Now M.
Bergson's psychological fictions, being drawn from what is rudimentary
in man, have a better chance of being literally true beyond man.
Indeed what he asks us to do, and wishes to do himself, is simply to
absorb so completely the aspect and habit of things that the soul of
them may take possession of us: that we may know by intuition the
_elan vital_ which the world expresses, just as Paolo, in Dante, knew
by intuition the _elan vital_ that the smile of Francesca expressed.
The correctness of such an intuition, however, rests on a circumstance
which M. Bergson does not notice, because his psychology is literary
and not scientific. It rests on the possibility of imitation. When the
organism observed and that of the observer have a similar structure
and can imitate one another, the idea produced in the observer by
intent contemplation is like the experience present to the person
contemplated. But where this contagion of attitude, and therefore of
feeling, is impossible, our intuition of our neighbours' souls remains
subjective and has no value as a revelation. Psychological novelists,
when they describe people such as they themselves are or might have
been, may describe them truly; but beyond that limit their personages
are merely plausible, that is, such as might be conceived by an
equally ignorant reader in the presence of the same external
indications.
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