for the purpose of joining the states together.” [Footnote:  Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 25.] We shall never make the soul fit into a category or succeed in applying concepts to our inner life.  The life of the soul is wider than the brain and wider than all intellectual constructions or moulds we may attempt to form.  It is a creative force capable of producing novelty in the world:  it creates actions and can, in addition, create itself.

Philosophy shows us “the life of the body just where it really is, on the road that leads to the life of the spirit”; our powers of sense impression and of intelligence are both instruments in the service of the will.  With a little will one can do much if one places the will in the right direction.  For this force of will which is the essence of the soul or personality has these exceptional characteristics, that its intensity depends on its direction, and that its quality may become the creator of quantity. [Footnote:  See the lectures La Nature de l’Ame.] The brain and the body in general are instruments of the soul.  The brain orients the mind toward action, it is the point of attachment between the spirit and its material environment.  It is like the point of a knife to the blade—­it enables it to penetrate into the realm of action or, to give another of Bergson’s metaphors, it is like the prow of the ship, enabling the soul to penetrate the billows of reality.  Yet, for all that, it limits and confines the life of the spirit; it narrows vision as do the blinkers which we put on horses.  We must, however, abandon the notion of any rigid and determined parallelism between soul and body and accustom ourselves to the fact that the life of the mind is wider than the limits of cerebral activity.  And further, there is this to consider--"The more we become accustomed to this idea of a consciousness which overflows the organ we call the brain, then the more natural and probable we find the hypothesis that the soul survives the body.  For were the mental exactly modelled on the cerebral, we might have to admit that consciousness must share the fate of the body and die with it.” [Footnote:  New York Times, Sept. 27, 1914.] “But the destiny of consciousness is not bound up with the destiny of cerebral matter.” [Footnote:  Creative Evolution, p. 285 (Fr. p. 293).] “Although the data is not yet sufficient to warrant more than an affirmation of high probability,” [Footnote:  Louis Levine’s interview with Bergson, New York Times, Feb. 22, 1914.  Quoted by Miller, Bergson and Religion, p. 268.] yet it leaves the way open for a belief in a future life and creates a presumption in favour of a faith in immortality.  “Humanity,” as Bergson remarks, “may, in its evolution, overcome the most formidable of its obstacles, perhaps even death.” [Footnote:  Creative Evolution, p. 286 (Fr. p. 294).  In Life and Consciousness he says we may admit that in man at any rate “Consciousness pursues its path beyond this earthly life” Cf. also conclusion to La Conscience el la Vie in L’Energie spirituelle, p. 29, and to L’Ame et le Corps, in the same vol., p. 63.]