According to a dictum of Ravaisson, of which Mr Bergson makes use, the explanation must be sought in the body: “it is materiality which causes forgetfulness in us.”
There are, in fact, several planes of memory, from “pure recollection” not yet interpreted in distinct images down to the same recollection actualised in embryo sensations and movements begun; and we descend from the one to the other, from the life of simple “dream” to the life of practical “drama,” along “dynamic schemes.” The last of these planes is the body; a simple instrument of action, a bundle of motive habits, a group of mechanisms which mind has set up to act. How does it operate in the work of memory? The task of the brain is every moment to thrust back into unconsciousness all that part of our past which is not at the time useful. Minute study of facts shows that the brain is employed in choosing from the past, in diminishing, simplifying, and extracting from it all that can contribute to present experience; but it is not concerned to preserve it. In short, the brain can only explain absences, not presences. That is why the analysis of memory illustrates the reality of mind, and its independence relative to matter. Thus is determined the relation of soul to body, the penetrating point which it inserts and drives into the plane of action. “Mind borrows from matter perceptions from which it derives its nourishment, and gives them back to it in the form of movement, on which it has impressed its liberty.” (“Matter and Memory”, page 279.)
This, then, is how the cycle of research closes, by returning to the initial problem, the problem of perception. In the two opposing systems by which attempts have been made to solve it, Mr Bergson discovers a common postulate, resulting in a common impotence. From the idealistic point of view we do not succeed in explaining how a world is expressed externally, nor from the realistic point of view how an ego is expressed internally. And this double failure comes again from the underlying hypothesis, according to which the duality of the subject and object is conceived as primitive, radical, and static. Our duty is diametrically opposed. We have to consider this duality as gradually elaborated, and the problem concerning it must be first stated, and then solved as a function of time rather than of space. Our representation begins by being impersonal, and it is only later that it adopts our body as centre. We emerge gradually from universal reality, and our realising roots are always sunk in it. But this reality in itself is already consciousness, and the first moment of perception always puts us back into the initial state previous to the separation of the subject and object. It is by the work of life, and by action, that this separation is effected, created, accentuated, and fixed. And the common mistake of realism and idealism is to believe it effected in advance, whereas it is relatively second to perception.
Hence comes the absolute value of immediate intuition. For from what source could an irreducible relativity be produced in it? It would be absurd to make it depend on the constitution of our brain, since our brain itself, so far as it is a group of images, is only a part of the universe, presenting the same characteristics as the whole; and in so far as it is a group of mechanisms become habits, is only a result of the initial action of life, of original perceptive discernment. And, on the other hand, no less absurd would be the fear that the subject can ever be excluded or eliminated from its own knowledge, since, in reality, the subject, like the object, is in perception, not perception in the subject–at least not primitively. So that it is by a trick of speech that the theses of fundamental relativity take root: they vanish when we return to immediacy; that is to say, when we present problems as they ought to be presented, in terms which do not suppose any conceptual analysis yet accomplished.
VI. The Problem of Evolution: Life and Matter.
After the problem of consciousness Mr Bergson was bound to approach that of evolution, for psychological liberty is only truly conceivable if it begins in some measure with the first pulsation of corporal life. “Either sensation has no raison d’etre or it is a beginning of liberty”; that is what the “Essay on the Immediate Data” (Page 25.) already told us.
It was easy then to foresee the necessity of a general theoretical frame in which our duration might take a position which would render it more intelligible by removing its appearance of singular exception.
Thus in 1901, I wrote (“Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale”, May 1901) with regard to the new philosophy considered as a philosophy of becoming: “It has been prepared by contemporary evolution, which is investigates and perfects, sifting it from its ore of materialism, and turning it into genuine metaphysics. Is not this the philosophy suited to the century of history? Perhaps it indicates that a period has arrived in which mathematics, losing its role as the regulating science, is about to give place to biology.” This is the programme carried out, in what an original manner we are well aware, by the doctrine of Creative Evolution.
When we examine ancient knowledge, one characteristic of it is at once visible. It studies little but certain privileged moments of changing reality, certain stable forms, certain states of equilibrium. Ancient geometry, for example, is almost always limited to the static consideration of figures already traced. Modern science is quite different. Has not the greatest progress which it has realised in the mathematical order really been the invention of infinitesimal analysis; that is to say, an effort to substitute the process for the resultant, to follow the moving generation of phenomena and magnitudes in its continuity, to place oneself along becoming at any moment whatsoever, or rather, by degrees at all successive moments? This fundamental tendency, coupled with the development of biological research, was bound to incline it towards a doctrine of evolution; and hence the success of Spencer.
But time, which is everywhere in modern science the chief variable, is only a time-length, indefinitely and arbitrarily divisible. There is no genuine duration, nothing really tending to evolution in Spencer’s evolution: no more than there is in the periodic working of a turbine or in the stationary tremble of a diapason. Is not this what is emphasised by the perpetual employment of mechanical images and vulgar engineering metaphors, the least fault of which is to suppose a homogeneous time, and a motionless theatre of change which is at bottom only space? “In such a doctrine we still talk of time, we pronounce the word, but we hardly think of the thing; for time is here robbed of all effect.” (“Creative Evolution”, page 42.)
Whence comes a latent materialism, ready to grasp the chance of self- expression. Whence the automatic return to the dream of universal arithmetic, which Laplace, Du Bois-Reymond, and Huxley have expressed with such precision. (Ibid., page 41.)
In order to escape such consequences we must, with Mr Bergson, reintroduce real duration, that is to say, creative duration into evolution, we must conceive life according to the mode exhibited with regard to change in general. And it is science itself which calls us to this task. What does science actually tell us when we let it speak instead of prescribing to it answers which conform to our preferences? Vitality, at every point of its becoming, is a tangent to physico-chemical mechanism. But physico- chemistry does not reveal its secret any more than the straight line produces the curve.
Consider the development of an embryo. It summarises the history of species; ontogenesis, we are told, reproduces phylogenesis. And what do we observe then?
Now that a long sequence of centuries is contracted for us into a short period, and that our view is thus capable of a synthesis which before was too difficult, we see appearing the rhythmic organisation, the musical character, which the slowness of the transitions at first prevented us from seeing. In each state of the embryo there is something besides an instantaneous structure, something besides a conservative play of actions and reactions; there is a tendency, a direction, an effort, a creative activity. The stage traversed is less interesting than the traversing itself; this again is an act of generating impulse, rather than an effect of mechanical inertia. So must the case be, by analogy, with general evolution. We have there, as it were, a vision of biological duration in miniature; expansion and relaxation of its tension bring its homogeneity to notice, but at the same time, properly speaking, evolution disappears.
And further, Mr Bergson establishes by direct and positive arguments that life is genuine creation. A similar conclusion is presented as the envelope of his whole doctrine.
It is imposed first of all by immediate evidence, for we cannot deny that the history of life is revealed to us under the aspect of a progress and an ascent. And this impulse implies initiative and choice, constituting an effort which we are not authorised by the facts to pronounce fatalistic: “A simple glance at the fossil species shows us that life could have done without evolution, or could have evolved only within very restricted limits, had it chosen the far easier path open to it of becoming cramped in its primitive forms; certain Foraminifera have not varied since the silurian period; the Lingulae, looking unmoved upon the innumerable revolutions which have upheaved our planet, are today what they were in the most distant times of the palaeozoic era.” (“Creative Evolution”, page 111.) Moreover, if, in us, life is indisputably creation and liberty, how would it not, to some extent, be so in universal nature? “Whatever be the inmost essence of what is and what is being made, we are of it: (“Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale”, November 1911.) a conclusion by analogy is therefore legitimate. But above all, this conclusion is verified by its aptitude for solving problems of detail, and for taking account of observed facts, and in this respect I regret that I can only refer the reader to the whole body of admirable discussions and analyses drawn up by Mr Bergson with regard to “the plant and the animal,” or “the development of animal life.” (“Creative Evolution”, chapter ii.)
As regards matter, two main laws stand out from the whole of our science, relative to its nature and its phenomena: a law of conservation and a law of degradation. On the one hand, we have mechanism, repetition, inertia, constants, and invariants: the play of the material world, from the point of view of quantity, offers us the aspect of an immense transformation without gain or loss, a homogeneous transformation tending to maintain in itself an exact equivalence between the departure and arrival point. On the other hand, from the point of view of quality, we have something which is being used up, lowered, degraded, exhausted: energy expended, movement dissipated, constructions breaking up, weights falling, levels becoming equalised, and differences effaced. The travel of the material world appears then as a loss, a movement of fall and descent.
In addition, there is only a tendency to conservation, a tendency which is never realised except imperfectly; while, on the contrary, we notice that the failure of the vital impulse is most infallibly interpreted by the appearance of mechanism. Reality falling asleep or breaking up is the figure under which we finally observe matter: matter then is secondary.
Finally, according to Mr Bergson, matter is defined as a kind of descent; this descent as the interruption of an ascent; this ascent itself as growth; and thus a principle of creation is at the base of things.
Such a view seems obscure and disturbing to the mathematical understanding. It cannot accustom itself to the idea of a becoming which is more than a simple change of distribution, and more than a simple expression of latent wealth. When confronted with such an idea, it always harks back to its eternal question: How has something come out of nothing? The question is false; for the idea of nothing is only a pseudo-idea. Nothing is unthinkable, since to think nothing is necessarily to think or not to think something; and according to Mr Bergson’s formula, (Cf. the discussion on existence and non-existence in chapter iv. of “Creative Evolution”, pages 298-322.) “the representation of void is always a full representation.” When I say: “There is nothing,” it is not that I perceive a “nothing.” I never perceive except what is. But I have not perceived what I was seeking, what I was expecting, and I express my deception in the language of my desire. Or else I am speaking a language of construction, implying that I do not yet possess what I intend to make.
Let us abruptly forget these idols of practical action and language. The becoming of evolution will then appear to us in its true light, as phases of gradual maturation, rounded at intervals by crises of creative discovery. Continuity and discontinuity will thus admit possibility of reconciliation, the one as an aspect of ascent towards the future, the other as an aspect of retrospection after the event. And we shall see that the same key will in addition disclose to us the theory of knowledge.
VII. The Problem of Knowledge: Analysis and Intuition.
We know what importance has been attached since Kant to the problem of reason: it would seem sometimes that all future philosophy is a return to it; that it is no longer called to speak of anything else. Besides, what we understand by reason, in the broad sense, is, in the human mind, the power of light, the essential operation of which is defined as an act of directing synthesis, unifying the experience and rendering it by that very fact intelligible. Every movement of thought shows this power in exercise. To bring it everywhere to the front would be the proper task of philosophy; at least it is in this manner that we understand it today. But from what point of view and by what method do we ordinarily construct this theory of knowledge?
The spontaneous works of mind, perception, science, art, and morality are the departure-point of the inquiry and its initial matter. We do not ask ourselves whether but how they are possible, what they imply, and what they suppose; a regressive analysis attempts by critical reflection to discern in them their principles and requisites. The task, in short, is to reascend from production to producing activity, which we regard as sufficiently revealed by its natural products.
Philosophy, in consequence, is no longer anything but the science of problems already solved, the science which is confined to saying why knowledge is knowledge and action action, of such and such a kind, and such and such a quality. And in consequence also reason can no longer appear anything but an original datum postulated as a simple fact, as a complete system come down ready-made from heaven, at bottom a kind of non-temporal essence, definable without respect to duration, evolution, or history, of which all genesis and all progress are absurd. In vain do we persist in maintaining that it is originally an act; we always come round to the fact that the method followed compels us to consider this act only when once accomplished, and when once expressed in results. The inevitable consequence is that we imprison ourselves hopelessly in the affirmation of Kantian relativism.
Such a system can only be true as a partial and temporary truth: at the most, it is a moment of truth. “If we read the “Critique of Pure Reason” closely, we become aware that Kant has made the critique, not of reason in general, but of a reason fashioned to the habits and demands of Cartesian mechanism or Newtonian physics.” (H. Bergson, “Report of French Philosophical Society”, meeting, 2nd May 1901.) Moreover, he plainly studies only adult reason, its present state, a plane of thought, a sectional view of becoming. For Kant, men progress perhaps in reason, but reason itself has no duration: it is the fixed spot, the atmosphere of dead eternity in which every mental action is displayed. But this could not be the final and complete truth. Is it not a fact that human intelligence has been slowly constituted in the course of biological evolution? To know it, we have not so much to separate it statically from its works, as to replace it in its history.
Let us begin with life, since, in any case, whether we will or no, it is always in life and by life that we are.
Life is not a brute force, a blind mechanism, from which one could never conceive that thought would spring. From its first pulsation, life is consciousness, spiritual activity, creative effort tending towards liberty; that is, discernment already luminous, although the quality is at first faint and diffused. In other terms, life is at bottom of the psychological nature of a tendency. But “the essence of a tendency is to develop in sheaf-form, creating, by the mere fact of its growth, diverging directions between which its impulse will be divided.” (“Creative Evolution”, page 108.)
Along these different paths the complementary potentialities are produced and intensified, separating in the very process, their original interpretation being possible only in the state of birth. One of them ends in what we call intelligence. This latter therefore has become gradually detached from a less intense but fuller luminous condition, of which it has retained only certain characteristics to accentuate them.
We see that we must conceive the word mind–or, if we prefer the word, thought–as extending beyond intelligence. Pure intelligence, or the faculty of critical reflection and conceptual analysis, represents only one form of thought in its entirety, a function, a determination or particular adaptation, the part organised in view of practical action, the part consolidated as language. What are its characteristics? It understands only what is discontinuous, inert, and fixed, that which has neither change nor duration; it bathes in an atmosphere of spatiality; it uses mathematics continually; it feels at home only among “things,” and everything is reduced by it to solid atoms; it is naturally “materialist,” owing to the very fact that it naturally grasps “forms” only. What do we mean by that except that its object of election is the mechanism of matter? But it supposes life; it only remains living itself by continual loans from a vaster and fuller activity from which it is sprung. And this return to complementary powers is what we call intuition.
From this point of view it becomes easy to escape Kantian relativity. We are confronted by an intelligence which is doubtless no longer a faculty universally competent, but which, on the contrary, possesses in its own domain a greater power of penetration. It is arranged for action. Now action would not be able to move in irreality. Intelligence, then, makes us acquainted, if not with all reality, at least with some of it, namely that part by which reality is a possible object of mechanical or synthetic action.
More profoundly, intuition falls into analysis as life into matter: they are two aspects of the same movement. That is why, “provided we only consider the general form of physics, we can say that it touches the absolute.” (“Creative Evolution”, page 216.)
In other terms, language and mechanism are regulated by each other. This explains at once the success of mathematical science in the order of matter, and its non-success in the order of life.
For, when confronted with life, intelligence fails. “Being a deposit of the evolutive movement along its path, how could it be applied throughout the evolutive movement itself? We might as well claim that the part equals the whole, that the effect can absorb its cause into itself, or that the pebble left on the shore outlines the form of the wave which brought it.” (Preface to “Creative Evolution”.)
Is not that as good as saying that life is unknowable? Must we conclude that it is impossible to understand it?
“We should be forced to do so, if life had employed all the psychic potentialities it contains in making pure understandings; that is to say, in preparing mathematicians. But the line of evolution which ends in man is not the only one. By other divergent ways other forms of consciousness have developed, which have not been able to free themselves from external constraint, nor regain the victory over themselves as intelligence has done, but which, none the less for that, also express something immanent and essential in the movement of evolution.
“By bringing them into connection with one another, and making them afterwards amalgamate with intelligence, should we not thus obtain a consciousness co-extensive with life, and capable, by turning sharply round upon the vital thrust which it feels behind it, of obtaining a complete, though doubtless vanishing vision?” (“Creative Evolution”, Preface.) It is precisely in this that the act of philosophic intuition consists. “We shall be told that, even so, we do not get beyond our intelligence, since it is with our intelligence, and through our intelligence, that we observe all the other forms of consciousness. And we should be right in saying so, if we were pure intelligences, if there had not remained round our conceptual and logical thought a vague nebula, made of the very substance at the expense of which the luminous nucleus, which we call intelligence, has been formed. In it reside certain complementary powers of the understanding, of which we have only a confused feeling when we remain shut up in ourselves, but which will become illumined and distinct when they perceive themselves at work, so to speak, in the evolution of nature. They will thus learn what effort they have to make to become more intense, and to expand in the actual direction of life.” (“Creative Evolution”, Preface.) Does that mean abandonment to instinct, and descent with it into infra-consciousness again? By no means. On the contrary, our task is to bring instinct to enrich intelligence, to become free and illumined in it; and this ascent towards super-consciousness is possible in the flash of an intuitive act, as it is sometimes possible for the eye to perceive, as a pale and fugitive gleam, beyond what we properly term light, the ultra- violet rays of the spectrum.
Can we say of such a doctrine that it seeks to go, or that it goes “against intelligence”? Nothing authorises such an accusation, for limitation of a sphere is not misappreciation of every legitimate exercise. But intelligence is not the whole of thought, and its natural products do not completely exhaust or manifest our power of light.
Besides, that intelligence and reason are not things completed, for ever arrested in their inner structure, that they evolve and expand, is a fact: the place of discovery is precisely the residual fringe of which we were speaking above. In this respect, the history of thought would furnish examples in plenty. Intuitions at first obscure, and only anticipated, facts originally admitting no comparison, and as it were irrational, become instructive and luminous by the fruitful use made of them, and by the fertility which they manifest. In order to grasp the complex content of reality, the mind must do itself violence, must awaken its sleeping powers of revealing sympathy, must expand till it becomes adapted to what formerly shocked its habits so much as almost to seem contradictory to it. Such a task, moreover, is possible: we work out its differential every moment, and its complete whole appears in the sequence of centuries.
At bottom, the new theory of knowledge has nothing new in it except the demand that all the facts shall be taken into account: it renews duration in the thinking mind, and places itself at the point of view of creative invention, not only at that of subsequent demonstration. Hence its conception of experience, which, for it, is not simple information, fitted into pre-existing frames, but elaboration of the frames themselves.
Hence the problem of reason changes its aspect. A great mistake has been made in thinking that Mr Bergson’s doctrine misunderstands it: to deny it and to place it are two different things. In its inmost essence, reason is the demand for unity; that is why it is displayed as a faculty of synthesis, and why its essential act is presented as apperception of relation. It is unifying activity, not so much by a dialectic of harmonious construction as by a view of reciprocal implication. But all that, however shaded we suppose it, entails a previous analysis. Therefore if we place ourselves in a perspective of intuition, I mean, of complete perception, the demand for reason appears second only, without being deprived, however, of its true task: it is an echo and a recollection, an appeal and a promise of profound continuity, our original anticipation and our final hope, in the bosom of the elementary atomism which characterises the transitory region of language; and reason thus marks the zone of contact between intelligence and instinct.
Is thought only possible under the law of number? Does reality only become an object of knowledge as a system of distinct but regulated factors and moments? Do ideas exist only by their mutual relations, which first of all oppose them and afterwards force intelligence to move endlessly from one term to another? If such were the case, reason would certainly be first, as alone making an intelligible continuity out of discontinuous perception and restoring total unity to each temporary part by a synthetic dialectic. But all this really has meaning only after analysis has taken place. The demand for rational unity constitutes in the bosom of atomism something like a murmur of deep underlying continuity: it expresses in the very language of atomism, atomism’s basic irreality. There is no question of misunderstanding reason, but only of putting it in its proper place. In a perspective of complete intuition nothing would require to be unified. Reason would then be reabsorbed in perception. That is to say, its present task is to measure and correct in us the limits, gaps, and weaknesses of the perceptive faculty. In this respect not a man of us thinks of denying it its task. But we try with Mr Bergson to reduce this task to its true worth and genuine importance. For we are decidedly tired of hearing “Reason” invoked in solemn and moving tones, as if to write the venerable name with the largest of capital R’s were a magic solution of all problems.
Mind, in fact, sets out from unity rather than arrives at it; and the order which it appears to discover subsequently in an experience which at first is manifold and incoherent is only a refraction of the original unity through the prism of a spontaneous analysis. Mr Bergson admirably points out (“Creative Evolution”, pages 240-244 and 252-257.) that there are two types of order, geometric and vital, the one a static hierarchy of relations, the other a musical continuity of moments. These two types are opposed, as space to duration and matter to mind; but the negation of one coincides with the position of the other. It is therefore impossible to abolish both at once. The idea of disorder does not correspond to any genuine reality. It is essentially relative, and arises only when we do not meet the type of order which we were expecting; and then it expresses our deception in the language of our expectation, the absence of the expected order being equivalent, from the practical point of view, to the absence of all order. Regarded in itself, this notion is only a verbal entity, unduly taking form as the common basis of two antithetic types. How therefore do we come to speak of a “perceptible diversity” which mind has to regulate and unify? This is only true at most of the disjointed experience employed by common-sense. Reason, accepting this preliminary analysis, and proceeding to language, seeks to organise it according to the mathematical type. But it is the vital type which corresponds to absolute reality, at least when it is a question of the Whole; and only intuition has re-access to it, by soaring above synthetic dissociations.
VIII. Conclusion.
As my last word and closing formula I come back to the leitmotiv of my whole study: Mr Bergson’s philosophy is a philosophy of duration.
Let us regard it from this point of view, as contact with creative effort, if we wish to conceive aright the original notions which it proposes to us about liberty, life, and intuition.
Let us say once more that it appears as the enthronement of positive metaphysics: positive, that is to say, capable of continuous, regular, and collective progress, no longer forcibly divided into irreducible schools, “each of which retains its place, chooses its dice, and begins a never- ending match with the rest.” (“Introduction to Metaphysics” in the “Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale”, January 1903. Psychology, according to Mr Bergson, studies the human mind in so far as it operates in a useful manner to a practical end; metaphysics represent the effort of this same mind to free itself from the conditions of useful action, and regain possession of itself as pure creative energy. Now experience, the experience of the laboratory, allows us to measure with more and more accuracy the divergence between these two planes of life; hence the positive character of the new metaphysics.)
Let us next say that until the present moment it constitutes the only doctrine which is truly a metaphysic of experience, since no other, at bottom, explains why thought, in its work of discovery and verification, remains in subjection to a law of probation by durable action. We have now only to show how it evades certain criticisms which have been levelled against its tendencies.
Some have wanted to see in it a kind of atheist monism. Mr Bergson has answered this point himself. What he rejects, and what he is right in rejecting, are the doctrines which confine themselves to personifying the unity of nature or the unity of knowledge in God as motionless first cause. God would really be nothing, since he would do nothing. But he adds: “The considerations put forward in my “Essay on the Immediate Data” result in an illustration of the fact of liberty; those of “Matter and Memory” lead us, I hope, to put our finger on mental reality; those of “Creative Evolution” present creation as a fact: from all this we derive a clear idea of a free and creating God, producing matter and life at once, whose creative effort is continued, in a vital direction, by the evolution of species and the construction of human personalities.” (Letter to P. de Tonquedec, published in the “Studies” of 20th February 1912, and quoted here as found in the “Annals of Christian Philosophy”, March 1912.) How can we help finding in these words, according to the actual expression of the author, the most categorical refutation “of monism and pantheism in general”?
Now to go further and become more precise, Mr Bergson points out that we must “approach problems of quite a different kind, those of morality.” About these new problems the author of “Creative Evolution” has as yet said nothing; and he will say nothing, so long as his method does not lead him, on this point, to results as positive, after their manner, as those of his other works, because he does not consider that mere subjective opinions are in place in philosophy. He therefore denies nothing; he is waiting and searching, always in the same spirit: what more could we ask of him?
One thing only is possible today: to discern in the doctrine already existing the points of a moral and religious philosophy which present themselves in advance for ultimate insertion.
This is what we are permitted to attempt. But let us fully understand what is at issue. The question is only to know whether, as has been claimed, there is incompatibility between Mr Bergson’s point of view and the religious or moral point of view; whether the premisses laid down block the road to all future development in the direction before us; or whether, on the contrary, such a development is invited by some parts at least of the previous work. The question is not to find in this work the necessary and sufficient bases, the already formed and visible lineaments of what will one day complete it. To imagine that the religious and moral problem is bound to be regarded by Mr Bergson as arising when it is too late for revision, as admitting proposition and solution only as functions of a previous theoretical philosophy beyond which we should not go; that in his eyes the solution of this problem will be deduced from principles already laid down without any call for the introduction of new facts or new points of view, without any need to begin from a new intuition; that his view precludes all considerations of strictly spiritual life, of inner and profound action, regarding things in relation to God and in an eternal perspective: such a view would be illegitimate and unreasonable, first of all, because Mr Bergson has said nothing of the kind, and secondly, because it is contrary to all his tendencies.
After the “Essay on the Immediate Data” critics proceeded to confine him in an irreducible static dualism; after “Matter and Memory” they condemned him as failing for ever to explain the juxtaposition of the two points of view, utility and truth: why should we require that after “Creative Evolution” he should be forbidden to think anything new, or distinguish, for example, different orders of life?
The problems must be approached one after the other, and, in the solution of each of them, it is proper to introduce only the necessary elements. But each result is only “temporarily final.” Let us lose the strange habit of asking an author continually to do something other than he has done, or, in what he has done, to give us the whole of his thought.
Till now, Mr Bergson has always considered each new problem according to its specific and original nature, and, to solve it, he has always supplied a new effort of autonomous adaptation: why should it be otherwise for the future? I seek vainly for the decree forbidding him the right to study the problem of biological evolution in itself, and for the necessity which compels him to abide now by the premisses contained in his past work. (For Mr Bergson, the religious sentiment, as the sentiment of obligation, contains a basis of “immediate datum” rendering it indissoluble and irreducible.)
The only point which we have to examine is this: will the moral and religious question compel Mr Bergson to break with the conclusions of his previous studies, and can we not, on the contrary, foresee points of general agreement?
In the depths of ourselves we find liberty; in the depths of universal being we find a demand for creation. Since evolution is creative, each of its moments works for the production of an indeducible and transcendent future. This future must not be regarded as a simple development of the present, a simple expression of germs already given. Consequently we have no authority for saying that there is for ever only one order of life, only one plane of action, only one rhythm of duration, only one perspective of existence. And if disconnections and abrupt leaps are visible in the economy of the past–from matter to life, from the animal to man–we have no authority again for claiming that we cannot observe today something analogous in the very essence of human life, that the point of view of the flesh, and the point of view of the spirit, the point of view of reason, and the point of view of charity are a homogeneous extension of it. And apart from that, taking life in its first tendency, and in the general direction of its current, it is ascent, growth, upward effort, and a work of spiritualising and emancipating creation: by that we might define Good, for Good is a path rather than a thing.
But life may fail, halt, or travel downwards. “Life in general is mobility itself; the particular manifestations of life accept this mobility only with regret, and constantly fall behind. While it is always going forward, they would be glad to mark time. Evolution in general would take place as far as possible in a straight line; special evolution is a circular advance. Like dust-eddies raised by the passing wind, living bodies are self-pivoted and hung in the full breeze of life.” (“Creative Evolution”, page 139.) Each species, each individual, each function tends to take itself as its end; mechanism, habit, body, and letter, which are, strictly speaking, pure instruments, actually become principles of death. Thus it comes about that life is exhausted in efforts towards self-preservation, allows itself to be converted by matter into captive eddies, sometimes even abandons itself to the inertia of the weight which it ought to raise, and surrenders to the downward current which constitutes the essence of materiality: it is thus that Evil would be defined, as the direction of travel opposed to Good. Now, with man, thought, reflection, and clear consciousness appear. At the same time also properly moral qualifications appear: good becomes duty, evil becomes sin. At this precise moment, a new problem begins, demanding the soundings of a new intuition, yet connected at clear and visible points with previous problems.
This is the philosophy which some are pleased to say is closed by nature to all problems of a certain order, problems of reason or problems of morality. There is no doctrine, on the contrary, which is more open, and none which, in actual fact, lends itself better to further extension.
It is not my duty to state here what I believe can be extracted from it. Still less is it my duty to try to foresee what Mr Bergson’s conclusions will be. Let us confine ourselves to taking it in what it has expressly given us of itself. From this point of view, which is that of pure knowledge, I must again, as I conclude, emphasise its exceptional importance and its infinite reach. It is possible not to understand it. Such is frequently the case: thus it always has been in the past, each time that a truly new intuition has arisen among men; thus it will be until the inevitable day when disciples more respectful of the letter than the spirit will turn it, alas, into a new scholastic. What does it matter! The future is there; despite misconceptions, despite incomprehensions, there is henceforth the departure-point of all speculative philosophy; each day increases the number of minds which recognise it; and it is better not to dwell upon the proofs of several of those who are unable or unwilling to see it.
Index.
Absolute, the.
Adaptation, value of.
Analysis, conceptual, contrasted with intuition.
Appearances.
Art, and philosophy.
Atomism.
Automatism.
Automaton, of daily life.
Being, as becoming.
Brain, work of.
Causality, psychological.
Change.
Common-sense.
Concepts, analysis by and functions of, as symbols, creation of, as general frames, practical reach of, inferior to intuition, further discussed.
Consciousness.
Conservation, law of.
Constants, search for, represented.
Continuity, qualitative.
Criticism, of language.
Deduction, impotence of.
Degradation, law of.
Determinism, physical.
Discontinuity, apparent.
Disorder.
Du Bois-Reymond.
Duration, real, perpetually new, and thought, and time, pure.
Dynamic connection, schemes.
Ego, encrustations of the.
Eleatic dialectic.
Embryology, evidence of.
Evil, a reality.
Evolution, drama of, biological, value and meaning of, not indispensable, distinguished from development, as dynamic continuity, as activity, further discussed.
Existence, as change.
Experience.
Fact.
Freedom.
Free-will.
Genesis, law of.
Good, a reality, a path.
Habit, as obstacle.
Heredity.
Heterogeneity.
Homogeneity, absence of.
Huxley.
Images.
Immediacy.
Immediate, the.
Inert, the.
Instinct, is sympathy, contrasted with intelligence.
Intellectualism, distrusted.
Intelligence, product of evolution, and instinct, broad meaning of.
Intuition, as starting-point, intransmissible without language, aesthetic, triumph of, and duration, and analysis.
Intuitional effort, content.
Kant, his point of departure, conclusions of, escape from.
Knowledge, absolute, utilitarian nature of, new theory of.
Language, dangers of.
Laplace.
Law, concept of.
Liberty, personal importance of.
Life, tendencies of, is finality, is progress, further discussed.
Limit-concepts.
Materialism.
Mechanism, psychological, failure of.
Memory, problem of, perception complicated by, importance of, racial, planes of, memory of solids.
Metaphor, justification of.
Method, philosophical.
Mill, Stuart.
Motor-schemes, mechanisms.
Mysticism.
Non-morality.
Nothingness.
Number.
Ontogenesis.
Palaeontology, evidence of.
Parallelism.
Paralogism.
Perception, an art, affected by memory, further explained, fulfilment of guesswork, utilitarian signification, subjectivity of, pure and ordinary, further discussed, relation to matter, perception of immediacy.
Philosophy, duty of, function of.
Phylogenesis.
Planes, of consciousness.
Progress, and reality.
Quality, and inner world.
Quantity, and quality.
Rationalism.
Ravaisson.
Realism.
Reality, contact with, a flux, recognition of, absolute, elusive nature of, personal, essentially qualitative, pure, inner, contrasting views about, further discussed.
Reason.
Relation, between mind and matter.
Religion, its place in philosophy.
Renan.
Romanticism.
Schemes, dynamic.
Science, prisoner of symbolism, cult of, impotence of.
Sense, good, and common-sense.
Space.
Spencer, criticism of, success and weakness of.
Spiritualism.
Symbolism.
Sympathy.
Taine.
Thought, methods of common.
Time, required by Mr Bergson’s philosophy, in space, and common-sense, and duration.
Torpor.
Transformism, errors of.
Utility, as goal of perception.
Variation.
Zeno of Elea.
Zone, of feeling.