Well, what must we do in this tragic predicament?  For my own part, I have finally found myself compelled to give up the logic, fairly, squarely, and irrevocably.  It has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality—­just what it is I can perhaps suggest to you a little later.  Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it.  If you like to employ words eulogistically, as most men do, and so encourage confusion, you may say that reality obeys a higher logic, or enjoys a higher rationality.  But I think that even eulogistic words should be used rather to distinguish than to commingle meanings, so I prefer bluntly to call reality if not irrational then at least non-rational in its constitution,—­and by reality here I mean reality where things happen, all temporal reality without exception.  I myself find no good warrant for even suspecting the existence of any reality of a higher denomination than that distributed and strung-along and flowing sort of reality which we finite beings swim in.  That is the sort of reality given us, and that is the sort with which logic is so incommensurable.  If there be any higher sort of reality—­the ‘absolute,’ for example—­that sort, by the confession of those who believe in it, is still less amenable to ordinary logic; it transcends logic and is therefore still less rational in the intellectualist sense, so it cannot help us to save our logic as an adequate definer and confiner of existence.

These sayings will sound queer and dark, probably they will sound quite wild or childish in the absence of explanatory comment.  Only the persuasion that I soon can explain them, if not satisfactorily to all of you, at least intelligibly, emboldens me to state them thus baldly as a sort of programme.  Please take them as a thesis, therefore, to be defended by later pleading.

I told you that I had long and sincerely wrestled with the dilemma.  I have now to confess (and this will probably re-animate your interest) that I should not now be emancipated, not now subordinate logic with so very light a heart, or throw it out of the deeper regions of philosophy to take its rightful and respectable place in the world of simple human practice, if I had not been influenced by a comparatively young and very original french writer, Professor Henri Bergson.  Reading his works is what has made me bold.  If I had not read Bergson, I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper privately, in the hope of making ends meet that were never meant to meet, and trying to discover some mode of conceiving the behavior of reality which should leave no discrepancy between it and the accepted laws of the logic of identity.  It is certain, at any rate, that without the confidence which being able to lean on Bergson’s authority gives me I should never have ventured to urge these particular views of mine upon this ultra-critical audience.