"A PROPHET OF THE SOUL" 



of Bergson's work that led William James to say of 

 it that it was "like a breath of the morning and the 

 singing of birds." 



I think we may say that no new world can be 

 opened to a man unless that world is already in him 

 in embryo at least; then the poet, the seer, the in- 

 spired teacher, like Bergson, can open it for him. 

 Wordsworth opened up a new world to John Stuart 

 Mill, Goethe opened up a new world to Carlyle, 

 Emerson and Whitman have been world-openers 

 in our own land and times. The world-opening to 

 which I here refer, is almost a sacrament; it implies 

 a spiritual illumination and exaltation that does not 

 and cannot come to every mind. It means the open- 

 ing of a door that our logical faculties cannot open. 

 Positive science, of course, opens its own new worlds 

 of facts and relations, and speculative philosophy 

 opens its new world of ideas and concepts; but only 

 the inspired, the creative works, admit us to the 

 high heaven of spiritual freedom itself. We do not 

 merely admire such writers as Goethe, Carlyle, 

 Emerson, Whitman; we experience them, and they 

 enter into our lives. I think this is in a measure true 

 of Bergson. With more method and system than 

 any of the others I have named, he yet possesses the 

 same liberating power, the same imaginative lift, 

 and begets in one a similar spiritual exaltation. 



Bergson is first and foremost a great literary artist 

 occupying himself with problems of science and 

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