the invisible breath that bears them is materialised before our eyes. We have this _sudden illumination before certain forms of maternal love_, so striking and in most animals so touching, observable even in the solicitude of the plant for its seed. This _love, in which some have seen the great mystery of life, may possibly deliver us life’s secret_. It shows us each generation leaning over the generation that shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the movement by which life is transmitted” (_Creative Evolution_, pp. 134–5; italics mine). It is surely needless to point out how much truer to human nature, truer therefore to an important part of reality, this life-philosophy is than the abstractionism of Professor Bosanquet in the preceding chapter. [410] This insistence is, I think, amply confirmed by the very fact of the _immediate_ contact with life and reality indicated in the quotation that is given in the preceding note upon the “motive-awakening,” or the “dynamic” character of the philosophy of Bergson. It is also confirmed in his manifest insistence upon the one fact that all philosophy must assume (and has for ever assumed) the fact of life, the fact of the life and thought of God that underlies all our life and all our thought. [411] This position of the pragmatists is certainly confirmed by Bergson’s entire doctrine of the brain and of the intellect--that their main service is, in the first instance, to interpret the “life” of things, its relation to our own will and to our practical activity. I have suggested, too, in this chapter that it is obviously a characteristic, or a consequence, of the philosophy of Bergson that our highest thought about ourselves and about the world should be relative to, and provocative, of our highest emotion.