If æsthete and zealot will philosophize, they are at this disadvantage with the wise man, that their philosophy can do no more, in expressing the nature of this “realest essence” of reality, than the wise man’s rationalism may do--discourse about it, interpret it. Philosophy indeed never can, and never should aspire to enter into the inner nature of reality in any such sense as the immediatism of Bergson and James summons it to do. There is art and there is religion for that. It is not clear how the qualitative or how the teleological aspect of reality is more internal to it than its relational aspect; but, at any rate, philosophy has its own interest, and that is distinct from those of art and religion. Wherefore the own proper interest of art or of religion is not served in their philosophy; in their philosophy they deny themselves. The efforts of such philosophies to wrest from reality, in a non-intellectual way, its secret, must be rather superhuman. This characterization is hardly a burlesque of Bergson’s own observations on his method, for it is little less than the repudiation of our natural constitution, to which he exhorts us.[93] But, as with Kant, so with Bergson, prodigies of subtlety fail to produce a revelation of truth that is so subtle as to be inarticulate because immediate, or that does not lend itself to discussion and interpretation. Or, if this is not to be looked for in a philosophy which is ‘a method rather than a doctrine,’ neither is there any suggestion how such revelation may be socialized, rendered human; or even, in fact, how it can assume _meaning_, meaning to the philosopher himself (which is surely indispensable to truth), without becoming predication--assertion and denial;--that is to say, without becoming judgment. If humans make superhuman effort, it should not be surprising if the result is self-contradiction. CHAPTER II BERGSON’S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON What, then, is called philosophic “method” and is distinguished thereby from “doctrine,” is really, in fact, always the cardinal principle of the _content_ of the philosophy in question, its fundamental _doctrine_. If this doctrine is acceptable to reason, if it is reasonable, logical principles must determine it. No anti-intellectualist philosophy legitimately evades the rules of the game of dialectic by the representation that it is a ‘method rather than a doctrine.’ For this is the game that anyone plays who undertakes to show, by reasonable discourse, why reality and knowledge conform to a certain definition, or (the same mental procedure) why they do not conform to other definitions. Since dialectic is just significant discourse with a meaning to be judged, it may vary in form between any degree of syllogistic baldness, at one extreme, and of suggestive subtlety at the other. It is dialectic if it is constituted of statements, explicit or implied, which relate to each other.