Studied and insinuating as M. Bergson is in his style, he is no less
elaborate in his learning. In the history of philosophy, in
mathematics and physics, and especially in natural history he has
taken great pains to survey the ground and to assimilate the views and
spirit of the most recent scholars. He might be called outright an
expert in all these subjects, were it not for a certain externality
and want of radical sympathy in his way of conceiving them. A genuine
historian of philosophy, for instance, would love to rehearse the
views of great thinkers, would feel their eternal plausibility, and in
interpreting them would think of himself as little as they ever
thought of him. But M. Bergson evidently regards Plato or Kant as
persons who did or did not prepare the way for some Bergsonian
insight. The theory of evolution, taken enthusiastically, is apt to
exercise an evil influence on the moral estimation of things. First
the evolutionist asserts that later things grow out of earlier, which
is true of things in their causes and basis, but not in their values;
as modern Greece proceeds out of ancient Greece materially but does
not exactly crown it. The evolutionist, however, proceeds to assume
that later things are necessarily better than what they have grown out
of: and this is false altogether. This fallacy reinforces very
unfortunately that inevitable esteem which people have for their own
opinions, and which must always vitiate the history of philosophy when
it is a philosopher that writes it. A false subordination comes to be
established among systems, as if they moved in single file and all had
the last, the author's system, for their secret goal. In Hegel, for
instance, this conceit is conspicuous, in spite of his mastery in the
dramatic presentation of points of view, for his way of
reconstructing history was, on the surface, very sympathetic. He too,
like M. Bergson, proceeded from learning to intuition, and feigned at
every turn to identify himself with what he was describing, especially