If we find the dead body of a man in the kitchen, and then find a knife sticking into his heart, the knife helps to explain the dead body. A bloody finger-print of the cook’s thumb helps further. If we then learn that the dead man had been the cook’s lover and that he had been flirting with the second-parlor maid, we have taken another step. But if we want to know how to prevent such incidents (or to bring them about, if that be our aim) we must go on and learn “Why We Behave Like Human Beings.” The very title of Mr. Dorsey’s book shows it to be a search for the ultimate. Does he wish us to understand that it is therefore unscientific moonshine? But let him proceed with his personifications. “Nature,” he says,[146] “can mean anything.” Whether he is referring to the word “nature” or to the sum of things commonly called “nature” I do not know. When we were talking of primates, the thing nature appeared to mean a great deal, since it could experiment with fingers and weigh nails in the balance against claws. Or was the primate an independent experimenter, and not a part of nature? Dorsey goes on by speaking of a certain development as being “an amazing tribute to the persistence of nature,” and of a time when “nature” began to branch out on “new lines.” Clearly nature here is something with will, force and purpose. He writes also of “the vertebrate idea,” as if it were an idea possessed by some backbone--in the days, too, when the only backbone in the world was a thread-like notochord, such as that of the amphioxus. So the idea was originally the notochord’s! But through all this verbal debris something seems to shine like a skeleton through the dark, which it is not difficult to recognize as the _élan vital_ of Bergson--that God which nothing developed out of nothing, which _inheres_ in things of an origin as tenuous as its own and is determined to go somewhere but is by no means certain where--nor can the imagination of man picture how. The motion pictures have accustomed us to demand a continuous stream of action, of facts or of what look like facts. Nothing but motion seems any longer to interest us. Probably we have fallen into the habit of ignoring all comment which may be made upon it. The danger is that the comment nevertheless may impress us, reaching our minds when our intelligence is off its guard, so that we end by mistaking comment for something else. We remember that we came upon it in company with facts; and are not conclusions, like men, to be judged by the company they keep? Unfortunately, facts cannot choose their company, and may be mustered in to screen the nakedness of any theory whatsoever. To discover the _non-sequitur_, the disharmony between the facts and their evil companions, requires mental effort--and against mental effort, also, the movie has somewhat prejudiced us.