"A PROPHET OF THE SOUL" 



One may think of it under the image of the bow 

 in the clouds, so frail and fugitive, yet apparently 

 so permanent. It is not involved in the fate of the 

 raindrops through which it is manifested. They fall 

 but it does not. It is ceaselessly renewed; it hangs 

 forever on the verge of dissolution. If the sun is 

 veiled it is gone; if the rain ceases it is gone. Its 

 source is not in the rain, but is inseparable from it. 

 So matter is only the seat of life, not its source. Its 

 final source is in the elan vital, as the source of the 

 rainbow is in the sun. The sunbeams still pour 

 through space whether they encounter raindrops 

 or not. 



Bergson thinks that consciousness, or the soul, is 

 not involved in the fate of the brain, though mo- 

 mentarily dependent upon it. The true way in 

 which to regard the life of the body is to postulate 

 that it is on the road which leads to the life of the 

 spirit. Souls, he says, are continually being created, 

 which nevertheless, in a certain sense, preexisted in 

 the cosmic spirits as the bow preexisted hi the sun. 



v 



In a limited sense Darwin was a creative evolu- 

 tionist also; in his view nothing in animal life was 

 fixed or stereotyped; ceaseless change, ceaseless 

 development marked its whole course through the 

 geologic ages; his animal series is as mobile, or as 

 much a flowing current, as Bergson's; species give 

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