of metaphysical powers raises all the others, artificially and without occasion.  This side of M. Bergson’s philosophy illustrates the worst and most familiar vices of metaphysics.  It marvels at some appearance, not to investigate it, but to give it an unctuous name.  Then it turns this name into a power, that by its operation creates the appearance.  This is simply verbal mythology or the hypostasis of words, and there would be some excuse for a rude person who should call it rubbish.

The metaphysical abuse of psychology is as extraordinary in modern Europe as that of fancy ever was in India or of rhetoric in Greece.  We find, for instance, Mr. Bradley murmuring, as a matter almost too obvious to mention, that the existence of anything not sentience is unmeaning to him; or, if I may put this evident principle in other words, that nothing is able to exist unless something else is able to discover it.  Yet even if discovered the poor candidate for existence would be foiled, for it would turn out to be nothing but a modification of the mind falsely said to discover it.  Existence and discovery are conceptions which the malicious criticism of knowledge (which is the psychology of knowledge abused) pretends to have discarded and outgrown altogether; the conception of immediacy has taken their place.  This malicious criticism of knowledge is based on the silent assumption that knowledge is impossible.  Whenever you mention anything, it baffles you by talking instead about your idea of what you mention; and if ever you describe the origin of anything it substitutes, as a counter-theory, its theory of the origin of your description.  This, however, would not be a counter-theory at all if the criticism of knowledge had not been corrupted into a negative dogma, maintaining that ideas of things are the only things possible and that therefore only ideas and not things can have an origin.  Nothing could better illustrate how deep this cognitive impotence has got into people’s bones than the manner in which, in the latest schools of philosophy, it is being disavowed; for unblushing idealism is distinctly out of fashion.  M. Bergson tells us he has solved a difficulty that seemed hopeless by avoiding a fallacy common to idealism and realism.  The difficulty was that if you started with self-existent matter you could never arrive at mind, and if you started with self-existent mind you could never arrive at matter.  The fallacy was that both schools innocently supposed there was an existing world to discover, and each thought it possible that its view should describe that world as it really was.  What now is M. Bergson’s solution?  That no articulated world, either material or psychical, exists at all, but only a tendency or enduring effort to evolve images of both sorts; or rather to evolve images which in their finer texture and vibration are images of matter, but which grouped and foreshortened in various ways are images of minds.  The idea of nature and the idea of consciousness are two apperceptions or syntheses of the same stuff of experience.  The two worlds thus become substantially identical, continuous, and superposable; each can merge insensibly into the other.  “To perceive all the influences of all the points of all bodies would be to sink to the condition of a material object."[4] To perceive some of these influences, by having created organs that shut out the others, is to be a mind.