see but a further unrolling of a panorama long ago rolled up on a cosmic reel. Even Bergson, who, to a casual reader, appears to reveal vast unexplored vistas of genuinely novel possibilities, turns out, upon careful study, to regard _intellect_ (everything which in the past has gone by the name of observation and reflection) as but an evolutionary deposit whose importance is confined to the conservation of a life already achieved, and bids us trust to instinct, or something akin to instinct, for the future:--as if there were hope and consolation in bidding us trust to that which, in any case, we cannot intelligently direct or control. I do not see that the school of history which finds Bergson mystic and romantic, which prides itself upon its hard-headed and scientific character, comes out at a different place. I refer to the doctrine of the economic interpretation of history in its extreme form--which, so its adherents tell us, is its only logical form. It is easy to follow them when they tell us that past historians have ignored the great part played by economic forces, and that descriptions and explanations have been correspondingly superficial. When one reflects that the great problems of the present day are those attending economic reorganization, one might even take the doctrine as a half-hearted confession that historians are really engaged in construing the past in terms of the problems and interests of an impending future, instead of reporting a past in order to discover some mathematical curve which future events are bound to describe. But no; our strictly scientific economic interpreters will have it that economic forces present an inevitable evolution, of which state and church, art and literature, science and philosophy are by-products. It is useless to suggest that while modern industry has given an immense stimulus to scientific inquiry, yet nevertheless the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century comes after the scientific revolution of the seventeenth. The dogma forbids any connection. But when we note that Marx gave it away that his materialistic interpretation of history was but the Hegelian idealistic dialectic turned upside down, we may grow wary. Is it, after all, history we are dealing with or another philosophy of history? And when we discover that the great importance of the doctrine is urged upon us, when we find that we are told that the general recognition of its truth helps us out of our present troubles and indicates a path for future effort, we positively take heart. These writers do not seem to mean just what they say. Like the rest of us, they are human, and infected with a belief that ideas, even highly abstract theories, are of efficacy in the conduct of human affairs influencing the history which is yet to be. * * * * *