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She was thinking that many things to which we attach great value and importance in this world are as easily swept away as the sand barriers raised against the sea by childish hands; that everywhere there must be flux and reflux, that the beach the children had so dug up would soon become smooth as a mirror, ready for other little ones to dig it over again, tempting them to work, and yet discouraging their industry.
The train doubled round an abrupt curve, in the sharpness of its swing almost throwing her off her feet, and when she had regained her balance and looked again the station was furlongs behind her, hidden from sight by intervening buildings. It was that smile of farewell which acted as a flux to carry into the recipient's mind a resolution already forming.
There is no lovely great flux of vital sympathy, no rich rejoicing of pride into isolation and independence. There is no reverence for great traditions of parenthood. No, there is substitute for everything life-substitute just as we have butter-substitute, and meat-substitute, and sugar-substitute, and leather-substitute, and silk-substitute, so we have life-substitute.
I shall say to you, as, MONSIEUR, Louis XIV.'s brother, said to his wife, to whom he was in the habit of showing what he had written and asking her to decipher it: See into my heart and mind, dear friend, disperse the mists, quiet the worries, and the flux and reflux of will which this affair stirs up in me. My poor Louise was mistaken, was she not?
If the flux be phlegmatic, it will last long and be hard to cure, but if sickness or diarrhoea supervene, it carries off the humour and cures the disease. If it is abundant it does not last so long, but it is more dangerous, for it will cause a cleft in the neck of the womb, and sometimes also an excoriation of the matrix; if melancholy, it must be dangerous and obstinate.
Of course, there is a certain amount of truth in this view; at the same time, it is lamentably insufficient. The fact is that in the vast flux of destiny which is involved in such a war as the present, and which no argument can really adequately represent, we are fain to snatch at some neat phrase, however superficial, by way of explanation.
This is the sort of observation that the Indian sages made long ago; it is what renders their philosophy, for all its practical impotence, such an irrefragable record of experience, such a superior, definitive perception of the flux. Beside it, our progresses of two centuries and our philosophies of history, embracing one-quarter of the earth for three thousand years, seem puerile vistas indeed.
The operation is simple: first the flux, then the reflux; a wave advances, a billow returns. In such cases the question of life and death is balanced thus: if the wave carries the vessel on the rock, she breaks on it and is lost; if the billow retires before the ship has touched, she is carried back, she is saved.
But an Argonautic expedition, a Trojan siege, a Jewish exodus, Nomadic invasions, and the names of Hanno, Cæsar, William the Conqueror, and Columbus, suggest an explanation. It is the flux of human life which must account for the flowing outline of the earth's geography. As with the terrestrial, so with the celestial. The heavens change by a subtiler movement than the precession of the equinoxes.
Matter is a flux rather than a thing, but its flow is in the opposite direction to that of Spirit. The flow of Spirit shows itself in the creativeness of the evolutionary process; Matter is the inverse movement towards stability. Bergson adheres to the view of Spirit as fundamental, while Matter, he says, is due to a lessening of the tension of the spiritual force which is the initial elan.
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