y light a heart, or throw it out of the deeper regions of
philosophy to take its rightful and respectable place in the world of
simple human practice, if I had not been influenced by a comparatively
young and very original french writer, Professor Henri Bergson.
Reading his works is what has made me bold. If I had not read
Bergson, I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper
privately, in the hope of making ends meet that were never meant to
meet, and trying to discover some mode of conceiving the behavior of
reality which should leave no discrepancy between it and the accepted
laws of the logic of identity. It is certain, at any rate, that
without the confidence which being able to lean on Bergson's authority
gives me I should never have ventured to urge these particular views
of mine upon this ultra-critical audience.

I must therefore, in order to make my own views more intelligible,
give some preliminary account of the bergsonian philosophy. But here,
as in Fechner's case, I must confine myself only to the features
that are essential to the present purpose, and not entangle you in
collateral details, however interesting otherwise. For our present
purpose, then, the essential contribution of Bergson to philosophy
is his criticism of intellectualism. In my opinion he has killed
intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery. I don't
see how it can ever revive again in its ancient platonizing role of
claiming to be the most authentic, intimate, and exhaustive definer
of the nature of reality. Others, as Kant for example, have denied
intellectualism's pretensions to define reality _an sich_ or in its
absolute capacity; but Kant still leaves it laying down laws--and laws
from which there is no appeal--to all our human experience; while what
Bergson denies is that its methods give any adequate account of this
human experience in its very finiteness. Just how Bergson accomplishes
all this I must try to tell in my imperfect way in the next lecture;
but since I have already used the words 'logic,' 'logic of identity,
intellectualistic logic,' and 'intellectualism' so often, and
sometimes used them as if they required no particular explanation, it
will be wise at this point to say at greater length than heretofore in
what sense I take these terms when I claim that Bergson has refuted
their pretension to decide what reality can or cannot be. Just what I
mean by intellectualism is therefore what I sh