that it may be doubted whether any professor has quite understood it.”  There is in his works a beauty of style and a comparative absence of technical terms which have contributed much to his popularity.  The criticism directed against his poetic style, accuses him of hypnotizing us by his fine language, of employing metaphors where we expect facts, and of substituting illustrations for proof.  Sir Ray Lankester says:  “He has exceeded the limits of fantastic speculation which it is customary to tolerate on the stage of metaphysics, and has carried his methods into the arena of sober science.” [Footnote:  In the preface to Elliot’s volume, Modern Science and the Illusions of Bergson, p. xvii.] Another critic remarks that “as far as Creative Evolution is concerned, his writing is neither philosophy nor science.” [Footnote:  McCabe:  Principles of Evolution, p. 254.] Certainly his language is charming; it called forth from William James the remark that it resembled fine silk underwear, clinging to the shape of the body, so well did it fit his thought.  But it does not seem a fair criticism to allege that he substitutes metaphor for proof, for we find, on examination of his numerous and striking metaphors, that they are employed in order to give relief from continuous abstract statements.  He does not submit analogies as proof, but in illustration of his points.  For example, when he likens the elan vital to a stream, he does not suggest that because the stream manifests certain characteristics, therefore the life force does so too.  Certainly that would be a highly illegitimate proceeding.  But he simply puts forward this to help us to grasp by our imaginative faculty what he is striving to make clear.  Some critics are apt to forget the tense striving which must be involved in any highly philosophical mind dealing with deep problems, to achieve expression, to obtain a suitable vehicle for the thought—­what wrestling of soul may be involved in attempting to make intuitions communicable.  Metaphor is undoubtedly a help and those of Bergson are always striking and unconventional.  Had Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, given more illustrations, many of his readers would have been more enlightened.

Bergson’s thought, although in many respects it is strikingly original and novel, is, nevertheless, the continuation, if not the culmination, of a movement in French philosophy which we can trace back through Boutroux, Guyau, Lachelier and Ravaisson to Maine de Biran, who died in 1824.  Qui sait, wrote this last thinker, [Footnote:  In his Pensees, p. 213.] tout ce que peut la reflection concentree et s’il n’y a pas un nouveau monde interieur qui pourra etre decouvert un jour par quelque Colomb metaphysicien.

Many of the ideas contained in Bergson’s work find parallels in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, as given in his work The World as Will and Idea (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), particularly his Voluntarism and his Intuitionism.  The German thinker regarded all great scientific discoveries as an immediate intuition, a flash of insight, not simply the result of a process of abstract reasoning.  Schelling also maintained a doctrine of intuition as supra-rational.