I.

Mr Bergson's readers will undergo at almost every page they read an intense
and singular experience. The curtain drawn between ourselves and reality,
enveloping everything including ourselves in its illusive folds, seems of a
sudden to fall, dissipated by enchantment, and display to the mind depths
of light till then undreamt, in which reality itself, contemplated face to
face for the first time, stands fully revealed. The revelation is
overpowering, and once vouchsafed will never afterwards be forgotten.

Nothing can convey to the reader the effects of this direct and intimate
mental vision. Everything which he thought he knew already finds new birth
and vigour in the clear light of morning: on all hands, in the glow of
dawn, new intuitions spring up and open out; we feel them big with infinite
consequences, heavy and saturated with life. Each of them is no sooner
blown than it appears fertile for ever. And yet there is nothing
paradoxical or disturbing in the novelty. It is a reply to our
expectation, an answer to some dim hope. So vivid is the impression of
truth, that afterwards we are even ready to believe we recognise the
revelation as if we had always darkly anticipated it in some mysterious
twilight at the back of consciousness.

Afterwards, no doubt, in certain cases, incertitude reappears, sometimes
even decided objections. The reader, who at first was under a magic spell,
corrects his thought, or at least hesitates. What he has seen is still at
bottom so new, so unexpected, so far removed from familiar conceptions.
For this surging wave of thought our mind contains none of those ready-cut
channels which render comprehension easy. But whether, in the long run, we
each of us give or refuse complete or partial adhesion, all of us, at
least, have received a regenerating shock, an internal upheaval not readily