice to which we give,
by common consent, the name of "will," finds itself confronted at
the start by the eternal duality of the impulse to create and the
impulse to resist creation. The impulse to create we find, by
experience, to be identical with the emotion of love. And the
impulse to resist creation we find, by experience, to be identical
with the emotion of malice.

But experience carries us further than this. The impulse to create,
or the emotion of love, is found, as soon as it begins a function, to
be itself a living synthesis of three primordial reactions to life,
which, in philosophic language, we name "ideas." These three
primordial ideas may be summed up as follows: The idea of
beauty, which is the revelation of the aesthetic sense. The idea of
goodness or nobility, which is the revelation of conscience. The
idea of truth, or the mind's apprehension of reality, which is the
revelation of reason, intuition, instinct, and imagination,
functioning in sympathic harmony. Now it is true that by laying so
much stress upon the "elan vital" or flowing tide of cre