out any need to
begin from a new intuition; that his view precludes all considerations
of strictly spiritual life, of inner and profound action, regarding
things in relation to God and in an eternal perspective: such a view
would be illegitimate and unreasonable, first of all, because Mr Bergson
has said nothing of the kind, and secondly, because it is contrary to
all his tendencies.

After the "Essay on the Immediate Data" critics proceeded to confine
him in an irreducible static dualism; after "Matter and Memory" they
condemned him as failing for ever to explain the juxtaposition of the
two points of view, utility and truth: why should we require that after
"Creative Evolution" he should be forbidden to think anything new, or
distinguish, for example, different orders of life?

The problems must be approached one after the other, and, in the
solution of each of them, it is proper to introduce only the necessary
elements. But each result is only "temporarily final." Let us lose the
strange habit of asking an author continually to do something other
than he has done, or, in what he has done, to give us the whole of his
thought.

Till now, Mr Bergson has always considered each new problem according
to its specific and original nature, and, to solve it, he has always
supplied a new effort of autonomous adaptation: why should it be
otherwise for the future? I seek vainly for the decree forbidding him
the right to study the problem of biological evolution in itself,
and for the necessity which compels him to abide now by the premisses
contained in his past work. (For Mr Bergson, the religious sentiment,
as the sentiment of obligation, contains a basis of "immediate datum"
rendering it indissoluble and irreducible.)

The only point which we have to examine is this: will the moral and
religious question compel Mr Bergson to break with the conclusions of
his previous studies, and can we not, on the contrary, foresee points of
general agreement?

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 for ever
only one order of life, only one plane of action, only one rhythm of
dura