UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



difficult to see the road to free will, liberty, and the 

 ascendancy of the spirit. The weight of the whole 

 material world is on the side of determinism. All om* 

 intellectual and logical faculties are trained in this 

 school; we can act successfully upon matter only 

 when we regard it as held in the leash of irrefragable 

 law; through the conceptions of geometry and me- 

 chanics we conquer and use the material world. Our 

 civilization is the product of these conceptions. Any 

 indeterminism, any inexactness, in measurements 

 and calculations, any of the freedom of life admitted 

 into our dealings with matter and force, and we 

 come or may come to grief. If we built our houses as 

 we often build our arguments, they would fall upon 

 our heads. But Bergson's philosophy does not fall 

 upon our heads, because it is buoyant with spirit; it 

 is not a mere framework of logical concepts; it is a 

 living and not a dead philosophy; it is more like a 

 tree rooted in the soil, not a framework of inert 

 ideas. It is Gothic rather than classic; its symbols 

 and suggestions are in living things. 



I can fancy how like a dream or the shadow of 

 a dream all this may seem to the rigidly scientific 

 mind — the mind that has always dealt with the 

 solid facts and the measurable forces of the mechan- 

 ical world. And science, as such, can deal with no 

 other. Its analysis necessarily kills living matter, 

 and when it deals with the living animal none of its 

 vital functions fall within the sphere of the mechan- 



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