it must first choose a point of view and an optical method.  This point of view and this method posit the individual; they fix him in time and space, and determine the quality and range of his passive experience:  they are his body.  If the Absolute, then, wishes to retain the individual not merely as one of its memories but as one of its organs of practical life, it must begin by retaining the image of his body.  His body must continue to figure in that landscape of nature which the absolute life, as it pulses, keeps always composing and recomposing.  Otherwise a personal mind, a sketch of things made from the point of view and in the interests of that body, cannot be preserved.

M. Bergson, accordingly, should either tell us that our bodies are going to rise again, or he should not tell us, or give us to understand, that our minds are going to endure.  I suppose he cannot venture to preach the resurrection of the body to this weak-kneed generation; he is too modern and plausible for that.  Yet he is too amiable to deny to our dilated nostrils some voluptuous whiffs of immortality.  He asks if we are not “led to suppose” that consciousness passes through matter to be tempered like steel, to constitute distinct personalities, and prepare them for a higher existence.  Other animal minds are but human minds arrested; men at last (what men, I wonder?) are “capable of remembering all and willing all and controlling their past and their future,” so that “we shall have no repugnance in admitting that in man, though perhaps in man alone, consciousness pursues its path beyond this earthly life.”  Elsewhere he says, in a phrase already much quoted and perhaps destined to be famous, that in man the spirit can “spurn every kind of resistance and break through many an obstacle, perhaps even death.”  Here the tenor has ended on the inevitable high note, and the gallery is delighted.  But was that the note set down for him in the music?  And has he not sung it in falsetto?

The immediate knows nothing about death; it takes intelligence to conceive it; and that perhaps is why M. Bergson says so little about it, and that little so far from serious.  But he talks a great deal about life, he feels he has penetrated deeply into its nature; and yet death, together with birth, is the natural analysis of what life is.  What is this creative purpose, that must wait for sun and rain to set it in motion?  What is this life, that in any individual can be suddenly extinguished by a bullet?  What is this elan-vital, that a little fall in temperature would banish altogether from the universe?  The study of death may be out of fashion, but it is never out of season.  The omission of this, which is almost the omission of wisdom from philosophy, warns us that in M. Bergson’s thought we have something occasional and partial, the work of an astute apologist, a party man, driven to desperate speculation by a timid attachment to prejudice.  Like other terrified idealisms, the