"A PROPHET OF THE SOUL" 



ical and chemical categories. When it tries to for- 

 mulate the psychic, it finds itself dealing with the 

 vague, the unforeseeable. What is true of the psy- 

 chosis of one animal is not always true of another of 

 the same species. As soon as we enter the sphere 

 of life, we enter the sphere of the variable, the incal- 

 culable, the supra-mechanical; and when we enter 

 the sphere of mind, the doors of the unstable and 

 unpredictable are thrown still wider open. 



In theory Bergson says it is a kind of absurdity to 

 try to know otherwise than by intelligence or reason. 

 How can intelligence go beyond intelligence? Is not 

 all this step of setting bonds to intelligence taken by 

 the aid of the very faculty to which we prescribe 

 limits.'^ By life alone is the contradiction solved. As 

 in swimming, action, the fearless plunge, cuts the 

 knot; and we swim by the same members we walk 

 with. A man can lift himself over the fence if he 

 uses the fence as a fulcrum, and life can overcome 

 matter when it enters into it and uses it. 



Our scientific faculties will carry us through the 

 inorganic world and unfold for us the processes 

 of inorganic evolution, the foundation of all suns 

 and systems, and they will account for the present 

 state of the earth on physical and chemical princi- 

 ples, and can with reasonable confidence forecast its 

 state or condition in the far distant future. But 

 when it comes to the living world, those faculties are 

 baffled; when they pass from the astronomic and the 



225 



