use it has no end. It embodies no formula or
statable law; any formula is at best a poor abstraction, describing
what, in some region and for some time, may be the most striking
characteristic of existence; the law is a description _a posteriori_
of the habit things have chosen to acquire, and which they may
possibly throw off altogether. What a day may bring forth is
uncertain; uncertain even to God. Omniscience is impossible; time is
real; what had been omniscience hitherto might discover something more
to-day. "There shall be news," William James was fond of saying with
rapture, quoting from the unpublished poem of an obscure friend,
"there shall be news in heaven!" There is almost certainly, he
thought, a God now; there may be several gods, who might exist
together, or one after the other. We might, by our conspiring
sympathies, help to make a new one. Much in us is doubtless immortal;
we survive death for some time in a recognisable form; but what our
career and transformations may be in the sequel we cannot tell,
although we may help to determine them by our daily choices.
Observation must be continual if our ideas are to remain true. Eternal
vigilance is the price of knowledge; perpetual hazard, perpetual
experiment keep quick the edge of life.

This is, so far as I know, a new philosophical vista; it is a
conception never before presented, although implied, perhaps, in
various quarters, as in Norse and even Greek mythology. It is a vision
radically empirical and radically romantic; and as William James
himself used to say, the visions and not the arguments of a
philosopher are the interesting and influential things about him.
William James, rather too generously, attributed this vision to M.
Bergson, and regarded him in consequence as a philosopher of the first
rank, whose thought was to be one of the turning-points in history. M.
Bergson had killed intellectualism. It was his book on creative
evolution, said James with humorous emphasis, that had come at last to
"_ecraser l'infame_." We may suspect, notwithstanding, that
intellectualism, infamous and crushed, will survive the blow; and if
the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes were now alive, and heard that
there shall be news in heaven, he would doubtless say that there may
possibly be news there, but that under the sun there is nothing
new--not even radical empiricism or radical romanticism, which from
the beginning of the world has been the philosophy of th