This criticism hangs on the acceptance of a moral ideal, and if we must have an ideal in the sense of a goal beckoning us from the future, then the criticism is well founded and Bergson is an ethical pessimist. But systematic ethics have been denied by other philosophers before Bergson, and most people of modern temperament are quite willing to let the whole question of _a priori_ ethics drop. They might not be willing to exchange it for the very unpoetic utilitarianism which has so often been offered in its place, but Bergson offers something more than that. If he be an ethical pessimist, he is not a religious pessimist. Of religion he has not yet spoken, except incidentally. Obviously so long as he uses the scientific method in his philosophy, proceeding from facts to their subordination in a picture whose values are given by intuitions, he cannot present a systematic philosophy. But in spite of the fact that pessimism--not only in ethics but in his view of the content of personality and its relations with the universe--is charged against him, Bergson means to be decidedly optimistic in his treatment of personality. In his article in _The Hibbert Journal_ for October, 1911, occur these remarkable words: If then, in every province, the triumph of life is expressed by creation, ought we not to think that the ultimate reason of human life is a creation which, in distinction from that of the artist or man of science, can be pursued at every moment and by all men alike? I mean the creation of self by self, the continual enrichment of personality by elements which it does not draw from outside but causes to spring forth from itself.... If we admit that with man consciousness has finally left the tunnel; that everywhere else consciousness has remained imprisoned; that every other species corresponds to the arrest of something which in man succeeded in overcoming resistance and in expanding almost freely, thus displaying itself in true personalities capable of remembering all and willing all and controlling their past and their future, we shall have no repugnance in admitting that in man, though perhaps in man alone, consciousness pursues its path beyond this earthly life. On the other suppositions of Bergson's philosophy this is by no means so far-fetched as are most theories of immortality. For the consciousness which cuts out the patterns of our spatial life here could easily cut out others in the beyond, like enough to our present ones to carry on the continuity of our active existence. The idea of survival, or an idea that may be applied to transmundane survival, is suggested by Laurence Binyon in a recent volume of poems entitled "Auguries." He writes: