But the degree of intelligence which this age possesses
makes it so very uncomfortable that, in this instance,
it asks for something less vital, and sighs for what
evolution has left behind. In the presence of
such cruelly distinct things as astronomy or such
cruelly confused things as theology it feels la
nostalgie de la boue. It was only, M. Bergson
tells us, where dead matter oppressed life that life
was forced to become intelligence; for this reason
intelligence kills whatever it touches; it is the
tribute that life pays to death. Life would find
it sweet to throw off that painful subjection to circumstance
and bloom in some more congenial direction. M.
Bergson’s own philosophy is an effort to realise
this revulsion, to disintegrate intelligence and stimulate
sympathetic experience. Its charm lies in the
relief which it brings to a stale imagination, an
imagination from which religion has vanished and which
is kept stretched on the machinery of business and
society, or on small half-borrowed passions which we
clothe in a mean rhetoric and dot with vulgar pleasures.
Finding their intelligence enslaved, our contemporaries
suppose that intelligence is essentially servile;
instead of freeing it, they try to elude it. Not
free enough themselves morally, but bound to the world
partly by piety and partly by industrialism, they
cannot think of rising to a detached contemplation
of earthly things, and of life itself and evolution;
they revert rather to sensibility, and seek some by-path
of instinct or dramatic sympathy in which to wander.
Having no stomach for the ultimate, they burrow downwards
towards the primitive. But the longing to be
primitive is a disease of culture; it is archaism in
morals. To be so preoccupied with vitality is
a symptom of anaemia. When life was really vigorous
and young, in Homeric times for instance, no one seemed
to fear that it might be squeezed out of existence
either by the incubus of matter or by the petrifying
blight of intelligence. Life was like the light
of day, something to use, or to waste, or to enjoy.
It was not a thing to worship; and often the chief
luxury of living consisted in dealing death about
vigorously. Life indeed was loved, and the beauty
and pathos of it were felt exquisitely; but its beauty
and pathos lay in the divineness of its model and in
its own fragility. No one paid it the equivocal
compliment of thinking it a substance or a material
force. Nobility was not then impossible in sentiment,
because there were ideals in life higher and more
indestructible than life itself, which life might illustrate
and to which it might fitly be sacrificed. Nothing
can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live
on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honour
is not willing to live except in its own way, and a
spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at
all. In those days men recognised immortal gods
and resigned themselves to being mortal. Yet
those were the truly vital and instinctive days of