Bergson's doctrine has been seized upon by apologists for every creed and for every iconoclasm. Bergson has been accused of every intellectual crime, from being the intellectual father of syndicalism to being the last rich relative of struggling obscurantism. The protestant theologians talk glibly of Bergson's idea of God, and use him as a stick with which to beat the hated materialist. Bergson himself would never apply his philosophy to the uses of the syndicalists. The argument of the syndicalists themselves is simply an ingenious parody of the Bergsonian philosophy, as it is so far developed. As mechanism and the mathematical order, they say, do not represent life, we cannot by the means of natural and sociological sciences predict in advance what life will do, and what forms it will take. We cannot base revolutionary action, for instance, along Marxian lines, because the whole Marxist philosophy rests upon the assumption that life is the slave of material forces--chemical firstly, and economical in the human drama--and that it will therefore follow along predetermined lines. If life is an "elan vital," breaking its path as it goes, and only able to think in terms of the past, then revolutionary activity must cut loose from the reactionary intellect, and trust itself to its instincts; fight its way to that freedom which is impossible in the mathematically determined intellectual realm, and which is equally impossible of achievement by mere intellectual foresight. So the syndicalist in the name of Bergson cuts loose from all theories of the future he wishes to bring in, preaches the "general strike" for its stimulating effect on the emotions of the proletarian constituents of his social "elan vital"--quite careless of whether it would ever be a practical success or not--and deliberately cuts loose from all forms of "bourgeoise culture."