reality, and upon the impossibility of our beginning in philosophy without assumptions of one kind or another, (δ) their refusal to make any ultimate separation[411] between the intellect and the will, between the highest thought and the highest emotion, (ε) their tendency to regard belief[412] rather than knowledge as our fundamental estimate of truth and reality. A fourth constructive result, however, of the philosophy of Bergson would be not the mere confirmation of any number of pragmatist and humanist tendencies, but their integration, and their transformation into the evidences and the manifestation of a new spiritual philosophy of life and of the universe generally. It is this possible _quasi_ integration and transformation of so many of the tendencies of Pragmatism and Voluntarism and of the Philosophy of Science of the day, that makes Bergson the greatest of all the pragmatists--although the term hardly occurs in his main writings, and although he breathes from first to last the air of an idealism[413] and a spiritualism that is above and beyond all the mere instrumentalism, and the mere empiricism and the ethical opportunism of Pragmatism. * * * * * The following are some of the difficulties and counter-considerations that stand in the way of the intelligibility and the supposed novelty of the philosophy of Bergson. (1) It is in some respects but a biological philosophy after all, a would-be philosophical interpretation of the “evolutionary process” which takes many things for granted and ignores many difficulties. Some of these things are the life-force itself, the _élan de vie_, the vital aspects that he sees in the forces of nature, the “eternal movement” of which he is always speaking as the only reality and as the very life of the universe, the whole “adaptation” philosophy that characterises his own teleology despite his attacks on “mechanism” and on “finalism,” and so on. One is tempted, indeed, to think that in much of all this he forgets his own doctrine of the hypothetical character of science and philosophy, and that, in his very anxiety to escape from mechanism and from rationalism, and Paleyism, he credits Nature with a contingency and a “freedom”[414] that corresponds in their way to the chaos, of which the Greeks thought as a necessary background to the cosmos. He seems, in other words, to deify into a kind of eternal “becoming” and a _quasi_ free and creative “duration,” his own (necessary) inability to grasp the system of things.