Neither Rousseauist nor Baconian carry into the realm of the human law the keen analysis that is necessary to distinguish between genuine insight and some mere phantasmagoria of the emotions. I am speaking especially, of course, of the interplay of Rousseauistic and Baconian elements that appear in certain recent philosophies like that of Bergson. According to Bergson one becomes spiritual by throwing overboard both thought and action, and this is a very convenient notion of spirituality for those who wish to devote both thought and action to utilitarian and material ends. It is hard to see in Bergson’s intuition of the creative flux and perception of real duration anything more than the latest form of Rousseau’s transcendental idling. To work with something approaching frenzy according to the natural law and to be idle according to the human law must be accounted a rather one-sided view of life. The price the man of to-day has paid for his increase in power is, it should seem, an appalling superficiality in dealing with the law of his own nature. What brings together Baconian and Rousseauist in spite of their surface differences is that they are both intent on the element of novelty. But if wonder is associated with the Many, wisdom is associated with the One. Wisdom and wonder are moving not in the same but in opposite directions. The nineteenth century may very well prove to have been the most wonderful and the least wise of centuries. The men of this period--and I am speaking of course of the main drift--were so busy being wonderful that they had no time, apparently, to be wise. Yet their extreme absorption in wonder and the manifoldness of things can scarcely be commended unless it can be shown that happiness also results from all this revelling in the element of change. The Rousseauist is not quite consistent on this point. At times he bids us boldly set our hearts on the transitory. _Aimez_, says Vigny, _ce que jamais on ne verra deux fois_. But the Rousseauist strikes perhaps a deeper chord when looking forth on a world of flux he utters the anguished exclamation of Leconte de Lisle: _Qu’est-ce que tout cela qui n’est pas éternel?_ Even as one swallow, says Aristotle, does not make a spring, so no short time is enough to determine whether a man deserves to be called happy. The weakness of the romantic pursuit of novelty and wonder and in general of the philosophy of the beautiful moment--whether the erotic moment[298] or the moment of cosmic revery--is that it does not reckon sufficiently with the something deep down in the human breast that craves the abiding. To pin one’s hope of happiness to the fact that “the world is so full of a number of things” is an appropriate sentiment for a “Child’s Garden of Verse.” For the adult to maintain an exclusive Bergsonian interest in “the perpetual gushing forth of novelties” would seem to betray an inability to mature. The effect on a mature observer of an age so entirely turned