ative
energy, Bergson has indicated his acceptance of one side of the
ultimate duality. But for Bergson this creative impulse is not
confronted by evil or by malice as its opposite, but simply by the
natural inertness of mechanical "matter."

And once having assumed his "continuum" of pure spirit, he deals
no further with the problem of good and evil or with the problem
of the aesthetic sense.

From our point of view he is axiomatically unable to deal with
these problems for the simple reason that his elan vital or flux of
pure spirit, being itself a mere metaphysical abstraction from
living personality, can never, however hard you squeeze it,
produce either the human conscience or the human aesthetic sense.

These things can only be produced from the concrete activity of a
real living individual soul. In the same way it is true that William
James, by his emphasis upon conduct and action and practical
efficiency as the tests of truth, is bound to lay enormous stress at
the very start upon the ethical problem.

What a person believes about the universe becomes itself an
ethical problem by the introduction on the one hand of the
efficiency of the will to believe and on the other of the assumption
that a person "ought" to believe that which it is "useful" to him to
believe, as long as it does not conflict with other desirable truths.
But this ethical element in the pragmatic doctrine, though it is so
dominant as almost to reduce philosophy itself to a sub-division of
ethics, is not, when one examines it, at all the same thing as what
the philosophy of the complex vision means by the revelation of
conscience.

Ethics with William James swallows up philosophy and in
swallowing up philosophy the nature of Ethics is changed and
becomes something different from the clear unqualified mandate
of the human conscience. With the philosophy of the complex
vision the revelations of conscience are intimately associated with
the revelations of the aesthetic sense; and these again, in the
rhythmic totality of man's nature, with the revelations of emotion,
instinct, intuition, imagination.

Thus when it comes to conduct and the question of choice the kind
of "imperative" issued by conscience has been already profoundly
changed. It is still the mandate of conscience. But it is the mandate
of a conscience whose search-light has been taken possession of
by the aesthetic sense and has been fed by imagination, instinct
and intuition.