It seems to me that Bergson virtually admits the impossibility of the coincidence of subject and object when he says that instinct and intellect are neither possibly pure, which is deeply true. But then an action “completely free” is only a limiting case, is it not?--a case which would put the action out of relation and so out of activity? In a certain obvious sense “the whole person takes part,” perhaps, in _any_ action; but I cannot imagine any action or state that could be other than a relation between object and subject. I cannot see how perfect self-expression in one’s act makes in any degree for obliteration of ontological distinctness between agent and patient, subject and object. How may action be conceived to dispense with reaction? How deny its relational character, then, without denying its activity--in short, without contradiction? “Perfect self-expression” distinguishes certain acts, no doubt, but the distinction is ethical, denoting a teleological harmony, not a metaphysical identity between subject and object. To say that one _is_ completely one’s act and yet _knows_ his act again confuses a relation with one of its terms. Is it merely a matter of taste to choose to say that such a state--_i. e._ perfect absorption in one’s act--is _not knowledge_ of the act just in so far as it is the act? Is it not necessary to distinguish between the subject’s relation to the act, on one hand, and to those things, on the other (which are neither subject nor act) entering, together with the subject, into the act? Those things, it seems to me, are the object, and the act itself a relation between the subject and them, a relation which wears a conscious as well as an active aspect, and which, as knowledge, is knowledge of the things, not of the act, not of itself. PART THREE BERGSON’S GENIUS BERGSON’S GENIUS Logical soundness is never amiss, and is notably desirable in a philosopher; but Professor Bergson is assuredly right in thinking that it is no measure of a philosopher’s genius. One’s feeling about the fallacies of Spinoza and Berkeley and Kant may pale almost into indifference, in the enthusiasm of following such heroic feats of insight. But then, it would seem, their greatness is their _insight_, and not their logic, and insight therefore, after all, is philosophical genius.