ess it would be deeply
ethical, expressing the feelings that have always inspired Hebraic
morality.

A good way of testing the calibre of a philosophy is to ask what it
thinks of death. Philosophy, said Plato, is a meditation on death, or
rather, if we would do justice to his thought, an aspiration to live
disembodied; and Schopenhauer said that the spectacle of death was the
first provocation to philosophy. M. Bergson has not yet treated of
this subject; but we may perhaps perceive for ourselves the place that
it might occupy in his system.[5] Life, according to him, is the
original and absolute force. In the beginning, however, it was only a
potentiality or tendency. To become specific lives, life had to
emphasise and bring exclusively to consciousness, here and there,
special possibilities of living; and where these special lives have
their chosen boundary (if this way of putting it is not too Fichtean)
they posit or create a material environment. Matter is the view each
life takes of what for it are rejected or abandoned possibilities of
living. This might show how the absolute will to live, if it was to be
carried out, would have to begin by evoking a sense of dead or
material things about it; it would not show how death could ever
overtake the will itself. If matter were merely the periphery which
life has to draw round itself, in order to be a definite life, matter
could never abolish any life; as the ring of a circus or the sand of
the arena can never abolish the show for which they have been
prepared. Life would then be fed and defined by matter, as an artist
is served by the matter he needs to carry on his art.

[Footnote 5: M. Bergson has shown at considerable length that the idea
of non-existence is more complex, psychologically, than the idea of
existence, and posterior to it. He evidently thinks this disposes of
the reality of non-existence also: for it is the reality that he
wishes to exorcise by his words. If, however, non-existence and the
idea of non-existence were identical, it would have been impossible
for me not to exist before I was born: my non-existence then would be
more complex than my existence now, and posterior to it. The initiated
would not recoil from this consequence, but it might open the eyes of
some catechumens. It is a good test of the malicious theory of
knowledge.]

Yet in actual life there is undeniably such a thing as danger and
failure. M. Bergson even thinks that the facing