“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 élan 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, preéxisted in 
the cosmic spirits as the bow preéxisted in the Sun. 
Vv 
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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