[384] He even says in the Abstract of his first lecture upon the “Central Experiences,” that Lord Gifford’s desire that his lecturers should “try to communicate” a “grave experience” is the demand that “introduces us to the double task of philosophy. It [philosophy] needs the best of logic, but also the best of life, and neither can be had in philosophy without the other.” [385] _Treatise upon Human Nature_, sect. vii. (Green and Grose, i. 547). [386] I had originally the idea of calling this chapter by the more modest title of a note upon “pragmatist elements” in the teaching of Bergson. I have allowed myself to call it a chapter partly for the sake of symmetry, and partly because the footnotes and the criticism (of his Idealism) have carried it beyond the limits of a note. I find, too, (as I have partly indicated in my preface) in the teaching of Bergson so many things that make up almost the very body of truth and fact upon which Pragmatism, and Humanism, and Idealism all repose (or ought to repose) that I quote them directly in my footnotes. They indicate to me the scope and the territory of my entire subject. And they are a confirmation to me of much that I had myself arrived at before I read a line of Bergson. [387] “Our intelligence, as it leaves the hands of nature, has for its chief object the unorganised solid” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 162); “of immobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea” (_ibid._ 164). “The aspect of life that is accessible to the intellect--as indeed to our senses, of which our intellect is the extension--is that which offers a hold to action” (_ibid._ 170). “We see that the intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigour, the stiffness, and the brutality of the instrument _not designed_ for such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us much in this matter. When we think of the cardinal, urgent, and constant need we have to preserve our bodies and to raise our souls, of the special facilities given to each of us in this field to experiment continually on ourselves and on others, of the palpable injury by which the wrongness of a medical or a pedagogical practice is made manifest and punished at once, we are amazed at the stupidity and especially at the persistence of errors. We may easily find their origin in the natural obstinacy _with which we treat the living like the lifeless_, and think all reality, however fluid, under the form of the sharply-defined solid. _We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. The intellect is characterised by a natural inability to comprehend life_” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 174). (Italics mine.)