UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



but ever onward flowing by reason of its essential 

 mobility. The branchings and the imfoldings of Hfe 

 in the process of evolution have been contingent and 

 indeterminate in the same way — inevitable, but 

 plastic, yielding, accommodating, taking what they 

 could get and ever reaching out for more. Life has 

 succeeded, but its triumph has not been complete. 

 It has been very human and fallible. Indeed, it is 

 the complete humanization of life that makes Berg- 

 son's conception so pleasing and stimulating. It is 

 the taking of it out of the realm of mechanical neces- 

 sity or fatality, and the surrounding of it with the 

 atmosphere of the humanly finite and contingent, 

 that is new in philosophy. I hardly know why we 

 should wish to believe that what we have always 

 called God should have its problems and difficulties 

 and setbacks, as we do, unless it helps us the better 

 to understand the failures and imperfections in the 

 world — the condition of struggle and unrealized 

 ideals that is the common lot of mankind, and, in a 

 measure, of all that lives. The soul dreams of perfec- 

 tion, but it is hampered and defeated by the body it 

 animates; so did, or does, the Cosmic Spirit, but the 

 obduracy of the matter through which it works makes 

 it fall short of the perfection at which it aims. 



There are two short sentences in Bergson which 

 hold the key to his philosophy. "Living nature," 

 he says, "is more and better than a plan in course 

 of realization"; and again, "Everything is obscure 



214 



