To protect this inner conviction, however, it is necessary for the mystic to sally forth and attack the enemy on his own ground.  If he refuted physics and mathematics simply out of his own faith, he might be accused of ignorance of the subject.  He will therefore study it conscientiously, yet with a certain irritation and haste to be done with it, somewhat as a Jesuit might study Protestant theology.  Such a student, however, is apt to lose his pains; for in retracing a free inquiry in his servile spirit, he remains deeply ignorant, not indeed of its form, but of its nature and value.  Why, for instance, has M. Bergson such a horror of mechanical physics?  He seems to think it a black art, dealing in unholy abstractions, and rather dangerous to salvation, and he keeps his metaphysical exorcisms and antidotes always at hand, to render it innocuous, at least to his own soul.  But physical science never solicited of anybody that he should be wholly absorbed in the contemplation of atoms, and worship them; that we must worship and lose ourselves in reality, whatever reality may be, is a mystic aberration, which physical science does nothing to foster.  Nor does any critical physicist suppose that what he describes is the whole of the object; he merely notes the occasions on which its sensible qualities appear, and calculates events.  Because the calculable side of nature is his province, he does not deny that events have other aspects—­the psychic and the moral, for instance—­no less real in their way, in terms of which calculation would indeed be impossible.  If he chances to call the calculable elements of nature her substance, as it is proper to do, that name is given without passion; he may perfectly well proclaim with Goethe that it is in the accidents, in the farbiger Abglanz, that we have our life.  And if it be for his freedom that the mystic trembles, I imagine any man of science would be content with M. Bergson’s assertion that true freedom is the sense of freedom, and that in any intelligible statement of the situation, even the most indeterministic, this freedom disappears; for it is an immediate experience, not any scheme of relation between events.

The horror of mechanical physics arises, then, from attributing to that science pretensions and extensions which it does not have; it arises from the habits of theology and metaphysics being imported inopportunely into science.  Similarly when M. Bergson mentions mathematics, he seems to be thinking of the supposed authority it exercises—­one of Kant’s confusions—­over the empirical world, and trying to limit and subordinate that authority, lest movement should somehow be removed from nature, and vagueness from human thought.  But nature and human thought are what they are; they have enough affinity to mathematics, as it happens, to suggest that study to our minds, and to give those who go deep into it a great, though partial, mastery over things.  Nevertheless a true mathematician is satisfied with