On the other hand, a directing law is immanent in life, but in the shape of an appeal to endless transcendence. In dealing with this future transcendent to our daily life, with this further shore of present experience, where are we to seek the inspiring strength? And is there not ground for asking ourselves whether intuitions have not arisen here and there in the course of history, lighting up the dark road of the future for us with a prophetic ray of dawn? It is at this point that the new philosophy would find place for the problem of religion. But this word "religion," which has not come once so far from Mr Bergson's pen, coming now from mine, warns me that it is time to end. No man today would be justified in foreseeing the conclusions to which the doctrine of creative evolution will one day undoubtedly lead on this point. More than any other, I must forget here what I myself may have elsewhere tried to do in this order of ideas. But it was impossible not to feel the approach of the temptation. Mr Bergson's work is extraordinarily suggestive. His books, so measured in tone, so tranquil in harmony, awaken in us a mystery of presentiment and imagination; they reach the hidden retreats where the springs of consciousness well up. Long after we have closed them we are shaken within; strangely moved, we listen to the deepening echo, passing on and on. However valuable already their explicit contents may be, they reach still further than they aimed. It is impossible to tell what latent germs they foster. It is impossible to guess what lies behind the boundless distance of the horizons they expose. But this at least is sure: these books have verily begun a new work in the history of human thought. ADDITIONAL EXPLANATIONS I. Mr Bergson's Work and the General Directions of Contemporary Thought. A broad survey of the new philosophy was bound to be somewhat rapid and summary; and now that this is completed it will doubtless not be superfluous to come back, on the same plan as before, to some more important or more difficult individual points, and to examine by themselves the most prominent centres on which we should focus the light of our attention. Not that I intend to probe in minute detail the folds and turns of a doctrine which admits of infinite development: how can I claim to exhaust a work of such profound thought that the least passing example employed takes its place as a particular study? Still less do I wish to undertake a kind of analytic resume; no undertaking could be less profitable than that of arranging paragraph headings to repeat too briefly, and therefore obscurely, what a thinker has said without any extravagance of language, yet with every requisite explanation.