In concluding this study of Bergson's philosophy, it remains to sum up and to review its general merits and deficiencies. We must remember, in fairness to Bergson, that he does not profess to offer us A SYSTEM of philosophy. In fact, if he were to do so, he would involve himself in a grave inconsistency, for his thought is not of the systematic type. He is opposed to the work of those individual thinkers who have offered "systems" to the world, rounded and professedly complete constructions, labelled, one might almost say, "the last word in Philosophy." Bergson does not claim that his thought is final. His ideal, of which he speaks in his lectures on La Perception du Changement--that excellent summary of his thought--is a progressive philosophy to which each thinker shall contribute. If we feel disappointed that Bergson has not gone further or done more by attempting a solution of some of the fundamental problems of our human experience, upon which he has not touched, then we must recollect his own view of the philosophy he is seeking to expound. All thinking minds must contribute their quota. A philosophy such as he wishes to promote by establishing a method by his own works will not be made in a day. "Unlike the philosophical systems properly so called, each of which was the individual work of a man of genius, and sprang up as a whole to be taken or left, it will only be built up by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting, and improving one another." [Footnote: Introduction to Creative Evolution, p. xiv. (Fr. p. vii).] Both science and the older kind of metaphysics have kept aloof from the vital problems of our lives. In one of his curious but brilliant metaphors Bergson likens Life to a river over which the scientists have constructed an elaborate bridge, while the laborious metaphysicians have toiled to build a tunnel underneath. Neither group of workers has attempted to plunge into the flowing tide itself. In the most brilliant of his short papers: L'Intuition philosophique, he makes an energetic appeal that philosophy should approach more closely to practical life. His thought aims at setting forth, not any system of knowledge, but rather a method of philosophizing; in a phrase, this method amounts to the assertion that Life is more than Logic, or, as Byron put it, "The tree of Knowledge is not the tree of Life."