absorbed in the contemplation of atoms, and worship them; that we must
worship and lose ourselves in reality, whatever reality may be, is a
mystic aberration, which physical science does nothing to foster. Nor
does any critical physicist suppose that what he describes is the
whole of the object; he merely notes the occasions on which its
sensible qualities appear, and calculates events. Because the
calculable side of nature is his province, he does not deny that
events have other aspects--the psychic and the moral, for
instance--no less real in their way, in terms of which calculation
would indeed be impossible. If he chances to call the calculable
elements of nature her substance, as it is proper to do, that name is
given without passion; he may perfectly well proclaim with Goethe that
it is in the accidents, in the _farbiger Abglanz_, that we have our
life. And if it be for his freedom that the mystic trembles, I imagine
any man of science would be content with M. Bergson's assertion that
true freedom is the sense of freedom, and that in any intelligible
statement of the situation, even the most indeterministic, this
freedom disappears; for it is an immediate experience, not any scheme
of relation between events.

The horror of mechanical physics arises, then, from attributing to
that science pretensions and extensions which it does not have; it
arises from the habits of theology and metaphysics being imported
inopportunely into science. Similarly when M. Bergson mentions
mathematics, he seems to be thinking of the supposed authority it
exercises--one of Kant's confusions--over the empirical world, and
trying to limit and subordinate that authority, lest movement should
somehow be removed from nature, and vagueness from human thought. But
nature and human thought are what they are; they have enough affinity
to mathematics, as it happens, to suggest that study to our minds, and