The cure, however, is never found to be permanent; and latterly we see the not very accommodating philosophy of M. Bergson grasped at as yielding some kind of weapon wherewith to beat back the advance of the ever-encroaching assailant. Sooth to say, neither the analyses nor the syntheses of M. Bergson are in any way damaging to rationalism, or in any way rationally ancillary to supernaturalism. The anti-rationalists have clutched eagerly at his dictum that reason, considered as a light upon the universe, is a poor thing; and that there is something in us higher than intelligence. Apart from the disparaging form given (gratuitously) to the content of these propositions, there is nothing in them that has not been rationalistically put. That is to say, it is a rationalistic proposition that new truths are reached neither by deduction nor by induction, but by a leap of the judgment, by spontaneous guess or hypothesis. What then? To say or imply that the guessing faculty is something incomparably higher than intelligence is one of the inconsequences of M. Bergson, whose very acute analysis is apt to play upon special problems without controlling his own dialectic procedure. The sobering fact is that the false hypotheses are reached in the same way as the true, the wrong guesses in the same way as the right, the delusions in the same way as the discoveries. The very theses in science which M. Bergson contemns were reached by the way which he arbitrarily pronounces 'superior' to the way of reason. And the court of appeal that determines which is which, is after all just that intelligence or reason which M. Bergson, imitating one of the old methods he has ably helped to discredit, had verbally belittled in merely discriminating its function. No prerogative whatever can thereby be conferred upon either the guessing faculty or the guesser as such. The 'divining' faculty is not more divine than another: it is not really more wonderful to catch fish than to cook them; and the gift of establishing hypotheses is as rare as the gift of framing them. When all is said, the self-confidence of the transcendentalist avails for none but himself: as his own craving for countenance shows, his hypothesis must pass muster before reason if it is to persuade.