as the eaters of hashish will confess.  To follow all our intuitions would lead us into the wildest dervish dance of thought and action and leave us spent and disheartened at the end.  “Agnosticism” would be too mild a term for the result.  Our intuitions have to be tried and tested; there is a thorny and difficult path of criticism to be traversed before we can philosophically endorse them and find peace of mind.  What Hoffding says is in a sense quite true:  “When we pass into intuition we pass into a state without problems.”  But that is, as Hoffding intends us to understand, not because all problems are thereby solved, but because they have not yet emerged.  If we consent to remain at that point, we refuse to make the acquaintance of Philosophy; if we recognize the problems that are really latent there, we soon realize that the business of Philosophy is yet to be transacted.

The fact is that in this part of his doctrine—­and it is an important part—­the brilliant French writer, in his endeavours to make philosophizing more concrete and practical, makes it too abstract.  Intuition is not a process over against and quite distinct from conceptual thought.  Both are moments in the total process of man’s attempt to come to terms with the universe, and too great emphasis on either distorts and falsifies the situation in which we find ourselves on this planet.  The insistence on intuition is doubtless due, at bottom, to Bergson’s admiration for the activity in the creative artist.  The border-line between Art and Philosophy becomes almost an imaginary line with him.  In the one case as in the other we have, according to him, to get inside the object by a sort of sympathy.  True, there is this difference, he says, that aesthetic intuition achieves only the individual—­which is doubtful—­whereas the philosophic intuition is to be conceived as a “recherche orientee dans la meme sens que l’art, indeed, but qui prendrait pour objet la vie en general.”  He fails to note, it may be observed, that the expression of the aesthetic intuition, that is to say, Art, is always fixed and static.  This in view of other aspects of his doctrine is remarkable.  But apart from this attempt to practically identify Art and Philosophy—­a hopeless attempt—­ there is, of course, available as a means of explanation the well-known and not entirely deplorable tendency of the protestant and innovator to overstate his case, to bring out by strong emphasis the aspect with which he is chiefly concerned and which he thinks has been unduly neglected.  This, as hinted, has its merits, and not only or chiefly for Philosophy, but also, and perhaps primarily, for the conduct of life.  If he convinces men, should they need convincing, that they cannot be saved by the discursive reason alone, he will have done a good service to his generation, and to the philosophers among them who may (though they ought not to) be tempted to ignore the intuitive element in experience.