me be members of a world-experience defined
expressly as having all its parts co-conscious, or known together. The
definitions are contradictory, so the things defined can in no way be
united. You see how unintelligible intellectualism here seems to make
the world of our most accomplished philosophers. Neither as they
use it nor as we use it does it do anything but make nature look
irrational and seem impossible.

In my next lecture, using Bergson as my principal topic, I shall enter
into more concrete details and try, by giving up intellectualism
frankly, to make, if not the world, at least my own general thesis,
less unintelligible.

LECTURE VI

BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF INTELLECTUALISM

I gave you a very stiff lecture last time, and I fear that this one
can be little less so. The best way of entering into it will be to
begin immediately with Bergson's philosophy, since I told you that
that was what had led me personally to renounce the intellectualistic
method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of
what can or cannot be.

Professor Henri Bergson is a young man, comparatively, as influential
philosophers go, having been born at Paris in 1859. His career has
been the perfectly routine one of a successful french professor.
Entering the ecole normale superieure at the age of twenty-two, he
spent the next seventeen years teaching at _lycees_, provincial or
parisian, until his fortieth year, when he was made professor at the
said ecole normale. Since 1900 he has been professor at the College de
France, and member of the Institute since 1900. So far as the outward
facts go, Bergson's career has then been commonplace to the utmost.
Neither one of Taine's famous principles of explanation of great
men, _the race, the environment, or the moment_, no, nor all three
together, will explain that peculiar way of looking at things that
constitutes his mental individuality. Originality in men dates from
nothing previous, other things date from it, rather. I have to confess
that Bergson's originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle
me entirely. I doubt whether any one understands him all over, so to
speak; and I am sure that he would himself be the first to see that
this must be, and to confess that things which he himself has not yet
thought out clearly, had yet to be mentioned and have a tentative
place assigned them in his philosophy. Many of us are profusely
original, in that no man