as has been said, to obvious spontaneity. At most this
would be the case in the animal world, where the psychological life is
principally that of the affections. But in the case of man, a thinking
being, the free act can be called a synthesis of feelings and ideas, and
the evolution which leads to it a reasonable evolution." ("Matter and
Memory", page 205.)

Finally, in a most important letter, ("Report of the French
Philosophical Society", meeting, 26th February 1903.) Mr Bergson
becomes a little more precise still. We must certainly not confuse the
affirmation of liberty with the negation of physical determinism; "for
there is more in this affirmation than in this negation." All the same,
liberty supposes a certain contingence. It is "psychological causality
itself," which must not be represented after the model of physical
causality.

In opposition to the latter, it implies that between two moments of a
conscious being there is not an equivalence admitting of deduction, that
in the transition from one to the other there is a genuine creation.
Without doubt the free act is not without explanatory reasons.

"But these reasons have determined us only at the moment when they have
become determining; that is, at the moment when the act was virtually
accomplished, and the creation of which I speak is entirely contained in
the progress by which these reasons have become determining." It is true
that all this implies a certain independence of mental life in relation
to the mechanism of matter; and that is why Mr Bergson was obliged to
set himself the problem of the relations between body and mind.

We know that the solution of this problem is the principal object of
"Matter and Memory". The thesis of psycho-physiological parallelism is
there peremptorily refuted.

The method which Mr Bergson has followed to do so will be found set out
by himself in a communication to the French Philosophical Society, which
it is important to study as introduction. ("Report" of meeting, 2nd
May 1901.) The paralogism included in the very enunciation of the
parallelist thesis is explained in a memoire presented to the Geneva
International Philosophical Congress in 1904. ("Revue de Metaphysique et
de Morale", November 1904.) But the actual proof is made by the analysis
of the memoire which fills chapters ii. and iii. of the work cited
above. (An extremely suggestive resume of these theses will be found
in the second lecture on "The Percept