UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
“Philosophy of Laughter,” the “Introduction to 
Metaphysics,” and the “Creative Evolution,” his 
masterpiece. It was also my privilege to hear some 
of his lectures at Columbia University in the winter 
of 1912, and to meet him personally. 
A view of the man always seems to bring one 
nearer to an understanding of his work. In person 
Bergson is a small, slender, rather shy man, with 
a wonderfully beautiful and symmetrical head — a 
large brain, filled out and rounded on all sides; face 
smooth and thin, with a close-cropped mustache; 
prominent, finely chiseled aquiline nose; small, ex- 
pressive eyes in deep sockets overhung by heavy, 
mobile eyebrows —an Emersonian type of face 
with more than the Emersonian size and beauty 
of brain, lacking only the powerful Emersonian 
mouth. 
His lectures in French were delivered without 
notes, in an animated conversational style, his 
hands, within a narrow circle, being as active as his 
mind. Not an imposing figure on the platform or off, 
nor an aggressive and dominating personality, but 
a gentle, winsome man, the significant beauty of 
whose head one cannot easily forget. Those who 
were fortunate enough to hear him may well have 
felt that they were seeing and hearing a modern 
Plato or Kant or Hegel, for surely his work is des- 
tined to make as distinct an epoch in the history 
of philosophy as did theirs. 
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