The inadequacy of the scientific standpoint is a theme upon which Bergson never tires of insisting. Not only does he regard a metaphysic as necessary to complete this inadequacy, but he claims that our intellect is incapable of grasping reality in its flux and change. The true instrument of metaphysics is, according to him, intuition. Bergson’s doctrine of intuition does not, however, amount to a pure hostility to intellectual constructions. These are valuable, but they are not adequate to reality. Metaphysics cannot dispense with the natural sciences. These sciences work with concepts, abstractions, and so suffer by being intellectual moulds. We must not mistake them for the living, pulsing, throbbing reality of life itself which is far wider than any intellectual construction. By his insistence upon this point, in which he joins hands with several of his predecessors, Bergson claims to have got over the Kantian difficulties of admitting the value and possibility of a metaphysic. There is nothing irrational, he insists, in his doctrine of metaphysical intuition or “intellectual sympathy”; it is rather super-rational, akin to the spirit of the poet and the artist. The various sciences can supply data and, as such, are to be respected, for they have a relative value. What Bergson is eager to do is to combat their absolute value. His metaphysic is, however, no mere “philosophy of the sciences” in the sense of being a mere summary of the results of the sciences. His intuition is more than a mere generalisation of facts; it is an “integral experience,” a penetration of reality in its flux and change, a looking upon the world _sub specie durationis_. It is a vision, but it is one which we cannot obtain without intellectual or scientific labour. We can become better acquainted with reality only by the progressive development of science _and_ philosophy. We cannot live on the dry bread of the sciences alone, an intuitional philosophy is necessary for our spiritual welfare. Science promises us well-being or pleasure, but philosophy, claims Bergson, can give us joy, by its intuitions, its super-intellectual vision, that vital contact with life itself in its fulness, which is far grander and truer than all the abstractions of science. This is the culmination of much already indicated in Cournot, Renouvier, Ravaisson, Lachelier, and Boutroux, which Bergson presents in a manner quite unique, thus closing in our period the development of that criticism and hostility to the finality and absoluteness of the purely scientific attitude which is so marked a feature of both our second and third groups, the neo-critical thinkers and the neo-spiritualists. * * * * * * * * *