tones in which insertion into reality is effected.
If by rationalism we mean the attitude which consists in cabining
ourselves within the zone of geometrical light in which language
evolves, we must admit that rationalism supposes something other than
itself, that it hangs suspended by a generating act which escapes it.

The method therefore which we seek to employ everywhere today is
experience; but complete experience, anxious to neglect no aspect of
being nor any resource of mind; shaded experience, not extending on the
surface only, in a homogeneous and uniform manner; on the contrary,
an experience distributed in depth over multiple planes, adopting a
thousand different forms to adapt itself to the different kinds of
problems; in short, a creative and informing experience, a veritable
genesis, a genuine action of thought, a work and movement of life by
which the guiding principles, forms of intelligibility, and criteria of
verification obtain birth and stability in habits. And here again it
is by borrowing Mr Bergson's own formula from him that we shall most
accurately describe the new spirit.

That the attitude and fundamental procedure of this new spirit are in
no way a return to scepticism or a reaction against thought cannot
be better demonstrated than by this resurrection of metaphysics, this
renaissance of idealism, which is certainly one of the most distinctive
features of our epoch. Undoubtedly philosophy in France has never known
so prosperous and so pregnant a moment. Notwithstanding, it is not
a return to the old dreams of dialectic construction. Everything is
regarded from the point of view of life, and there is a tendency more
and more to recognise the primacy of spiritual activity. But we wish to
understand and employ this activity and this life in all its wealth,
in all its degrees, and by all its functions: we wish to think with the
whole of thought, and go to the truth with the whole of our soul; and
the reason of which we recognise the sovereign weight is reason laden
with its complete past history.

And what is that, really, but realism? By realism I mean the gift of
ourselves to reality, the work of concrete realisation, the effort to
convert every idea into action, to regulate the idea by the action as
much as the action by the idea, to live what we think and think what we
live. But that is positivism, you will say; certainly it is positivism.
But how changed! Far from considering as positiv