cism ought to take second place. It is more profitable to
attempt to feel oneself into the heart of the teaching, to relive its
genesis, to perceive the principle of organic unity, to come at the
mainspring. Let our reading be a course of meditation which we live.
The only true homage we can render to the masters of thought consists in
ourselves thinking, as far as we can do so, in their train, under their
inspiration, and along the paths which they have opened up.

In the case before us this road is landmarked by several books which it
will be sufficient to study one after the other, and take successively
as the text of our reflections.

In 1889 Mr Bergson made his appearance with an "Essay on the Immediate
Data of Consciousness".

This was his doctor's thesis. Taking up his position inside the human
personality, in its inmost mind, he endeavoured to lay hold of the
depths of life and free action in their commonly overlooked and fugitive
originality.

Some years later, in 1896, passing this time to the externals of
consciousness, the contact surface between things and the ego, he
published "Matter and Memory", a masterly study of perception and
recollection, which he himself put forward as an inquiry into the
relation between body and mind. In 1907 he followed with "Creative
Evolution", in which the new metaphysic was outlined in its full
breadth, and developed with a wealth of suggestion and perspective
opening upon the distances of infinity; universal evolution, the meaning
of life, the nature of mind and matter, of intelligence and instinct,
were the great problems here treated, ending in a general critique of
knowledge and a completely original definition of philosophy.

These will be our guides which we shall carefully follow, step by step.
It is not, I must confess, without some apprehension that I undertake
the task of summing up so much research, and of condensing into a few
pages so many and such new conclusions.

Mr Bergson excels, even on points of least significance, in producing
the feeling of unfathomed depths and infinite levels. Never has anyone
better understood how to fulfil the philosopher's first task, in
pointing out the hidden mystery in everything. With him we see all at
once the concrete thickness and inexhaustible extension of the most
familiar reality, which has always been before our eyes, where before we
were aware only of the external film.

Do not imagine that this is simply a poet