a universal vitalist; apparently an _elan
vital_ must have existed once to deposit in inorganic matter the
energy stored there, and to set mechanism going. But he relies on
biology alone to prove the present existence of an independent effort
to live; this is needed to do what mechanism, as he thinks, could
never do; it is not needed to do, as in Schopenhauer, what mechanism
does. M. Bergson thus introduces his metaphysical force as a peculiar
requirement of biology; he breaks the continuity of nature; he loses
the poetic justification of a metaphysical vitalism; he asks us to
believe that life is not a natural expression of material being, but
an alien and ghostly madness descending into it--I say a ghostly
madness, for why should disembodied life wish that the body should
live? This vitalism is not a kind of biology more prudent and literal
than the mechanical kind (as a scientific vitalism would be), but far
less legitimately speculative. Nor is it a frank and thorough
mythology, such as the total spectacle of the universe might suggest
to an imaginative genius. It is rather a popular animism, insisting on
a sympathetic interpretation of nature where human sympathy is quick
and easy, and turning this sympathy into a revelation of the absolute,
but leaving the rest of nature cold, because to sympathise with its
movement there is harder for anxious, self-centred mortals, and
requires a disinterested mind. M. Bergson would have us believe that
mankind is what nature has set her heart on and the best she can do,
for whose sake she has been long making very special efforts. We are
fortunate that at least her darling is all mankind and not merely
Israel.

In spite, then, of M. Bergson's learning as a naturalist and his eye
for the facts--things Aristotle also possessed--he is like Aristotle
profoundly out of sympathy with nature. Aristotle was alienated from
nature and any penetrating study of it by the fact that he was a
disciple of Socrates, and therefore essentially a moralist and a
logician. M. Bergson is alienated from nature by something quite
different; he is the adept of a very modern, very subtle, and very
arbitrary art, that of literary psychology. In this art the
imagination is invited to conceive things as if they were all centres
of passion and sensation. Literary psychology is not a science; it is
practised by novelists and poets; yet if it is to be brilliantly
executed it demands a minute and extended obse