But the degree of
intelligence which this age possesses makes it so very uncomfortable
that, in this instance, it asks for something less vital, and sighs
for what evolution has left behind. In the presence of such cruelly
distinct things as astronomy or such cruelly confused things as
theology it feels _la nostalgie de la boue_. It was only, M. Bergson
tells us, where dead matter oppressed life that life was forced to
become intelligence; for this reason intelligence kills whatever it
touches; it is the tribute that life pays to death. Life would find it
sweet to throw off that painful subjection to circumstance and bloom
in some more congenial direction. M. Bergson's own philosophy is an
effort to realise this revulsion, to disintegrate intelligence and
stimulate sympathetic experience. Its charm lies in the relief which
it brings to a stale imagination, an imagination from which religion
has vanished and which is kept stretched on the machinery of business
and society, or on small half-borrowed passions which we clothe in a
mean rhetoric and dot with vulgar pleasures. Finding their
intelligence enslaved, our contemporaries suppose that intelligence is
essentially servile; instead of freeing it, they try to elude it. Not
free enough themselves morally, but bound to the world partly by piety
and partly by industrialism, they cannot think of rising to a detached
contemplation of earthly things, and of life itself and evolution;
they revert rather to sensibility, and seek some by-path of instinct
or dramatic sympathy in which to wander.
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