can understand us--violently peculiar ways
of looking at things are no great rarity. The rarity is when great
peculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual
command of all the classic expository apparatus. Bergson's resources
in the way of erudition are remarkable, and in the way of expression
they are simply phenomenal. This is why in France, where _l'art de
bien dire_ counts for so much and is so sure of appreciation, he has
immediately taken so eminent a place in public esteem. Old-fashioned
professors, whom his ideas quite fail to satisfy, nevertheless speak
of his talent almost with bated breath, while the youngsters flock to
him as to a master.

If anything can make hard things easy to follow, it is a style like
Bergson's. A 'straightforward' style, an american reviewer lately
called it; failing to see that such straightforwardness means a
flexibility of verbal resource that follows the thought without a
crease or wrinkle, as elastic silk underclothing follows the movements
of one's body. The lucidity of Bergson's way of putting things is what
all readers are first struck by. It seduces you and bribes you in
advance to become his disciple. It is a miracle, and he a real
magician.

M. Bergson, if I am rightly informed, came into philosophy through the
gateway of mathematics. The old antinomies of the infinite were,
I imagine, the irritant that first woke his faculties from their
dogmatic slumber. You all remember Zeno's famous paradox, or sophism,
as many of our logic books still call it, of Achilles and the
tortoise. Give that reptile ever so small an advance and the swift
runner Achilles can never overtake him, much less get ahead of him;
for if space and time are infinitely divisible (as our intellects
tell us they must be), by the time Achilles reaches the tortoise's
starting-point, the tortoise has already got ahead of _that_
starting-point, and so on _ad infinitum_, the interval between the
pursuer and the pursued growing endlessly minuter, but never becoming
wholly obliterated. The common way of showing up the sophism here is
by pointing out the ambiguity of the expression 'never can overtake.'
What the word 'never' falsely suggests, it is said, is an infinite
duration of time; what it really means is the inexhaustible number of
the steps of which the overtaking must consist. But if these steps are
infinitely short, a finite time will suffice for them; and in point of
fact they do rapidl