In 1889 Mr Bergson made his appearance with an "Essay on the Immediate Data
of Consciousness".

This was his doctor's thesis. Taking up his position inside the human
personality, in its inmost mind, he endeavoured to lay hold of the depths
of life and free action in their commonly overlooked and fugitive
originality.

Some years later, in 1896, passing this time to the externals of
consciousness, the contact surface between things and the ego, he published
"Matter and Memory", a masterly study of perception and recollection, which
he himself put forward as an inquiry into the relation between body and
mind. In 1907 he followed with "Creative Evolution", in which the new
metaphysic was outlined in its full breadth, and developed with a wealth of
suggestion and perspective opening upon the distances of infinity;
universal evolution, the meaning of life, the nature of mind and matter, of
intelligence and instinct, were the great problems here treated, ending in
a general critique of knowledge and a completely original definition of
philosophy.

These will be our guides which we shall carefully follow, step by step. It
is not, I must confess, without some apprehension that I undertake the task
of summing up so much research, and of condensing into a few pages so many
and such new conclusions.

Mr Bergson excels, even on points of least significance, in producing the
feeling of unfathomed depths and infinite levels. Never has anyone better
understood how to fulfil the philosopher's first task, in pointing out the
hidden mystery in everything. With him we see all at once the concrete