been omniscience hitherto might discover something more to-day.  “There shall be news,” William James was fond of saying with rapture, quoting from the unpublished poem of an obscure friend, “there shall be news in heaven!” There is almost certainly, he thought, a God now; there may be several gods, who might exist together, or one after the other.  We might, by our conspiring sympathies, help to make a new one.  Much in us is doubtless immortal; we survive death for some time in a recognisable form; but what our career and transformations may be in the sequel we cannot tell, although we may help to determine them by our daily choices.  Observation must be continual if our ideas are to remain true.  Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge; perpetual hazard, perpetual experiment keep quick the edge of life.

This is, so far as I know, a new philosophical vista; it is a conception never before presented, although implied, perhaps, in various quarters, as in Norse and even Greek mythology.  It is a vision radically empirical and radically romantic; and as William James himself used to say, the visions and not the arguments of a philosopher are the interesting and influential things about him.  William James, rather too generously, attributed this vision to M. Bergson, and regarded him in consequence as a philosopher of the first rank, whose thought was to be one of the turning-points in history.  M. Bergson had killed intellectualism.  It was his book on creative evolution, said James with humorous emphasis, that had come at last to “ecraser l’infame.”  We may suspect, notwithstanding, that intellectualism, infamous and crushed, will survive the blow; and if the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes were now alive, and heard that there shall be news in heaven, he would doubtless say that there may possibly be news there, but that under the sun there is nothing new—­not even radical empiricism or radical romanticism, which from the beginning of the world has been the philosophy of those who as yet had had little experience; for to the blinking little child it is not merely something in the world that is new daily, but everything is new all day.  I am not concerned with the rights and wrongs of that controversy; my point is only that William James, in this genial evolutionary view of the world, has given a rude shock to the genteel tradition.  What!  The world a gradual improvisation?  Creation unpremeditated?  God a sort of young poet or struggling artist?  William James is an advocate of theism; pragmatism adds one to the evidences of religion; that is excellent.  But is not the cool abstract piety of the genteel getting more than it asks for?  This empirical naturalistic God is too crude and positive a force; he will work miracles, he will answer prayers, he may inhabit distinct places, and have distinct conditions under which alone he can operate; he is a neighbouring being, whom we can act upon, and rely upon for specific aids, as upon a personal friend, or a physician, or