system of M. Bergson has neither good sense, nor rigour, nor candour, nor solidity.  It is a brilliant attempt to confuse the lessons of experience by refining upon its texture, an attempt to make us halt, for the love of primitive illusions, in the path of discipline and reason.  It is likely to prove a successful attempt, because it flatters the weaknesses of the moment, expresses them with emotion, and covers them with a feint at scientific speculation.  It is not, however, a powerful system, like that of Hegel, capable of bewildering and obsessing many who have no natural love for shams.  M. Bergson will hardly bewilder; his style is too clear, the field where his just observations lie—­the immediate—­is too well defined, and the mythology which results from projecting the terms of the immediate into the absolute, and turning them into powers, is too obviously verbal.  He will not long impose on any save those who enjoy being imposed upon; but for a long time he may increase their number.  His doctrine is indeed alluring.  Instead of telling us, as a stern and contrite philosophy would, that the truth is remote, difficult, and almost undiscoverable by human efforts, that the universe is vast and unfathomable, yet that the knowledge of its ways is precious to our better selves, if we would not live befooled, this philosophy rather tells us that nothing is truer or more precious than our rudimentary consciousness, with its vague instincts and premonitions, that everything ideal is fictitious, and that the universe, at heart, is as palpitating and irrational as ourselves.  Why then strain the inquiry?  Why seek to dominate passion by understanding it?  Rather live on; work, it matters little at what, and grow, it matters nothing in what direction.  Exert your instinctive powers of vegetation and emotion; let your philosophy itself be a frank expression of this flux, the roar of the ocean in your little sea-shell, a momentary posture of your living soul, not a stark adoration of things reputed eternal.

So the intellectual faithlessness and the material servility of the age are flattered together and taught to justify themselves theoretically.  They cry joyfully, non peccavi, which is the modern formula for confession.  M. Bergson’s philosophy itself is a confession of a certain mystical rebellion and atavism in the contemporary mind.  It will remain a beautiful monument to the passing moment, a capital film for the cinematography of history, full of psychological truth and of a kind of restrained sentimental piety.  His thought has all the charm that can go without strength and all the competence that can go without mastery.  This is not an age of mastery; it is confused with too much business; it has no brave simplicity.  The mind has forgotten its proper function, which is to crown life by quickening it into intelligence, and thinks if it could only prove that it accelerated life, that might perhaps justify its existence; like a philosopher at sea who, to make himself useful, should blow into the sail.