“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 
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