oint. It is never wholly recoverable. To recover it at all, an
historian must have a certain detachment and ingenuousness; knowing
the dignity and simplicity of his own mind, he must courteously
attribute the same dignity and simplicity to others, unless their
avowed attitude prevents; this is to be an intelligent critic and to
write history like a gentleman. The truth, which all philosophers
alike are seeking, is eternal. It lies as near to one age as to
another; the means of discovery alone change, and not always for the
better. The course of evolution is no test of what is true or good;
else nothing could be good intrinsically nor true simply and
ultimately; on the contrary, it is the approach to truth and
excellence anywhere, like the approach of tree tops to the sky, that
tests the value of evolution, and determines whether it is moving
upward or downward or in a circle.

M. Bergson accordingly misses fire when, for instance, in order
utterly to damn a view which he has been criticising, and which may be
open to objection on other grounds, he cries that those who hold it
"_retardent sur Kant;_" as if a clock were the compass of the mind,
and he who was one minute late was one point off the course. Kant was
a hard honest thinker, more sinned against than sinning, from whom a
great many people in the nineteenth century have taken their point of
departure, departing as far as they chose; but if a straight line of
progress could be traced at all through the labyrinth of philosophy,
Kant would not lie in that line. His thought is essentially excentric
and sophisticated, being largely based on two inherited blunders,
which a truly progressive philosophy would have to begin by avoiding,
thus leaving Kant on one side, and weathering his philosophy, as one
might Scylla or Charybdis. The one blunder was that of the English
malicious psychology which had maintained since the time of Locke that
the ideas in the mind are the only objects of knowledge, instead of
being the knowledge of objects. The other blunder was that of
Protestantism that, in groping after that moral freedom which is so
ineradicable a need of a pure spirit, thought to find it in a revision
of revelation, tradition, and prejudice, so as to be able to cling to
these a little longer. How should a system so local, so accidental,
and so unstable as Kant's be prescribed as a sort of catechism for all
humanity? The tree of knowledge has many branches, and all its f