_Note_.--It may be thought that something should have been said about the revolt against authority and tradition which has styled itself variously 'Pragmatism' and 'Humanism', and also about the recent vogue of Bergsonianism. I may in part excuse my silence by the plea that both movements are, in my judgement, already spent forces. If I must say more than this, I would only remark about Pragmatism that I could speak of it with more confidence if its representatives themselves were more agreed as to its precise principles. At present I can discern little agreement among them about anything except that they all show a great impatience with the business of thinking things quietly and steadily out, and that none of them seems to appreciate the importance of the 'critical' problem. 'Pragmatism' thus seems to me less a definite way of thinking than a collective name for a series of 'guesses at truth'. Some of the guesses may be very lucky ones, but I, at least, can hardly take the claims of unmethodic guessing to be a philosophy very seriously. To 'give and receive argument' appears to me to be of the very essence of Philosophy. As for M. Bergson, I yield to no one in admiration for his brilliancy as a stylist and the happiness of many of his illustrations. But I have always found it difficult to grasp his central idea--if he really has one--because his whole doctrine has always seemed to me to be based upon a couple of elementary blunders which will be found in the opening chapter of his _Donnees Immediates de la Conscience_. We are there called on to reject the intellect in Philosophy on the grounds (1) that, being originally developed in the services of practical needs, it can at best tell us how to find our way about among the bodies around us, and is thus debarred from knowing more than the _outsides_ of things; (2) that its typical achievement is therefore geometry, and geometry, _because it can measure only straight lines_, necessarily misconceives the true character of 'real duration'. Now, as to the first point, I should have thought it obvious that the establishment of a _modus vivendi_ with one's fellows has always been as much of a practical need as the avoidance of stones and pit-falls, and the alleged conclusion about the defects of the intellect does not therefore seem to me to follow from M. Bergson's premisses, even if we had any reason, as I do not see that we have, to accept the premisses. And as to the second point, I would ask whether M. Bergson possesses a clock or a watch, and if he has, how he supposes time is measured on them? He seems to me to have forgotten the elementary fact that angles can be measured as well as straight lines. (I might add that he makes the further curious assumption that all geometry is metrical.) It may be that something would be left of the Bergsonian philosophy if one eliminated the consequences of these initial blunders, but I do not know what the remainder would be.