an internal world, of a spiritual activity
distinct from matter and its mechanism. No chemistry of the brain, no
dance of atoms, is equivalent to the least thought, or indeed to the
least sensation.

Some, it is true, have brought forward a thesis of parallelism,
according to which each mental phenomenon corresponds point by point
to a phenomenon in the brain, without adding anything to it, without
influencing its course, merely translating it into another tongue,
so that a glance sufficiently penetrating to follow the molecular
revolutions and the fluxes of nervous production in their least
episodes would immediately read the inmost secrets of the associated
consciousness.

But no one will deny that a thesis of this kind is only in reality a
hypothesis, that it goes enormously beyond the certain data of current
biology, and that it can only be formulated by anticipating future
discoveries in a preconceived direction. Let us be candid: it is not
really a thesis of positive science, but a metaphysical thesis in the
unpleasant meaning of the term. Taking it at its best, its worth today
could only be one of intelligibleness. And intelligible it is not.

How are we to understand a consciousness destitute of activity and
consequently without connection with reality, a kind of phosphorescence
which emphasises the lines of vibration in the brain, and renders in
miraculous duplicate, by its mysterious and useless light, certain
phenomena already complete without it?

One day Mr Bergson came down into the arena of dialectic, and,
talking to his opponents in their own language, pulled their
"psycho-physiological paralogism" to pieces before their eyes; it
is only by confounding in one and the same argument two systems of
incompatible notations, idealism and realism, that we succeed in
enunciating the parallelist thesis. This reasoning went home, all
the more as it was adapted to the usual form of discussions between
philosophers. But a more positive and more categorical proof is to
be found all through "Matter and Memory". From the precise example of
recollection analysed to its lowest depths, Mr Bergson completely grasps
and measures the divergence between soul and body, between mind and
matter. Then, putting into practice what he said elsewhere about the
creation of new concepts, he arrives at the conclusion--these are his
own expressions--that between the psychological fact and its counterpart
in the brain there must be