ruits
are not condemned to hang for ever from that one gnarled and contorted
bough. M. Bergson himself "lags behind" Kant on those points on which
his better insight requires it, as, for instance, on the reality of
time; but with regard to his own philosophy I am afraid he thinks that
all previous systems empty into it, which is hardly true, and that all
future systems must flow out of it, which is hardly necessary.

The embarrassment that qualifies M. Bergson's attainments in
mathematics and physics has another and more personal source. He
understands, but he trembles. Non-human immensities frighten him, as
they did Pascal. He suffers from cosmic agoraphobia. We
might think empty space an innocent harmless thing, a mere opportunity
to move, which ought to be highly prized by all devotees of motion.
But M. Bergson is instinctively a mystic, and his philosophy
deliberately discredits the existence of anything except in immediacy,
that is, as an experience of the heart. What he dreads in space is
that the heart should be possessed by it, and transformed into it. He
dreads that the imagination should be fascinated by the homogeneous
and static, hypnotised by geometry, and actually lost in
_Auseinandersein_. This would be a real death and petrifaction of
consciousness, frozen into contemplation of a monotonous infinite
void. What is warm and desirable is rather the sense of variety and
succession, as if all visions radiated from the occupied focus or
hearth of the self. The more concentration at this habitable point,
with the more mental perspectives opening backwards and forwards
through time, in a word, the more personal and historical the
apparition, the better it would be. Things must be reduced again to
what they seem; it is vain and terrible to take them for what we find
they are. M. Bergson is at bottom an apologist for very old human
prejudices, an apologist for animal illusion. His whole labour is a
plea for some vague but comfortable faith which he dreads to have
stolen from him by the progress of art and knowledge. There is a
certain trepidation, a certain suppressed instinct to snap at and
sting the hated oppressor, as if some desperate small being were at
bay before a horrible monster. M. Bergson is afraid of space, of
mathematics, of necessity, and of eternity; he is afraid of the
intellect and the possible discoveries of science; he is afraid of
nothingness and death. These fears may prevent him from being a