into it—­I say a ghostly madness, for why should disembodied life wish that the body should live?  This vitalism is not a kind of biology more prudent and literal than the mechanical kind (as a scientific vitalism would be), but far less legitimately speculative.  Nor is it a frank and thorough mythology, such as the total spectacle of the universe might suggest to an imaginative genius.  It is rather a popular animism, insisting on a sympathetic interpretation of nature where human sympathy is quick and easy, and turning this sympathy into a revelation of the absolute, but leaving the rest of nature cold, because to sympathise with its movement there is harder for anxious, self-centred mortals, and requires a disinterested mind.  M. Bergson would have us believe that mankind is what nature has set her heart on and the best she can do, for whose sake she has been long making very special efforts.  We are fortunate that at least her darling is all mankind and not merely Israel.

In spite, then, of M. Bergson’s learning as a naturalist and his eye for the facts—­things Aristotle also possessed—­he is like Aristotle profoundly out of sympathy with nature.  Aristotle was alienated from nature and any penetrating study of it by the fact that he was a disciple of Socrates, and therefore essentially a moralist and a logician.  M. Bergson is alienated from nature by something quite different; he is the adept of a very modern, very subtle, and very arbitrary art, that of literary psychology.  In this art the imagination is invited to conceive things as if they were all centres of passion and sensation.  Literary psychology is not a science; it is practised by novelists and poets; yet if it is to be brilliantly executed it demands a minute and extended observation of life.  Unless your psychological novelist had crammed his memory with pictures of the ways and aspects of men he would have no starting-point for his psychological fictions; he would not be able to render them circumstantial and convincing.  Just so M. Bergson’s achievements in psychological fiction, to be so brilliantly executed as they are, required all his learning.  The history of philosophy, mathematics, and physics, and above all natural history, had to supply him first with suggestions; and if he is not really a master in any of those fields, that is not to be wondered at.  His heart is elsewhere.  To write a universal biological romance, such as he has sketched for us in his system, he would ideally have required all scientific knowledge, but only as Homer required the knowledge of seamanship, generalship, statecraft, augury, and charioteering, in order to turn the aspects of them into poetry, and not with that technical solidity which Plato unjustly blames him for not possessing.  Just so M. Bergson’s proper achievement begins where his science ends, and his philosophy lies entirely beyond the horizon of possible discoveries or empirical probabilities.  In essence, it is myth or fable;