ndency to vision._ If those
words express more than ignorance, they express the love of it. Even
if the vitalists were right in despairing of further scientific
discoveries, they would be wrong in offering their verbiage as a
substitute. Nature may possibly have only a very loose hazy
constitution, to be watched and understood as sailors watch and
understand the weather; but Neptune and AEolus are not thereby proved
to be the authors of storms. Yet M. Bergson thinks if life could only
be safely shown to arise unaccountably, that would prove the invisible
efficacy of a mighty tendency to life. But would the ultimate
contexture and miracle of things be made less arbitrary, and less a
matter of brute fact, by the presence behind them of an actual and
arbitrary effort that such should be their nature? If this word
"effort" is not a mere figure of rhetoric, a name for a movement in
things of which the end happens to interest us more than the
beginning, if it is meant to be an effort actually and consciously
existing, then we must proceed to ask: Why did this effort exist? Why
did it choose that particular end to strive for? How did it reach the
conception of that end, which had never been realised before, and
which no existent nature demanded for its fulfilment? How did the
effort, once made specific, select the particular matter it was to
transform? Why did this matter respond to the disembodied effort that
it should change its habits? Not one of these questions is easier to
answer than the question why nature is living or animals have eyes.
Yet without seeking to solve the only real problem, namely, how nature
is actually constituted, this introduction of metaphysical powers
raises all the others, artificially and without occasion. This side
of M. Bergson's philosophy illustrates the worst and most familiar
vices of metaphysics. It marvels at some appearance, not to
investigate it, but to give it an unctuous name. Then it turns this
name into a power, that by its operation creates the appearance. This
is simply verbal mythology or the hypostasis of words, and there would
be some excuse for a rude person who should call it rubbish.

The metaphysical abuse of psychology is as extraordinary in modern
Europe as that of fancy ever was in India or of rhetoric in Greece. We
find, for instance, Mr. Bradley murmuring, as a matter almost too
obvious to mention, that the existence of anything not sentience is
unmeaning to him; or, i