introduction to Bergson's philosophy for those who are making their
first approach to it, and as such it can be commended.

The eager interest which has been manifested in the writings of M.
Bergson is one more indication, added to the many which history
provides, of the inextinguishable vitality of Philosophy. When the man
with some important thought which bears upon its problems is
forthcoming, the world is ready, indeed is anxious, to listen. Perhaps
there is no period in recorded time in which the thinker, with something
relevant to say on the fundamental questions, has had so large and so
prepared an audience as in our own day. The zest and expectancy with
which men welcome and listen to him is almost touching; it has its
dangerous as well as its admirable aspects. The fine enthusiasm for the
physical and biological sciences, which is so noble an attribute of the
modern mind, has far from exhausted itself, but the almost boundless
hope which for a time accompanied it has notably abated. The study of
the immediate problems centring round the concepts of matter, life, and
energy goes on with undiminished, nay, with intensified, zeal, but in a
more judicious perspective. It begins to be noticed that, far from
leading us to solutions which will bring us to the core of reality and
furnish us with a synthesis which can be taken as the key to experience,
it is carrying the scientific enquirer into places in which he feels the
pressing need of Philosophy rather than the old confidence that he is on
the verge of abolishing it as a superfluity. The former hearty and self-
assured empiricism of science is giving way before the outcome of its
own logic and a new and more promising spirit of reflection on its own
"categories" is abroad. Things are turning out to be very far from what
they seemed. The physicists have come to a point where, it may be to
their astonishment, they often find themselves talking in a way which is
suspiciously like that of the subjective idealist. They have made the