As for the latter contradiction, we may note in his favour that he talks, at least once or twice, of “God” as “unceasing life”[422] and “active freedom,” and I am inclined to take this master thought as possibly a kind of foundation for his rich and suggestive philosophy of life and reality. But there is in his writings nothing like the thorough-going attempt that we find in the philosophy of Aristotle[423] to ground the motion and the life of the world in God as its final cause and its ultimate explanation. Equally little is there in Bergson a thorough-going attempt to work out the Idealism[424] upon which his whole system reposes--his initial conception of objects as “images,” or “ideas” for a consciousness, or for the life-force, or for the different “centres of activity” with which he peoples the worlds. Fourthly, there is the drawback from the point of view of social philosophy about the thought of Bergson to which we have already made reference--that it lacks somehow the ethical and the social idealism that would warrant us in thinking of it as a worthy rival or substitute for the philosophy of history of the great idealists of the past and the present. It is necessary to speak here with the utmost caution if we would avoid doing injustice[425] to Bergson. We cannot mean, for example, that he does not do justice[426] to the social factor in human development of which we have heard so much, perhaps too much, from the sociologists.[427] We might mean, however, and we do in a sense mean that he has not made as much as he might have done of this factor, by developing for the thought of to-day the reality of that world of “spiritual communion” and “inter-subjective intercourse” of which we have spoken more than once. Then we might also contend that Bergson has not as yet, in his philosophy of human life, taken much cognizance of the deeper[428] experiences of life, of the specifically ethical and religious feelings and thoughts of men. With the pragmatists he is unduly optimistic about the free expansive development of the individual. Against this objection it may be replied, that he has so thoroughly assimilated into the very texture of his thought and feeling some of the finest things in the spiritualism and the idealism of the reflective thought of France[429] that we would not, if we could, wish the germinal or fructifying elements in his system to be different from what they are. His “social” message is perhaps after all the best thing that it can be--the need of the inward spiritualization of the life and thought of the individual.