of facts, each of which, considered apart, gives us a direction in which the answer to the problem may be sought--a direction only. But it is a great thing to have even a direction, and still more to have several directions, for at the precise point where these directions converge might be found the solution we are seeking. What we possess meanwhile are lines of facts.[3]..." "But what is this new reality," writes Professor Eucken (p. 135), "and this whole to which the course of the movement trends? The more we reflect over the question the more strongly we feel that it is a direction rather than a conclusion that is offered to us in this matter...." There is another passage from M. Bergson the quotation of which in the present context is justified by its harmony with so much that Professor Eucken himself says with regard to man's ideal of life: "If, then, in every province, the triumph of life is expressed by creation, ought we not to think that the ultimate reason of human life is a creation which, in distinction from that of the artist or the man of science, can be pursued at every moment and by all men alike; I mean the creation of self by self, the continual enrichment of personality by elements which it does not draw from outside, but causes to spring forth from itself?"[4] Whether in the works of the late Professor James there is evidence of a lurking desire for an Absolute may be left undiscussed. M. Bergson certainly gives more than a hint of something like an Absolute. Of the absolutist (not rationalistic) tendency in the philosophy of our author there can be no doubt. Notwithstanding the antagonism to intellectualism shown in this philosophy, the influence of Hegel seems evident in its absolutist tendency. Dr. Ward has justly said that, "with Hegel, the Absolute seems at one time to be a perfect Self with no hint of aught beside or beyond its own completed self-consciousness, and at another not to be a self at all, but only the absolutely spiritual--art, religion, and philosophy--the over-individual ends, as they are sometimes called, which become realised in subjective spirits: not self-conscious Spirit, but simply the impersonal Spirit in all spirits."[5] How far a corresponding criticism is applicable to the ideas of the Independent Spiritual Life, and the spiritual life in humanity and the world, in the present philosophy, its readers must be left to decide.