ideals; this man, this woman, this typical thought or sentiment was
what fixed their attention and seemed to them the ultimate thing. Not
so M. Bergson: he is a microscopic psychologist, and even in man what
he studies by preference is not some integrated passion or idea, but
something far more recondite; the minute texture of sensation, memory,
or impulse. Sharp analysis is required to distinguish or arrest these
elements, yet these are the predestined elements of his fable; and so
his anthropomorphism is far less obvious than that of most poets and
theologians, though no less real.

This peculiarity in the terms of the myth carries with it a notable
extension in its propriety. The social and moral phenomena of human
life cannot be used in interpreting life elsewhere without a certain
conscious humour. This makes the charm of avowed writers of fable;
their playful travesty and dislocation of things human, which would be
puerile if they meant to be naturalists, render them piquant
moralists; for they are not really interpreting animals, but under the
mask of animals maliciously painting men. Such fables are morally
interesting and plausible just because they are psychologically false.
If Æsop could have reported what lions and lambs, ants and donkeys,
really feel and think, his poems would have been perfect riddles to
the public; and they would have had no human value except that of
illustrating, to the truly speculative philosopher, the irresponsible
variety of animal consciousness and its incommensurable types. Now M.
Bergson's psychological fictions, being drawn from what is rudimentary
in man, have a better chance of being literally true beyond man.
Indeed what he asks us to do, and wishes to do himself, is simply to
absorb so completely the aspect and habit of things that the soul of
them may take possession of us: that we may know by intuition the
_élan vital_ which the world expresses, just as Paolo, in Dante, knew