The complexity of Bergson's speculations with regard to memory and the "élan vital," with regard above all to the "true time," has done much to distract popular attention away from his real attitude towards the soul. But Bergson's attitude towards the existence of a substantial soul-monad is consistently and inevitably hostile. It could not be anything else as long as the original personal "fling" into life which gives each one of us his peculiar angle of vision remained with him a question of one unified _spirit_--"a continuum of eternal shooting-forth"--which functioned through the brain and through all personal life and perpetually created a new unforeseen universe. In the flux of this one universal "spirit," whereof "duration," in the mysterious Bergsonian sense, is the functional activity, there can obviously be no place for an actual substantial soul. "The consciousness we have of our own self in its continual flux introduces us to the interior of a reality on the model of which we must represent other realities. All reality, therefore, is a tendency, if we agree to mean by tendency an incipient change in any direction." And when we enquire as to the nature of this "continual flux" of which the positive and integral thing we have come to call the soul is but a ripple, or swirling whirlpool of centripetal ripples, the answer which Bergson gives is definite enough. "We approach a duration which _strains_, contracts, and intensifies itself more and more; at the limit would be eternity. No longer conceptual eternity, which is an eternity of death, but an eternity of life. A living, and therefore still moving eternity in which our own particular duration would be included, as the vibrations are in light; an eternity which would be the concentration of all duration, as materiality is its dispersion. Between these two extreme limits intuition moves, and this movement is the very essence of metaphysics." Thus according to Bergson the essential secret of life is to be found in some peculiar movement of what he calls spirit; a movement which takes place in some unutterable medium, or upon some indescribable plane, the name of which is "pure time" or "duration." And listening to all this we cannot resist a sigh of dismay. For here, in these vague de-humanized terms--"tendency," "flux," "eternity," "vibration," "duration," "dispersion"--we are once more, only with a different set of concepts, following the old metaphysical method, that very method which Bergson himself sets out to confine to its inferior place. "Tendency" or "flux" or "duration" is just as much a metaphysical concept as "being" or "not being" or "becoming."