are mutable and corruptible.  This is the tradition known as rationalism in philosophy, and what I have called intellectualism is only the extreme application of it.  In spite of sceptics and empiricists, in spite of Protagoras, Hume, and James Mill, rationalism has never been seriously questioned, for its sharpest critics have always had a tender place in their hearts for it, and have obeyed some of its mandates.  They have not been consistent; they have played fast and loose with the enemy; and Bergson alone has been radical.

To show what I mean by this, let me contrast his procedure with that of some of the transcendentalist philosophers whom I have lately mentioned.  Coming after Kant, these pique themselves on being ‘critical,’ on building in fact upon Kant’s ‘critique’ of pure reason.  What that critique professed to establish was this, that concepts do not apprehend reality, but only such appearances as our senses feed out to them.  They give immutable intellectual forms to these appearances, it is true, but the reality an sich from which in ultimate resort the sense-appearances have to come remains forever unintelligible to our intellect.  Take motion, for example.  Sensibly, motion comes in drops, waves, or pulses; either some actual amount of it, or none, being apprehended.  This amount is the datum or gabe which reality feeds out to our intellectual faculty; but our intellect makes of it a task or aufgabe—­this pun is one of the most memorable of Kant’s formulas—­and insists that in every pulse of it an infinite number of successive minor pulses shall be ascertainable.  These minor pulses we can indeed go on to ascertain or to compute indefinitely if we have patience; but it would contradict the definition of an infinite number to suppose the endless series of them to have actually counted themselves out piecemeal.  Zeno made this manifest; so the infinity which our intellect requires of the sense-datum is thus a future and potential rather than a past and actual infinity of structure.  The datum after it has made itself must be decompos_able_ ad infinitum by our conception, but of the steps by which that structure actually got composed we know nothing.  Our intellect casts, in short, no ray of light on the processes by which experiences get made.

Kant’s monistic successors have in general found the data of immediate experience even more self-contradictory, when intellectually treated, than Kant did.  Not only the character of infinity involved in the relation of various empirical data to their ‘conditions,’ but the very notion that empirical things should be related to one another at all, has seemed to them, when the intellectualistic fit was upon them, full of paradox and contradiction.  We saw in a former lecture numerous instances of this from Hegel, Bradley, Royce, and others.  We saw also where the solution of such an intolerable state of things was sought for by these authors.  Whereas Kant had placed