full equivalent.  When I read recent transcendentalist literature—­I must partly except my colleague Royce!—­I get nothing but a sort of marking of time, champing of jaws, pawing of the ground, and resettling into the same attitude, like a weary horse in a stall with an empty manger.  It is but turning over the same few threadbare categories, bringing the same objections, and urging the same answers and solutions, with never a new fact or a new horizon coming into sight.  But open Bergson, and new horizons loom on every page you read.  It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds.  It tells of reality itself, instead of merely reiterating what dusty-minded professors have written about what other previous professors have thought.  Nothing in Bergson is shop-worn or at second hand.

That he gives us no closed-in system will of course be fatal to him in intellectualist eyes.  He only evokes and invites; but he first annuls the intellectualist veto, so that we now join step with reality with a philosophical conscience never quite set free before.  As a french disciple of his well expresses it:  ’Bergson claims of us first of all a certain inner catastrophe, and not every one is capable of such a logical revolution.  But those who have once found themselves flexible enough for the execution of such a psychological change of front, discover somehow that they can never return again to their ancient attitude of mind.  They are now Bergsonians ... and possess the principal thoughts of the master all at once.  They have understood in the fashion in which one loves, they have caught the whole melody and can thereafter admire at their leisure the originality, the fecundity, and the imaginative genius with which its author develops, transposes, and varies in a thousand ways by the orchestration of his style and dialectic, the original theme.’[2]

This, scant as it is, is all I have to say about Bergson on this occasion—­I hope it may send some of you to his original text.  I must now turn back to the point where I found it advisable to appeal to his ideas.  You remember my own intellectualist difficulties in the last lecture, about how a lot of separate consciousnesses can at the same time be one collective thing.  How, I asked, can one and the same identical content of experience, of which on idealist principles the esse is to be felt, be felt so diversely if itself be the only feeler?  The usual way of escape by ‘quatenus’ or ‘as such’ won’t help us here if we are radical intellectualists, I said, for appearance-together is as such not appearance-apart, the world qua many is not the world qua one, as absolutism claims.  If we hold to Hume’s maxim, which later intellectualism uses so well, that whatever things are distinguished are as separate as if there were no manner of connexion between them, there seemed no way out of the difficulty save by stepping outside of experience altogether and invoking different spiritual agents, selves or souls, to realize the diversity required.  But this rescue by ‘scholastic entities’ I was unwilling to accept any more than pantheistic idealists accept it.