but in the texture and degree of its fabulousness it differs notably from the performances of previous metaphysicians.  Primitive poets, even ancient philosophers, were not psychologists; their fables were compacted out of elements found in practical life, and they reckoned in the units in which language and passion reckon—­wooing, feasting, fighting, vice, virtue, happiness, justice.  Above all, they talked about persons or about ideals; this man, this woman, this typical thought or sentiment was what fixed their attention and seemed to them the ultimate thing.  Not so M. Bergson:  he is a microscopic psychologist, and even in man what he studies by preference is not some integrated passion or idea, but something far more recondite; the minute texture of sensation, memory, or impulse.  Sharp analysis is required to distinguish or arrest these elements, yet these are the predestined elements of his fable; and so his anthropomorphism is far less obvious than that of most poets and theologians, though no less real.

This peculiarity in the terms of the myth carries with it a notable extension in its propriety.  The social and moral phenomena of human life cannot be used in interpreting life elsewhere without a certain conscious humour.  This makes the charm of avowed writers of fable; their playful travesty and dislocation of things human, which would be puerile if they meant to be naturalists, render them piquant moralists; for they are not really interpreting animals, but under the mask of animals maliciously painting men.  Such fables are morally interesting and plausible just because they are psychologically false.  If AEsop could have reported what lions and lambs, ants and donkeys, really feel and think, his poems would have been perfect riddles to the public; and they would have had no human value except that of illustrating, to the truly speculative philosopher, the irresponsible variety of animal consciousness and its incommensurable types.  Now M. Bergson’s psychological fictions, being drawn from what is rudimentary in man, have a better chance of being literally true beyond man.  Indeed what he asks us to do, and wishes to do himself, is simply to absorb so completely the aspect and habit of things that the soul of them may take possession of us:  that we may know by intuition the elan vital which the world expresses, just as Paolo, in Dante, knew by intuition the elan vital that the smile of Francesca expressed.

The correctness of such an intuition, however, rests on a circumstance which M. Bergson does not notice, because his psychology is literary and not scientific.  It rests on the possibility of imitation.  When the organism observed and that of the observer have a similar structure and can imitate one another, the idea produced in the observer by intent contemplation is like the experience present to the person contemplated.  But where this contagion of attitude, and therefore of feeling, is impossible, our intuition of our neighbours’