In philosophy there are always the professors, as in art there are always the portrait painters and the makers of official sculpture; and both sorts of academicians are often very expert and well-educated.  Yet in philosophy, besides the survival of all the official and endowed systems, there has been of late a very interesting fresh movement, largely among the professors themselves, which in its various hues may be called irrationalism, vitalism, pragmatism, or pure empiricism.  But this movement, far from being a reawakening of any organising instinct, is simply an extreme expression of romantic anarchy.  It is in essence but a franker confession of the principle upon which modern philosophy has been building—­or unbuilding—­for these three hundred years, I mean the principle of subjectivity.  Berkeley and Hume, the first prophets of the school, taught that experience is not a partial discovery of other things but is itself the only possible object of experience.  Therefore, said Kant and the second generation of prophets, any world we may seem to live in, even those worlds of theology or of history which Berkeley or Hume had inadvertently left standing, must be an idea which our present experience suggests to us and which we frame as the principles of our mind allow and dictate that we should.  But then, say the latest prophets—­Avenarius, William James, M. Bergson—­these mental principles are no antecedent necessities or duties imposed on our imagination; they are simply parts of flying experience itself, and the ideas—­say of God or of matter—­which they lead us to frame have nothing compulsory or fixed about them.  Their sole authority lies in the fact that they may be more or less congenial or convenient, by enriching the flying moment aesthetically, or helping it to slip prosperously into the next moment.  Immediate feeling, pure experience, is the only reality, the only fact:  if notions which do not reproduce it fully as it flows are still called true (and they evidently ought not to be) it is only in a pragmatic sense of the word, in that while they present a false and heterogeneous image of reality they are not practically misleading; as, for instance, the letters on this page are no true image of the sounds they call up, nor the sounds of the thoughts, yet both may be correct enough if they lead the reader in the end to the things they symbolise.  It is M. Bergson, the most circumspect and best equipped thinker of this often scatter-brained school, who has put this view in a frank and tenable form, avoiding the bungling it has sometimes led to about the “meaning of truth.”  Truth, according to M. Bergson, is given only in intuitions which prolong experience just as it occurs, in its full immediacy; on the other hand, all representation, thought, theory, calculation, or discourse is so much mutilation of the truth, excusable only because imposed upon us by practical exigences.  The world, being a feeling, must be felt to be known, and then the