ur. This makes the charm of avowed writers of fable;
their playful travesty and dislocation of things human, which would be
puerile if they meant to be naturalists, render them piquant
moralists; for they are not really interpreting animals, but under the
mask of animals maliciously painting men. Such fables are morally
interesting and plausible just because they are psychologically false.
If AEsop could have reported what lions and lambs, ants and donkeys,
really feel and think, his poems would have been perfect riddles to
the public; and they would have had no human value except that of
illustrating, to the truly speculative philosopher, the irresponsible
variety of animal consciousness and its incommensurable types. Now M.
Bergson's psychological fictions, being drawn from what is rudimentary
in man, have a better chance of being literally true beyond man.
Indeed what he asks us to do, and wishes to do himself, is simply to
absorb so completely the aspect and habit of things that the soul of
them may take possession of us: that we may know by intuition the
_elan vital_ which the world expresses, just as Paolo, in Dante, knew
by intuition the _elan vital_ that the smile of Francesca expressed.

The correctness of such an intuition, however, rests on a circumstance
which M. Bergson does not notice, because his psychology is literary
and not scientific. It rests on the possibility of imitation. When the
organism observed and that of the observer have a similar structure
and can imitate one another, the idea produced in the observer by
intent contemplation is like the experience present to the person
contemplated. But where this contagion of attitude, and therefore of
feeling, is impossible, our intuition of our neighbours' souls remains
subjective and has no value as a revelation. Psychological novelists,
when they describe people such as they themselves are or might have
been, may describe them truly; but beyond that limit their personages
are merely plausible, that is, such as might be conceived by an
equally ignorant reader in the presence of the same external
indications. So, for instance, the judgment which a superficial
traveller passes on foreign manners or religions is plausible to him
and to his compatriots just because it represents the feeling that
such manifestations awaken in strangers and does not attempt to convey
the very different feeling really involved for the natives; had the
latter been discovered a