But the degree of intelligence which this age possesses makes it so very uncomfortable that, in this instance, it asks for something less vital, and sighs for what evolution has left behind.  In the presence of such cruelly distinct things as astronomy or such cruelly confused things as theology it feels la nostalgie de la boue.  It was only, M. Bergson tells us, where dead matter oppressed life that life was forced to become intelligence; for this reason intelligence kills whatever it touches; it is the tribute that life pays to death.  Life would find it sweet to throw off that painful subjection to circumstance and bloom in some more congenial direction.  M. Bergson’s own philosophy is an effort to realise this revulsion, to disintegrate intelligence and stimulate sympathetic experience.  Its charm lies in the relief which it brings to a stale imagination, an imagination from which religion has vanished and which is kept stretched on the machinery of business and society, or on small half-borrowed passions which we clothe in a mean rhetoric and dot with vulgar pleasures.  Finding their intelligence enslaved, our contemporaries suppose that intelligence is essentially servile; instead of freeing it, they try to elude it.  Not free enough themselves morally, but bound to the world partly by piety and partly by industrialism, they cannot think of rising to a detached contemplation of earthly things, and of life itself and evolution; they revert rather to sensibility, and seek some by-path of instinct or dramatic sympathy in which to wander.  Having no stomach for the ultimate, they burrow downwards towards the primitive.  But the longing to be primitive is a disease of culture; it is archaism in morals.  To be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anaemia.  When life was really vigorous and young, in Homeric times for instance, no one seemed to fear that it might be squeezed out of existence either by the incubus of matter or by the petrifying blight of intelligence.  Life was like the light of day, something to use, or to waste, or to enjoy.  It was not a thing to worship; and often the chief luxury of living consisted in dealing death about vigorously.  Life indeed was loved, and the beauty and pathos of it were felt exquisitely; but its beauty and pathos lay in the divineness of its model and in its own fragility.  No one paid it the equivocal compliment of thinking it a substance or a material force.  Nobility was not then impossible in sentiment, because there were ideals in life higher and more indestructible than life itself, which life might illustrate and to which it might fitly be sacrificed.  Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honour is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.  In those days men recognised immortal gods and resigned themselves to being mortal.  Yet those were the truly vital and instinctive days of