IN MEMORY OF HENRI BERGSON
21
tions, seemed to him essentially spiritual. We can imagine therefore /
what must have been the state of that vast and deep mind in the
presence of events that destroyed so many beautiful forecasts and so
swiftly and so violently changed the face of things. Was he able to
' retain his faith in the evolution of our species towards an ever higher
V
level? I do not know. For unaware that he had been in Paris since
September and not learning of his presence here until the moment
when I was told of
his
death, I had not been to visit him. But I do
not doubt that he wa'! cruelly stricken to the very depths of his being
by that total disaster the consequences of which we are now experi–
encing.
An
extremely elevated, pure and superior type of thinking man,
.
,/
perhaps one of the last to have thought exclusively, deeply and super-
latively! In a period when the world thinks and meditates less and
less; when civilization seems to reduce itself from day
to
day to
nothing more than the memories and traces we
preserv~
of its many–
sided richness and its free and exuberant intellectual production;
while miseries, anxieties and constraints of every kind suppress and
discourage the undertakings of the mind-in such a period Bergson
seems already to belong to a bygone age, and
his
name to be the last
great name
in
the history of the European intelligence.
