and only a bare hint of lines of
solution dare be offered.

It is of interest to note that the last word in science and philosophy
tends to reinforce and even to explain the position of the mystic. The
latest of European philosophers, M. Bergson, builds up on a mystical
basis the whole of his method of thought, that is, on his perception of
the simple fact that true duration, the real time-flow, is known to us
by a state of feeling which he calls intuition, and not by an
intellectual act.

He says something like this. We find as a matter of practice that
certain problems when presented to the intellect are difficult and even
impossible to solve, whereas when presented to our experience of life,
their solution is so obvious that they cease to be problems. Thus, the
unaided intellect might be puzzled to say how sounds can grow more alike
by continuing to grow more different. Yet a child can answer the
question by sounding an octave on the piano. But this solution is
reached by having sensible knowledge of the reality and not by logical
argument. Bergson's view, therefore, is that the intellect has been
evolved for practical purposes, to deal in a certain way with material
things by cutting up into little bits what is an undivided flow of
movement, and by looking at these little bits side by side. This, though
necessary for practical life, is utterly misleading when we assume that
the "points" thus singled out by the intellect represent the "thickness"
of reality. Reality is fluidity, and we cannot dip up its substance with
the intellect which deals with surfaces, even as we cannot dip up water
with a net, however finely meshed. Reality is movement, and movement is
the one thing we are unable intellectually to realise.

In order to grasp reality we must use the faculty of contact or
immediate feeling, or, as Bergson calls it, intuition. Intuition is a
different order of knowledge, it is moulded on the very form of life,
and it enables us to enter into life, to be one with it, to live it. It
is "a direction of movement: and, although capable of infinite
development, is simplicity itself." This is the mystic art, which in
its early stages is a direction of movement, an alteration of the
quality and intensity of the self. So Bergson, making use of and
applying the whole range of modern psychology and biology, tells us that
we must develop intuition as a philosophical instrument if we are to
gain any knowledge of things in