UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
but ever onward flowing by reason of its essential 
mobility. The branchings and the unfoldings of life 
in the process of evolution have been contingent and 
indeterminate in the same way — inevitable, but 
plastic, yielding, accommodating, taking what they 
could get and ever reaching out for more. Life has 
succeeded, but its triumph has not been complete. 
It has been very human and fallible. Indeed, it is 
the complete humanization of life that makes Berg- 
son’s conception so pleasing and stimulating. It is 
the taking of it out of the realm of mechanical neces- 
sity or fatality, and the surrounding of it with the 
atmosphere of the humanly finite and contingent, 
that is new in philosophy. I hardly know why we 
should wish to believe that what we have always 
called God should have its problems and difficulties 
and setbacks, as we do, unless it helps us the better 
to understand the failures and imperfections in the 
world — the condition of struggle and unrealized 
ideals that is the common lot of mankind, and, ina 
measure, of all that lives. The soul dreams of perfec- 
tion, but it is hampered and defeated by the body it 
animates; so did, or does, the Cosmic Spirit, but the 
obduracy of the matter through which it works makes 
it fall short of the perfection at which it aims. 
There are two short sentences in Bergson which 
hold the key to his philosophy. “Living nature,” 
he says, “is more and better than a plan in course 
of realization”’; and again, “Everything is obscure 
214 
