“A PROPHET OF THE SOUL” 
ical and chemical categories. When it tries to for- 
mulate the psychic, it finds itself dealing with the 
vague, the unforeseeable. What is true of the psy- 
chosis of one animal is not always true of another of 
the same species. As soon as we enter the sphere 
of life, we enter the sphere of the variable, the incal- 
culable, the supra-mechanical; and when we enter 
the sphere of mind, the doors of the unstable and 
unpredictable are thrown still wider open. 
In theory Bergson says it is a kind of absurdity to 
try to know otherwise than by intelligence or reason. 
How can intelligence go beyond intelligence? Is not 
all this step of setting bonds to intelligence taken by 
the aid of the very faculty to which we prescribe 
limits? By life alone is the contradiction solved. As 
in swimming, action, the fearless plunge, cuts the 
knot; and we swim by the same members we walk 
with. A man can lift himself over the fence if he 
uses the fence as a fulcrum, and life can overcome 
matter when it enters into it and uses it. 
Our scientific faculties will carry us through the 
inorganic world and unfold for us the processes 
of inorganic evolution, the foundation of all suns 
and systems, and they will account for the present 
state of the earth on physical and chemical princi- 
ples, and can with reasonable confidence forecast its 
state or condition in the far distant future. But 
when it comes to the living world, those faculties are 
baffled; when they pass from the astronomic and the 
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