"A PROPHET OF THE SOUL" 



ery of his style, the freedom and elasticity of his 

 thought, and not the net result of his philosophical 

 speculations, that carry him, as a prophet and an 

 interpreter of nature, so much beyond the sphere of 

 Darwin and Spencer and Tyndall. 



Thus at the centre of their conceptions, at the 

 point from which they start, our natural philos- 

 ophers do not seem to differ radically. They all 

 begin with life in some form, hidden somewhere in 

 matter. There is no dead matter. 



All our philosophers look to the sun as the source 

 of the energy which the organism uses and mani- 

 fests. But M. Bergson fixes his attention upon life 

 as something working in the organism and releasing 

 at will the energy which the organism has stored up. 

 There is always in his scheme this free agent or 

 being, called Life or Consciousness, which works its 

 will upon matter, while with Tyndall and Huxley 

 and Haeckel attention is fixed upon this mysterious 

 force which they conceive of as potential in the ulti- 

 mate particles of matter itself. Out of this force 

 comes life; vitality is in some way identified with 

 molecular physics, matter has no forward impulse 

 or current as Bergson conceives it, but the phe- 

 nomena of life appear when the atoms and corpus- 

 cles are compounded in certain proportions and in a 

 certain order. One sees a psychic principle launched 

 into matter where the other sees mechanical and 

 chemical principles; one humanizes a force, and 



