as he was bound to do, the intelligence to discredit the intelligence he has been attempting the impossible.  He has only succeeded in demonstrating the authority, the magisterial power, of the intelligence.  No step in Philosophy can be taken without it.  What are Life, Consciousness, Evolution, even Movement, as these terms are employed by Bergson, but the symbolization of concepts which on his own showing are the peculiar products of the human understanding or intelligence?  It seems, indeed, on reflection, the oddest thing that Philosophy should be employed in the service of an anti-intellectual, or as it would be truer to call it a supra-intellectual, attitude.  Philosophy is a thinking view of things.  It represents the most persistent effort of the human intelligence to satisfy its own needs, to attempt to solve the problems which it has created:  in the familiar phrase, to heal the wounds which it has itself made.  The intellect, therefore, telling itself that it is incompetent for this purpose, is a strange, and not truly impressive, spectacle.

We are not enabled to recover from the sense of impotency thus created by being referred to “intuition.”  Bergson is not the first to try this way out.  It would be misleading, no doubt, to identify him with the members of the Scottish School of a hundred years ago or with Jacobi; he reaches his conclusion in another way, and that conclusion is differently framed; nevertheless, in essence there is a similarity, and Hegel’s comments[Footnote:  Smaller Logic, Wallace’s translation, c. v.] on Bergson’s forerunners will often be found to have point with reference to Bergson himself.

It is hardly conceivable that any careful observer of human experience would deny the presence and power of intuition in that experience.  The fact is too patent.  Many who would not give the place to intuition which is assigned to it by Bergson would be ready to say that there may be more in the thrilling and passionate intuitive moments than Philosophy, after an age-long and painful effort, has been able to express.  All knowledge, indeed, may be said to be rooted in intuition.  Many a thinker has been supported and inspired through weary years of inquiry and reflection by a mother-idea which has come to him, if not unsought yet uncompelled, in a flash of insight.  But that is the beginning, not the end, of his task.  It is but the raw material of knowledge, knowledge in potentia.  To invert the order is to destroy Philosophy not to serve it, is, indeed, a mere counsel of desperation.  An intuitive Philosophy so-called finds itself sooner or later, generally sooner, in a blind alley.  Practically, it gives rise to all kinds of crude and wasteful effort.  It is not an accident that Georges Sorel in his Reflexions sur la Violence takes his “philosophy” from Bergson or, at least, leans on him.  There are intuitions and intuitions, as every wise man knows, as William James once ruefully admitted after his adventures with nitrous oxide, or