acquaintance with the extensive amount of pathological investigation
which has been carried out in recent years, and for which France is
justly entitled to very honourable mention.

In 1898 Bergson became Maitre de conferences at his Alma Mater, L'Ecole
Normale Superieure, and was later promoted to a Professorship. The year
1900 saw him installed as Professor at the College de France, where he
accepted the Chair of Greek Philosophy in succession to Charles
L'Eveque. The College de France, founded in 1530, by Francois I, is less
ancient, and until recent years has been less prominent in general
repute than the Sorbonne, which traces back its history to the middle of
the thirteenth century. Nevertheless, it is one of the intellectual
headquarters of France, indeed of the whole world. While the Sorbonne is
now the seat of the University of Paris, the College is an independent
institution under the control of the Ministre de l'Instruction publique.
The lectures given by the very eminent professors who fill its forty-
three chairs are free and open to the general public, and are attended
mainly by a large number of women students and by the senior students
from the University. The largest lecture room in the College was given
to Bergson, but this became quite inadequate to accommodate his hearers.

At the First International Congress of Philosophy, which was held in
Paris, during the first five days of August, 1900, Bergson read a short,
but important, paper, Sur les origines psychologiques de notre croyance
a la loi de causalite. In 1901 Felix Alcan published in book form a work
which had just previously appeared in the Revue de Paris entitled Le
Rire, one of the most important of his minor productions. This essay on
the meaning of the Comic was based on a lecture which he had given in
his early days in the Auvergne. The study of it is essential to an
understanding of Bergson's views of life, and its passages dealing with