with great lucidity and unusual command of all the classic expository apparatus.  Bergson’s resources in the way of erudition are remarkable, and in the way of expression they are simply phenomenal.  This is why in France, where l’art de bien dire counts for so much and is so sure of appreciation, he has immediately taken so eminent a place in public esteem.  Old-fashioned professors, whom his ideas quite fail to satisfy, nevertheless speak of his talent almost with bated breath, while the youngsters flock to him as to a master.

If anything can make hard things easy to follow, it is a style like Bergson’s.  A ‘straightforward’ style, an american reviewer lately called it; failing to see that such straightforwardness means a flexibility of verbal resource that follows the thought without a crease or wrinkle, as elastic silk underclothing follows the movements of one’s body.  The lucidity of Bergson’s way of putting things is what all readers are first struck by.  It seduces you and bribes you in advance to become his disciple.  It is a miracle, and he a real magician.

M. Bergson, if I am rightly informed, came into philosophy through the gateway of mathematics.  The old antinomies of the infinite were, I imagine, the irritant that first woke his faculties from their dogmatic slumber.  You all remember Zeno’s famous paradox, or sophism, as many of our logic books still call it, of Achilles and the tortoise.  Give that reptile ever so small an advance and the swift runner Achilles can never overtake him, much less get ahead of him; for if space and time are infinitely divisible (as our intellects tell us they must be), by the time Achilles reaches the tortoise’s starting-point, the tortoise has already got ahead of that starting-point, and so on ad infinitum, the interval between the pursuer and the pursued growing endlessly minuter, but never becoming wholly obliterated.  The common way of showing up the sophism here is by pointing out the ambiguity of the expression ‘never can overtake.’  What the word ‘never’ falsely suggests, it is said, is an infinite duration of time; what it really means is the inexhaustible number of the steps of which the overtaking must consist.  But if these steps are infinitely short, a finite time will suffice for them; and in point of fact they do rapidly converge, whatever be the original interval or the contrasted speeds, toward infinitesimal shortness.  This proportionality of the shortness of the times to that of the spaces required frees us, it is claimed, from the sophism which the word ‘never’ suggests.

But this criticism misses Zeno’s point entirely.  Zeno would have been perfectly willing to grant that if the tortoise can be overtaken at all, he can be overtaken in (say) twenty seconds, but he would still have insisted that he can’t be overtaken at all.  Leave Achilles and the tortoise out of the account altogether, he would have said—­they complicate the case unnecessarily.  Take any single process