"But this is indigestion! First comes Herbert Spencer, with his misconception of the life process as a struggle of individuals to survive. His word 'Evolution' is the quintessence of the misunderstanding; his image of a steadfast, mechanical unfolding through selfishness, masked plausibly and disastrously the intricate, perplexing vision of the truth. From that sort of thing we go at a stride to the inevitable Super Man, the megatherium individual of futurity, the large egoist, and all that nonsense. Then comes a swarm of shallow, incontinent thinkers, anxious to find a simple driving force with a simple name for the whole process; the 'Life Force' and 'Will,' and so on. These things, my dear Boon, are just the appalling bubbles of gas that show how completely the Mind of the Race has failed to assimilate...." "It is remarkable," said Boon, "how a metaphor may run away with the clearest of thinkers. The Mind of the Race is not so consistently gastric as all that." "You started the metaphor," said Wilkins. "And you mounted it and it bolted with you. To these unpleasant consequences.... Well, I hold, on the contrary, that after the superficialities of the sixties and seventies and eighties people's minds have been getting a firmer and firmer grip upon the reality of specific instability. The new body of intellectual experiment, which isn't indigestion at all but only a preliminary attack, is all that mass of trial thinking that one lumps together in one's mind when one speaks of Pragmatism. With the breakdown of specific boundaries the validity of the logical process beyond finite ends breaks down. We make our truth for our visible purposes as we go along, and if it does not work we make it afresh. We see life once more as gallant experiment. The boundaries of our universe recede not only in time and space but thought. The hard-and-fast line between the scientific and the poetic method disappears...." "And you get Bergson," said Wilkins triumphantly. "Bergson is of that class and type that exploits the affairs of thought. But I refuse to have Pragmatism judged by Bergson. He takes hold of the unfinished inquiries that constitute the movement of Pragmatism and he makes a soft scepticism for delicate minds with easy ways back to any old-established orthodoxy they may regret." "But here is my case again," said Wilkins. "It is only through Bergson that the Mind of the Race, the great operating mass mind out there, can take hold of this new system of ideas...." § 3