in your hand.  Get at the expanding centre of a human character, the elan vital of a man, as Bergson calls it, by living sympathy, and at a stroke you see how it makes those who see it from without interpret it in such diverse ways.  It is something that breaks into both honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, stupidity and insight, at the touch of varying circumstances, and you feel exactly why and how it does this, and never seek to identify it stably with any of these single abstractions.  Only your intellectualist does that,—­and you now also feel why he must do it to the end.

Place yourself similarly at the centre of a man’s philosophic vision and you understand at once all the different things it makes him write or say.  But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to build the philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one and then another and seeking to make them fit, and of course you fail.  You crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists.  I hope that some of the philosophers in this audience may occasionally have had something different from this intellectualist type of criticism applied to their own works!

What really exists is not things made but things in the making.  Once made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them.  But put yourself in the making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and, the whole range of possible decompositions coming at once into your possession, you are no longer troubled with the question which of them is the more absolutely true.  Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life—­it buds and bourgeons, changes and creates.  Once adopt the movement of this life in any given instance and you know what Bergson calls the devenir reel by which the thing evolves and grows.  Philosophy should seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality, not follow science in vainly patching together fragments of its dead results.

Thus much of M. Bergson’s philosophy is sufficient for my purpose in these lectures, so here I will stop, leaving unnoticed all its other constituent features, original and interesting tho they be.  You may say, and doubtless some of you now are saying inwardly, that his remanding us to sensation in this wise is only a regress, a return to that ultra-crude empiricism which your own idealists since Green have buried ten times over.  I confess that it is indeed a return to empiricism, but I think that the return in such accomplished shape only proves the latter’s immortal truth.  What won’t stay buried must have some genuine life. Am anfang war die tat; fact is a first; to which all our conceptual handling comes as an inadequate second, never its