insufficient, and in reality the theory is a metaphysical conception, resulting from the views of the seventeenth century thinkers who had hopes of “a universal mathematic.”  The idea had been accepted that all was capable of determination in the psychical as well as the physical world, inasmuch as the psychical was only a reflex of the physical.  Parallelism was adopted by science because of its convenience.[Footnote:  See The Times of Oct. 21, 1911.] Bergson, however, pointed out that philosophy ought not to accept it without criticism, and maintained, moreover, that it could not stand the criticism that might be brought against it.  Relation of soul and body was undeniable, but that it was a parallel or equivalent relation he denied most emphatically.  That criticism he had launched himself with great vigour in 1901 at a Meeting of the Societe francaise de philosophie,[Footnote:  See Bibliography, p. 153.] and on a more memorable occasion, at the International Congress of Philosophy at Geneva in 1904.[Footnote:  See Bibliography, p. 154.] Before the Philosophical Society he lectured on Le Parallelisme psycho-physique et la Metaphysique positive, and propounded the following propositions: 

1.  If psycho-physical parallelism is neither rigorous nor complete, if to every determined thought there does not correspond an absolutely determined state (si a toute pensee determinee ne correspond pas un etat cerebral determine absolument), it will be the business of experience to mark with increasing accuracy the precise points at which parallelism begins and ends.

2.  If this empirical inquiry is possible, it will measure more and more exactly the separation between the thought and the physical conditions in which this thought is exercised.  In other words, it will give us a progressive knowledge of the relation of man as a thinking being to man as a living being, and therefore of what may be termed “the meaning of Life.”

3.  If this meaning of Life can be empirically determined more and more exactly, and completely, a positive metaphysic is possible:  that is to say, a metaphysic which cannot be contested and which will admit of a direct and indefinite progress; such a metaphysic would escape the objections urged against a transcendental metaphysic, and would be strictly scientific in form.

After having propounded these propositions, he defended them by recalling much of the data considered in his work Matiere et Memoire which he had published five years previously and which has been examined in the previous chapter.  The onus of proof lay, said Bergson, with the upholders of parallelism.  It is a purely metaphysical hypothesis unwarrantable in his opinion as a dogma.  He distinguishes between correspondence—­which he of course admits—­and parallelism, to which he is opposed.  We never think without a certain substratum of cerebral activity, but what the relation is precisely, between brain and consciousness, is one for long and patient research: