has taken years of painful effort to build up.

It is possible that some people who do not understand this philosophy
may use Bergson's name as a cloak for giving up all self-direction and
letting themselves go intellectually to pieces, just as hooligans may
use a time of revolution to plunder in the name of the Red Guard. But
Bergson's philosophy is in reality as far from teaching mere laziness
as Communism is from being mere destruction of the old social order.

Bergson attacks the use to which we usually put our minds, but he most
certainly does not suggest that a philosopher should not use his mind
at all; he is to use it for all it is worth, only differently, more
efficiently for the purpose he has in view, the purpose of knowing for
its own sake.

There is, of course, a sense in which doing anything in the right way
is simply letting one's self go, for after all it is easier to do a
thing well than badlyit certainly takes much less effort to produce
the same amount of result. So to know in the way which Bergson
recommends does in a sense come more easily than attempting to get the
knowledge we want by inappropriate methods. If this saving of waste
effort is a fault, then Bergson must plead guilty. But as the field of
knowledge open to us is far too wide for any one mind to explore, the
new method of knowing, though it requires less effort than the old to
produce the same result, does not thereby let us off more easily, for
with a better instrument it becomes possible to work for a greater
result.

It is not because it affords an excuse for laziness that Bergson's
philosophy is popular but because it gives expression to a feeling