“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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