Alas, I
was insensible to his thrillingness. His gaiety did not make me gay.
His crystal clarity confused me dreadfully. I could make nothing of
William James. And now, in the fullness of time, I have been floored
by M. Bergson.
It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of
thought as they pass into oblivion. It makes me wonder whether I am,
after all, an absolute fool. Yet surely I am not that. Tell me of a
man or a woman, a place or an event, real or fictitious: surely you
will find me a fairly intelligent listener. Any such narrative will
present to me some image, and will stir me to not altogether fatuous
thoughts. Come to me in some grievous difficulty: I will talk to you
like a father, even like a lawyer. I'll be hanged if I haven't a
certain mellow wisdom. But if you are by way of weaving theories as to
the nature of things in general, and if you want to try those theories
on some one who will luminously confirm them or powerfully rend them,
I must, with a hang-dog air, warn you that I am not your man. I suffer
from a strong suspicion that things in general cannot be accounted for
through any formula or set of formulae, and that any one philosophy,
howsoever new, is no better than another. That is in itself a sort of
philosophy, and I suspect it accordingly; but it has for me the merit
of being the only one I can make head or tail of.
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