and experience, because
belief in them, involving no action, involves no practical risk. Where
action is a consequence of a philosophic system, the system seems to
dichotomize into art and religion. It becomes particularized into a
technique of living or the dogma of a sect, and so particularized it
becomes radically self-conscious and an aspect of creative intelligence.

So particularized, it is, however, no longer philosophy, and philosophy
has (I hope I may say this without professional bias) an inalienable
place in the life of reason. This place is rationally defined for it by
the discovery of its ground and function in the making of civilization;
and by the perfection of its possibilities through the definition of its
natural relationships. Thus, it is, in its essential historic character
at least, as fine an art as music, the most inward and human of all
arts. It may be, and human nature being what it is, undoubtedly will
continue to be, an added item to the creations wherewith man makes his
world a better place to live in, precious in that it envisages and
projects the excellences and perfections his heart desires and his
imagination therefore defines. So taken, it is not a substitution for
the world, but an addition to it, a refraction of it through the medium
of human nature, as a landscape painting by Whistler or Turner is not a
substitution for the actual landscape, but an interpretation and
imaginative perfection of it, more suitable to the eye of man. A system
like Bergson's is such a work, and its aesthetic adequacy, its beauty,
may be measured by the acknowledgment it receives and the influence it
exercises. Choosing one of the items of experience as its medium, and
this item the most precious in the mind's eye which the history of
philosophy reveals, it proceeds to fabricate a dialectical image of
experience in which all the compensatory desiderates are expressed and
realized. It entices minds of all orders, and they are happy to dwell in
it, for the nonce realizing in the perception of the system the values
it utters. By abandoning all pretense to be true, philosophic systems of
the traditional sort may attain the simple but supreme excellence of
beauty, and rest content therewith.

The philosophic ideal, however, is traditionally not beauty but truth:
the function of a philosophic system is not presentative, but
_re_presentative and causal, and that the systems of tradition have had
and still have co