understand, that our minds are going to endure. I suppose he cannot
venture to preach the resurrection of the body to this weak-kneed
generation; he is too modern and plausible for that. Yet he is too
amiable to deny to our dilated nostrils some voluptuous whiffs of
immortality. He asks if we are not "led to suppose" that consciousness
passes through matter to be tempered like steel, to constitute
distinct personalities, and prepare them for a higher existence. Other
animal minds are but human minds arrested; men at last (what men, I
wonder?) are "capable of remembering all and willing all and
controlling their past and their future," so that "we shall have no
repugnance in admitting that in man, though perhaps in man alone,
consciousness pursues its path beyond this earthly life." Elsewhere he
says, in a phrase already much quoted and perhaps destined to be
famous, that in man the spirit can "spurn every kind of resistance and
break through many an obstacle, perhaps even death." Here the tenor
has ended on the inevitable high note, and the gallery is delighted.
But was that the note set down for him in the music? And has he not
sung it in falsetto?

The immediate knows nothing about death; it takes intelligence to
conceive it; and that perhaps is why M. Bergson says so little about
it, and that little so far from serious. But he talks a great deal
about life, he feels he has penetrated deeply into its nature; and yet
death, together with birth, is the natural analysis of what life is.
What is this creative purpose, that must wait for sun and rain to set
it in motion? What is this life, that in any individual can be
suddenly extinguished by a bullet? What is this _elan-vital_, that a
little fall in temperature would banish altogether from the universe?
The study of death may be out of fashion, but it is never out of
season. The omission of this, which is almost the omission of wisdom