in conflict—­Germany representing a mechanical and materialistic force.  In quite another way he illustrates the same truth, in his book on Laughter, where he shows us that “rigidity, automatism, absent-mindedness, and unsociability, are all inextricably entwined, and all serve as ingredients to the making up of the comic in character,” [Footnote:  Laughter, p. 147 (Fr. p. 151).] for “the comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life.” [Footnote:  Laughter, p. 87 (Fr. p. 89).]

Finally, in reviewing the evolutionary process as a whole, Bergson asserts that it manifests a radical contingency.  The forms of life created, also the proportion of Intuition to Intelligence, in man, and the physique and morality of man, are all of them contingent.  Life might have stored up energy in a different way through plants selecting different chemical elements.  The whole of organic chemistry would then have been different.  Then, too, it is probable that Life manifests itself in other planets, in other solar systems also, in forms of which we have no idea.  He points out that between the perfect humanity and ours one may conceive many possible intermediaries, corresponding to all the degrees imaginable of Intelligence and Intuition.  Another solution might have issued in a humanity either more intelligent or more intuitive.  Man has warred like the other species, he has warred against the other species.  If the evolution of life had been opposed by different accidents en route, if the current of life had been divided otherwise, we should have been, in physique and in morality, very different from what we are. [Footnote:  Creative Evolution, pp. 280-282 (Fr. p. 288-290).] We cannot regard humanity as prefigured in the evolutionary process, nor look on man as the ultimate outcome of the whole of Evolution.  The rest of Nature does not exist simply for the sake of man.  Certainly man stands highest, for only in man has consciousness succeeded, but man has, as it were, lost much in coming to this position.  The whole process of Evolution “Is as if A vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will, man or super-man, had sought to realize himself and had succeeded only by abandoning A part of himself on the way.” [Footnote:  Creative Evolution, p. 281 (Fr. p. 289).  (Italics are Bergson’s.)]

In the lectures on The Nature of the Soul, Bergson referred to the “Pathway of the evolutionary process” as being a “Way to Personality.”  For on the line which leads to man liberation has been accomplished and thus personalities have been able to constitute themselves.  If we could view this line of evolution it would appear to resemble a telegraph wire on which has travelled a dispatch sent off as long ago as the first beginnings of life, a message which was then confused, of which a part has been lost on the way, but which has at last found in the human race the appropriate instrument.