of
matter; and so the great experiment crawls and shoots on, the dream of
a giant without a body, mindful of the past, uncertain of the future,
shuffling his images, and threading his painful way through a
labyrinth of cross-purposes.

Such at least is the notion which the reader gathers from the
prevailing character of M. Bergson's words; but I am not sure that it
would be his ultimate conclusion. Perhaps it is to be out of sympathy
with his spirit to speak of an ultimate conclusion at all; nothing
comes to a conclusion and nothing is ultimate. Many dilemmas, however,
are inevitable, and if the master does not make a choice himself, his
pupils will divide and trace the alternative consequences for
themselves in each direction. If they care most for a real fluidity,
as William James did, they will stick to something like what I have
just described; but if they care most for immediacy, as we may suspect
that M. Bergson does, they will transform that view into something far
more orthodox. For a real fluidity and an absolute immediacy are not
compatible. To believe in real change you must put some trust in
representation, and if you posit a real past and a real future you
posit independent objects. In absolute immediacy, on the contrary,
instead of change taken realistically, you can have only a feeling of
change. The flux becomes an idea in the absolute, like the image of a
moving spiral, always flowing outwards or inwards, but with its centre
and its circumference always immovable. Duration, we must remember, is
simply the sense of lasting; no time is real that is not lived
through. Therefore various lives cannot be dated in a common time, but
have no temporal relations to one another. Thus, if we insist on
immediacy, the vaunted novelty of the future and the inestimable
freedom of life threaten to become (like all else) the given _feeling_
of novelty or freedom, in passing from a given image of the past to a
given image of the future--all these terms being contained in the
present; and we have reverted to the familiar conception of absolute
immutability in absolute life. M. Bergson has studied Plotinus and
Spinoza; I suspect he has not studied them in vain.

Nor is this the only point at which this philosophy, when we live a
while with it, suddenly drops its mask of novelty and shows us a
familiar face. It would seem, for instance, that beneath the drama of
creative evolution there was a deeper nature of things. For