e only that which can
be an object of sensation or calculation, we begin by greeting the great
spiritual realities with this title. The deep and living aspiration of
our day is in everything to seek the soul, the soul which specifies and
quickens, seek it by an effort towards the revealing sympathy which
is genuine intelligence, seek it in the concrete, without dissolving
thought in dreams or language, without losing contact with the body or
critical control, seek it, in fine, as the most real and genuine part of
being.

Hence its return to questions which were lately declared out of date
and closed; hence its taste for problems of aesthetics and morality,
its close siege of social and religious problems, its homesickness for a
faith harmonising the powers of action and the powers of thought; hence
its restless desire to hark back to tradition and discipline.

A new philosophy was required to answer this new way of looking at
things. Already, in 1867, Ravaisson in his celebrated "Report" wrote
these prophetic lines: "Many signs permit us to foresee in the near
future a philosophical epoch of which the general character will be the
predominance of what may be called spiritualist realism or positivism,
having as generating principle the consciousness which the mind has in
itself of an existence recognised as being the source and support of
every other existence, being none other than its action."

This prophetic view was further commented on in a work where Mr Bergson
speaks with just praise of this shrewd and penetrating sense of what was
coming: "What could be bolder or more novel than to come and predict
to the physicists that the inert will be explained by the living, to
biologists that life will only be understood by thought, to philosophers
that generalities are not philosophic?" ("Notice on the Life and Works
of M. Felix Ravaisson-Molien", in the Reports of the Academy of Moral
and Political Sciences, 1904.)

But let us give each his due. What Ravaisson had only anticipated Mr
Bergson himself accomplishes, with a precision which gives body to the
impalpable and floating breath of first inspiration, with a depth which
renews both proof and theses alike, with a creative originality which
prevents the critic who is anxious for justice and precision from
insisting on any researches establishing connection of thought.

One reason for the popularity today enjoyed by this new philosophy is
doubtless to be found in th