that they should move so, he would not be reputed, I suppose, to have
thrown a bright light on the subject.

Yet this is what M. Bergson does in his whole defence of metaphysical
vitalism, and especially in the instance of the evolution of eyes by
two different methods, which is his palmary argument. Since in some
molluscs and in vertebrates organs that coincide in being organs of
vision are reached by distinct paths, it cannot have been the
propulsion of mechanism in each case, he says, that guided the
developments, which, being divergent, would never have led to
coincident results, but the double development must have been guided
by a common _tendency towards vision_. Suppose (what some young man in
a laboratory may by this time have shown to be false) that M.
Bergson's observations have sounded the facts to the bottom; it would
then be of the ultimate nature of things that, given light and the
other conditions, the two methods of development will end in eyes;
just as, for a peasant, it is of the ultimate nature of things that
puddles can be formed in two quite opposite ways, by rain falling from
heaven and by springs issuing from the earth; but as the peasant would
not have reached a profound insight into nature if he had proclaimed
the presence in her of a _tendency to puddles_, to be formed in
inexplicably different ways; so the philosopher attains to no profound
insight when he proclaims in her a _tendency to vision._ If those
words express more than ignorance, they express the love of it. Even
if the vitalists were right in despairing of further scientific
discoveries, they would be wrong in offering their verbiage as a
substitute. Nature may possibly have only a very loose hazy
constitution, to be watched and understood as sailors watch and
understand the weather; but Neptune and Æolus are not thereby proved
to be the authors of storms. Yet M. Bergson thinks if life could only