by intuition the _élan vital_ that the smile of Francesca expressed.

The correctness of such an intuition, however, rests on a circumstance
which M. Bergson does not notice, because his psychology is literary
and not scientific. It rests on the possibility of imitation. When the
organism observed and that of the observer have a similar structure
and can imitate one another, the idea produced in the observer by
intent contemplation is like the experience present to the person
contemplated. But where this contagion of attitude, and therefore of
feeling, is impossible, our intuition of our neighbours' souls remains
subjective and has no value as a revelation. Psychological novelists,
when they describe people such as they themselves are or might have
been, may describe them truly; but beyond that limit their personages
are merely plausible, that is, such as might be conceived by an
equally ignorant reader in the presence of the same external
indications. So, for instance, the judgment which a superficial
traveller passes on foreign manners or religions is plausible to him
and to his compatriots just because it represents the feeling that
such manifestations awaken in strangers and does not attempt to convey
the very different feeling really involved for the natives; had the
latter been discovered and expressed the traveller's book would have
found little understanding and no sale in his own country. This
plausibility to the ignorant is present in all spontaneous myth.
Nothing more need be demanded of irresponsible fiction, which makes no
pretensions to be a human document, but is merely a human
entertainment.

Now, a human psychology, even of the finest grain, when it is applied
to the interpretation of the soul of matter, or of the soul of the
whole universe, obviously yields a view of the irresponsible and