and there will
be some to listen to it in the future, as there have been many in the
past. As to modernism, it is suicide. It is the last of those
concessions to the spirit of the world which half-believers and
double-minded prophets have always been found making; but it is a
mortal concession. It concedes everything; for it concedes that
everything in Christianity, as Christians hold it, is an illusion.

III

THE PHILOSOPHY OF M. HENRI BERGSON

The most representative and remarkable of living philosophers is M.
Henri Bergson. Both the form and the substance of his works attract
universal attention. His ideas are pleasing and bold, and at least in
form wonderfully original; he is persuasive without argument and
mystical without conventionality; he moves in the atmosphere of
science and free thought, yet seems to transcend them and to be
secretly religious. An undercurrent of zeal and even of prophecy seems
to animate his subtle analyses and his surprising fancies. He is
eloquent, and to a public rather sick of the half-education it has
received and eager for some inspiriting novelty he seems more eloquent
than he is. He uses the French language (and little else is French
about him) in the manner of the more recent artists in words,
retaining the precision of phrase and the measured judgments which are
traditional in French literature, yet managing to envelop everything
in a penumbra of emotional suggestion. Each expression of an idea is
complete in itself; yet these expressions are often varied and
constantly metaphorical, so that we are led to feel that much in that
idea has remained unexpressed and is indeed inexpressible.

Studied and insinuating as M. Bergson is in his style, he is no less
elaborate in his learning. In the history of philosophy, in
mathematics and physics, and especially in natural history he has
taken great pains to survey the ground and to assimilate the views and
spirit of the most recent scholars. He might be called outright an
expert in all these subjects, were it not for a certain externality
and want of radical sympathy in his way of conceiving them. A genuine
historian of philosophy, for instance, would love to rehearse the
views of great thinkers, would feel their eternal plausibility, and in
interpreting them would think of himself as little as they ever
thought of him. But M. Bergson evidently regards Plato or Kant as
persons who did or did not prepare the way for some Bergs