It has been repeatedly stated that the current philosophical dualism of mind and body, of spirit and mere outward doing, is ultimately but an intellectual reflex of the social divorce of routine habit from thought, of means from ends, practice from theory. One hardly knows whether most to admire the acumen with which Bergson has penetrated through the accumulation of historic technicalities to this essential fact, or to deplore the artistic skill with which he has recommended the division and the metaphysical subtlety with which he has striven to establish its necessary and unchangeable nature. For the latter tends to confirm and sanction the dualism in all its obnoxiousness. In the end, however, detection, discovery, is the main thing. To envisage the relation of spirit, life, to matter, body, as in effect an affair of a force which outruns habit while it leaves a trail of routine habits behind it, will surely turn out in the end to imply the acknowledgment of the need of a continuous unification of spirit and habit, rather than to be a sanction of their divorce. And when Bergson carries the implicit logic to the point of a clear recognition that upon this basis concrete intelligence is concerned with the habits which incorporate and deal with objects, and that nothing remains to spirit, pure thought, except a blind onward push or impetus, the net conclusion is surely the need of revision of the fundamental premiss of separation of soul and habit. A blind creative force is as likely to turn out to be destructive as creative; the vital _élan_ may delight in war rather than in the laborious arts of civilization, and a mystic intuition of an ongoing splurge be a poor substitute for the detailed work of an intelligence embodied in custom and institution, one which creates by means of flexible continuous contrivances of reorganization. For the eulogistic qualities which Bergson attributes to the _élan vital_ flow not from its nature but from a reminiscence of the optimism of romanticism, an optimism which is only the reverse side of pessimism about actualities. A spiritual life which is nothing but a blind urge separated from thought (which is said to be confined to mechanical manipulation of material objects for personal uses) is likely to have the attributes of the Devil in spite of its being ennobled with the name of God. V