e very tendencies of the milieu in which
it is produced and in the aspirations which work it. But, after once
remarking these desires, we must further not forget that Mr Bergson has
contributed more than anyone else to awaken them, determine them,
and make them become conscious of themselves. Let us therefore try to
understand in itself and by itself the work of genius of which just now
we were seeking the dawning gleams. What synthetic formula will be best
able to tell us the essential direction of its movement? I will borrow
it from the author himself: "It seems to me," he writes, ("Philosophic
Intuition" in the "Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", November 1911.)
"that metaphysics are trying at this moment to simplify themselves, to
come nearer to life." Every philosophy tends to become incarnate in a
system which constitutes for it a kind of body of analysis.

Regarded literally, it appears to be an infinite complication, a complex
construction with a thousand alcoves of high architecture, "in which
measures have been taken to provide ample lodging for all problems."
(Ibid.) Do not let us be deceived by this appearance: it signifies only
that language is incommensurable with thought, that speech admits of
endless multiplication in approximations incapable of exhausting their
object. But before constructing such a body for itself, all philosophy
is a soul, a mind, and begins with the simple unity of a generating
intuition. Here is the fitting point at which to see its essence; this
is what determines it much better than its conceptual expression, which
is always contingent and incomplete. "A philosophy worthy of the name
has never said but one thing; and that thing it has rather attempted to
say than actually said. And it has only said one thing, because it has
only seen one point: and that was not so much vision as contact; this
contact supplied an impulse, this impulse a movement, and if this
movement, which is a kind of vortex of a certain particular form, is
only visible to our eyes by what it has picked up on its path, it is no
less true that other dust might equally well have been raised, and that
it would still have been the same vortex." ("Philosophic Intuition" in
the "Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", November 1911.)

Hence comes the fact that a philosophy is at bottom much more
independent of its natal environment than one might at first suppose;
hence also the fact that ancient philosophies, though ap