In 1911 the French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote an impassioned preface to a new edition of William James’s Pragmatism (1907). James, the distinguished American psychologist, had recently died, and Bergson paid homage, in his preface, to the mind with which he had felt such a strong affinity. He stressed the centrality of redundancy and superabundancy to James’s vision of reality: 'While our motto is Exactly what is necessary, nature’s motto is More than is necessary - too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything … Reality, as James sees it, is redundant and superabundant' (267).

Bergson then went on to draw an essentially literary analogy between traditional (pre-Jamesian) philosophy and the artifice of the stage play: