dwelt in their hearts, meaning this pretty
literally: so this mystical philosophy of the immediate, which talks
sometimes so scientifically of things and with such intimacy of
knowledge, feels that these things are not far from it, but dwell
literally in its heart. The revelation and the sentiment of them, if
it be thorough, is just what the things are. The total aspects to be
discerned in a body _are_ that body; and the movement of those
aspects, when you enact it, _is_ the spirit of that body, and at the
same time a part of your own spirit. To suppose that a man's
consciousness (either one's own or other people's) is a separate fact
over and above the shuffling of the things he feels, or that these
things are anything over and above the feeling of them which exists
more or less everywhere in diffusion--that, for the mystic, is to be
once for all hopelessly intellectual, dualistic, and diabolical. If
you cannot shed the husk of those dead categories--space, matter,
mind, truth, person--life is shut out of your heart. And the mystic,
who always speaks out of experience, is certainly right in this, that
a certain sort of life is shut out by reason, the sort that reason
calls dreaming or madness; but he forgets that reason too is a kind of
life, and that of all the kinds--mystical, passionate, practical,
aesthetic, intellectual--with their various degrees of light and heat,
the life of reason is that which some people may prefer. I confess I
am one of these, and I am not inclined, even if I were able, to
reproduce M. Bergson's sentiments as he feels them. He is his own
perfect expositor. All a critic can aim at is to understand these
sentiments as existing facts, and to give them the place that belongs
to them in the moral world. To understand, in most cases, is intimacy
enough.

Herbert Spencer says somewhere that the yolk of an egg is homogeneous,
the highly heterogeneous bird being differentiated in it by the law of
evolution. I cannot think what assured Spencer of this homogeneity in
the egg, except the fact that perhaps it all tasted alike, which might
seem good proof to a pure empiricist. Leibnitz, on the contrary,
maintained that the organisation of nature was infinitely deep, every
part consisting of an endless number of discrete elements. Here we
may observe the difference between good philosophy and bad. The idea
of Leibnitz is speculative and far outruns the evidence, but it is
speculative in a well-advised,