UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
difficult to see the road to free will, liberty, and the 
ascendancy of the spirit. The weight of the whole 
material world is on the side of determinism. All our 
intellectual and logical faculties are trained in this 
school; we can act successfully upon matter only 
when we regard it as held in the leash of irrefragable 
law; through the conceptions of geometry and me- 
chanics we conquer and use the material world. Our 
civilization is the product of these conceptions. Any 
indeterminism, any inexactness, in measurements 
and calculations, any of the freedom of life admitted 
into our dealings with matter and force, and we 
come or may come to grief. If we built our houses as 
we often build our arguments, they would fall upon 
our heads. But Bergson’s philosophy does not fall 
upon our heads, because it is buoyant with spirit; it 
is not a mere framework of logical concepts; it is a 
living and not a dead philosophy; it is more like a 
tree rooted in the soil, not a framework of inert 
ideas. It is Gothic rather than classic; its symbols 
and suggestions are in living things. 
I can fancy how like a dream or the shadow of 
a dream all this may seem to the rigidly scientific 
mind — the mind that has always dealt with the 
solid facts and the measurable forces of the mechan- 
ical world. And science, as such, can deal with no 
other. Its analysis necessarily kills living matter, 
and when it deals with the living animal none of its 
vital functions fall within the sphere of the mechan- 
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