[Footnote 5:  M. Bergson has shown at considerable length that the idea of non-existence is more complex, psychologically, than the idea of existence, and posterior to it.  He evidently thinks this disposes of the reality of non-existence also:  for it is the reality that he wishes to exorcise by his words.  If, however, non-existence and the idea of non-existence were identical, it would have been impossible for me not to exist before I was born:  my non-existence then would be more complex than my existence now, and posterior to it.  The initiated would not recoil from this consequence, but it might open the eyes of some catechumens.  It is a good test of the malicious theory of knowledge.]

Yet in actual life there is undeniably such a thing as danger and failure.  M. Bergson even thinks that the facing of increased dangers is one proof that vital force is an absolute thing; for if life were an equilibrium, it would not displace itself and run new risks of death, by making itself more complex and ticklish, as it does in the higher organisms and the finer arts.[6] Yet if life is the only substance, how is such a risk of death possible at all?  I suppose the special life that arises about a given nucleus of feeling, by emphasising some of the relations which that feeling has in the world, might be abolished if a greater emphasis were laid on another set of its relations, starting from some other nucleus.  We must remember that these selections, according to M. Bergson, are not apperceptions merely.  They are creative efforts.  The future constitution of the flux will vary in response to them.  Each mind sucks the world, so far as it can, into its own vortex.  A cross apperception will then amount to a contrary force.  Two souls will not be able to dominate the same matter in peace and friendship.  Being forces, they will pull that matter in different ways.  Each soul will tend to devour and to direct exclusively the movement influenced by the other soul.  The one that succeeds in ruling that movement will live on; the other, I suppose, will die, although M. Bergson may not like that painful word.  He says the lower organisms store energy for the higher organisms to use; but when a sheep appropriates the energy stored up in grass, or a man that stored up in mutton, it looks as if the grass and the sheep had perished.  Their elan vital is no longer theirs, for in this rough world to live is to kill.  Nothing arises in nature, Lucretius says, save helped by the death of some other thing.  Of course, this is no defeat for the elan vital in general; for according to our philosopher the whole universe from the beginning has been making for just that supreme sort of consciousness which man, who eats the mutton, now possesses.  The sheep and the grass were only things by the way and scaffolding for our precious humanity.  But would it not be better if some being should arise nobler than man, not requiring abstract intellect nor artificial weapons, but endowed with instinct