MAJOR PROPHETS OF TO-DAY

BY

EDWIN E. SLOSSON

M.S., PH.D.

LITERARY EDITOR OF "THE INDEPENDENT"

ASSOCIATE IN THE COLUMBIA SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM

AUTHOR OF "GREAT AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES," ETC

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

1916

TO MY WIFE

MAY PRESTON SLOSSON

WHO WAS THE COMPANION OF MY PILGRIMAGE

TO THE OLD WORLD

IN SEARCH OF NEW PROPHETS

THIS VOLUME

IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

PREFACE

Each age has its own prophets, men who bring to it distinctive messages and present them in such effective form as to sway the currents of contemporary thought. No age perhaps has had more diverse theories of life and the meaning of things presented to it than our own, and certainly none has ever given such an opportunity for the original thinker to reach quickly a world-wide audience as he can now through the medium of cheap books and free schools.

This volume originated in my own desire to find out what was being said by certain persons who, I had reason to believe, were worth attention. But unless one is abnormally selfish, he always wants to introduce others to an interesting acquaintance. It is then simply as introductions that I would wish the following chapters to be taken. In one way or another such men are influencing the thought of all of us, but since we mostly get their philosophy at second hand—or at third, fourth, or nth hand—we fail to recognize its origin and are apt to misconceive its intent. Ideas that reach us in fragmentary form, and often after multiple translation through minds sometimes alien or hostile, are not very useful. It is always safer to drink at the source. I have endeavored to give some idea of the scope and character of each man's work, so that the reader may judge for himself whether it is profitable for him to follow up the acquaintance. If he does, he will find at the end of the chapter directions how to proceed further.

We imagine we can understand a man better if we can see his face, even his photograph. This may be a superstition, but, if so, it is a superstition worth deferring to by one who aspires to be an interpreter. So in the summer of 1910 I went to see the six men included in this first volume in their homes, not with the hope of getting any new and unpublished opinions, not with the expectation of gaining a personal acquaintance that would give me any deeper insight into their mental processes, but merely to convince myself that they are flesh and blood, instead of paper and ink. If I can convince the reader of this, my purpose will be accomplished.

In the choice of names to be included in the list, I was guided primarily by the idea that I should be most likely to interest others in the men who have most interested me. Since the object of the book is to serve as an introduction to the works of the authors, not as a substitute for them, the choice was limited to those who have given expression to their philosophical views in a sufficiently popular form to be attractive to the general reader. It was necessary to select representatives of diverse types of thought, and it was not possible to confine the choice to the philosophical profession, for in our day philosophy has escaped from its classroom and often displays more activity outside than in it. So I have included men of science and letters as well as philosophers of the chair.

The group comprised in this volume includes: Maurice Maeterlinck, dramatist and essayist, interpreter of the animate and inanimate world; Henri Bergson, of the Collège de France, whose intuitive philosophy has been introduced into America by the late William James; Henri Poincaré, of the French Academy, mathematician and astronomer; Élie Metchnikoff, director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, author of studies in optimistic philosophy; Wilhelm Ostwald, of Leipzig University, recipient of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1909, founder of the Annals of Natural Philosophy, and Ernst Haeckel, of Jena University, veteran zoölogist, champion of Darwinism and Monism, author of the "Riddle of the Universe."

In large part the chapters of this volume have appeared in the Independent during the last three years in a series under the general title of "Twelve Major Prophets of To-day", which includes similar articles on Rudolf Eucken, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, F. C. S. Schiller, and John Dewey, and I am indebted to that periodical for the privilege of book publication.

EDWIN E. SLOSSON.

NEW YORK,

March 1, 1914.

CONTENTS

LIST OF PORTRAITS
[MAURICE MAETERLINCK]
[HENRI BERGSON]
[HENRI POINCARÉ]
[ÉLIE METCHNIKOFF]
[WILHELM OSTWALD]
[ERNST HAECKEL]

MAJOR PROPHETS OF TO-DAY

CHAPTER I

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Let us not forget that we live in pregnant and decisive times. It is probable that our descendants will envy us the dawn through which, without knowing it, we are passing, just as we envy those who took part in the age of Pericles, in the most glorious days of Roman greatness and in certain hours of the Italian Renascence. The splendid dust that clouds the great movements of men shines brightly in the memory, but blinds those who raise it and breathe it, hiding from them the direction of their road and, above all, the thought, the necessity or the instinct that leads them.—"The Double Garden."

It was half past seven in the morning of my last possible day in Paris, when the maid brought on the tray with my chocolate, a blue envelope addressed in the business-like writing of Maeterlinck; the long expected and at last despaired of note confirming the invitation received in America to visit him at the Abbey of St. Wandrille, and setting five P.M. as the time. No chocolate for me that morning. The concierge and I put our heads together over a French railway guide, more baffling than Bullinger's, and we made up our minds that a train started in that direction at nine, although where and when it made connections we neither of us could make out. From Rouen on, I would have to trust to luck, or to the Government railway service—much the same thing.

The Gare St. Lazare is a long way from the Latin Quarter when one has got to make a train, but the cabman said he would make it, and he did. At Rouen, I discovered that in the course of the day one could get to Barentin, and from Barentin, a deliberate and occasional train went to St. Wandrille. But when I got to Barentin I found that the train was not going till the following day. It was getting near tea time and Maeterlinck seventeen miles away! Barentin would, under other circumstances, have interested me on account of the incompatibility of temper between the town and its environment, a cotton-spinning, socialistic population in the midst of an ultra-Catholic agricultural community. But as I strolled about, I took no interest in anything until I came to a little automobile repair shop. Here I found a young man who knew where he could find a machine and promised to get me to St. Wandrille in time for tea, or burst a tire.

It was a joy ride certainly, in one sense of the word, and, I suspect, in two. The road, such a road as we rarely see in this country, wound around the hills overlooking the valley through which the Seine twisted its way to the sea. The banks were flooded with the July rains, and the poplars were up to their knees in water. We gradually left behind us the smart brick houses of the new cotton aristocracy, and came into the older stone age. Along the railroad, as I was sorry to see, the meadows were beginning to grow the most noxious of American weeds, big advertising signs, but we soon escaped them, and saw around us only the grass and fields through the double row of trees that lined the road.

As we got away from town, my extemporized chauffeur made better time, and under the stimulus of the acceleration, I recited passages of Maeterlinck's dithyramb to "Speed", for he was the first to perceive poetry in the automobile:

The pace grows faster and faster, the delirious wheels cry aloud in their gladness. And at first the road comes moving toward me, like a bride waving palms, rhythmically keeping time to some joyous melody. But soon it grows frantic, springs forward and throws itself madly upon me, rushing under the car like a furious torrent whose foam lashes my face.... Now the road drops sheer into the abyss, and the magical carriage rushes ahead of it. The trees, that for so many slow-moving years have serenely dwelt on its borders, shrink back in dread of disaster. They seem to be hastening one to the other, to approach their green heads, and in startled groups to debate how to bar the way of the strange apparition. But as this rushes onward they take panic, and scatter and fly, each one quickly seeking its own habitual place; and as I pass they bend tumultuously forward, and their myriad leaves, quick to the mad joy of the force that is chanting its hymn, murmur in my ears the voluble psalm of space, acclaiming and greeting the enemy that hitherto has always been conquered but now at last triumphs: Speed.

Afterward, when I recalled this essay to Maeterlinck, he laughed heartily and said he had written it when he had only a three-horse power automobile, one of the first kind made and altogether unreliable. Now he has a big one; also a motor cycle with which he makes fifty miles an hour, but I do not know that he is writing prose poems on the motor cycle yet. He is likely to be the first to do it, though, unless Rostand or Kipling get ahead of him, as they have in literary aviation: Rostand with a sonnet on the biplane and Kipling with his "Night Mail", wherein he invents and teaches a new technical vocabulary without slackening speed. No wonder Kipling got the Nobel prize for idealistic literature. Maeterlinck, who received the same prize in 1911, deserved it on the same ground, for he, too, is entitled to write after his name the degree of M. M., Master of Machinery.

With the help of the machine, I got to the little village of St. Wandrille even before the appointed hour, so I had time to drop into the queer old church. This is a favorite resort of pilgrims from all over Normandy and not undeserving of its repute, if one may judge from the crutches, canes, and votive tablets left behind by those who have been cured or blessed. Ever since 684 a.d., when Wandregisilus left the French court and founded this retreat in the forest by the Seine, it has been noted for its relics. The ossuary department indeed makes a fine display; skulls, thigh bones, vertebræ, and phalanges, all laid out under glass and labeled neatly, as in a museum. Thirty saints I counted, some familiar like St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Clotilde, St. Genevieve, and St. Wulfranc. But most of those represented by relics or wooden statues were quite outside the range of my hagiography—St. Firmin, St. Mien, St. Vilmir, St. Wilgeforte, St. Pantoleon, and St. Herbland.

The village church is too modern to interest any one but an American. The old abbey, dating in part from the twelfth century, and belonging now to Maeterlinck, is across the road. Ringing at the little arched portal in the wall, I was shown into the cloister; very familiar it seemed to me, for I had a photograph of it in my room at home, a photograph showing three witches over a caldron, since it was taken when Maeterlinck's version of "Macbeth" was played here. "The cloister of St. Wandrille is without doubt one of the most magnificent monuments of the kind that has escaped the vandalism of recent times", says Langlois in the large volume he devoted to its architecture.[1] Until recently the monastery was in the hands of the Benedictines, but they were dispossessed by the French Government on the separation of Church and State in 1907, and the property offered for sale. It was about to be sold to a chemical syndicate for a factory, when Maeterlinck intervened and purchased it, possibly more to please his wife than himself, for he is indifferent to surroundings, while she takes a keen delight in an artistic stage setting, not merely for the plays she enacts, but for daily life. For thus saving the abbey from commercial desecration, Maeterlinck received a parchment blessing from the Pope, but his later use of it as a theater was quite as offensive to Catholic sentiment.

Certainly no author has been housed more satisfactorily to his admirers than Maeterlinck. He had, in fact, pictured it in his youthful plays. It is a verification of his faith that a man creates his own environment. The surrounding forest, the old house with its long corridors, the garden where the broken pillars and arches of the buried temple appear here and there among the vines and flowers, are the familiar scenes of all his dramas. All that is lacking is the sea, which is so often in his thoughts, and some dank, dark caves and dungeons underneath. But Maeterlinck does not need nowadays such subterranean accessories, for he has passed through his Reign of Terror, and come up into the sunshine.

It is curious that a man who is so modernistic in mind and who has shown so unique a power to idealize the prosaic details of the life of to-day, should place all his dramas in the historical or legendary past. But he always views the past as a poet, not as an archaeologist, giving merely some beautiful names and a suggestion as to scene setting, and leaving it to the imagination of the reader to do the stage carpentering. Determinist though he is, no one, not even James or Bergson, has been more bold in repudiating the right of the past to control our actions:

In reality, if we think of it, the past belongs to us quite as much as the present, and is far more malleable than the future. Like the present, and to a much greater extent than the future, its existence is all in our thoughts, and our hand controls it; nor is this true only of our material past, wherein there are ruins that we perhaps can restore, but also of those regions that are closed to our tardy desire for atonement, and, above all, of our moral past, and of what we consider to be most irreparable there.

"The past is past", we say, and it is not true; the past is always present. "We have to bear the burden of our past", we sigh; and it is not true; the past bears our burden. "Nothing can wipe out the past", and it is not true; the least effort of will sends present and future traveling over the past, to efface whatever we bid them efface. "The indestructible, irreparable, immutable past!" And that is no truer than the rest. In those who speak thus it is the present that is immutable and knows not how to repair. "My past is wicked, it is sorrowful, empty", we say again, "as I look back I can see no moment of beauty, or happiness or love; I see nothing but wretched ruins...." And that is not true, for you behold precisely what you yourself place' there at the moment your eyes rest upon it.[2]

While I was wandering in the cloister, puzzling over battered saints and mossy gargoyles, any disposition I may have felt toward monastic meditation was dissipated by the appearance of a woman, not merely a woman, but a modern woman, one who has gained vitality and initiative without losing the feminine graces, "the virile friend and equal comrade", as Maeterlinck calls her. Her costume was not inharmonious with the surroundings, for it was vaguely medieval in appearance—a hooded robe of some heavy blue stuff, falling in long straight folds to her feet.

It is not necessary to describe Madame Georgette Leblanc Maeterlinck, for Maeterlinck himself has done that, sketching equally her virtues and failings with a loving hand.[3] Her powerful influence over his thought he gratefully acknowledges in the prefaces to his essays, and shows it by the frequent references in them to her opinions and personality. Monna Vanna, Joyzelle, and Mary Magdalene are rôles written for her. We can tell when she came into Maeterlinck's life by the appearance of "the new woman" in his dramas; Aglavaine, who involuntarily overshadows and displaces the frail and timid Sélysette, Ariane, the last wife of Blue Beard, who releases his other wives from the secret chamber where they were confined, not killed as earlier rumor had it. The imprisoned sisterhood, who are, by the way, the anæmic heroines of Maeterlinck's earlier period, Sélysette, Mélisande, Ygraine, Bellangère, and Alladine, refuse to follow Ariane to freedom; they prefer to stay with Blue Beard, so she goes out alone. But she does not slam the door like Nora in "The Doll's House." It is not necessary nowadays to slam the door.

Madame Maeterlinck shows me the places she picked out for the scenes of "Pelléas and Mélisande", for she is the inventor of a new form of dramatic art based on the discovery that audiences are easier moved about than castles, trees, and hills. Only the weather she cannot control, and the pathetic drama was played appropriately though inconveniently in a rainstorm.[4] The ancient refectory which she used as the banquet hall in "Macbeth" was large enough to seat four hundred Benedictine monks at table. It is roofed and paneled with carved wood and lighted by a row of large pointed windows set with bits of very old stained glass.

Here we are soon joined by M. Maeterlinck, a sturdy figure in Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, for he is just in from a tramp in the woods with his dog. No, the dog was not his friend, Pelléas. Pelléas, as you should have remembered, died years ago, very young.

Some say that Maeterlinck has a Flemish peasant face. Some say a Flemish bourgeois face. Not being familiar with the physiognomy of either the peasantry or the bourgeoisie of Flanders, I cannot decide this delicate question. All I can say is that it is a face one could trust, the face of a man one would like to have for a friend. The eyes, wide open and wide apart, are clear and steady. His hair is getting gray, and he has in recent years shaved off his mustache, showing his straight, firm-set mouth and pleasant smile. His photographs do not do him justice, for none of them show him smiling—neither do his books. Early to bed and early to rise and much time spent in the open air have given him an erect carriage and a vigorous step. He is fond of boxing and has written an essay in praise of this sport.

From the window of his study upstairs he points out to me his woodland stretching far up the hill, and he takes from his pocket the book that has occupied his afternoon, a book of trout flies. But I am more interested in other things, in the big work-table that occupies the center of the study, littered with papers, a typewriter on the corner of it. The wall opposite the window is lined with books, and as I glance over them I see his own plays and essays translated into half a dozen languages, Carlyle's works, Vaughan's "English Mystics", and many volumes of natural science, poetry, and philosophy. M. Maeterlinck divines what I want most to see and takes down his Emerson, an old one-volume edition, in excruciatingly fine print, but manifestly well read, with numerous underlinings and as much annotation as the narrow margins would permit. It is curious that Emerson should have strongly influenced two such unlike men as Nietzsche and Maeterlinck.[5] But only the latter acquired his finest attribute, serenity of spirit. Maeterlinck also resembles Thoreau in his love for nature, though he makes no affectation of asceticism or hermitage.

He spends his summers only at the Abbaye de St. Wandrille. In the winter he goes to the Riviera, to live with the bees and the flowers whose language he speaks. His winter residence is at Les Quatre Chemins, near Grasse, in the southeastern corner of the country. Here he is even more secluded than at St. Wandrille. He prefers the country to the city, not because he has any aversion to people in mass or to the mechanism of modern life, but because he dislikes lionization and publicity of all sorts. He would stifle in the atmosphere of a Parisian salon. He belongs to none of the literary coteries combined for mutual admiration and the reciprocal promotion of individual interests. He has never been what Verlaine used to call a "Cymbalist."

As a mystic philosopher Maeterlinck finds a flower in a crannied wall sufficient to give him a clew to the secrets of the universe. Modern science, instead of killing mysticism, as was foreboded by despairing poets of the last century, has brought about a revival of it. This is quite natural, for mysticism is the verification of religion by the experimental method, as ecclesiasticism is the verification of religion by the historical method. The doctrine of evolution has given an intellectual basis and a richer content to the sense of the unity of nature, which is the force of mysticism. A weak poet, distrustful of his vision or of his own powers, fears science and flees from it. A great and courageous poet seizes science and turns it to his own uses. Tennyson and Sully-Prudhomme were among the first to perceive and to demonstrate the possibility of this. Maeterlinck, being of the generation born since the dawn of the scientific era, entered upon the inheritance of its wealth without having to pass through any storm and stress period to acquire it. No traces of the fretful antagonisms of the nineteenth century disturb the equanimity of his essays. He sees no conflict between the scientific and poetic views of the world. He looks upon it with both eyes open and the two visions fuse into one solid reality.

Maeterlinck has been a leader in that characteristic movement of the twentieth century which might be called the reanimation of the universe. Time was, and was not so long ago but that most of us can remember it, when, terrified by the advance of science, man did not dare to call his soul his own. Naturally he denied a soul to the rest of the world. Animals were automatons; plants, of course, unconscious; and planets and machines out of the question. Nature was subjected to a process succinctly to be described as deanthropomorphization. To naturalists of the inanimate school an insect was not worth studying until it had a pin through it. Animals were only interesting when stuffed.

Nowadays naturalists are going back to nature. They are leaving the laboratory for the woods. They have come to realize that studying zoölogy in a museum is like studying sociology in a cemetery. They have discovered that animals and plants possess not merely vitality, but individuality, and since man's real interest in the world he looks down upon has always been, though he has often denied it, because he hoped to see himself there, a new school of fabulists has appeared who hold the mirror of nature up to us as Esop and Pilpay did of old.

Among them there is no one, unless it be Kipling, who is the equal of Maeterlinck. Like Tyltyl, he wears the fairy button on his cap which, when touched, brings out the souls of things. And, as in "The Blue Bird", the souls he has once released by the magic of his phrases from their material prisons do not get back again. They remain visible to us ever after; not merely the souls of the dog and the cat, but of the bee, the oak, the bread, and the automobile. He shows us the cat as a diminutive but undomesticated tiger to whom we are nothing more than an overgrown and uneatable prey. We see through his eyes the cultivated plants as our dumb slaves, for "the rose and the corn, had they wings, would fly at our approach like the birds."

Maeterlinck has recently been testing the thinking horses of Eberfeld, the successors of Kluge Hans, and convinced himself of their ability to spell and cipher, even to extract the square root of big numbers, a feat which Maeterlinck says he himself could never learn at school. He does, however, draw the line at crediting the horses with telepathic powers.[6]

"The Blue Bird" cannot escape comparison with its contemporary rival on the stage, "Chantecler", but the similarity is superficial. They are as unlike in their philosophy as in their style. Maeterlinck has written a fairy story for children; Rostand a satire for grown people. Maeterlinck conceals his depth of thought under a dialogue of simple and artless prose. Rostand disguises his trivialities in elaborate and artificial versification. "The Blue Bird" is really the offspring of "The Little White Bird", Mendel to the contrary notwithstanding. But Maeterlinck lacks the delicious humor with which Barrie had depicted his Peter Pan.

Whether one who has read "The Blue Bird" will be disappointed when he sees it depends upon the vividness of his imagination. He will probably find that he has in reading it failed to appreciate the humor of the grotesque characterization of the minor characters, such as the Bread, Dog, Cat, and Sugar, but on the other hand he will find that he has pictured to himself such scenes as the Palace of Night and the Kingdom of the Future much more splendid and impressive than they appear on the stage. The play as performed at the New Theater in New York was not nearly so effective as at the Haymarket in London.

"The Blue Bird" would go best as an opera. I wish somebody would set it to music. The very impressive song of the mothers welcoming their children shows how much music might add to it. Debussy's dreamy and formless harmonies suited "Pelléas and Mélisande", but the author of the "Domestic Symphony" alone could do justice to this kitchen drama. Only Strauss could fit Sugar and Milk with suitable motives, and give the proper orchestration to the quarrels of Cat and Dog, and Fire and Water.

With Maeterlinck, personification is not accomplished through falsification. His "Life of the Bee" is based on his own observation and wide reading, and is freer from error than many of the purely scientific books written on the subject. Such mistakes in fact, as he makes, are accidental and never due to distortion or invention for the purpose of working in a poetic fancy or of pointing a moral. In fact, he does not point a moral. His nature studies teach no lesson unless it is the great lesson of kinship with nature. He does not, like Kipling, write an animal story with the aim of amending the budget bill or changing diplomatic relations. "The Life of the Bee" may be used as a socialistic tract. It may also be used as an anti-socialistic tract. "The spirit of the hive", as he interprets it, attracts some people and repels others. Lord Avebury, who is the leading English authority on ants and bees, is the head of the society for opposing socialism.

Maeterlinck is not one of those who set up animals on their hind legs to act as schoolmasters to men. He finds nowhere outside of ourselves, neither in the heavens above nor in the earth beneath, that justice in which mankind instinctively and inevitably believes. He is as largely pragmatic as Sumner in his derivation of morality:

Between the external world and our actions there exists only the simple and essentially non-moral relations of cause and effect.

In the course of adapting ourselves to the laws of life we have naturally been led to credit with our moral ideas those principles of causality that we encounter most frequently. And we have in this fashion created a very plausible semblance of effective justice, which rewards or punishes most of our actions in the degree that they approach, or deviate from, certain laws that are essential for the preservation of the race.

Within us there is a spirit that weighs only intentions; without us a power that only balances deeds.[7]

This reads like a twentieth century supplement to Huxley's Romanes address.

Maeterlinck's sense of justice is more outraged by the calamities that result from the carelessness and malevolence of man than the disasters of earthquake and tempest. We are strange lovers of an ideal justice, he says; we who condemn three fourths of mankind to the misery of poverty and disease, and then complain of the injustice of impersonal nature. And in reading a story of the "Arabian Nights", he is struck by the fact that the women of the harem, creatures trained to vice and condemned to slavery, give utterance to the highest moral precepts:

These women, who forever are pondering the loftiest, grandest problems of justice, of the morality of men and of nations, never throw one questioning glance on their own fate, or for one instant suspect the abominable injustice whereof they are victims. Nor do those suspect it either who listen to them, and love and admire and understand them. And we who marvel at this—we who also reflect on justice and virtue, on pity and love—are we so sure that they who come after us shall not some day find in our present social condition a spectacle equally disconcerting and amazing.[8]

Maeterlinck stands quite aloof from politics, but not because he is out of sympathy with the tendency of the times. He has faith in democracy in spite of his clear perception of its faults and dangers:

In those problems in which all life's enigmas converge, the crowd which is wrong is almost always justified as against the wise man who is right. It refuses to believe him on his word. It feels dimly that behind the most evident abstract truths there are numberless living truths which no brain can foresee, for they need time, reality and men's passions to develop their work. That is why, whatever warning we may give it, whatever prediction we may make to it, the crowd insists before all that the experiment shall be tried. Can we say that, in cases where the crowd has obtained the experiment, it was wrong to insist upon it?[9]

It would surely have been highly dangerous to confide the destinies of the species to Plato or Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare or Montesquieu. At the very worst moments of the French Revolution the fate of the people was in the hands of philosophers of no mean order.[10]

The thoroughgoing character of his democracy is emphasized by Professor Dewey in his lecture on "Maeterlinck's Philosophy of Life" delivered at Columbia University:

"Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Maeterlinck are thus far, perhaps, the only men who have been habitually, and, as it were, instinctively, aware that democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency, but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience to nature; among these Maeterlinck has at least the advantage of greater illumination by the progress of natural science."

This democratic feeling seems to me to arise more from his mystical sense of the continuity of life than from personal disposition or political theory. In his earlier and more characteristic dramas, the persons are hardly more than talking symbols. Their looks and costumes are not described, either in the stage directions or in the dialogue. Their names—if he takes the trouble to give them names—are scarcely sufficient in some cases to indicate the sex. Their speech is language reduced to its lowest elements, excessively simplified, in fact, and full of the repetitions and incoherencies common to stupid and uneducated people the world over. Maeterlinck himself calls them "marionnettes", and says that they have the appearance of half deaf somnambulists just awakening from a painful dream.

But these puppet people are divested of individuality for the purpose of reducing them to the common denominator of humanity. They are devoided of personal interest in order to prevent the attention of the spectator from being fixed upon them. They are made transparent so that we may look through them and perceive the external forces which control them. The dramatic poet, he says in the preface to his early dramas, "must show us in what way, in what form, in what conditions, according to what laws, and to what end our destinies are controlled by the superior powers, the unintelligible influences, the infinite principles of which, in so far as he is a poet, he is persuaded that the universe is full."

Great poetry he regards as composed of three principal elements:

First, verbal beauty, then the contemplation and passionate depiction of what really exists around us and in ourselves, that is to say, nature and feeling, and, finally, enveloping the entire work and creating its own atmosphere, the idea which the poet has of the unknown in which float the beings and things he evokes, of the mystery which dominates them and judges them and presides over their destinies.

The critics were not altogether wrong when they called the characters of his earlier plays "mere shadows." But a shadow exists only when a bright light is cast on a real object. Maeterlinck's purpose is to make Plato's cave men aware of the drama that is being enacted behind their backs. The real action of these plays is not that seen on the stage. His dramas contain their message written in secret ink between the lines, and it becomes visible only when warmed by the sympathy of the reader.

The performance of "Macbeth" at Saint-Wandrille had a double interest. It introduced a novel form of the drama, and it added another to the many attempts to put Shakespeare into French. This select and household entertainment might be called "chamber pageantry", because it bears somewhat the same relation to the outdoor processionings now so popular as chamber music does to orchestral. Most of the incongruities which the critics pointed out[11] are not inherent in the plan, but due to the fact that "Macbeth" is not adapted to such a setting any more than it is to the modern theater. Conceivably something more effective could be done in this line if a new play were written to fit the place and the conditions of enactment, requirements certainly not more exigeant than those of the Elizabethan stage. In this it would even be possible to keep strictly to the three unities, and play the scenes appropriately indoors and out, in daylight and dark.

Madame Georgette Leblanc-Maeterlinck has been, as wives are apt to be, both a help and a hindrance to her husband.

She has inspired some of his best work and also embroiled him in interminable controversies with theatrical managers. "Monna Vanna" was written for her, so, very naturally, she wanted a monopoly of the title rôle, and when Debussy set "Pelléas et Mélisande" to music as unearthly as the play, she insisted upon singing Mélisande. But the Parisian managers, either because they had protégées of their own or because they did not have a sufficiently high opinion of Madame Leblanc's capabilities as an actress and a prima donna, declined to take her, and M. Maeterlinck was not able to compel them to, or to prevent the production of the play and opera with other leading ladies. She did, however, finally sing the part both at home and in America, though she lost the distinction of creating it.

But, at any rate, we owe to her assiduity a new translation of "Macbeth", which the London Times says "is the most conscientious effort to preserve the atmosphere of a Shakespearean play which has been attempted in French since M. Marcel Schwab's remarkable rendering of 'Hamlet.'" The difficulty of translating poetical language, wherein the sound and connotation of the words are as essential as their literal meaning, is admirably stated by M. Maeterlinck:

The humble translators face to face with Shakespeare are like painters seated in front of the same forest, the same seas, on the same mountain. Each of them will make a different picture. And a translation is almost as much an état d'âme as is a landscape. Above, below, and all round the literal and literary sense of the primitive phrase floats a secret life which is all but impossible to catch, and which is, nevertheless, more important than the external life of the words and of the images. It is that secret life which it is important to understand and to reproduce as well as one can. Extreme prudence is required, since the slightest false note, the smallest error, may destroy the illusion and destroy the beauty of the finest page. Such is the ideal of the conscientious translator. It excuses in advance every effort of the kind, even this one, which comes after so many others, and contributes to the common work merely the very modest aid of a few phrases which chance may now and then have favored.

He illustrates these variant views of the same landscape by bringing together all the different versions of a couplet, from Letourneur of the eighteenth century to Duval, the latest translator of Shakespeare:

"Strange things I have in head that will to hand
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.

"J'ai dans la tête d'étranges choses qui aboutiront à ma main; et qu'il faut accomplir avant qu'on les médite."—(Maeterlinck.)

"J'ai dans la tête d'étranges choses qui réclament ma main et veulent être exécutés avant d'être méditées."—(François-Victor Hugo.)

"Ma tête a des projets étranges qui réclament ma main; achevons l'acte avant d'y réfléchir."—(Maurice Pottecher.)

"J'ai dans la tête d'étranges choses qui passeront dans mes mains, des choses qu'il faut exécuter avant d'avoir le temps de les examiner."—(Guizot.)

"J'ai dans ma tête d'étranges choses que ma main exécutera, et qui veulent être accomplies sans me laisser le temps de les peser."—(Montégut.)

"Ma tête a des projets qu'exécutera ma main; je veux les accomplir de suite, sans me donner le temps de les examiner de trop près."—(Benjamin Laroche.)

"J'ai d'étranges projets en tête qui veulent être exécutés avant d'y réfléchir."—(Georges Duval.)

"J'ai dans la tête d'étranges projets, qui, de là, passeront dans mes mains; et il faut les exécuter avant qu'on puisse les pénétrer."—(Pierre Letourneur.)

This couplet is in itself an argument for more freedom of translation than is customarily allowed. The choice of "scann'd" from among other words that would have expressed the idea as well or better was obviously dictated by the necessity of rhyming with "hand", and this in turn was due to the desire to alliterate with "head." A translator, if he is to make as good poetry as the original author, must have an equal license. It is therefore not surprising to see that M. Maeterlinck has been most successful in preserving the spirit of the original where he has translated into rhyme instead of prose, for here the exactions of the French verse have forced him to a greater freedom. Here are fragments of the witches' songs:

Paddock crie, "Allez, allez."
Le laid est beau et le beau laid
Allons flotter dans la brume,
Allons faire le tour du monde,
Dans la brume et l'air immonde.
Trois fois le chat miaula
Le hérisson piaula.
Harpier crie, "Voilà! voilà!"
Double, double, puis redouble,
Le feu chante au chaudron trouble.

In order that the reader may judge for himself whether the Belgian poet has succeeded in this effort to put Shakespeare into French, we quote a few passages of especial difficulty. The complete text is published in Illustration of August 28, 1909.

Et, enfin, ce Duncan fut si doux sur son trône, si pur dans sa puissance que ses vertues parleront comme d'angéliques trompettes contre le crime damné de son assassinat. Et la pitié, pareille à un nouveau-né chevauchant la tempête, ou à un cherubin céleste qui monte les coursiers invisibles de l'air, soufflerait l'acte horrible dans les yeux de tout homme jusqu'à noyer le vent parmi les larmes.

"Tu ne dormiras! Macbeth a tué le sommeil!" L'innocent sommeil, le sommeil qui dévide l'écheveau embrouillé des soucis.

Tout l'océan du grand Neptune pourrait-il laver ce sang de ma main? Non, c'est plutôt cette main qui empourprera les vagues innombrables, faisant de la mer verte un océan rouge.

Maeterlinck has himself suffered many things of many translators. Alfred Sutro has given us admirable versions of his philosophical works, "Wisdom and Destiny", "The Treasure of the Humble", and "The Life of the Bee", but his plays have not been so fortunate, for their emotional effect is dependent upon the maintenance of a peculiar atmosphere, so sensitive that a harsh breath will destroy it, leaving ridiculous wooden puppets where the moment before we thought we glimpsed beings of supernatural beauty. So even a reader whose French is feeble will prefer the plays in the original, for their language is of extreme simplicity and the effect may be even enhanced by the additional veil that his partial incomprehension draws across the stage picture. Then, too, Maeterlinck's trick of triple repetition which offends our Anglo-Saxon ears ceases to annoy us in French, for in that language even identical rhymes are permissible.

As an example of how a prosaic literalism may spoil the illusion, let us take that exquisite passage which closes "Pelléas et Mélisande":

C'était un petit être si tranquille, si timide et si silencieux. C'était un pauvre petit très mystérieux, comme tout le monde. Elle est là, comme si elle était la grande soeur de son enfant.

This is the way it is rendered by Laurence Alma Tadema, and the libretto of the opera is still worse: "It was a little gentle being, so quiet, so timid and so silent. It was a poor little mysterious being, like all the world. She lies there as if she were her own child's big sister."

The wise old man, who at Mélisande's death bed sums up her character in the words, "C'était un pauvre petit être mystérieux, comme tout le monde", gives at the same time the key to the philosophy of the play.—"She was a poor little mysterious being like every one." "Like every one"! The phrase throws back a level ray of light, as though it were a setting sun, and illuminates the dark road we have traversed. "Like every one", and all this while we had been thinking what an unnatural and absurd creature this Mélisande was, this princess who did not know where she came from or where she was going to, who was always weeping without reason, who played so carelessly with her wedding ring over the well's mouth, and whose words could never express what she felt. "Like every one"? perhaps ... at any rate to be thought on, once it has been suggested to us. And in this connection we may consider a sentence in "Wisdom and Destiny":

Genius only throws into bolder relief all that can and actually does take place in the lives of all men; otherwise were it genius no longer but incoherence or madness.

What fun Francisque Sarcey did make of "Pelléas and Mélisande" and of its admirers at its first representation in Paris in 1893. According to the veteran critic of Le Temps,[12] the play contained a triple symbolism; one part not understood by the profane, one part not understood by the initiates, and one part not understood by the author. Maeterlinck was only a passing craze, he thought, due to the reprehensible fondness of the Parisians for anything foreign. Yet some fifteen years after that he might have seen in New York blocks of people standing for hours in the snow around the Manhattan Opera House to get a chance to see, with the added charm of Debussy's music, this same play that the critics called "Maeterlinck's Sedan."

Even Richard Hovey, who first introduced Maeterlinck's plays to America in the days when the "Green Tree Library" flourished and bore its strange fruit, feared that "his devotion to the wormy side of things may prevent him from ever becoming popular." But he got over his devotion to the wormy side of things and has grown into a more wholesome philosophy and so into a greater popularity. The transition point in his style and thought is marked by the preface to his dramas, 1901. He neither recants nor apologizes for his earlier work, still less does he ridicule it, as Ruskin did his first writing, but he frankly and gracefully indicates the changed attitude toward life which shows itself in his later essays.

He ceases to use the word "destiny" exclusively in its evil sense, and to represent it as a power inimical to man, watching in the shadow to pounce upon us whenever we manifest a little joy. Fate in his later work does not always mean fatality, and events are controlled by character more than by external forces. Man by wisdom can overcome destiny. But Maeterlinck would have us take care to keep a sane balance of altruism and egoism:

You are told you should love your neighbor as yourself; but if you love yourself meanly, childishly, timidly, even so shall you love your neighbor. Learn, therefore, to love yourself with a love that is wise and healthy, that is large and complete.

It is a curious transformation by which this Belgian lawyer and esoteric poet has become one of the widest known of French playwrights and moralists. He was born in Ghent, August 29, 1862, of an old Flemish family. The name, "measurer of grain", is derived from an ancestor who was generous in a time of famine.

He was educated at the University of Ghent for law, in accordance with the wishes of his family, though he would have preferred medicine. But his dominant interest was always literature.

His experience at the bar was brief, a couple of criminal cases, and then he deserted the law and went to Paris for a year, where he was chiefly under the influence of the French symbolist, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Then he returned home to devote himself in quiet to the cultivation of his double garden of literature and science. He was especially attracted by the freshness and richness of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and, as he says, drank long and thirstily from the Elizabethan springs. In Shelley and Browning he was also deeply interested.[13]

At the age of twenty-four he began to contribute to La Pléiade, the organ of the "Young Belgians", a group of ambitious young writers, impressionists, seekers after novel effects of style, chiefly attained by means of transferring descriptive adjectives from one of the five senses to the other four. In the third number of this short-lived periodical was published Maeterlinck's first and apparently his last story, "The Massacre of the Innocents", a biblical incident reset in the times of the Spanish wars.[14] Here appeared some of the poems republished in 1889 in the little volume entitled "Serres Chaudes" ("Hot-house Blooms").

The cross-fertilization of Elizabethan drama with French symbolism gave rise to the "Princess Maleine", a new species if there ever was one, Shakespearean in form and incident, most un-Shakespearean in everything else. The first edition of this drama was an extremely limited one, twenty copies, printed on a hand press with Maeterlinck turning the crank.

It was the "Princess Maleine" which led to his "discovery" by Octave Mirbeau, who proclaimed it "the greatest work of genius of the times", and "superior in beauty to what is most beautiful in Shakespeare."[15] This newspaper praise made Maeterlinck instantly famous everywhere save in his own country. His neighbors in Ghent refused to take it seriously, and thought it a pity that his family should encourage the young man in his mania by paying for puffs like that.

To trace Maeterlinck's dramatic development is like watching a materialization at a séance. His characters have become increasingly solid and life-like, but they have lost the illusiveness and allusiveness that made their charm in his earlier plays. Maeterlinck has never been able to equal Ibsen—nor has anyone else—in the art of making a perfectly individualized and natural character serve also as a type or symbol, thus doubling our interest by combining the specific and the general.

Maeterlinck's genius shows best in his own peculiar field of symbolism and suggestion, that of his early dramas and of "The Blue Bird." His plays of a more conventional type, "Monna Vanna" and "Mary Magdalene", betray his deficiencies as a dramatic writer, his lack of the power of plot construction and a sense of humor. "Mary Magdalene" is really as much a one-act play as "The Interior", for the last act is the only one that counts. Here the crowd has the star part, the crowd of the lame, the halt and the blind, the sinners and the diseased, whom Jesus has cured and who now desert him; and the real drama is enacted, not in the upper chamber of the house of Joseph of Arimathea, but in the street outside, leading to the Place of the Skull. The scene of the woman taken in adultery is far less dramatic than in its biblical form, because in the play she is really protected by Roman swords, not by the awakened consciences of the mob.

The continuous development of Maeterlinck's philosophy of life is shown as well in his plays as in his essays. Mary Magdalene, who would not save her Savior by the sacrifice of her virtue, represents a higher ethical ideal than Monna Vanna, who gives herself for the city. In his earlier plays Maeterlinck tries to frighten us with the traditional Terrors which in "The Blue Bird" are shown to be imprisoned and harmless in the Palace of Night. Old Time with his scythe, who as "The Intruder" of twenty years ago brought death into the household, appears now in "The Blue Bird" under a kinder aspect, calling the Children of the Future into life. In fact, "The Blue Bird" represents the highest point of the philosophy of optimism, for it is based upon the most daring of all the assumptions of science—that the secret of existence is also the secret of happiness. "To be wise is above all to be happy", says Maeterlinck. Truly, he has got a long way from Schopenhauer, the object of his boyish admiration.

Maeterlinck has, in short, acquired a faith. I do not see exactly whom or what he has faith in, but he has faith, and that, after all, seems to be the main thing. The development of his thought has an especial interest in that it shows how a spiritual interpretation of the universe and a moral support can be built up on pure agnosticism. From Christianity he has derived little except a vague symbolism and certain ethical ideals. He looks back with bitterness upon his school days in the Jesuit college at Ghent, but his writings show no trace of the anticlerical animosity which is so conspicuous in Haeckel's. It was his latest book, "Death", the most religious of them all, breathing a spirit of unconquerable faith in immortality and future happiness, that brought down upon Maeterlinck the condemnation of Rome, and in 1914 all his books and plays were put upon the Index by the Sacred Congregation.

From the mystics he has derived much, especially from the German Novalis and the Flemish Ruysbroek, whose works he has translated into French. In his preface to the latter he says:

Mystical truths have this strange superiority over truths of the ordinary kind, that they know neither age nor death.... They possess the immunity of Swedenborg's angels, who progress continually toward the springtime of youth, so that the eldest angels always appear the youngest.

But he undoubtedly owes his ethical and philosophical growth most of all to the study of nature, not the vague contemplation of natural objects which in the early Victorian era was thought proper pabulum for poets, but the effort to understand nature through the use of modern scientific methods. We are reminded of Sir Thomas Browne, who says: "Those strange and mystical transmigrations that I have observed in silkworms turned my philosophy into divinity."

The reason why many poets and imaginative writers of high ability find themselves without influence in the modern world is, in my opinion, because they are ignorant of science or inimical to it. They, therefore, write for antiquity, which does not buy books, or for posterity, which, it is safe to say, will never come back to the position they hold. The people do not enjoy science, but their manner of thought is molded by it, and they are unaffected or repelled by music out of tune with it.

Maeterlinck, while thoroughly appreciating science, does not exaggerate its power. He does not look to it for a complete explanation of the world.

Rarely does a mystery disappear; ordinarily it only changes its place. But it is often very important, very desirable, that it manage to change its place. From a certain point of view, all the progress of human thought reduces itself to two or three changes of this kind—to have dislodged two or three mysteries from the place where they did harm in order to transport them where they become harmless, where they can do good. Sometimes it is enough, without a mystery changing its place, if we can succeed in giving it another name. That which was called "the gods" is now called "life." And if life is just as inexplicable as the gods, we have at least gained this, that in the name of life no one has authority to speak nor right to do harm.

Maeterlinck does not seem to me so much an original thinker as an exquisitely sensitive personality who is able to catch the dominant note of the times in which he lives, and to give it artistic expression, as a musician upon a high tower might take as his key the fundamental tone of the streets below, modulating his music as the rhythm of the city changes, not to obtain applause, but because his soul is in sympathy with the life around him. In Maeterlinck's writings, various though they be in form and topic, may be continuously traced the changing moods of the philosophy of the last twenty years, for he has always retained his sincerity of thought and courage of expression.

To look fearlessly upon life; to accept the laws of nature, not with meek resignation, but as her sons, who dare to search and question; to have peace and confidence within our soul—these are the beliefs that make for happiness. But to believe is not enough; all depends on how we believe. I may believe that there is no God, that I am self-contained, that my brief sojourn here serves no purpose; that in the economy of this world without limit my existence counts for as little as the evanescent hue of a flower—I may believe all this, in a deeply religious spirit, with the infinite throbbing within me; you may believe in one all-powerful God, who cherishes and protects you, yet your belief may be mean, and petty, and small. I shall be happier than you, and calmer, if my doubt is greater, and nobler, and more earnest than is your faith; if it has probed more deeply into my soul, traversed wider horizons, if there are more things it has loved. And if the thoughts and feelings on which my doubt reposes have become vaster and purer than those that support your faith, then shall the God of my disbelief become mightier and of supremer comfort than the God to whom you cling. For, indeed, belief and unbelief are mere empty words; not so the loyalty, the greatness and profoundness of the reasons wherefore we believe or do not believe.[16]

HOW TO READ MAETERLINCK

To those familiar with Maeterlinck, the following, and perhaps also the foregoing, will be of no interest. But those who wish to make his closer acquaintance may find some suggestions not impertinent.

Maeterlinck's essays are published in English by Dodd, Mead and Company, in seven volumes: "The Treasure of the Humble"; "Wisdom and Destiny"; "The Buried Temple"; "The Measure of the Hours"; "The Double Garden"; "On Emerson and Other Essays" (Novalis and Ruysbroek); and "Our Eternity." The order given is that of their publication in French. Any one of them will give the reader an insight into the character of his thought; "Wisdom and Destiny" is the most consecutive. If one has time for but a single essay, he may read "The Leaf of Olive."

For his treatment of nature, see "The Life of the Bee" (Dodd, Mead and Company), essays in "The Double Garden" and in "The Measure of the Hodrs", and "The Insect's Homer" in Forum, September, 1910; also "News of Spring and Other Nature Studies", illustrated by E. J. Detmold (Dodd, Mead and Company).

Of his dramatic work the early mystical plays are most characteristic. The timid reader should avoid reading them alone after dark. Yet there is nothing supernatural in them—except the sense of the supernatural that permeates them. Nothing happens that cannot be given a rationalistic explanation—only the reader is not disposed at the time to accept such an explanation. Select your co-readers with care (all plays should, of course, be read aloud); avoiding particularly the hysterical giggler, for the effect depends upon maintaining the atmospheric pressure, and Maeterlinck treads close to the line that separates the sublime from the ridiculous and, as he himself confesses, he occasionally steps over. Read the original if you have any knowledge whatever of French, for the language is of the simplest, and in these veiled dramas a slight additional haziness does no harm. (The French edition is published by Lacomblez, Brussels, in three volumes. Volume I, "La Princesse Maleine", "L'lntruse", "Les Aveugles"; Volume II, "Pelléas et Mélisande", "Alladine et Palomides", "Intérieur", "La mort de Tintagiles"; Volume III, "Aglavaine et Sélysette", "Ariane et Barbe-bleue", "Soeur Beatrice." Volumes I and II, translated by Hovey, are sold by Dodd, Mead and Company in three volumes.) If you are doubtful of your ability to read "the static drama", or of your capacity to enjoy it, begin with "The Interior (The Home)." Here the tragedy is enacted inside the house, while all the talking is done outside. If you find a fascination in it, pass on to "The Intruder" and "The Blind." This last affords unlimited scope to those who are fond of running down symbols. The dead priest in the middle of the group will stand for any form of ecclesiasticism you may have outgrown, and you can give the blind people around him the names of all the philosophers you know, according to the degree of their blindness and their reliance upon rationalism, intuitionalism, child psychology, animal psychology, etc., for a way out. But don't think you have to label them at all if you don't like to.

To understand "The Blue Bird," all you have to do is to become a child. Then after you grow up again you may find that you understand it still better. It was first presented in Russia, where it was played by fifty-two companies. London and New York saw it before Paris, where it was put on the stage for the first time five years after it appeared elsewhere, with Madame Georgette Leblanc in the rôle of Light. (English version, Dodd, Mead and Company.) Maeterlinck has taken out the forest conspiracy because it scared the children, and substituted a new act containing one of his most original characters, the Happiness of Running Barefoot in the Dew, who is apparently a daughter of Doctor Kneipp. Madame Maeterlinck has prepared "The Blue Bird for Children" in story form for schools (Silver, Burdett and Company).

"Mary Magdalene" is played by Olga Nethersole, but may be as well read as seen. "Monna Vanna" was prohibited by the Censor in England until 1914, but was played in this country by Bertha Kalich, without offense. The only play by Maeterlinck that is at all "Frenchy" is one he translated from the English of John Ford. (Dodd, Mead and Company publish "Joyzelle" and "Monna Vanna", "Aglavaine and Sélysette", "Mary Magdalene", "Pelléas and Mélisande", "Princess Maleine", "The Intruder, and Other Plays", and "Sister Beatrice", and "Ariane and Blue Beard." Harper publishes "Monna Vanna"; Crowell published "Pelléas and Mélisande"; R. F. Seymour, Chicago, publishes "Twelve Songs of Maeterlinck." Several of the plays can be found in back numbers of Poet Lore sold by R. G. Badger, Boston.)

A comprehensive bibliography will be found in the life of Maeterlinck by Montrose J. Moses (Duffield). We have also in English brief biographies by Gérard Harry (Allen and Sons) and J. Bithel (Scribner). The sketch by William Sharp in the "Warner Library of the World's Best Literature" is remarkable for its insight, and the reader may also be referred to Hunneker's "Iconoclasts", Thorold's "Six Masters of Disillusion", and the article on "Maeterlinck's Philosophy of Life", by Professor John Dewey of Columbia in the Hibbert Journal, July, 1911. The lover of Maeterlinck, whose affection is capable of being alienated, should beware of reading the very clever parody on his style in Owen Sea-man's "Borrowed Plumes" (Holt).

[1] "L'Abbaye de Fontenelle ou de Saint-Wandrille." Paris. 1827.

[2] From "The Past", by Maurice Maeterlinck. The Independent, March 6, 1902.

[3] "The Portrait of a Lady", in "The Double Garden."

[4] See her account of the performance in Century Magazine, January, 1911.

[5] For Maeterlinck on Emerson, see Poet Lore, Vol. 10, p. 76, January, 1898, and Arena, Vol. 16, p. 563, March, 1896.

[6] Metropolitan Magazine, May, 1914.

[7] "The Mystery of Justice", in "The Double Garden."

[8] The Independent, January 3, 1901.

[9] "The Double Garden."

[10] "The Mystery of Justice."

[11] For a description of the performance see "A Realization of Macbeth" by Alvan G. Sanborn in The Independent, September 15, 1909.

[12] See his "Quarante Ans de Théâtre."

[13] His admiration for Browning appears in his reply to Professor William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, who had called attention to the close similarity between an incident in Browning's "Luria" and Maeterlinck's "Monna Vanna." Maeterlinck very frankly and courteously acknowledged his indebtedness to Browning, whom, he said, he regarded, like Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare, as common sources of literary inspiration. The Independent, March 5 and June 11, 1903.

[14] This is signed by his name in its original form, Mooris Mäterlinck. A translation of this and other tales by Belgian writers by Edith Wingate Rinder was published in 1897 in the "Green Tree Library" of Stone & Kimball (now Duffield & Co.).

[15] Figaro, August 24, 1890. Octave Mirbeau later busied himself in booming Marguerite Audoux, the Paris sempstress, who wrote "Marie-Claire."

[16] "Wisdom and Destiny," § 79.

[CHAPTER II]

HENRI BERGSON

The history of philosophy shows us chiefly the ceaselessly renewed efforts of reflection laboring to attenuate difficulties, to resolve contradictions, to measure with an increasing approximation a reality incommensurable with our thought. But from time to time bursts forth a soul which seems to triumph over these complications by force of simplicity, the soul of artist or of poet, keeping close to its origin, reconciling with a harmony felt by the heart terms perhaps irreconcilable by the intelligence. The language which it speaks, when it borrows the voice of philosophy, is not similarly understood by everybody. Some think it vague, and so it is in what it expresses. Others feel it precise, because they experience all it suggests. To many ears it brings only the echo of a vanished past, but others hear in it as in a prophetic dream the joyous song of the future.

These words, which Bergson used in his eulogy of his teacher, Ravaisson, before the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, may be applied with greater appropriateness to Bergson himself. For he, far more than Ravaisson, has shown himself an original force in the world of thought, and his philosophy also appears to some people reactionary in tendency and to others far in advance of anything hitherto formulated. But to all it appears important. "Nothing like it since Descartes", they say in France. "Nothing like it since Kant", they say in Germany. His lecture room is the largest in the Collège de France, but it is too small to accommodate the crowd which would hear him. They begin to gather at half-past three for the five o'clock lecture, though they have to listen to a political economist to hold their seats. A cosmopolitan crowd it is that on Wednesdays awaits the lecturer, talking more languages than have ordinarily been heard in the same room at any time during the period from the strike on the Tower of Babel to the universal adoption of Esperanto. French, Italian, English, American, German, Yiddish, and Russian are to be distinguished among them; perhaps the last predominate among the foreign tongues, for young people of both sexes come from Russia in swarms to put themselves under his instruction. This may rouse in us some speculation, even apprehension. Bergsonianism has already assumed some curious forms in the minds of his over-ardent disciples, and what it will become after it has been translated into the Russian language and temperament it would be rash to prophesy.

But the polyglot audience is silent as M. Bergson ascends the rostrum and begins to talk, in slow, smooth, clear tones, accented by nervous gestures of his slender hands. His figure is slight, and his face thin and pointed, almost ecclesiastical in appearance. His hair is slightly gray, but his close-cropped mustache is brown. The eyes are deep, dark, and penetrating, the eyes of seer and scientist together. He lays out his argument in advance in the formal French style, but unlike most French lecturers he does not confine himself to notes. His quick turns of thought break through the conventional forms of logic and find expression in striking and original similes drawn from his wide range of reading. I suppose all professors are given nicknames by their students; at least all who are either loved or hated, and that includes all who amount to anything. Bergson's students call him "the lark", because the higher he flies the sweeter he sings. His voice, indeed, seems to come down from some altitudinous region of the upper atmosphere, so clear and thin and high and penetrating it is. A writer in the London News put it very well when he said of Bergson's London lecture, "No one ever spoke before a large audience with more complete self-possession and less self-assertion."

As an experienced teacher he appreciates the importance of repetition, and in his lectures brings up the same idea in many varied forms and italicizes with his voice the essential points. All his life he has been a teacher, climbing up the regular educational ladder rung by rung to the top.

Henri Bergson was born in the heart of Paris, the Montmartre quarter, on October 18, 1859. He is descended from a prominent Jewish family of Poland and he owes his excellent command of the English language to his mother, for he always spoke that language with her. At the age of nine he entered the Lycée Condorcet, only a few blocks from his house on the Rue Lamartine. He was a good student and worked hard, particularly on geography, which was most difficult for him. Mathematics was his favorite study, and he then intended to make it his life work, but instead he chose a harder road, for, as he told me, philosophy is much more difficult, requires more concentrated thought than mathematics. Before he left the Lycèe at the age of eighteen he won a prize for a solution to a mathematical problem, and the Annales de Mathématiques published his paper in full.

Next he entered the École Normale Supérieure, where he came under the influence of Ravaisson, Lachelier, and Boutroux. On graduation, in 1881, he was made professor of philosophy in the Lycèe of Angers for two years, afterward for five years at Clermont, then back to Paris, first in the Collège Rollin and later in the Lycée Henri IV. In 1898 he was promoted to the École Normale Supérieure, and two years later to the Collège de France. In 1901 he was elected to the Institute, and in 1914 to the Academy.

The rapid spread of his philosophy in France is due not only to its intrinsic value and the eloquence with which he presents it, but in part also to his having been a teacher of teachers. By his twenty years' work in the secondary schools or lycées of the provinces and Paris, and in the Superior Normal School, he has molded the thought of thousands of young men who are now teaching and writing and ruling in France. His present position as lecturer to miscellaneous audiences in the Collège of France, though more conspicuous, is really not more influential than his earlier work. He has the faculty of arousing the enthusiasm and personal devotion of his students, so the soil all over the country was prepared in advance for the propagation of his ideas, and now all he has to do is to sow them broadcast. We may observe something of the kind in our own country, where Dewey's influence has been largely exercised through personal contact with teachers. If he had never published a line, the colleges, normal and high schools in the western half of the United States would, nevertheless, be teaching anonymous Deweyism. A philosopher who cares more for influence than celebrity will prefer a chair where he can reach the largest number of future teachers to any other position however exalted.

We are not left to speculation as to the extent of Bergson's influence in French education. A questionnaire on the teaching of philosophy in the lycées conducted by Binet[1] showed that his ideas were the dominant force of the time. One school reported that "four professors here have adopted them without reserve and made them the soul of their teaching." It is interesting to note that not one of these high school professors mentioned either materialism or pantheism among their various philosophic creeds. They were equally divided between objective and subjective thinkers, or, say, between realists and idealists.

Bergson himself was a materialist to start with, and he worked his way up into his present spiritualistic philosophy when he found the inadequacy of his early conceptions. His taste was for the exact sciences, and in them he excelled while at school. He intended at that time to devote himself to the study of mechanics, and his youthful ambition was to continue and develop the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, of whom he was then an enthusiastic admirer.

But as he studied the formulas of mechanics with a view of discovering their philosophical implications, and of utilizing them in the explanation of the universe, he was struck with their inadequacy, even falsity, when applied to the phenomena of life and mind. In particular he was troubled by the symbol t which occurs so frequently in mathematical and physical formulas, and is supposed to stand for "time." It is represented geometrically by a straight line just like the three dimensions of space. In fact, as Bergson points out, "time" as used in physical science is nothing more or less than a fourth dimension of space. It is purely a spatial conception, an empty framework in which events may be arranged in order as objects are set up in a row on a shelf. There is no change or development in it, for past and future are all the same to it.

Now, when Bergson compared this physical conception of "time" with real time or duration as he felt it within himself, he found they were entirely different things. For the mind the past does not stretch out in a line behind. It is rolled up into the present and projected toward the future. Still less is there a path or several optional paths definitely laid out ahead of us in the future. We break our own paths as we go forward. It is like the big snowballs that we boys used to roll up to make forts out of; all the snow it has passed over is a part of it, and in front the snow is trackless.

The mechanical formulas of science are admirably adapted to the purpose for which they were designed, that is, the handling of matter, but they are misleading as applied to living beings, and especially to the human mind, which is the farthest removed from the realm of material mechanics. Here is true freedom and initiative.

The advocate of free will always gets beaten in the argument with the determinist when he meets him on his own ground, for adopting the spatial conception of time and the dynamic conception of motives, reduces man to a machine and, of course, makes him amenable to the ordinary laws of mechanics. If it is correct to represent the future as two crossroads in front of the undecided individual and he pulled to right and left by "motives" on either side, then the determinist has it all his own way. The case has been conceded to him in advance, and the libertarian can only flinch from his logic. But Bergson holds that when the determinist pretends to talk about the future, he really is regarding it as already past, as definitely mapped and virtually existent.

As Bergson's first book, "Time and Free Will", was devoted to the overthrow of the metaphysical argument for determinism, so his second, "Matter and Memory", was devoted to the overthrow of the psychological argument, which is that the mind and the brain are merely different aspects of the same thing (monism) or that their action is parallel so that a certain state of consciousness always corresponds to a certain molecular motion (dualism). Since the activities of the brain are presumably controlled by the physical and chemical laws, then must be also the mental activities identical or inseparably connected with them. But Bergson, taking the position of an extreme dualist, argues that the mind is distinct from matter and only in part dependent upon it, that memories are not altogether stored in the brain or anywhere in space, and that the brain is essentially nothing more than an instrument of action.

The same is true of our senses, of our bodily organism in general. They are made for practical, not speculative, purposes. The things nearest to us are seen largest and clearest. The eye is useful because its vision is limited. If it were susceptible to all rays, like our skin, we should get, not vision, but sunburn. Now the understanding, also having a pragmatic origin, limits our knowledge just as the eye limits our vision, and for the same purpose.

Let me give a few examples of this limitation of our senses and of our intellect. Suppose we are looking at a horse or automobile going past in the street. We get an immediate sense of the movement very decidedly, but the motion itself we cannot see. We must first analyze the motion; that is, take it apart, break it up into something that is not motion. This we can do with a kinetoscope camera which takes snapshots at the rate of fifty a second. These successive pictures do not give the motion, no matter how rapidly they are taken. Each represents the object standing still, or if not quick enough for that, the picture is blurred; but show these still-life photographs to us in quick succession, and we no longer perceive them as separate views but as continuous motion. Why can the camera so deceive us? Simply because our eyes work in the same way. They are cameras, and the exposure time of the retina is about the same as that of the moving picture films. A moving object looked at steadily is merely a blurred band. But if we wink rapidly, we can catch glimpses of the legs of the horse or the spokes of the wheel, thus like the kinetoscope transforming motion into immobility by intermittent attention.

Look closely at a portrait in this book, and you will see that it consists of pure black and white. Needless to say that the face portrayed was not composed of black spots of various sizes on a white ground. In the original there were no black, no white, and no dots. There were only even shadings, lighter and darker. The picture is an absolute misrepresentation. Yet viewed with the naked eye at sufficient distance to put the dots out of sight, it imitates the shading of the original well enough to be called a "half-tone plate", although there is really not a half tone in it, nothing but black and white.

Now this trick of decomposing continuous motion into successive pictures like the kinetoscope and decomposing continuous space into successive spots like the printing process, is the way we do our thinking. The mind goes by jerks like the eye. When we think of the course of history we break it up into blocks of handy size, comparing century with century, year with year. This is perfectly justifiable, very useful, in fact inevitable, and quite innocent, provided we realize that it is a logical fiction, adapted to practical purposes merely. The trouble has come from not recognizing this. People generally, and especially scientists and philosophers, have been inclined to regard this process of rationalization as the way of getting at reality, instead of as a mere tool for handling reality.

Long ago, when men first began to think hard, they discovered the inadequacy of mere thinking. Zeno of Elea propounded among other puzzles that of Achilles and the tortoise, which has kept the world guessing for twenty-four centuries. While Achilles is making up his handicap, the tortoise has gone on a bit farther, and when Achilles has covered this distance, the tortoise is not there, but still ahead, and since space is conceived as infinitely divisible, Achilles would take an infinity of time to catch up. I do not suppose the experiment was ever tried. That was not the way of the Greeks. They placed too much reliance upon their brains and too little on anything outside of them to put a theory to the test of experiment. But it has been agreed everywhere, always and by all, that Achilles would catch the tortoise, and a considerable proportion of each generation have tried to explain how he could, often succeeding to their own satisfaction, but rarely to the satisfaction of other people. For the point to this puzzle is not to get the answer, but to say why it puzzles us, and to this point philosophers from Aristotle to Bergson have devoted much study; and doubtless the end is not yet.

I remember well the day when that ancient jest was first sprung upon me in the University of Kansas, by the instructor in philosophy, a bright young man just on from Harvard, who had the Eleatics at his finger tips. Several of the boys volunteered to explain it, but I, having the longest arm and snappiest fingers, got the floor. I suggested that we substitute a greyhound chasing a jack rabbit for Achilles and the tortoise, who must be tired of running so long. Both greyhound and jack rabbit progress by jumps, and I argued, with the aid of a piece of chalk, that these could be measured and laid off on the prairie, here represented by the blackboard, and so the whole thing figured out. But the instructor denied my petition for a change of venue. He stuck to Greece and refused to meet me on my native soil, so I retired discomfited. I thought him unaccommodating at the time, but I see now that he was merely wise. Wariness is often so mistaken for disobligingness. The paradox is solved by science and by common sense by assuming that Achilles and the tortoise move by jumps instead of continuously and then comparing these jumps, for they are of finite length and number.

In short, we know what motion is by common sense, by feeling, by intuition, but when we come to reason about it, and especially when we come to talk about it, we have to substitute for it something that is not motion, but is easier to handle and near enough like it, so that ordinarily it serves just as well. It is as much like it as the short, straight lines, substituted by the mathematician, are like the segments of the curve he is trying to solve. What is true of motion is true in a way of all our definitions, formulations, laws, and categories; they are not the real things, but merely handy surrogates. They represent some particular phase of reality more or less satisfactorily. These formulas are not designed to pick all the locks of Nature's treasure chests. They are good for the lock they are designed for and sometimes others, not all. The master key to all locks either does not exist or is too cumbrous to be wielded by man.

Bergson's theory of personality arises naturally out of his conception of time. Time is said to have one dimension. Yes, if we symbolize it by a line; otherwise not, it has no dimension. The impersonal time of the philosophers and scientists is merely the spatial symbol of duration. What our experience shows us is not this empty artificial uneventful time, but duration. And not merely duration, but durations, for there are as many durations of different interval rhythm as there are consciousnesses. This is what is real in time. Time is really the continuous unrolling of our conscious life, of psychologic states which do not become distinct except when it pleases us to divide them. Personality is a continuity of indivisible movement. We can draw a bucket of water out of the river, and then another bucketful, but we can never get the stream in this way, for the stream is essentially movement. The movement is what is substantial about the stream.

From immobile states we can never make of life what experience actually gives us, for life is change. Only by seizing this change directly in an integral experience can we solve the problem. To true realities no concept is applicable. Reality must be regarded itself, in itself, just as it is; and in giving a description of it, we can fix only the image of it before our eyes.

The guiding thread of philosophical problems is that the intellect is an instrument of action which has developed itself in the course of centuries in order to triumph over the difficulties that matter opposes to life. The intellect has constituted itself for the purpose of a battle. The obstacles which it would overthrow are those of brute matter. The categories of the understanding are constructed with a view of action upon matter. So where our intellect seeks to know something else than the material world, it finds itself unable to grasp it. The whole history of the evolution of life combines to show that intelligence is an instrumental function for action upon matter, to formulate and present the laws which permit us to foresee, and therefore to forestall.

In dealing with a reality like personality, the intellect will first attempt to handle the subject with the same processes that it employs for inert matter, therefore it ends in a logical impasse. This is the origin of the difficulties of the question. The concepts which it would apply to personality are made only for the material world. We do not know how to apply them adequately to the life of the mind, which overflows them.

To direct our attention upon the stream of our consciousness breaks it up and immobilizes it. But it may be reached by another kind of introspection, which consists in letting live, in trying to reënforce vitality. In this way activity may become consciousness without ceasing to be active. Thus the ego may be seized as it really is, as a transition and a continuity.

In his theory of evolution Bergson draws a sharp distinction between intelligence and instinct. As intelligence has reached its highest point in the human race, so instinct has reached its highest point in the ants, bees, and wasps. Here we see instinct attaining its ends by the employment of the most varied and complicated expedients. The ant is lord of the subsoil as man is lord of the soil. The solitary wasps, whom Maeterlinck would despise as primitive individualists in comparison with the socialized bees, are used by Bergson to illustrate his theory of instinct. These insects provide for the future needs of their larvæ by storing up in their underground nest spiders, beetles, or caterpillars. These are to be kept alive, as we keep turtles and lobsters, so they will be fresh, and in order to prevent them from escaping, the wasp paralyzes them by stinging them at the point or points where the motor nerves meet. One species of wasp pierces the ganglia of its caterpillar by nine successive thrusts of its sting and then squeezes the head in its mandibles, enough to cause paralysis without death. Other kinds of wasps have to use other forms of surgical treatment, according to the kind of insect they put into storage. How can this be explained? If we call it intelligence, we must assume that the wasp or its ancestors has been endowed with a knowledge of insect anatomy such as we hesitate to credit to any being lower in the scale of life than a professor of entomology. If we adopt a mechanistic hypothesis, we must assume that this marvelous skill in surgery has been gradually acquired in the course of thousands of generations, either by the survival of the descendants of those insects who happened to have stuck their stings into the nine right places (Darwinism), or by the inheritance of the acquired habit of stinging a certain species of caterpillar in that particular way (Lamarckianism). But since this knowledge or skill is never of use to the individual insect and is of no use to the species until it has arrived at a considerable degree of perfection, we can hardly adopt either theory without straining our imagination.

But the assumed difficulties vanish if we adopt the Bergsonian point of view and regard the caterpillar and wasp as two parts of the same process. It is no wonder then that they are fitted together. Slayer and slain have developed for that purpose, and what is apparently antagonism is really cooperation. The importance of this theory to those who are troubled about the moral interpretation of the universe is obvious, for the stinging of the caterpillar would seem something like picking a sliver out of the left hand by the right, but Bergson does not go into this question at all.

The formation of the eye, which is the source of much perplexity to evolutionists of all schools, provides Bergson with an excellent illustration of his theory. The eye of mollusks is similar in form and identical in function with the eye of the vertebrates, yet the two are composed of different elements and grow in a different way. The retina of the vertebrate is produced by an expansion of the central nervous system of the young embryo. It is, so to speak, a part of the brain coming out to see. In the mollusk, on the contrary, the retina is formed from the external layer of the embryo. Here heredity is out of the question because of this difference of formation and because the man is not descended from the mollusk nor the mollusk from man. The structure of the eye involves the combination of such a large number of elements and must satisfy so many conditions before it is good for anything, that it is practically impossible to explain it either as the effect of the action of light or as the result of an accretion of slight accidental variations.

But Bergson, coming in with his philosophic faith at the point where science leaves off, calls attention to the fact that while the eye is a complicated structure, seeing is one simple act. Why not begin our explanation with the simple, instead of the complex? The analytical method of the intellect, though useful in its place, does not lead us to the meaning of reality. It is as if we could only see a picture as broken up into a mosaic, or as if we could only consider a movement of the hand in the mathematician's way, as an infinite series of points arranged in a curve.

So the eye with its marvelous complexity of structure, may be only the simple act of vision, divided for us into a mosaic of cells, whose order seems marvelous to us because we have conceived the whole as an assemblage....

Mechanism and finalism both go too far, for they attribute to Nature the most formidable of the labors of Hercules in holding that she has exalted to the simple act of vision an infinity of infinitely complex elements, whereas Nature has had no more trouble in making an eye than I have in lifting my hand. Nature's simple act has divided itself automatically into an infinity of elements which are then found to be coordinated to one idea, just as the movement of my hand has dropped an infinity of points which are then found to satisfy one equation.—"Creative Evolution", pp. 90-91.

Bergson seems born to be an exception to Amiel's criticism of French philosophy: "The French lack that intuitive faculty to which the living unity of things is revealed." "Their logic never goes beyond the category of mechanism nor their metaphysic beyond dualism."

M. Bergson's residence is the Villa Montmorency in Auteuil, a quiet quarter of Paris, lying between the Seine and the Bois de Boulogne. In summer he goes to Switzerland for greater seclusion and the stimulus of a higher altitude upon his thought. Here I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with him. From Geneva, where I was staying, I took the railroad that skirts the lake upon the western side to Nyon, an old Roman town at the foot of the Dole, the highest peak of the Swiss Jura. St. Cergue, my destination, was nine miles inland and a half a mile up. The distance I had to go was therefore the square root of the sum of the squares of these distances, but I did not figure it out, because, according to Bergson, we live in time rather than space, and duration is not a measure of length. So I can only say that it was one of the longest and pleasantest hypotenuses I ever traversed. For there was a sense of exhilaration in rising ever higher as the carriage zigzagged through the woods, and in getting a grander view each time we stopped at a turn to give way to an automobile chugging slowly up or coasting swiftly down. Arrived at the little village of St. Cergue, I had still a climb and a search among the hotels, pensions, and summer homes scattered over the mountainside for Villa Bois-gentil. This was found in the middle of a meadow backed by a forest of firs, a square, two-story house, simply furnished but with no affectation of rusticity, as is common in American country homes. From the inclosed porch there is a glorious view of Mont Blanc, with the long blue crescent of Lake Geneva curving around the ramparts of its base. But, as with many another Swiss view, the effect is marred by the presence of a big box of a hotel in the immediate foreground.

One would have thought from the cordiality of my reception that a philosopher had nothing better to do than to entertain a wandering American journalist. At lunch I had an opportunity of meeting also Madame and Mademoiselle Bergson, and afterward a long talk with Professor Bergson, who later accompanied me down the steep mountain path to the village and along the winding road through the woods. His conversation has the charm of his books, the enthusiasm for the mission of philosophy, the wealth of illustrations drawn from many fields of science and art, the freshness and inspiration of his novel point of view, the candidness in the consideration of opposing arguments, the unaffected, unpretentious manner, the absence of the professional jealousy and personal arrogance which has been characteristic of many original thinkers. The reader will notice that in his reviews and criticisms of the historic systems of philosophy, he never seeks to overthrow them, but is always trying to see how much of them he can save and assimilate. He believes that it is possible for metaphysics to have a continuous and positive development like the natural sciences, each man building on what has gone before, instead of setting up a new school and endeavoring to secure a personal following.[2]

I took the liberty of extending to Professor Bergson an invitation to America, for I was able to assure him of a hearty welcome on account of the deep interest already taken here in his thought. The work of James and Dewey prepared the way for Bergson in this country, for his philosophy may be regarded as a constructive system built upon pragmatic criticism. Indeed, he has been accused by his opponents of stealing Yankee psychology and making metaphysics out of it. The truth is, James and Bergson pursued through many years lines of thought of similar tendency but of independent development, though each has repeatedly taken occasion to express his appreciation of the work of the other. It is a case of psycho-metaphysical parallelism rather than of interaction.

In February, 1913, Professor Bergson came to America at the invitation of Columbia University and gave two series of lectures, one in French and the other in English, on Spiritualité et Liberté and the Method of Philosophy. One would find reason to question the common assertion that nowadays no interest is taken in metaphysical problems when he saw the lecture rooms packed with people from the city as well as students from all departments of the university. A line of automobiles stood waiting along Broadway, as the litters waited in the streets of Rome when Plotinus, the Neoplatonist, came to lecture there seventeen hundred years ago. Those who could not beg, buy, or borrow a ticket of admission formed a line outside the door, hoping that some who had tickets would fail to appear, but that did not often happen. A lunette was discovered over the door which commanded the lecture room, and here gathered a compact group of the excluded, finding room for one eye or one ear apiece, but the fainting of a lady in the crush put a stop to this privilege. In the downtown department stores Bergson's books were stacked up on the "best sellers" counter. His American publisher sold in two years half as many copies of "Creative Evolution" as had been sold in France in fifteen. Yet Bergson is a prophet not without honor in his own country. The three weeks he spent here were so crowded with engagements that he had to be kept running on a schedule as close as a railroad time-table. As he was leaving, I asked Professor Bergson the banal question of what he thought of America. He answered: "I shall always remember America as the Land of Interrupted Conversations. I have met so many interesting people with whom I should like to talk, but then somebody else equally interesting comes up."

M. Bergson believes that it is possible to make any philosophical idea clear and acceptable to the multitude. In this he obviously differs from other philosophers, many of whom do not think it possible and some of whom do not think it desirable. But to gain the wider audience, the author must take great pains with his style. The fault with translations is that the swing, the rhythm, is apt to be lost or altered, and this is essential to the impression as well as the right words. I spoke to him of the difficulty of finding an exact English equivalent of élan vital, which is the key word of his "Evolution créatrice", and he replied that he thought that "impetus", the word chosen by Dr. Arthur Mitchell in his translation of the work, was better than any of the others which had been suggested, such as "impulse", "momentum", "movement", "onrush", "push", "force", and "urge."

M. Bergson's method of composition is based on his theory of style. In undertaking a new book he spends as many years as may be necessary to the mastery of the literature of the subject and the development of his ideas. Then when he starts in to compose, he sets aside all his books and notes, and writes at a furious rate so as to get the book down as nearly as possible in the form it took in his mind at one time, jotting down his thoughts as rapidly as they come, often in fragmentary sentences and words, so as not to interrupt the movement of his mind. Then having put on paper the essentials of his theme with its original impetus, he devotes himself to the long process of revision, verification, and correction.

To art in all its forms Bergson has given a large place in his philosophy. The little book in which he has touched upon it, "Le Rire" (Laughter), is not so much of a digression from his fundamental line of thought as may appear. He explains that ridicule has developed as a method of social control, to whip people into line, to punish them for willful or absent-minded disregard of social usages. Laughter is incompatible with emotion. The comic addresses itself to pure intelligence. A joke cannot be perceived until the heart has a momentary anæsthesia. There is nothing comic except human beings. Man has been defined as "the laughing animal." He is also the only laughable animal. Man becomes ridiculous when we regard him from an intellectualist standpoint; that is, as a machine. The attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body are laughable in the exact degree that they seem to us mechanical. We always laugh when persons seem like things.

The bearing of this theory of the ridiculous upon his philosophy is so obvious that he does not need to state it. Bergson, too, might use ridicule as a weapon and laugh determinism out of court. The man of the mechanists would be as funny as a jack-in-the-box.

In the same volume he gives his view of the function of art, from which a few sentences may be quoted here:

What is the object of art? If reality struck our senses and our consciousness directly; if we could enter into immediate communication with things and with each other, I believe that art would be useless, or rather that we would all be artists, for our souls would then vibrate continuously in unison with nature. Our eyes, aided by our memory, would cut out in space and fix in time inimitable pictures. Our glance would seize in passing, sculptured in the living marble of the human body, bits of statuary as beautiful as those of antiquity. We would hear singing in the depths of our souls like music, sometimes gay, more often plaintive, always original, the uninterrupted melody of our interior life. All this is around us, all this is in us, and yet nothing of all this is perceived by us distinctly. Between nature and us—what do I say?—between us and our own consciousness, a veil interposes, a thick veil for the common man, a thin veil, almost transparent, for the artist and the poet. What fairy has woven this veil? Was it through malice or through friendliness? It is necessary to live, and life requires that we apprehend things relatively to our needs. Living consists in acting. To live is to receive from objects only the useful impression in order to respond to it by the appropriate reactions; the other impressions must obliterate themselves or come to us only confusedly. I look and I believe I see, I listen and believe I hear, I study myself and I believe I read to the bottom of my heart. But what I see and what I hear from the external world is simply what my senses extract from it in order to throw light upon my conduct; what I know of myself is what flows on the surface, what takes part in action. My senses and my consciousness give me only a practical simplification of reality.

Thus, whether it be painting, sculpture, poetry or music, art has no other object than to dissipate the practically useful symbols, the generalities conventionally and socially accepted, in short all that masks reality for us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself. It is a misunderstanding on this point that has given rise to the debate between realism and idealism in art. Art is certainly only a more direct vision of reality. But this purity of perception implies a rupture with useful convention, an innate and specially localized disinterestedness of the sense or of the consciousness, in short, a certain immateriality of life which is what has always been called idealism. So one might say without in the least playing upon the sense of the words, that realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and that it is by force of ideality alone that one can regain contact with reality.

There are various other ways besides art whereby we may recover and strengthen the faculty of intuition, which has been suffered to atrophy through too exclusive a reliance upon rational processes. There is, for example, action, life itself, the sense of living, which brings us into immediate contact with reality. By the help of science, art, and philosophy, we may achieve sympathy, a feeling of the kinship of nature, a consciousness of interpenetration, a realization of the meaning of evolution. Above all, philosophy has this aim and power, to develop another faculty, complementary to the intellect, that will open to us a perspective on the other half of reality, not capable of being confined in the rigid formulas of deductive logic.

There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone can find, but it will never seek them.

Intelligence and instinct are turned in opposite directions, the former toward inert matter, the latter toward life. Intelligence by means of science, which is its work, will deliver up to us more and more completely the secret of physical operations; of life it brings us, and moreover only claims to bring us, a translation in terms of inertia. It goes all around life, taking from the outside the greatest possible number of views of it, drawing it into itself instead of entering into it. But it is to the very inwardness of life that intuition leads—by intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely.

We see that the intellect, so skillful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigor, the stiffness, and the brutality of an instrument not designed for such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us much in this matter.

In Bergson's system metaphysics occupies the same place that it does in the works of Aristotle. Metaphysics is simply what is beyond physics, not something antagonistic to it. He has not, like many modern philosophers, been contemptuous toward physiological psychology. On the contrary, he has mastered it and built upon it. This is the reason, I think, why his ideas have met with such swift acceptance. It is as absurd for a philosopher nowadays to attempt to confine himself to the data accessible to Plato as it would be for a mathematician to attempt to solve the problems of modern physics with the use of the methods of Euclid.

Bergson applied his theory of the relation of mind and brain to the explanation of the mechanism of dreaming, in an address before the Institut psychologique on March 28, 1901.[3] Here he showed how the obscure sensations of sight, touch, and hearing which reach us even during sleep furnish the basis for our dreams, and how our memories fit into this framework, so the process is similar to that of ordinary perception except that the critical faculty is less vigilant than in a waking state. Thus, light flashing upon the closed eyes may give rise to a dream of fire, and the recumbent posture and consequent absence of pressure on the soles of the feet give us the idea of floating in the air. The following passage from this paper on dreams is of especial interest, for in it Bergson brings forward the theory which since then Freud and his school have developed and in many cases carried to extravagant lengths,—the theory that our memories are stored in a state of tension like steam in a boiler, and may rise into consciousness in various guises when the vigilance of the individual is relaxed:

Our memories, at any given moment, form a solid whole, a pyramid, so to speak, whose point is inserted precisely into our present action. But behind the memories which are concerned in our occupations and are revealed by means of it, there are others, thousands of others, stored below the scene illuminated by consciousness. Yes, I believe indeed that all our past life is there, preserved even to the most infinitesimal details, and that we forget nothing, and that all that we have felt, perceived, thought, willed, from the first awakening of our consciousness, survives indestructibly. But the memories which are preserved in these obscure depths are there in the state of invisible phantoms. They aspire, perhaps, to the light, but they do not even try to rise to it; they know that it is impossible and that I, as a living and acting being, have something else to do than to occupy myself with them.

But suppose that, at a given moment, I become disinterested in the present situation, in the present action—in short, in all which previously has fixed and guided my memory; suppose, in other words, that I am asleep. Then these memories, perceiving that I have taken away the obstacle, have raised the trapdoor which has kept them beneath the floor of consciousness, arise from the depths; they rise, they move, they perform in the night of unconsciousness a great dance macabre. They rush together to the door which has been left ajar. They all want to get through. But they cannot; there are too many of them. From the multitudes which are called, which will be chosen? It is not hard to say. Formerly, when I was awake, the memories which forced their way were those which could involve claims of relationship with the present situation, with what I saw and heard around me. Now it is more vague images which occupy my sight, more indecisive sounds which affect my ear, more indistinct touches which are distributed over the surface of my body, but there are also the more numerous sensations which arise from the deepest parts of the organism. So, then, among the phantom memories which aspire to fill themselves with color, with sonority, in short with materiality, the only ones that succeed are those which can assimilate themselves with the color-dust that we perceive, the external and internal sensations that we catch, etc., and which, besides, respond to the effective tone of our general sensibility. When this union is effected between the memory and the sensation, we have a dream.

Bergson may be called a man of three books, if we ignore "Laughter", which is merely a flying but-tress of his system. In the first, known in English as "Time and Free Will", he develops his theory of vital duration as distinct from physical time, which has been the guiding clew of all his later thinking. This volume, completed in 1887, was the outcome of a four years' study of the physical, psychological, and metaphysical conceptions of time and space. For the second book, dealing with the relation of the mind to the brain, it was necessary to master the voluminous literature of the subject, especially the clinical and experimental researches on aphasia and localization of function. This required nine years of study, embodied in "Matter and Memory", appearing in 1896. In the preparation for the third book he devoted eleven years to the study of biology and produced "Creative Evolution" in 1907. According to this rate of increase, we might expect his fourth volume in 1923, but it would be obviously unfair to apply to M. Bergson himself the mathematical determinism that he repudiates.

I call attention to this preliminary study of the sciences, because there is a danger that the anti-intellectualist tendency of the pragmatic movement should lead to a disregard of the importance of scientific research. That this danger is real and present, was shown in the Binet report on the teaching of philosophy, previously referred to. Some of the professors complained that their students, under the influence of Bergson's ideas, had come to have a disdain for the tedious and laborious methods of experimental science, believing that science does not give us reality, and assuming that, while science is good enough for mechanics and physicians, it is indifferent to philosophers.

When this point was brought up for discussion in the Société française de Philosophie, M. Bergson made an indignant reply, declaring that in the theories attributed to him he recognized nothing that he had taught or written. He had never contemned science or subordinated it to metaphysics.

Mathematics, for instance, what have I said of that? That, however great may be the part played in it by the creative imagination, it must not lose sight of space and matter; that matter and space are realities; that matter is weighted with geometry; that geometry is consequently not a mere play but a true point of contact with the absolute. I attribute the same absolute value to the physical sciences. It is true they enunciate laws of which the form would have been different if other variables, other units of measure, had been chosen, and especially if the problems had been propounded chronologically in a different order. But all this is because we are obliged to break up nature and to examine one by one the problems it sets for us. Really, physics strives for the absolute, and it approaches more and more as it advances this ideal limit. I should like to know if there exists, among modern conceptions of science, a theory that puts a higher value upon positive science. Most of them give us science as entirely relative to human intelligence. I hold, on the contrary, that it is reality itself, absolute reality, which the mathematical and physical sciences tend to reveal to us. Science only begins to become relative, or rather symbolic, when it approaches from the physico-chemical side, the problems of life and consciousness. But even here it is quite legitimate. It only needs then to be completed by a study of another kind, that is, metaphysics. In short, all my researches have had no other object than to bring about a rapprochement between metaphysics and science and to consolidate the one with the other without sacrificing anything of either, after having first clearly distinguished the one from the other.

This outspoken and emphatic language ought to clear the air of many current misconceptions of Bergson's philosophy. Now that he has laid down his fundamental principles, it is to be hoped that he will next take up their applications to the interpretation of history and the problems of conduct. If he does not do this himself, others will do it for him, and doubtless not always in accordance with his intentions. In fact, they are already doing it. In France, Bergsonianism is not an academic speculation, but an active force in some of the most important movements of the day. We hear of a Bergsonian art and a Bergsonian literature as well as a Bergsonian Catholicism and a Bergsonian labor movement. The two last mentioned are of especial interest as showing the influence of his novel views upon the most diverse minds. Just as there were Hegelians of the Right and Hegelians of the Left, so now there are two wings of Bergsonianism, the conservative being the Modernists and the radical being the Syndicalists.

There has rarely been seen such an outburst of enthusiasm for metaphysical thought as that of the French neo-Catholics. The pragmatic philosophy, particularly James's "Varieties of Religious Experience", pointed the way to a new Christian apologetic based upon living experience, instead of abstract reasoning. The young Catholics turned their attention to the saints rather than to the theologians, and found inspiration in a fresh study of the Catholic mystics. In a conception of truth as a growth, as an ideal convergence of beneficial beliefs, rather than as a static limit, and in a conception of history as a progressive process of verification, they attained a point of view which enabled them to retain their ecclesiastical heritage and at the same time to accept the bounty of modern science. But such speculations were deemed dangerous by the Vatican, and the movement was crushed, so far as a movement of such vigor and vitality can be crushed, by the Encyclical and Syllabus issued by Pius X in 1907, and the anti-modernist oath that was later imposed.[4] This was followed in 1914 by the placing of Bergson's works upon the Index of Prohibited Books which no good Catholic may read without the express permission of his spiritual adviser.

At the opposite extreme we find the trades unions or syndicates, whose power has been often demonstrated in recent years, but whose aims and ideals are yet indeterminate and vague. So far it is Will and not Idea that is manifested in the revolutionary labor movement, to use the Schopenhauerian terms. But becoming conscious of the need of a philosophical justification, they have seized upon one side of Bergson's doctrine and declared the élan ouvrier brother to the élan vital, or a part of it. Their flamboyant phraseology reminds one of 1793: "The Collège de France collaborates with the Bourse du Travail" and "The flute of personal meditation harmonizes with the trumpets of the social revolution." The syndicalists, like the modernists, have their revolt against dogma, against the catchwords of republicanism as well as against the rigid formulas of Marxianism, against all attempts to confine the future in the past and to impose determinism upon conduct. And when it comes to the enforcement of conformity—or, rather, of uniformity—of profession, there is not much difference between Pope and party.[5]

It is unnecessary to say that M. Bergson teaches neither Catholicism nor revolution, and that he cannot be held accountable for all the various applications of his ideas to practical life. I mention these extremes only to show the range of their actual influence. Whatever may be the fate of Bergson's philosophy, we may be sure it will not leave the world as it found it. It is a force to be reckoned with at all events in the field of action as well as in the realm of pure reason.

Very few references to disputed questions in religion, sociology, and ethics can be found in his works, and since he prefers to use a new, clean, and unconventional vocabulary, he cannot be pocketed in any of the pigeonholes provided in advance by the historians of philosophy. To the demand for a brief formulation of his philosophy, an indignant Bergsonian retorts: "Can you put Maeterlinck's 'Pelléas and Mélisande' into a formula?"

The Post Impressionists and Futurists are fond of ascribing their novel ideas of art to Bergson, but he is not eager to assume the responsibility. When I asked him about it, he said that he had never yet been able to discover his philosophy in their paintings, and further that he was always skeptical of a movement where the theory ran so far ahead of the practice.

It is obvious that the adoption of the pragmatic principle, particularly in the extreme Bergsonian form, would radically alter our view of the past, and compel a rewriting or at least a rereading of history. If history never repeats itself, what is its lesson for us? Certainly it is not competent to foretell our future, still less to prescribe our actions. The best expression of what seems to me the legitimate ethical deductions of Bergson's philosophy is to be found in the brilliant essays by L. P. Jacks. According to the editor of the Hibbert Journal, the highest morality consists, not in following the established rules, but in a voluntary rise into a higher level. The true moral act is original, creative, unprecedented. What would the author of "Folk-ways", for whom conformity was the only morality, have said to the following:

"Had men all along restricted themselves to the performance of those actions for which the warrant of moral science was then and there available, many crimes perhaps would not have been committed, but it is doubtful if the world would contain the record of a single noble deed. We cannot remind ourselves too often that the most complete scientific knowledge of what has been done up to date will never enable us to answer the question, 'What ought to be done next?'

"The subject matter of science and the subject matter of morality are entirely different and in a sense opposed; the first is the deed-as-done, the second is the doing of a deed-to-be.

"Conscience rightly understood is no faculty of abstract judgment laying down propositions as to what ought and ought not to be done; it is not a 'voice', though we often name it such, bidding us do this or that; it is rather an élan vital, an impulse, an active principle, nay, the good Will itself."—"Alchemy of Thought", by L. P. Jacks, pp. 260, 287.

Among the numerous followers of Bergson, none is more enthusiastic or sympathetic than Edouard Le Roy, a modernist Catholic—if that, since the encyclical, is not a contradiction in terms—who has for many years been in close touch with Bergson, and has been especially interested in the religious and ethical applications of his theories. His introduction to Bergson's philosophy is therefore useful, not merely because it gives in brief a competent exposition of Bergson's ideas, for the beginner would probably find it quite as profitable and enjoyable to read the same number of pages of "Creative Evolution", but chiefly because M. Le Roy is in a way an authorized spokesman, and so we can get some notion of Bergson's opinions about questions on which he has not yet expressed himself. For example, Bergson in all his books never deals with religion, although it is obvious that his philosophy has the closest relation with religion in many of its aspects. Le Roy, however, is not so reticent, and he closes the volume with the following noteworthy passage:

"In the depths of ourselves we find liberty; in the depths of universal being we find a demand for creation. Since evolution is creative, each of its moments works for the production of an indeducible and transcendent future. This future must not be regarded as a simple development of the present, a simple expression of germs already given. Consequently we have no authority for saying that there is forever only one order of life, only one plane of action, only one rhythm of duration, only one perspective of existence. And if disconnections and abrupt leaps are visible in the economy of the past—from matter to life, from the animal to man—we have no authority again for claiming that we cannot observe to-day something analogous in the very essence of human life, that the point of view of the flesh, and the point of view of the spirit, the point of view of reason, and the point of view of charity are a homogeneous extension of it. And apart from that, taking life in its first tendency, and in the general direction of its current, it is ascent, growth, upward effort, and a work of spiritualizing and emancipating creation: by that we might define Good, for Good is a path rather than a thing.

"But life may fail, halt, or travel downward.... Each species, each individual, each function tends to take itself as its end; mechanism, habit, body and letter, which are, strictly speaking, pure instruments, actually become principles of death. Thus it comes about that life is exhausted in efforts toward self-preservation, allows itself to be converted by matter into captive eddies, sometimes even abandons itself to the inertia of the weight which it ought to raise, and surrenders to the downward current which constitutes the essence of materiality: it is thus that Evil would be defined, as the direction of travel opposed to Good. Now, with man, thought, reflection, and clear consciousness appear. At the same time also properly moral qualifications appear; good becomes duty, evil becomes sin. At this precise moment, a new problem begins, demanding the soundings of a new intuition, yet connected at clear and visible points with previous problems.

"This is the philosophy which some are pleased to say is closed by nature to all problems of a certain order, problems of reason or problems of morality. There is no doctrine, on the contrary, which is more open, and none which, in actual fact, lends itself better to further extension."

I have quoted this entire, because Professor Bergson has given it his indorsement in the plainest terms. In a letter to M. Le Roy about the book, he says:

Your study could not be more conscientious or true to the original. Nowhere is this sympathy more in evidence than where you point the possibilities of further developments of the doctrine. In this direction I should myself say exactly what you have said.

The passage quoted above from M. Le Roy's book has, then, almost the significance of a signed statement. It was observed that in his lectures in New York Professor Bergson was much more outspoken than formerly in his views upon religious matters; as, for example, when he replied affirmatively to the question whether he believed in immortality or not. It may be anticipated that his future work will be in the development of his philosophy along the lines indicated by M. Le Roy, although we may expect—judging from his former books—that this will take the form, not of the formulation of a new moral code, but of the discovery of a new way of looking at life and appraising action.

Until recently the triumphal march of Bergson into increasing popularity and influence has met with little systematic opposition. Some have found him obscure. Some have called him absurd. He has his devoted partisans and bitter opponents. But his views have not yet been subjected to the thorough criticism which they must inevitably receive sooner or later. A step in this direction is the study of the pragmatic movement by René Berthelot. The first volume of his "Utilitarian Romanticism" deals with the pragmatism of Nietzsche and Poincaré; the second with the pragmatism of Bergson. The author, after the manner of historians of philosophy, is more concerned to determine what is new in Bergson than what is true. He acts upon the old military rule "divide and conquer" and accordingly splits up Bergsonism into German romanticism and Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism, and then proceeds to dispatch these severally after the orthodox manner. This procedure is in a way begging the question, for it implicitly denies the Bergsonian thesis that there may be something new in the world. Tracing a thing back to its roots is all very well, provided that you do not assume that the roots are all there is of the plant that has grown out of them.

In tracing this genealogy of thought M. Berthelot finds Bergson related to Nietzsche on the romantic side. Both, he says, derive their romanticism from Schelling; Bergson, through his revered teacher, Ravaisson, and Nietzsche through Hoelderlin, Emerson, Schopenhauer, and Wagner. "Like the symbolists, Nietzsche and Bergson have drunk in different cups the water from the same magic fountain; an invisible Vivian has bound them both in the same enchantment."

From the other side of the house—might we say the masculine side?—Bergson derived his utilitarian empiricism; M. Berthelot traces its descent from Berkeley through Hume, Mill, Bain, and Spencer. In the course of this discussion the author introduces the following ingenious formula:

Hobbes : Berkeley :: Nietzsche : Bergson.

Those who are sufficiently expert with the application of the rule of three to metaphysics may work this out at their leisure.

One would suppose, on Mendelian principles, that a hybrid of such diverse and distinguished intellectual ancestry would show more originality than Berthelot is willing to allow to Bergson. At the end of his analysis he comes to the conclusion that Bergson has really made only one important contribution to philosophy; that is, his conception of duration as distinguished from time. As Berkeley in analyzing the idea of space showed how psychological space, that is, the notion of space derived from sensation, differed from mathematical or formal space, so Bergson has shown how concrete duration or psychological time differs from mathematical or formal time. But even this theory according to our author is misapplied by Bergson, for it is not an opposition between space and time, but between two different conceptions of both space and time. This is characteristic of Berthelot's criticism, which is mainly directed toward breaking down all along the line the dichotomy to which Bergson is addicted.

Bergson's literary skill and amazing popularity seem to annoy him as they do other professors of philosophy in various lands. Whenever Berthelot presents Bergson with a bundle of compliments, we may detect a nettle hidden in the bouquet, as when he alludes to Bergson as "the Debussy of contemporary philosophy", and he says that with an increasing floridity of style the number of the bergsoniennes has come to surpass that of the bergsoniens. But that a philosophy should become fashionable seems to me rather creditable to the public than discreditable to the originator.

Professor Bergson has on several occasions expressed an interest in the efforts of the Society of Psychical Research to throw light into dark corners, and he has shown his sympathy by accepting the presidency of the English society, a successor in that position to F. W. H. Myers, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Crookes, A. J. Balfour, and Andrew Lang. In his presidential address delivered in Æolian Hall, London, May 28, 1913, Professor Bergson made the novel suggestion that if the same amount of effort had been given toward the study of mental phenomena as has been given to physical, we might now know as much about mind as we do about matter. The concluding passage of the address is worth quoting:

What would have happened if all our science, for three centuries past, had been directed toward the knowledge of the mind, instead of toward that of matter—if, for instance, Kepler and Galileo and Newton had been psychologists? Psychology would have attained developments of which one could no more form an idea than people had been able, before Kepler and Galileo and Newton, to form an idea of our astronomy and of our physics. Probably, instead of their being disdained a priori, all the strange facts with which psychical research was concerned would have been sought out minutely. Probably we should have had a vitalist biology quite different from ours, perhaps also a different medicine, or therapeutics by way of suggestion would have been pushed to a point of which we can form no idea. But when the human mind, having pushed thus far the science of mind, had turned toward inert matter, it would have been confused as to its direction, not knowing how to set to work, not knowing how to apply to this matter the processes with which it had been successful up till then. The world of physical, and not that of psychical, phenomena would then have been the world of mystery. It was, however, neither possible nor desirable that things should have happened thus. It was not possible, because at the dawn of modern times mathematical science already existed, and it was necessary, consequently, that the mind should pursue its researches in a direction to which that science was applicable. Nor was it desirable, even for the science of mind, for there would always have been wanting to that science something infinitely precious—the precision, the anxiety for proof, the habit of distinguishing that which is certain and that which is simply possible or probable. The sciences concerned with matter can alone give to the mind that precision, that rigor, those scruples. Let us now approach the science of mind with these excellent habits, renouncing the bad metaphysic which embarrasses our research, and the science of the mind will attain results surpassing all our hopes.

But whatever might have been the result if Kepler, Galileo, and Newton had turned their attention to psychology instead of physics, it must be confessed that the Society for Psychical Research has been a disappointment, notwithstanding that it has numbered among its zealous investigators such distinguished scientists as Lodge, Crookes, and Wallace. When the society was organized in 1882, its first president, Professor Sidgwick, called attention to the numerous reports of physical phenomena in the séance room and expressed the hope that such evidence would be forthcoming more abundantly now that competent investigators were prepared to deal with them. But quite the contrary happened. As Mr. Podmore puts it in his book on "The Naturalization of the Supernatural":

"In short, just when an organized and systematic investigation on a scale not inadequate to the importance of the subject was for the first time about to be made, the phenomena to be investigated diminished rapidly in frequency and importance, and the opportunities for investigation were further curtailed by the indifference or reluctance of the mediums to submit their claims to investigation."

It would seem, then, that since mankind, or some small portion of it, has acquired the precision, rigor, and scruples of physical science, it has become difficult, even impossible, to cultivate the occult. Still most of us would agree with M. Bergson that, assuming that there was such an alternative opened to humanity as he supposes, science has chosen the better part in undertaking the conquest of the physical world first.

The religious importance of Bergson's theory of evolution will be apparent from the quotations given. It has occurred to me in reading his later work that in some passages the word "faith" could be substituted for "philosophy", and "elohim" for "élan vital", without materially altering the sense. Then, too, his emphasis of time restores a conception which has always been a vital factor in religious faith, but which is not found in the scientific conception of the world as a reversible reaction or the metaphysical conception of the world as an illusion of an unchangeable Absolute. The present day is different from any other, and the future depends upon it. We cannot console or excuse ourselves by saying, "It will be all the same a hundred years hence." Now is the accepted time, the day of decision, the unique opportunity, and the election may be irrevocable, a turning point in the history of the creation. The atoms have lost their chance. The animals are hopelessly sidetracked. Upon us depends the future, the salvation of the world.

We must no longer speak of life in general as if it were an abstraction, or a mere rubric under which all living beings are enrolled. At a certain time, in certain points of space, a very visible current originated. This current of life, traversing the bodies which it has successively organized, passing from generation to generation, has divided itself among species and dispersed itself among individuals without losing anything of its force.—"Creative Evolution"?

Bergson's philosophy would apparently lead to a conception of God more Arminian than Calvinistic, if it is permissible to apply the old theological categories; a God perhaps conscious, personal, and anthropomorphic, but not omnipotent and unchangeable. In fact it has a striking similarity to the conception of the Alexandrian Gnostics, a creative force struggling against the intractability of inert matter and triumphing by subtlety and persistence. The motto of Louis XI, Divide et impera, applies here in a different sense:

God, thus defined, has nothing of the already made: He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely....

It is as if a vague and formless being whom we may call as we will, man or superman, had sought to realize himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning part of himself on the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world and even by the vegetable world.—"Creative Evolution", pp. 248, 266.

According to this view, the world is gradually coming to life, acquiring a consciousness. Matter is an Undine in search of a soul. A Rodin statue with human forms emerging from the unhewn stone is Bergson's philosophy in marble. We see again Milton's "tawny lion pawing to get free his hinder parts." We hear again Faust's translation of the Logos: "In the beginning was the Act."

But I must refrain from imposing such analogies upon an author who has taken pains to clothe his thought in fresh language in order to be free from the connotations of the old. Let Bergson summarize his theory of evolution in his own words:

Life as a whole, from the initial impulsion that thrust it into the world, will appear as a wave that rises, and which is opposed by the descending movement of matter. On the greater part of its surface, at different heights, the current is converted by matter into a vortex. At one point alone it passes freely, dragging with it the obstacle which will weigh on its progress but will not stop it. At this point is humanity; it is our privileged situation. On the other hand, this rising wave is consciousness, and, like all consciousness, it includes potentialities without number which interpenetrate and to which consequently neither the category of unity nor that of multiplicity is appropriate, made as they both are for inert matter. The matter that it bears along with it, and in the interstices of which it inserts itself, alone can divide it into distinct individualities. On flows the current, running through human generations, subdividing itself into individuals. This subdivision was vaguely indicated in it, but could not have been made clear without matter. Thus souls are continually being created, which, nevertheless, in a certain sense pre-existed. They are nothing else than the little rills into which the great river of life divides itself, flowing through the body of humanity. The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course. Consciousness is distinct from the organism it animates, although it must undergo its vicissitudes. As the possible actions which a state of consciousness indicates are at every instant beginning to be carried out in the nervous centers, the brain underlines at every instant the motor indications of the state of consciousness; but the interdependency of consciousness and brain is limited to this; the destiny of consciousness is not bound up on that account with the destiny of cerebral matter. Finally, consciousness is essentially free; it is freedom itself; but it cannot pass through matter without settling on it, without adapting itself to it; this adaptation is what we call intellectuality; and the intellect, turning itself back toward active, that is to say, free, consciousness, naturally makes it enter into the conceptual forms into which it is accustomed to see matter fit. It will, therefore, always perceive freedom in the form of necessity; it will always neglect the part of novelty or of creation inherent in free act; it will always substitute for action itself an imitation, artificial, approximate, obtained by compounding the old with the old and the same with the same. Thus, to the eyes of a philosophy that attempts to reabsorb intellect in intuition, many difficulties vanish or become light. But such a doctrine does not only facilitate speculation, it gives us also more power to act and to live. For, with it, we feel ourselves no longer isolated in humanity, humanity no longer seems isolated in the nature that it dominates. As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent which, is materiality itself, so all organized beings, from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.—"Creative Evolution", p. 269.

HOW TO READ BERGSON

Read the last first. Begin with "Creative Evolution", for this is the most comprehensive exposition of his philosophy and is written in a less technical style than his earlier works. But the reader must remember that a knowledge of these is presupposed, and Bergson has here taken for granted what he has written two other large volumes to prove; namely, that time cannot be adequately represented in the forms of space, and that mind is not rigidly bound to matter. Bergson is unexcelled by any modern philosopher except William James in brilliancy of style and originality of illustration. "Creative Evolution" treats of such a variety of questions, biological, psychological, and metaphysical, that any intelligent reader will find something in it that will arouse new trains of thought. And if the intelligent reader finds passages which he cannot understand, he may console himself with the reflection that there are others who have been likewise baffled. Count Keyserling, who has the brain of a German metaphysician, says of Bergson that "his philosophy is perhaps the most original achievement since the days of Immanuel Kant", but he adds, "Many thoughts on which Bergson appears to lay great weight arouse in me not the shade of an idea." But he ascribes Bergson's obscurity to the fact that "he does not start from abstract principles; he begins in direct consciousness, in concrete life", so perhaps the ordinary reader may have in this respect an advantage over a Kantian student like Count Keyserling.

The student of philosophy may prefer to trace the development of Bergson's thought in its logical and chronological order. He will in that case begin with the "Essai sur les donnés immédiates de la conscience" (1889), and proceed to "Matière et Mémoire" (1896), and end with "Evolution créatrice" (1907). These are published by Félix Alcan, Paris, in his "Bibliothèque de Philosophie contemporaine." The "Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness" appears under the less cumbrous title of "Time and Free Will" in the translation of F. L. Pogson (Macmillan). "Matter and Memory" is translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Macmillan). It may not be improper to note that the British edition of the Essay costs nearly four times as much as the French and is twice as heavy. "Creative Evolution", translated by Arthur Mitchell, is printed in this country by Henry Holt & Company. Bergson's lecture on Dreams, translated by E. E. Slosson, is published in book form by B. W. Huebsch, New York.

Those who read French but do not wish to attack one of the larger works will find convenient the summary of his philosophy with illustrative selections made by one of his former pupils, René Gillouin, and published in "Les Grands Philosophes" by Louis Michaud, Paris. The German reader will find in A. Steenbergen's "Bergsons Intuitive Philosophie", Jena, an epitome and critique.

"Time and Free Will" contains an admirable bibliography, including the most important discussions of Bergson's philosophy that have appeared in eight languages up to 1911. The most interesting introduction to Bergson is the article published by Professor James in the Hibbert Journal, April, 1909, and reprinted in his Pluralistic Universe. This has the advantage of M. Bergson's indorsement, for when Professor Pitkin of Columbia attempted to show that James was wrong in claiming Bergson as an ally ("James and Bergson, or Who is Against Intellect?" in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method, April 28, 1910), Bergson replied that James had not misinterpreted him but had said what he meant in better words than his (same Journal, July 7, 1910). Other brief expositions of Bergson's philosophy are the articles by H. Wildon Carr in Proc. Aristotelian Society, 1909 and 1910, and Hibbert Journal, July, 1910; by J. Solomon in Mind, January, 1911 (both these now in book form also); by Arthur Balfour on "Creative Evolution and Philosophic Doubt" in the decennial number of the Hibbert Journal; "Bergson's Philosophy and the Idea of God," by H. C. Corrance, and "Syndicalism in its Relation to Bergson," by T. Rhondda Williams, both in Hibbert Journal of January, 1914. Professor Arthur O. Lovejoy of Johns Hopkins criticizes "The Practical Tendencies of Bergsonianism" in the International Journal of Ethics, April and July, 1913. Bergson's London lectures on the soul are summarized in the Educational Review, January, 1912. Santayana's "Winds of Doctrine" (Scribner) contains an interesting chapter on Bergson's philosophy.

Of the voluminous controversial literature in France it is only possible to mention a few recent titles: R. Gillouin, "La Philosophie de Bergson" (Grasset); J. Segond, "L'Intuition Bergsonienne" (Alcan); J. Desaymard, "La Pensée d'Henri Bergson" (Mercure de France). The most conspicuous of the opponents of Bergson are: René Berthelot in "Un Romanticisme utilitaire," tome II, "Le Pragmatisme chez Bergson" (Alcan); and Julien Benda in "Le Bergsonisme ou une Philosophie de la Mobilité", and "Réponse aux Défenseurs du Bergsonisme" (Mercure de France).

"Bergson for Beginners", by Darcy B. Kitchin (Macmillan) gives a summary of his works and adds some interesting observations on the relation of Bergson to the English philosophers James Ward and Herbert Spencer. Other recent expositions and criticisms are "The Philosophy of Bergson", by A. D. Lindsay; "A Critical Examination of Bergson's Philosophy", by J. McKellar Stewart; "An Examination of Professor Bergson's Philosophy", by David Balsillie; "Bergson and the Modern Spirit", by G. R. Dodgson (American Unitarian Assoc., Boston). But the best volume to serve as an introduction to Bergson is that previously mentioned, "The New Philosophy of Henri Bergson", by Edouard Le Roy (Holt).

A list of the most important of the books and articles on the subject in all languages up to 1913 comprising more than five hundred titles was published by the Columbia University Press on the occasion of Bergson's visit, "A Contribution to a Bibliography of Henri Bergson."

[1] Reported in the Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, 1908.

[2] For his views on the possibility of scientific metaphysics, see Le Parallélisme psycho-physique et la métaphysique positive in Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, June, 1901; and Introduction à la métaphysique in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, January, 1903.

[3] Published in the Revue scientifique, June 8, 1901, and in English in The Independent, October 23-30, 1913, and in book form, 1914.

[4] Articles on pragmatic Catholicism may be found in almost any volume of the Revue Philosophique and the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale during the first twelve years of the twentieth century. See especially those by Edouard Le Roy, a disciple of James and Bergson. A brief account of the movement is contained in Lalande's "Philosophy in France, 1907", Philosophical Review, May, 1908.

[5] As representatives of the pragmatic syndicalists may be mentioned George Sorel and Edouard Berth. For an account of the philosophical side of the movement, see Syndicalistes et Bergsoniens by C. Bougie in Revuedu Mois, April, 1909.

[CHAPTER III]

HENRI POINCARÉ

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Of course I do not here speak of that beauty that strikes the senses, the beauty of qualities and of appearances; not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science; I mean that profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp. This it is which gives body, a structure so to speak, to the iridescent appearances which flatter our senses, and without this support the beauty of these fugitive dreams would be only imperfect, because it would be vague and always fleeting. On the contrary, intellectual beauty is sufficient unto itself, and it is for its sake, more perhaps than for the future good of humanity, that the scientist devotes himself to long and difficult labors.

It is, therefore, the quest of this special beauty, the sense of the harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony, just as an artist chooses from among the features of his model those which perfect the picture and give it character and life. And we need not fear that this instinctive and unavowed prepossession will turn the scientist aside from the search for the true. One may dream a harmonious world, but how far the real world will leave it behind! The greatest artists that ever lived, the Greeks, made their heavens; how shabby it is beside the true heavens, ours!—Poincaré's "The Value of Science," p. 8.

Such language as this is extremely disconcerting to those who hold the popular notion of science and scientists; regarding science as a vague impending mass of solid fact, immutable, inexorable, threatening the extinction of all such things as art, sentiment, poetry, and religion, only to be diverted by a determination to remain ignorant of it; regarding men of science as mere calculating machines, mechanically grinding out logical grist for utilitarian purposes. Mathematical astronomy is surely one of the sciences, the most rigid, remote, and recondite of the sciences. Yet here is the leading mathematical astronomer of the age talking about it as though it were one of the fine arts, a thing of beauty that the artist creates for his own delight in the making of it and shapes in accordance with his own ideas of what is harmonious.

Now we cannot throw out of consideration M. Poincaré's opinion, on the ground that he did not know what he was talking about. A man who has made as much science as he has ought to know how science is made, and what for. To most of us nature—or to avoid hurting our own feelings let us rather say, opportunity—has denied the privilege of knowing this by experience. Consequently M. Poincaré is an especially interesting man to study, for he has been willing to tell us not only what a man of science is, but also how it feels to be one. No other contemporary of equal eminence has been so frank and accommodating in the self-revelation of his methods or so willing to submit himself as a subject of observation. We are admitted to the laboratory of a mathematician, and we can watch the mechanism of scientific thought in action.

So far as he is concerned, he has repudiated the idea that science is purely utilitarian in the most emphatic language. August Comte said that it would be idle to seek to know the composition of the sun, since this knowledge would be of no use to sociology. Against such a charge of uselessness Poincaré eloquently defended his science by showing the practical value of astronomy even from Comte's point of view, but in conclusion asserted his own opinion very plainly:

Was I wrong in saying that it is astronomy which has made us a soul capable of comprehending nature; that under heavens always overcast and starless, the earth itself would have been for us eternally unintelligible; that we should there have seen only caprice and disorder; and that, not knowing the world, we should never have been able to subdue it? What science could have been more useful? And in thus speaking I put myself at the point of view of those who only value practical applications. Certainly, this point of view is not mine; as for me, on the contrary, if I admire the conquests of industry, it is, above all, because they free us from material cares, they will one day give to all the leisure to contemplate nature. I do not say: Science is useful, because it teaches us to construct machines. I say: Machines are useful, because in working for us, they will some day leave us more time to make science. But finally it is worth remarking that between the two points of view there is no antagonism, and that man having pursued a disinterested aim, all else has been added unto him.—"Value of Science", p. 88.

It is this insistence upon the æsthetic value of science that caused him to shrink from being called a "pragmatist", although those who accept that name have always laid unusual stress upon the æsthetic factor in thinking. But in his theory of knowledge Poincaré is decidedly pragmatic, and no one has given a clear exposition or stronger expression to the practical mode of thought by which the natural sciences have made their progress and which is now being extended to the fields of metaphysics, religion, ethics, and sociology. Poincaré's favorite word is "convenient" (commode). Theories are strictly speaking not to be classed as true or false. They are merely more or less convenient. For example:

Masses are coefficients it is convenient to introduce into calculations. We could reconstruct all mechanics by attributing different values to all the masses. This new mechanics would not be in contradiction either with experience or with the general principles of dynamics. Only the equations of this new mechanics would be less simple.—"Science and Hypothesis", p. 76.

We have not a direct intuition of simultaneity, nor of the equality of two durations. If we think we have this intuition, this is an illusion. We replace it by the aid of certain rules which we apply almost always without taking count of them. But what is the nature of these rules? No general rule, no rigorous rule; a multitude of little rules applicable to each particular case. These rules are not imposed upon us, and we might amuse ourselves by inventing others; but they could not be cast aside without greatly complicating the laws of physics, mathematics, and astronomy. We therefore choose these rules, not because they are true, but because they are most convenient, and we may recapitulate them as follows: "The simultaneity of two events or the order of their succession, the equality of two durations, are to be so defined that the enunciation of the natural laws may be as simple as possible; in other words, all these rules, all these definitions, are only the fruit of an unconscious opportunism."—"Value of Science", p. 35.

Time should be so defined that the equations of mechanics may be as simple as possible. In other words, there is not one way of measuring time more true than another. That which is generally adopted is only more convenient. Of two watches, we have no right to say that one goes true, the other wrong: we can only say that it is advantageous to conform to the indications of the first.—"Value of Science", p. 30.

Behold then the rule we follow and the only one we can follow: when a phenomenon appears to us as the cause of another, we regard it as anterior. It is therefore by cause we define time.—"Value of Science", p. 32.

Experience does not prove to us that space has three dimensions. It only proves to us that it is convenient to attribute three dimensions to it.—"Value of Science", p. 69.

It has often been observed that if all the bodies in the universe were dilated simultaneously and in the same proportion we should have no means of perceiving it, since all our measuring instruments would grow at the same time as the objects themselves which they serve to measure. The world, after this dilatation, would continue on its course without anything apprising us of so considerable an event. —"Value of Science", p. 39.

But Poincaré goes farther and shows not only that two such worlds of different sizes would be absolutely indistinguishable, but that they would be equally indistinguishable if they were distorted in any manner so long as they corresponded with each other point by point. This conception of the relativity of space may be thought a little hard to grasp, but M. Poincaré is kind enough to suggest a way by which any one may see it for himself if he has ten cents to admit him to one of those hilarious resorts where life-size concave and convex mirrors are to be seen.[1] You may think yourself a gentleman of proper figure, that is to say, somewhat portly, and you look upon the tall slim shape that confronts you in the cylindrical mirror as absurdly misshapen. But you would find it difficult to convince him of his deformity. His legs, as well as yours, fulfill the requirement that Lincoln laid down as their proper length; that is, they reach from the body to the ground. If you touch your chin with your thumb and your brow with your forefinger, so does he. It occurs to you that here is a case where your knowledge of geometry would, if ever, prove useful, but when you appeal to it, you will find that the geometry of his queer-looking world is just as good as yours; in fact, is just the same. You get a foot rule and measure yourself; 70 inches high, 14 inches in diameter at the equator, ratio 5:2. But meanwhile the mirror man is also measuring himself, and his dimensions come out exactly the same as yours, 70 and 14 and 5:2, for when he holds the rule perpendicular it lengthens and when horizontal it shrinks. Lines that in your world are straight are curved in his, but you cannot prove it to him, for when he lays his straightedge against these curves of his, behold it immediately bends to correspond. By this time, finding it so difficult to prove to the mirror man that you are right and he is wrong, it occurs to you that perhaps he isn't, that he may have just as much reason as you for believing that his is the normal, well-proportioned world, and yours the distorted image of it. Since, then, you have no way of perceiving the absolute length, direction, or curvature of a line, your space may be as irregularly curved and twisted as it looks to be in the funniest of the mirrors, and you would not know it. Now the principle of the pragmatist is that anything that does not make any difference to anything else is not real. The reason why we have not been able to discover any differences between the mirror space and our space, each considered by itself, is because there is none. Or to return to the language of Poincaré, "space is in reality amorphous and the things that are in it alone give it a form." Why do we say that space has three dimensions instead of two or four or more? Why do we stick to an old fogy like Euclid when Riemann and Lobachevski proffer us new and equally self-consistent systems of geometry wherein parallels may meet or part? Because:

by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

Such language may pass without notice in university halls, for all scientists are more or less clearly conscious of the provisional and practical nature of the hypotheses and conventions they employ. But to the outside world it sounds startling. To some it seemed that the foundations of the universe were being undermined. Others saw in it a confession of what Brunetière had called "the bankruptcy of science" and openly rejoiced over the discomfiture of the enemy of the Church. Now Poincaré had chanced to use in discussing the relativity of motion the following illustration:

Absolute space, that is to say, the mark to which it would be necessary to refer the earth to know whether it really moves, has no objective existence. Hence this affirmation "the earth turns round" has no meaning, since it can be verified by no experiment; since such an experiment not only could not be either realized or dreamed by the boldest Jules Verne but cannot be conceived of without contradiction. Or rather these two propositions: "The earth turns round" and "it is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round" have the same meaning; there is nothing more in the one than in the other.—"Science and Hypothesis", p. 85.

This remark was at once seized upon by the Catholic apologists, and the Galileo case, once closed by the voice of Rome, was reopened for the admission of this new evidence. If the Ptolemaic and the Copernican theories are equally true, and the choice between them is merely a matter of expediency, was not the Holy Inquisition justified in upholding the established theory in the interests of religion and morality? Monsignor Bolo, an eminent and sagacious theologian, announced in Le Matin of February 20, 1908, that M. Poincaré, the greatest mathematician of the century, says that Galileo was wrong in his obstinacy. To this Poincaré replied in the whispered words of Galileo:

"E pur si muove, Monseigneur"?

In a later discussion of the point, he explains that what he said about the rotation of the earth could be equally well applied to any other accepted hypothesis, even the very existence of an external world, for "these two propositions, 'the external world exists' or 'it is more convenient to suppose that it exists' have one and the same meaning." The Copernican theory is the preferable because it has a richer, more profound content, since if we assume the earth is stationary we have to invent other explanations for the flattening at the poles, the rotation of Foucault's pendulum, the trade winds, etc., while the hypothesis of a revolving earth brings all these together as the effects of a single cause.

M. Le Roy, a Catholic pragmatist and a disciple of Bergson's, goes much further than Poincaré in regard to the human element in science, holding that science is merely a rule of action and can teach us nothing of truth, for its laws are only artificial conventions. This view Poincaré considered to be dangerously near to absolute nominalism and skepticism, and in his controversy with Le Roy[2] he showed that the scientist does not "create facts as Le Roy said, but merely the language in which he enunciates them." Of the contingence upon which Le Roy and Boutroux insist, Poincaré would admit only that scientific laws can never be more than approximate and probable. Even in astronomy, where the single and simple law of gravitation is involved, neither absolute certainty nor absolute accuracy can be attained. Therefore we cannot safely say that at a particular time Saturn will be at a certain point in the heavens. We must limit ourselves to the prediction that "Saturn will probably be near" such a point.

In an address before the International Philosophical Congress at Bologna in April, 1910, Professor Poincaré discussed again the question of whether the laws of nature may not change. He admitted that there is not a sole law that we can enunciate with the certainty that it has always been true in the past. Nevertheless, he concluded, there is nothing to hinder the man of science from keeping his faith in the principle of immutability, since no law can descend to the level of a secondary and limited law without being replaced by another law more general and more comprehensive. He considered in particular the possibility that in the remote past the fundamental laws of mechanics would not hold, for since the energy of the world has been continually dissipating in the form of heat there must have been a time when bodies moved faster than they do now. But according to the recent theories of matter, no body can travel faster than light, and with velocities approaching that of light its mass is no longer constant but increases with its velocity. This, of course, would play havoc with all of Newton's laws, which then we should have to regard as limited in their scope to such ordinary conditions and moderate motion as we see about us now.

But even at present we can hardly regard them with the same implicit confidence as formerly. Take, for example, Newton's law that action and reaction are equal and opposite. When a ball is fired from a cannon, the cannon recoils at the same time and with the same momentum that the ball goes forward. But suppose instead of a cannon we have a lamp with a reflector sending a beam of light into space. It has been deduced mathematically and proved experimentally that light exerts a minute but measurable pressure on an object which it strikes. The reflector therefore recoils like the cannon, but where is the ball if light is an immaterial wave motion? To be sure, if the ray of light strikes some planet out in space, it would give it an impulse equal and opposite to that originally imparted to the reflector on our earth. But what if the light goes on through vacant space and never hits anything at all? A law that may have to wait several thousand years for its validation and may even fail of it altogether is not what the layman has in mind when he thinks of immutable and infrangible laws governing the universe.

But it is rather important just now that the layman gets to understand what the scientist means when he talks of laws, theories, and hypotheses. For we are in the midst of a stupendous revolution in science. Our nicely arranged nineteenth century cosmos seems to be dissolving into chaos again. We have seen the elements melt with fervent heat and we can no longer rely upon the uniformity of atomic weights. The laws of the conservation of matter and energy, which were the guiding stars of research to the last generation, are becoming dimmed. The old-fashioned ether, in its time a useful but never entirely satisfactory contrivance, for it had to be patched up repeatedly with divers new properties to enable it to bear the various duties thrust upon it, seems no longer competent to stand the strain and may have to be sent to the scientific scrap-heap at any moment. We hear physicists of supposed sanity assert that all bodies contract in the direction of their motion and that their weight varies with their speed and the direction in which they are going. We read of "atoms of light," and of corpuscles of electricity which, though they are but a thousandth part of the hydrogen atom, are caught and counted and weighed one by one.

Now what puzzles the lay mind is the calmness with which the scientists survey this crash of worlds and shock of systems. They do not have the mien of exposed impostors. They are not, like the augurs of decadent Rome, unable to meet without laughing in each other's faces. They do not resent the overthrow of their former idols. They have no fear of heretics, consequently no hatred for them. They regard all this iconoclasm with a mild curiosity quite in contrast to their intense and personal interest in science generally. It is hard to get out a quorum at the Association for the Advancement of Science to hear a discussion of the principle of relativity with all its revolutionary consequences.

Compare this apparent indifference to the fate of fundamental principles in scientific circles with what would happen in a Presbyterian assembly if it should be proposed to eliminate predestination from the Westminster Confession or in an Episcopal convocation if the Virgin Birth were denied; with what would happen in a stockholders' meeting if doubt were expressed as to the rights of capital, or in a socialist convention if the class conflict were questioned. Now the existence of the ether has the same importance to scientific thought that predestination has to theological or capitalism to economic thought. Its refutation or modification would be quite as upsetting to faith and practice. Yet scientists are men; they have red blood in their veins, and it not infrequently shows in their cheeks when they debate something that seems to them worth while. Pure theory rarely seems to them worth while because it is recognized as pure conventionality and convenience.

The scientific man, especially the scientific investigator, holds his theories with a light hand, but keeps a firm grip on his facts. This is just the opposite of the lay attitude toward science. If the layman is interested in knowing the speed of light, it is because he thinks that he learns from it that all space is filled with a rigid elastic solid, at which he cannot but wonder. The scientist is interested in the ether because it helps him in his calculation of the speed of light.

A lecturer on wireless telegraphy will use in the course of the hour two or three more or less contradictory conceptions of electricity. If afterward you call his attention to the inconsistency and ask him which is right and which is wrong, you will not get a very satisfactory answer. He does not know and obviously does not care. You insist upon his telling you which theory he personally believes in. He really had not thought of "believing" in any of them. If he uses white chalk on the blackboard in preference to red, it is not because he denies the existence of red chalk and its occasional usefulness. So, too, the astronomer will speak of the sun's rising and in the next breath of the earth's turning toward the sun, quite innocent of his inconsistency. The botanist alludes to a certain flower as a poppy and again as Eschscholtzia. He means the same thing but is using different languages; in the first case English, in the second case I don't know what.

It is eminently desirable that people should have faith in science, but in order to do that they must have the same sort of faith in it that the scientist has. Otherwise they will regard it as a lot of ingenious fancies which are proved false by each succeeding generation. Science is moulting just now and looks queer. The public ought to understand clearly that the process means growth and not disease. There is another reason now for the popularization of the scientific mode of thought. It is beginning to be applied where entirely different conceptions have so far prevailed—to art, ethics, religion, sociology, and the like. This is already arousing a great commotion and will cause more before the process is complete. It will, for example, involve the rewriting and to a large extent the reinvestigation of history. Poincaré has hinted at this in a passage which seems to me of very great significance:

Carlyle has somewhere said something like this: "Nothing but facts are of importance. John Lackland passed by here. Here is something that is admirable. Here is a reality for which I would give all the theories in the world." Carlyle was a fellow countryman of Bacon, but Bacon would not have said that. That is the language of the historian. The physicist would say rather: "John Lackland passed by here. That makes no difference to me for he never will pass this way again."—"Science and Hypothesis", p. 102.

The aim of science is prevision, and I believe that this will eventually be recognized as the true aim of all knowledge. The historian, or let me say rather the antiquarian, for the historian may have the scientific temperament, values facts for their rarity. The scientist values facts for their commonness. A unique fact, if there be such, would have no possible interest to him. The antiquarian goes about looking for things, facts, or furniture, which have been of importance in the past. The scientist is looking only for things that will be of importance in the future.

According to Poincaré, the proper choice of facts is the first duty of the scientist. He must be able to pick out the significant and reject all the rest. "Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless combinations and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority. To invent is to discern, to choose." It is most desirable to bring together elements far distant from one another. Such unions are mostly sterile, but when this is not the case, they are the most fruitful of all. The successful scientist does not, like a shopper, look over one by one all available samples and pick out what he wants. Life is too short. The unsuitable ideas do not even present themselves to his mind. It is as if he were an examiner of second resort who only concerns himself with the candidates who have passed the first test. This preliminary sifting and sorting process is done largely by the unconscious mind, as Poincaré shows by telling how he came to make his first mathematical discoveries:

For a fortnight I labored to demonstrate that there could exist no function analogous to those that I have since called the fuchsian functions.[3] I was then very ignorant. Every day I seated myself at my work table and spent an hour or two there, trying a great many combinations, but I arrived at no result. One night when, contrary to my custom, I had taken black coffee and I could not sleep, ideas surged up in crowds. I felt them as they struck against one another until two of them stuck together, so to speak, to form a stable combination. By morning I had established the existence of a class of fuchsian functions, those which are derived from the hyper-geometric series. I had merely to put the results in shape, which only took a few hours.—"Science et Méthode", p. 52.

After working out the deductions from this discovery, he went on a geological excursion of the School of Mines. The distractions of travel took his mind from his mathematical labor. But at Constance, just as he was stepping into an omnibus for some excursion, the idea occurred to him, without any connection with his previous thoughts, that his fuchsian functions were identical in their transformations with those of the non-Euclidian geometry. He took his seat in the omnibus and continued his conversation, feeling absolutely certain of his discovery, which he worked out at his leisure on his return to his home at Caen.

He next devoted himself to the study of arithmetical questions, without reaching any results of importance and without suspecting that this subject could have the slightest connection with his earlier researches. Disgusted at his lack of success, he went to pass some days at the seashore, where he was occupied with other things. One day as he was walking on the cliff, the thought came to him, brief, sudden, and certain as usual, that he had been employing the same transformations in his arithmetical and geometrical work.

He thereupon went back to Caen and undertook the systematic application of his theory. But he was stopped by an insurmountable obstacle, and while in this perplexity he was called away to his military service at Mont-Valérien, where he had no time for mathematics. One day while walking on the street, the solution of the difficulty appeared to him in a flash. He did not try to think it out at the time, but after his release from the army, he completed his memoir without trouble.

These fascinating glimpses into the soul of a mathematician will remind the reader of many other instances of such subconscious assistance on record and doubtless of personal experiences as well. We think of Alfred Russel Wallace at Ternate, his brain inflamed with tropical fever, seized with the sudden inspiration of the theory of natural selection, the key to the biological problems which had perplexed him for so many months. How fortunate that his clerical opponents did not know of this and so could not dismiss evolution as the dream of a diseased imagination. But as James says in his "Varieties of Religious Experience", we have no right to discountenance unwelcome theories as feverish fancies, since for all we know 102° may be a more favorable temperature for truth to germinate and sprout in than the ordinary bloodheat of 98°.