Instinct, for instance, need not be, as our human
prejudice suggests, a rudimentary intelligence; it may be a parallel
sort of sensibility, an imageless awareness of the presence and
character of other things, with a superhuman ability to change oneself
so as to meet them. Do we not feel something of this sort ourselves in
love, in art, in religion? M. Bergson is a most delicate and charming
poet on this theme, and a plausible psychologist; his method of
accumulating and varying his metaphors, and leaving our intuition to
itself under that artful stimulus, is the only judicious and
persuasive method he could have employed, and his knack at it is
wonderful. We recover, as we read, the innocence of the mind. It seems
no longer impossible that we might, like the wise men in the
story-books, learn the language of birds; we share for the moment the
siestas of plants; and we catch the quick consciousness of the waves
of light, vibrating at inconceivable rates, each throb forgotten as
the next follows upon it; and we may be tempted to play on Shakespeare
and say:
"Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do _their spirits_ hasten to their end."
Some reader of M. Bergson might say to himself: All this is ingenious
introspection and divination; grant that it is true, and how does that
lead to a new theory of the universe? You have been studying surface
appearances and the texture of primitive consciousness; that is a part
of the internal rumble of this great engine of the world.
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