ust have sacrificed. This is what is meant by return
to the primitive, and the immediate, to reality and life. This is the
meaning of intuition.

Certainly the task is difficult. We at once suspect a vicious circle.
How can we go beyond intelligence except by intelligence itself? We are
apparently inside our thought, as incapable of coming out of it as is a
balloon of rising above the atmosphere. True, but on this reasoning we
could just as well prove that it is impossible for us to acquire any
new habit whatsoever, impossible for life to grow and go beyond itself
continually.

We must avoid drawing false conclusions from the simile of the balloon.
The question here is to know what are the real limits of the atmosphere.
It is certain that the synthetic and critical intelligence, left to
its own strength, remains imprisoned in a circle from which there is no
escape.

But action removes the barrier. If intelligence accepts the risk of
taking the leap into the phosphorescent fluid which bathes it, and to
which it is not altogether foreign, since it has broken off from it and
in it dwell the complementary powers of the understanding, intelligence
will soon become adapted and so will only be lost for a moment to
reappear greater, stronger, and of fuller content. It is action again
under the name of experience which removes the danger of illusion or
giddiness, it is action which verifies; by a practical demonstration,
by an effort of enduring maturation which tests the idea in intimate
contact with reality and judges it by its fruits.

It always falls therefore to intelligence to pronounce the grand verdict
in the sense that only that can be called true which will finally
satisfy it; but we mean an intelligence duly enlarged and transformed
by the very effect of the action it has lived. Thus the objection of
"irrationalism" directed against the new philosophy falls to the ground.

The objection of "non-morality" fares no better. But is has been made,
and people have thought fit to accuse Mr Bergson's work of being the too
calm production of an intelligence too indifferent, too coldly lucid,
too exclusively curious to see and understand, untroubled and unthrilled
by the universal drama of life, by the tragic reality of evil. On the
other hand, not without contradiction, the new philosophy has been
called "romantic," and people have tried to find in it the essential
traits of romanticism: its predilection for feeling and i