nd expressed the traveller's book would have
found little understanding and no sale in his own country. This
plausibility to the ignorant is present in all spontaneous myth.
Nothing more need be demanded of irresponsible fiction, which makes no
pretensions to be a human document, but is merely a human
entertainment.

Now, a human psychology, even of the finest grain, when it is applied
to the interpretation of the soul of matter, or of the soul of the
whole universe, obviously yields a view of the irresponsible and
subjective sort; for it is not based on any close similarity between
the observed and the observer: man and the ether, man and cosmic
evolution, cannot mimic one another, to discover mutually how they
feel. But just because merely human, such an interpretation may remain
always plausible to man; and it would be an admirable entertainment if
there were no danger that it should be taken seriously. The idea Paul
has of Peter, Spinoza observes, expresses the nature of Peter less
than it betrays that of Paul; and so an idea framed by a man of the
consciousness of things in general reveals the mind of that man rather
than the mind of the universe; but the mind of the man too may be
worth knowing, and the illusive hope of discovering everything may
lead him truly to disclose himself. Such a disclosure of the lower
depths of man by himself is M. Bergson's psychology; and the
psychological romance, purporting to describe the inward nature of the
universe, which he has built out of that introspection, is his
metaphysics.

Many a point in this metaphysics may seem strange, fantastic, and
obscure; and so it really is, when dislocated and projected
metaphysically; but not one will be found to be arbitrary; not one
but is based on attentive introspection and perception of the
immediate. Take, for example, what is M. Bergson's starting-point, his
somewhat dazzling doctrine that to be is to last, or rather to feel
oneself endure. This is a hypostasis of "true" (_i.e._ immediately
felt) duration. In a sensuous day-dream past feelings survive in the
present, images of the long ago are shuffled together with present
sensations, the roving imagination leaves a bright wake behind it like
a comet, and pushes a rising wave before it, like the bow of a ship;
all is fluidity, continuity without identity, novelty without
surprise. Hence, too, the doctrine of freedom: the images that appear
in such a day-dream are often congruous in