olleague Royce!--I get nothing
but a sort of marking of time, champing of jaws, pawing of the ground,
and resettling into the same attitude, like a weary horse in a stall
with an empty manger. It is but turning over the same few threadbare
categories, bringing the same objections, and urging the same answers
and solutions, with never a new fact or a new horizon coming into
sight. But open Bergson, and new horizons loom on every page you read.
It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds. It tells
of reality itself, instead of merely reiterating what dusty-minded
professors have written about what other previous professors have
thought. Nothing in Bergson is shop-worn or at second hand.

That he gives us no closed-in system will of course be fatal to him in
intellectualist eyes. He only evokes and invites; but he first annuls
the intellectualist veto, so that we now join step with reality with
a philosophical conscience never quite set free before. As a french
disciple of his well expresses it: 'Bergson claims of us first of all
a certain inner catastrophe, and not every one is capable of such a
logical revolution. But those who have once found themselves flexible
enough for the execution of such a psychological change of front,
discover somehow that they can never return again to their ancient
attitude of mind. They are now Bergsonians ... and possess the
principal thoughts of the master all at once. They have understood in
the fashion in which one loves, they have caught the whole melody and
can thereafter admire at their leisure the originality, the fecundity,
and the imaginative genius with which its author develops, transposes,
and varies in a thousand ways by the orchestration of his style and
dialectic, the original theme.'[2]

This, scant as it is, is all I have to say about Bergson on this
occasion--I hope it may send some of you to his original text. I must
now turn back to the point where I found it advisable to appeal to his
ideas. You remember my own intellectualist difficulties in the last
lecture, about how a lot of separate consciousnesses can at the same
time be one collective thing. How, I asked, can one and the same
identical content of experience, of which on idealist principles the
_esse_ is to be felt, be felt so diversely if itself be the only
feeler? The usual way of escape by 'quatenus' or 'as such' won't
help us here if we are radical intellectualists, I said, for
appearance-toge