Studied and insinuating as M. Bergson is in his style, he is no less elaborate in his learning.  In the history of philosophy, in mathematics and physics, and especially in natural history he has taken great pains to survey the ground and to assimilate the views and spirit of the most recent scholars.  He might be called outright an expert in all these subjects, were it not for a certain externality and want of radical sympathy in his way of conceiving them.  A genuine historian of philosophy, for instance, would love to rehearse the views of great thinkers, would feel their eternal plausibility, and in interpreting them would think of himself as little as they ever thought of him.  But M. Bergson evidently regards Plato or Kant as persons who did or did not prepare the way for some Bergsonian insight.  The theory of evolution, taken enthusiastically, is apt to exercise an evil influence on the moral estimation of things.  First the evolutionist asserts that later things grow out of earlier, which is true of things in their causes and basis, but not in their values; as modern Greece proceeds out of ancient Greece materially but does not exactly crown it.  The evolutionist, however, proceeds to assume that later things are necessarily better than what they have grown out of:  and this is false altogether.  This fallacy reinforces very unfortunately that inevitable esteem which people have for their own opinions, and which must always vitiate the history of philosophy when it is a philosopher that writes it.  A false subordination comes to be established among systems, as if they moved in single file and all had the last, the author’s system, for their secret goal.  In Hegel, for instance, this conceit is conspicuous, in spite of his mastery in the dramatic presentation of points of view, for his way of reconstructing history was, on the surface, very sympathetic.  He too, like M. Bergson, proceeded from learning to intuition, and feigned at every turn to identify himself with what he was describing, especially if this was a philosophical attitude or temper.  Yet in reality his historical judgments were forced and brutal:  Greece was but a stepping-stone to Prussia, Plato and Spinoza found their higher synthesis in himself, and (though he may not say so frankly) Jesus Christ and St. Francis realised their better selves in Luther.  Actual spiritual life, the thoughts, affections, and pleasures of individuals, passed with Hegel for so much moonshine; the true spirit was “objective,” it was simply the movement of those circumstances in which actual spirit arose.  He was accordingly contemptuous of everything intrinsically good, and his idealism consisted in forcing the natural world into a formula of evolution and then worshipping it as the embodiment of the living God.  But under the guise of optimism and belief in a cosmic reason this is mere idolatry of success—­a malign superstition, by which all moral independence is crushed out and conscience enslaved to chronology; and it is no marvel if, somewhat to relieve this subjection, history in turn was expurgated, marshalled, and distorted, that it might pass muster for the work of the Holy Ghost.