o the end.

Place yourself similarly at the centre of a man's philosophic vision
and you understand at once all the different things it makes him write
or say. But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to build
the philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one and then
another and seeking to make them fit, and of course you fail. You
crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling
into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but
inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists. I hope
that some of the philosophers in this audience may occasionally have
had something different from this intellectualist type of criticism
applied to their own works!

What really _exists_ is not things made but things in the making. Once
made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual
decompositions can be used in defining them. But put yourself _in the
making_ by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and, the
whole range of possible decompositions coming at once into your
possession, you are no longer troubled with the question which of
them is the more absolutely true. Reality _falls_ in passing into
conceptual analysis; it _mounts_ in living its own undivided life--it
buds and bourgeons, changes and creates. Once adopt the movement of
this life in any given instance and you know what Bergson calls the
_devenir reel_ by which the thing evolves and grows. Philosophy should
seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality,
not follow science in vainly patching together fragments of its dead
results.

Thus much of M. Bergson's philosophy is sufficient for my purpose in
these lectures, so here I will stop, leaving unnoticed all its other
constituent features, original and interesting tho they be. You may
say, and doubtless some of you now are saying inwardly, that his
remanding us to sensation in this wise is only a regress, a return to
that ultra-crude empiricism which your own idealists since Green
have buried ten times over. I confess that it is indeed a return to
empiricism, but I think that the return in such accomplished shape
only proves the latter's immortal truth. What won't stay buried must
have some genuine life. _Am anfang war die tat_; fact is a _first_; to
which all our conceptual handling comes as an inadequate second,
never its full equivalent. When I read recent transcendentalist
literature--I must partly except my c