of nervous production in their least episodes would immediately read the
inmost secrets of the associated consciousness.

But no one will deny that a thesis of this kind is only in reality a
hypothesis, that it goes enormously beyond the certain data of current
biology, and that it can only be formulated by anticipating future
discoveries in a preconceived direction. Let us be candid: it is not
really a thesis of positive science, but a metaphysical thesis in the
unpleasant meaning of the term. Taking it at its best, its worth today
could only be one of intelligibleness. And intelligible it is not.

How are we to understand a consciousness destitute of activity and
consequently without connection with reality, a kind of phosphorescence
which emphasises the lines of vibration in the brain, and renders in
miraculous duplicate, by its mysterious and useless light, certain
phenomena already complete without it?

One day Mr Bergson came down into the arena of dialectic, and, talking to
his opponents in their own language, pulled their "psycho-physiological
paralogism" to pieces before their eyes; it is only by confounding in one
and the same argument two systems of incompatible notations, idealism and
realism, that we succeed in enunciating the parallelist thesis. This
reasoning went home, all the more as it was adapted to the usual form of
discussions between philosophers. But a more positive and more categorical
proof is to be found all through "Matter and Memory". From the precise
example of recollection analysed to its lowest depths, Mr Bergson
completely grasps and measures the divergence between soul and body,
between mind and matter. Then, putting into practice what he said
elsewhere about the creation of new concepts, he arrives at the conclusion-
-these are his own expressions--that between the psychological fact and its