th dry
land. He treats the earth as his habitation, remodeling it in accordance
with his ever-varying needs and increasing ambitions.

This modern man, planning, contriving and making, finds Paley's watch as
little to his mind as Lucretius's blind flow of atoms. A universe wound
up once for all and doing nothing thereafter but mark time is as
incomprehensible to him as a universe that never had a mind of its own
and knows no difference between past and future. The idea of eternal
recurrence does not frighten him as it did Nietzsche, for he feels it to
be impossible. The mechanistic interpretation of natural phenomena
developed during the last century he accepts at its full value, and
would extend experimentally as far as it will go, for he finds it not
invalid but inadequate.

To minds of this temperament it is no wonder that Bergson's _Creative
Evolution_ came with the force of an inspiration. Men felt themselves
akin to this upward impulse, this _elan vital_, which, struggling
throughout the ages with the intractableness of inert matter, yet
finally in some way or other forces it to its will, and ever strives
toward the increase of vitality, mentality, personality.

Bergson has been reluctant to commit himself on the question of
immortality, but he of late has become quite convinced of it. He even
goes so far as to think it possible that we may find experimental
evidence of personal persistence after death. This at least we might
infer from his recent acceptance of the presidency of the British
Society for Psychical Research. In his opening address before the
Society, May 28, 1913, he discussed the question of telepathy and in
that connection he explained his theory of the relation of mind and
brain in the following language. I quote from the report in the London
_Times_:

The _role_ of the brain is to bring back the remembrance of an
action, to prolong the remembrance in movements. If one could see
all that takes place in the interior of the brain, one would find
that that which takes place there corresponds to a small part only
of the life of the mind. The brain simply extracts from the life of
the mind that which is capable of representation in movement. The
cerebral life is to the mental life what the movements of the baton
of a conductor are to the Symphony.

The brain, then, is that which allows the mind to adjust itself
exactly to circumstances. It is th