of things and with such intimacy of knowledge, feels that these things are not far from it, but dwell literally in its heart.  The revelation and the sentiment of them, if it be thorough, is just what the things are.  The total aspects to be discerned in a body are that body; and the movement of those aspects, when you enact it, is the spirit of that body, and at the same time a part of your own spirit.  To suppose that a man’s consciousness (either one’s own or other people’s) is a separate fact over and above the shuffling of the things he feels, or that these things are anything over and above the feeling of them which exists more or less everywhere in diffusion—­that, for the mystic, is to be once for all hopelessly intellectual, dualistic, and diabolical.  If you cannot shed the husk of those dead categories—­space, matter, mind, truth, person—­life is shut out of your heart.  And the mystic, who always speaks out of experience, is certainly right in this, that a certain sort of life is shut out by reason, the sort that reason calls dreaming or madness; but he forgets that reason too is a kind of life, and that of all the kinds—­mystical, passionate, practical, aesthetic, intellectual—­with their various degrees of light and heat, the life of reason is that which some people may prefer.  I confess I am one of these, and I am not inclined, even if I were able, to reproduce M. Bergson’s sentiments as he feels them.  He is his own perfect expositor.  All a critic can aim at is to understand these sentiments as existing facts, and to give them the place that belongs to them in the moral world.  To understand, in most cases, is intimacy enough.

Herbert Spencer says somewhere that the yolk of an egg is homogeneous, the highly heterogeneous bird being differentiated in it by the law of evolution.  I cannot think what assured Spencer of this homogeneity in the egg, except the fact that perhaps it all tasted alike, which might seem good proof to a pure empiricist.  Leibnitz, on the contrary, maintained that the organisation of nature was infinitely deep, every part consisting of an endless number of discrete elements.  Here we may observe the difference between good philosophy and bad.  The idea of Leibnitz is speculative and far outruns the evidence, but it is speculative in a well-advised, penetrating, humble, and noble fashion; while the idea of Spencer is foolishly dogmatic, it is a piece of ignorant self-sufficiency, like that insular empiricism that would deny that Chinamen were real until it had actually seen them.  Nature is richer than experience and wider than divination; and it is far rasher and more arrogant to declare that any part of nature is simple than to suggest the sort of complexity that perhaps it might have.  M. Bergson, however, is on the side of Spencer.  After studiously examining the egg on every side—­for he would do more than taste it—­and considering the source and destiny of it, he would summon his