M. Bergson would have us believe that
mankind is what nature has set her heart on and the best she can do,
for whose sake she has been long making very special efforts. We are
fortunate that at least her darling is all mankind and not merely
Israel.
In spite, then, of M. Bergson's learning as a naturalist and his eye
for the facts--things Aristotle also possessed--he is like Aristotle
profoundly out of sympathy with nature. Aristotle was alienated from
nature and any penetrating study of it by the fact that he was a
disciple of Socrates, and therefore essentially a moralist and a
logician. M. Bergson is alienated from nature by something quite
different; he is the adept of a very modern, very subtle, and very
arbitrary art, that of literary psychology. In this art the
imagination is invited to conceive things as if they were all centres
of passion and sensation. Literary psychology is not a science; it is
practised by novelists and poets; yet if it is to be brilliantly
executed it demands a minute and extended observation of life. Unless
your psychological novelist had crammed his memory with pictures of
the ways and aspects of men he would have no starting-point for his
psychological fictions; he would not be able to render them
circumstantial and convincing.
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