nothing compulsory or fixed about them. Their sole authority lies in
the fact that they may be more or less congenial or convenient, by
enriching the flying moment æsthetically, or helping it to slip
prosperously into the next moment. Immediate feeling, pure experience,
is the only reality, the only _fact_: if notions which do not
reproduce it fully as it flows are still called true (and they
evidently ought not to be) it is only in a pragmatic sense of the
word, in that while they present a false and heterogeneous image of
reality they are not practically misleading; as, for instance, the
letters on this page are no true image of the sounds they call up, nor
the sounds of the thoughts, yet both may be correct enough if they
lead the reader in the end to the things they symbolise. It is M.
Bergson, the most circumspect and best equipped thinker of this often
scatter-brained school, who has put this view in a frank and tenable
form, avoiding the bungling it has sometimes led to about the "meaning
of truth." Truth, according to M. Bergson, is given only in intuitions
which prolong experience just as it occurs, in its full immediacy; on
the other hand, all representation, thought, theory, calculation, or
discourse is so much mutilation of the truth, excusable only because
imposed upon us by practical exigences. The world, being a feeling,
must be felt to be known, and then the world and the knowledge of it
are identical; but if it is talked about or thought about it is
denaturalised, although convention and utility may compel the poor
human being to talk and to think, exiled as he is from reality in his
Babylon of abstractions. Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by
practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside. The mystic can
live happy in the droning consciousness of his own heart-beats and
those of the universe.

With this we seem to have reached the extreme of self-concentration