There is, therefore, I say, a misleading irrelevance in the characterization which Bergson himself has set the fashion of attributing to his philosophy, the characterization of it as rather a method than a system of doctrine. A method implies a system, that is to say an ordered conviction about the nature of reality and knowledge. Such a system is essential to any meaning in Bergson’s method. * * * * * Intellectualism in philosophy implies the conviction that the parts of reality are connected together in thinkable ways; that a comprehensive understanding of things as a connected system or unity is therefore theoretically possible; if actually impossible, this is merely because of the endlessness of relationships and the limitedness of any actual thinker’s time and strength. But in fact even human finitude is no obstacle to a comprehension of the principles of reality. Detail is immaterial to the unity of such a view. One of the sayings attributed to Professor James is that there is one thing you can always pronounce with assurance, upon any philosophical system, in advance of hearing a word of it, and that is that it is false. This suggests at any rate, very well, the meaning of philosophical anti-intellectualism, which implies the conviction contradictory to intellectualism, to wit that the parts of reality are not connected in thinkable ways. The connectedness of the intellectualist’s universe may have any degree of significance or casualness. A mere “and” may express much of it.[94] Intellectualism may be as pluralistic in this sense as you like, or as monistic. But if things are a universe in any such sense that they are comprehensible in intellect’s discursive way, which anti-intellectualism denies--on such a hypothesis anti-intellectualism and intellectualism have commonly agreed that some principle is embodied in this total comprehensibleness, a supreme induction, which would constitute the final interpretation of any fact. Like a master-key, it would open all the chambers of the many-mansioned universe. Every philosopher, as a fact, has some controlling thought which has the value, for him, of such a supreme principle. But always, it seems, there are doors which the master-key will not unlock. It is the conviction of intellectualism that this is because the maker of the key has missed them, and so left them out of account in fashioning it; while anti-intellectualism believes it is an illusion to see the situation as a case of locks to be turned by a key, at all. Entrance into possession of reality is otherwise conditioned, altogether; the procedure, in consequence, is radically different from this. But it is, I think, a true historical generalization that the success with which a philosopher, of whatever method, avoids a supreme principle of interpretation, corresponds exactly with the success with which he avoids being a philosopher at all. I suppose Omar Khayyam and