With a little will one can do much if one places the will in
the right direction. For this force of will which is the essence of the
soul or personality has these exceptional characteristics, that its
intensity depends on its direction, and that its quality may become the
creator of quantity. [Footnote: See the lectures La Nature de l'Ame.]
The brain and the body in general are instruments of the soul. The brain
orients the mind toward action, it is the point of attachment between
the spirit and its material environment. It is like the point of a knife
to the blade--it enables it to penetrate into the realm of action or, to
give another of Bergson's metaphors, it is like the prow of the ship,
enabling the soul to penetrate the billows of reality. Yet, for all
that, it limits and confines the life of the spirit; it narrows vision
as do the blinkers which we put on horses. We must, however, abandon the
notion of any rigid and determined parallelism between soul and body and
accustom ourselves to the fact that the life of the mind is wider than
the limits of cerebral activity. And further, there is this to consider-
-"The more we become accustomed to this idea of a consciousness which
overflows the organ we call the brain, then the more natural and
probable we find the hypothesis that the soul survives the body. For
were the mental exactly modelled on the cerebral, we might have to admit
that consciousness must share the fate of the body and die with it."
[Footnote: New York Times, Sept.
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