{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_1347/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_1347","id":"gutenberg_1347","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1347","summary":null,"tags":["Bergson, Henri, 1859-1941","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Philosophy"],"text":"Produced by Sue Asscher\n\n\n\n\n\nA NEW PHILOSOPHY: HENRI BERGSON\n\nby Edouard le Roy\n\nTranslated from the French by Vincent Benson\n\n\n\n\nPreface\n\nThis little book is due to two articles published under the same title\nin the \"Revue des Deux Mondes\", 1st and 15th February 1912.\n\nTheir object was to present Mr Bergson's philosophy to the public at\nlarge, giving as short a sketch as possible, and describing, without too\nminute details, the general trend of his movement. These articles I\nhave here reprinted intact. But I have added, in the form of continuous\nnotes, some additional explanations on points which did not come within\nthe scope of investigation in the original sketch.\n\nI need hardly add that my work, though thus far complete, does not in\nany way claim to be a profound critical study. Indeed, such a study,\ndealing with a thinker who has not yet said his last word, would today\nbe premature. I have simply aimed at writing an introduction which will\nmake it easier to read and understand Mr Bergson's works, and serve as a\npreliminary guide to those who desire initiation in the new philosophy.\n\nI have therefore firmly waived all the paraphernalia of technical\ndiscussions, and have made no comparisons, learned or otherwise, between\nMr Bergson's teaching and that of older philosophies.\n\nI can conceive no better method of misunderstanding the point at\nissue, I mean the simple unity of productive intuition, than that of\npigeon-holing names of systems, collecting instances of resemblance,\nmaking up analogies, and specifying ingredients. An original philosophy\nis not meant to be studied as a mosaic which takes to pieces, a compound\nwhich analyses, or a body which dissects. On the contrary, it is by\nconsidering it as a living act, not as a rather clever discourse, by\nexamining the peculiar excellence of its soul rather than the formation\nof its body, that the inquirer will succeed in understanding it.\nProperly speaking, I have only applied to Mr Bergson the method which\nhe himself justifiably prescribes in a recent article (\"Revue de\nMetaphysique et de Morale\", November 1911), the only method, in fact,\nwhich is in all senses of the word fully \"exact.\" I shall none the less\nbe glad if these brief pages can be of any interest to professional\nphilosophers, and have endeavoured, as far as possible, to allow them\nto trace, under the concise formulae employed, the scheme which I have\nrefused to develop.\n\nIt has become evident to me that even today the interpretation of Mr\nBergson's position is in many cases full of faults, which it would\nundoubtedly be worth while to assist in removing. I may or may not have\nsucceeded in my attempt, but such, at any rate, is the precise end I had\nin view.\n\nIn conclusion, I may say that I have not had the honour of being Mr\nBergson's pupil; and, at the time when I became acquainted with his\noutlook, my own direct reflection on science and life had already\nproduced in me similar trains of thought. I found in his work\nthe striking realisation of a presentiment and a desire. This\n\"correspondence,\" which I have not exaggerated, proved at once a help\nand a hindrance to me in entering into the exact comprehension of so\nprofoundly original a doctrine. The reader will thus understand that I\nthink it in place to quote my authority to him in the following lines\nwhich Mr Bergson kindly wrote me after the publication of the articles\nreproduced in this volume: \"Underneath and beyond the method you have\ncaught the intention and the spirit...Your study could not be more\nconscientious or true to the original. As it advances, condensation\nincreases in a marked degree: the reader becomes aware that the\nexplanation is undergoing a progressive involution similar to the\ninvolution by which we determine the reality of Time. To produce this\nfeeling, much more has been necessary than a close study of my works: it\nhas required deep sympathy of thought, the power, in fact, of rethinking\nthe subject in a personal and original manner. Nowhere is this sympathy\nmore in evidence than in your concluding pages, where in a few words you\npoint out the possibilities of further developments of the doctrine. In\nthis direction I should myself say exactly what you have said.\"\n\nParis, 28th March 1912.\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\nPreface\n\n\nGENERAL VIEW\n\n\nI. Method.\n\nScope of Henri Bergson's Philosophy. Material and Authorities.\nInvestigation of Common-sense. Value of Science. Perception Discussed.\nPractical Life and Reality. Concepts and Symbolism. Intuition and\nAnalysis. Use of Metaphor. The Philosopher's Task.\n\n\nII. Teaching.\n\nThe Ego. Space and Number. Parallelism. Henri Bergson's View of Mind\nand Matter. Qualitative Continuity. Memory. Real Duration Heterogeneous.\nLiberty and Determinism. Meaning of Reality. Evolution and Automatism.\nTriumph of Man. The Vital Impulse. Objections Refuted. Place of Religion\nin the New Philosophy.\n\n\nADDITIONAL EXPLANATIONS\n\nI. Henri Bergson's Work and the General Directions of Contemporary\nThought.\n\nMathematics and Philosophy. The Inert and the Living. Realism and\nPositivism. Henri Bergson and the Intuition of Duration.\n\n\nII. Immediacy.\n\nNecessity of Criticism. Utilitarianism of Common-sense. Perception of\nImmediacy.\n\n\nIII. Theory of Perception.\n\nPure and Ordinary Perception. Kant's Position. Relation of Perception to\nMatter. Complete Experience.\n\n\nIV. Critique of Language.\n\nDynamic Schemes. Dangers of Language. The Eleatic Dialectic. Scientific\nThought and the Task of Intuition. Discussion of Change.\n\n\nV. The Problem of Consciousness: Duration and Liberty.\n\nStates as Phases in Duration. The Scientific View of Time. Duration\nand Freedom. Liberty and Determinism in the Light of Henri Bergson's\nPhilosophy.\n\n\nVI. The Problem of Evolution: Life and Matter.\n\nEvolution and Creation. Laws of Conservation and Degradation. Quantity\nand Quality. Secondary Value of Matter.\n\n\nVII. The Problem of Knowledge: Analysis and Intuition.\n\nDifficulties of Kant's Position. Insufficiency of Intelligence. Henri\nBergson and the Problem of Reason. Geometric and Vital Types of Order.\n\n\nVIII. Conclusion.\n\nMoral and Religious Problems. Henri Bergson's Position.\n\n\n\n\nA NEW PHILOSOPHY\n\n\n\n\nGENERAL VIEW\n\n\n\n\nI. Method.\n\nThere is a thinker whose name is today on everybody's lips, who is\ndeemed by acknowledged philosophers worthy of comparison with the\ngreatest, and who, with his pen as well as his brain, has overleapt all\ntechnical obstacles, and won himself a reading both outside and inside\nthe schools. Beyond any doubt, and by common consent, Mr Henri Bergson's\nwork will appear to future eyes among the most characteristic, fertile,\nand glorious of our era. It marks a never-to-be-forgotten date in\nhistory; it opens up a phase of metaphysical thought; it lays down a\nprinciple of development the limits of which are indeterminable; and it\nis after cool consideration, with full consciousness of the exact value\nof words, that we are able to pronounce the revolution which it effects\nequal in importance to that effected by Kant, or even by Socrates.\n\nEverybody, indeed, has become aware of this more or less clearly. Else\nhow are we to explain, except through such recognition, the sudden\nstriking spread of this new philosophy which, by its learned rigorism,\nprecluded the likelihood of so rapid a triumph?\n\nTwenty years have sufficed to make its results felt far beyond\ntraditional limits: and now its influence is alive and working from one\npole of thought to the other; and the active leaven contained in it can\nbe seen already extending to the most varied and distant spheres:\nin social and political spheres, where from opposite points, and not\nwithout certain abuses, an attempt is already being made to wrench it\nin contrary directions; in the sphere of religious speculation, where\nit has been more legitimately summoned to a distinguished, illuminative,\nand beneficent career; in the sphere of pure science, where, despite old\nseparatist prejudices, the ideas sown are pushing up here and there;\nand lastly, in the sphere of art, where there are indications that it\nis likely to help certain presentiments, which have till now remained\nobscure, to become conscious of themselves. The moment is favourable to\na study of Mr Bergson's philosophy; but in the face of so many attempted\nmethods of employment, some of them a trifle premature, the point of\nparamount importance, applying Mr Bergson's own method to himself, is\nto study his philosophy in itself, for itself, in its profound trend and\nits authenticated action, without claiming to enlist it in the ranks of\nany cause whatsoever.\n\n\nI.\n\nMr Bergson's readers will undergo at almost every page they read an\nintense and singular experience. The curtain drawn between ourselves\nand reality, enveloping everything including ourselves in its illusive\nfolds, seems of a sudden to fall, dissipated by enchantment, and display\nto the mind depths of light till then undreamt, in which reality itself,\ncontemplated face to face for the first time, stands fully revealed. The\nrevelation is overpowering, and once vouchsafed will never afterwards be\nforgotten.\n\nNothing can convey to the reader the effects of this direct and intimate\nmental vision. Everything which he thought he knew already finds new\nbirth and vigour in the clear light of morning: on all hands, in the\nglow of dawn, new intuitions spring up and open out; we feel them big\nwith infinite consequences, heavy and saturated with life. Each of them\nis no sooner blown than it appears fertile for ever. And yet there is\nnothing paradoxical or disturbing in the novelty. It is a reply to our\nexpectation, an answer to some dim hope. So vivid is the impression of\ntruth, that afterwards we are even ready to believe we recognise the\nrevelation as if we had always darkly anticipated it in some mysterious\ntwilight at the back of consciousness.\n\nAfterwards, no doubt, in certain cases, incertitude reappears, sometimes\neven decided objections. The reader, who at first was under a magic\nspell, corrects his thought, or at least hesitates. What he has seen\nis still at bottom so new, so unexpected, so far removed from familiar\nconceptions. For this surging wave of thought our mind contains none of\nthose ready-cut channels which render comprehension easy. But whether,\nin the long run, we each of us give or refuse complete or partial\nadhesion, all of us, at least, have received a regenerating shock, an\ninternal upheaval not readily silenced: the network of our intellectual\nhabits is broken; henceforth a new leaven works and ferments in us; we\nshall no longer think as we used to think; and be we pupils or critics,\nwe cannot mistake the fact that we have here a principle of integral\nrenewal for ancient philosophy and its old and timeworn problems.\n\nIt is obviously impossible to sketch in brief all the aspects and all\nthe wealth of so original a work. Still less shall I be able to answer\nhere the many questions which arise. I must decide to pass rapidly\nover the technical detail of clear, closely-argued, and penetrating\ndiscussions; over the scope and exactness of the evidence borrowed from\nthe most diverse positive sciences; over the marvellous dexterity of the\npsychological analysis; over the magic of a style which can call up\nwhat words cannot express. The solidity of the construction will not be\nevidenced in these pages, nor its austere and subtle beauty. But what\nI do at all costs wish to bring out, in shorter form, in this new\nphilosophy, is its directing idea and general movement.\n\nIn such an undertaking, where the end is to understand rather than to\njudge, criticism ought to take second place. It is more profitable to\nattempt to feel oneself into the heart of the teaching, to relive its\ngenesis, to perceive the principle of organic unity, to come at the\nmainspring. Let our reading be a course of meditation which we live.\nThe only true homage we can render to the masters of thought consists in\nourselves thinking, as far as we can do so, in their train, under their\ninspiration, and along the paths which they have opened up.\n\nIn the case before us this road is landmarked by several books which it\nwill be sufficient to study one after the other, and take successively\nas the text of our reflections.\n\nIn 1889 Mr Bergson made his appearance with an \"Essay on the Immediate\nData of Consciousness\".\n\nThis was his doctor's thesis. Taking up his position inside the human\npersonality, in its inmost mind, he endeavoured to lay hold of the\ndepths of life and free action in their commonly overlooked and fugitive\noriginality.\n\nSome years later, in 1896, passing this time to the externals of\nconsciousness, the contact surface between things and the ego, he\npublished \"Matter and Memory\", a masterly study of perception and\nrecollection, which he himself put forward as an inquiry into the\nrelation between body and mind. In 1907 he followed with \"Creative\nEvolution\", in which the new metaphysic was outlined in its full\nbreadth, and developed with a wealth of suggestion and perspective\nopening upon the distances of infinity; universal evolution, the meaning\nof life, the nature of mind and matter, of intelligence and instinct,\nwere the great problems here treated, ending in a general critique of\nknowledge and a completely original definition of philosophy.\n\nThese will be our guides which we shall carefully follow, step by step.\nIt is not, I must confess, without some apprehension that I undertake\nthe task of summing up so much research, and of condensing into a few\npages so many and such new conclusions.\n\nMr Bergson excels, even on points of least significance, in producing\nthe feeling of unfathomed depths and infinite levels. Never has anyone\nbetter understood how to fulfil the philosopher's first task, in\npointing out the hidden mystery in everything. With him we see all at\nonce the concrete thickness and inexhaustible extension of the most\nfamiliar reality, which has always been before our eyes, where before we\nwere aware only of the external film.\n\nDo not imagine that this is simply a poetical delusion. We must be\ngrateful if the philosopher uses exquisite language and writes in a\nstyle which abounds in living images. These are rare qualities. But\nlet us avoid being duped by a show of printed matter: these unannotated\npages are supported by positive science submitted to the most minute\ninspection. One day, in 1901, at the French Philosophical Society, Mr\nBergson related the genesis of \"Matter and Memory\".\n\n\"Twelve years or so before its appearance, I had set myself the\nfollowing problem: 'What would be the teaching of the physiology and\npathology of today upon the ancient question of the connection between\nphysical and moral to an unprejudiced mind, determined to forget all\nspeculation in which it has indulged on this point, determined also to\nneglect, in the enunciations of philosophers, all that is not pure and\nsimple statement of fact?' I set myself to solve the problem, and I\nvery soon perceived that the question was susceptible of a provisional\nsolution, and even of precise formulation, only if restricted to the\nproblem of memory. In memory itself I was forced to determine bounds\nwhich I had afterwards to narrow considerably. After confining myself to\nthe recollection of words I saw that the problem, as stated, was\nstill too broad, and that, to put the question in its most precise and\ninteresting form, I should have to substitute the recollection of the\nsound of words. The literature on aphasia is enormous. I took five\nyears to sift it. And I arrived at this conclusion, that between the\npsychological fact and its corresponding basis in the brain there must\nbe a relation which answers to none of the ready-made concepts furnished\nus by philosophy.\"\n\nCertain characteristics of Mr Bergson's manner will be remarked\nthroughout: his provisional effort of forgetfulness to recreate a\nnew and untrammelled mind; his mixture of positive inquiry and bold\ninvention; his stupendous reading; his vast pioneer work carried on with\nindefatigable patience; his constant correction by criticism, informed\nof the minutest details and swift to follow up each of them at every\nturn. With a problem which would at first have seemed secondary and\nincomplete, but which reappears as the subject deepens and is thereby\nmetamorphosed, he connects his entire philosophy; and so well does he\nblend the whole and breathe upon it the breath of life that the final\nstatement leaves the reader with an impression of sovereign ease.\n\nExamples will be necessary to enable us, even to a feeble extent, to\nunderstand this proceeding better. But before we come to examples, a\npreliminary question requires examination. In the preface to his\nfirst \"Essay\" Mr Bergson defined the principle of a method which was\nafterwards to reappear in its identity throughout his various works; and\nwe must recall the terms he employed.\n\n\"We are forced to express ourselves in words, and we think, most often,\nin space. To put it another way, language compels us to establish\nbetween our ideas the same clear and precise distinctions, and the same\nbreak in continuity, as between material objects. This assimilation\nis useful in practical life and necessary in most sciences. But we\nare right in asking whether the insuperable difficulties of certain\nphilosophical problems do not arise from the fact that we persist in\nplacing non-spatial phenomena next one another in space, and whether,\nif we did away with the vulgar illustrations round which we dispute, we\nshould not sometimes put an end to the dispute.\"\n\nThat is to say, it is stated to be the philosopher's duty from the\noutset to renounce the usual forms of analytic and synthetic thought,\nand to achieve a direct intuitional effort which shall put him in\nimmediate contact with reality. Without doubt it is this question of\nmethod which demands our first attention. It is the leading question.\nMr Bergson himself presents his works as \"essays\" which do not aim at\n\"solving the greatest problems all at once,\" but seek merely \"to define\nthe method and disclose the possibility of applying it on some essential\npoints.\" (Preface to \"Creative Evolution\".) It is also a delicate\nquestion, for it dominates all the rest, and decides whether we shall\nfully understand what is to follow.\n\nWe must therefore pause here a moment. To direct us in this preliminary\nstudy we have an admirable \"Introduction to Metaphysis\", which appeared\nas an article in the \"Metaphysical and Moral Review\" (January 1903): a\nshort but marvellously suggestive memoire, constituting the best preface\nto the reading of the books themselves. We may say in passing, that we\nshould be grateful to Mr Bergson if he would have it bound in volume\nform, along with some other articles which are scarcely to be had at all\ntoday.\n\n\nII.\n\nEvery philosophy, prior to taking shape in a group of co-ordinated\ntheses, presents itself, in its initial stage, as an attitude, a frame\nof mind, a method. Nothing can be more important than to study this\nstarting-point, this elementary act of direction and movement, if\nwe wish afterwards to arrive at the precise shade of meaning of the\nsubsequent teaching. Here is really the fountain-head of thought; it\nis here that the form of the future system is determined, and here that\ncontact with reality takes effect.\n\nThe last point, particularly, is vital. To return to the direct view of\nthings beyond all figurative symbols, to descend into the inmost depths\nof being, to watch the throbbing life in its pure state, and listen to\nthe secret rhythm of its inmost breath, to measure it, at least so far\nas measurement is possible, has always been the philosopher's ambition;\nand the new philosophy has not departed from this ideal. But in what\nlight does it regard its task? That is the first point to clear up. For\nthe problem is complex, and the goal distant.\n\n\"We are made as much, and more, for action than for thought,\" says Mr\nBergson; \"or rather, when we follow our natural impulse, it is to act\nthat we think.\" (\"L'Evolution Creatrice\", page 321.) And again, \"What\nwe ordinarily call a fact is not reality such as it would appear to an\nimmediate intuition, but an adaptation of reality to practical interests\nand the demands of social life.\" (\"Matiere et Memoire\", page 201.) Hence\nthe question which takes precedence of all others is: to distinguish in\nour common representation of the world, the fact in its true sense\nfrom the combinations which we have introduced in view of action and\nlanguage.\n\nNow, to rediscover nature in her fresh springs of reality, it is not\nsufficient to abandon the images and conceptions invented by human\ninitiative; still less is it sufficient to fling ourselves into the\ntorrent of brute sensations. By so doing we are in danger of dissolving\nour thought in dream or quenching it in night.\n\nAbove all, we are in danger of committal to a path which it is\nimpossible to follow. The philosopher is not free to begin the work of\nknowledge again upon other planes, with a mind which would be adequate\nto the new and virgin issue of a simple writ of oblivion.\n\nAt the time when critical reflection begins, we have already been long\nengaged in action and science, by the training of individual life, as\nby hereditary and racial experience, our faculties of perception and\nconception, our senses and our understanding, have contracted habits,\nwhich are by this time unconscious and instinctive; we are haunted by\nall kinds of ideas and principles, so familiar today that they even pass\nunobserved. But what is it all worth?\n\nDoes it, in its present state, help us to know the nature of a\ndisinterested intuition?\n\nNothing but a methodical examination of consciousness can tell us that;\nand it will take more than a renunciation of explicit knowledge to\nrecreate in us a new mind, capable of grasping the bare fact exactly\nas it is: what we require is perhaps a penetrating reform, a kind of\nconversion.\n\nThe rational and perceptive function we term our intelligence emerges\nfrom darkness through a slowly lifting dawn. During this twilight period\nit has lived, worked, acted, fashioned and informed itself. On the\nthreshold of philosophical speculation it is full of more or less\nconcealed beliefs, which are literally prejudices, and branded with a\nsecret mark influencing its every movement. Here is an actual situation.\nExemption from it is beyond anyone's province. Whether we will or no,\nwe are from the beginning of our inquiry immersed in a doctrine which\ndisguises nature to us, and already at bottom constitutes a complete\nmetaphysic. This we term common-sense, and positive science is itself\nonly an extension and refinement of it. What is the value of this work\nperformed without clear consciousness or critical attention? Does\nit bring us into true relation with things, into relation with pure\nconsciousness?\n\nThis is our first and inevitable doubt, which requires solution.\n\nBut it would be a quixotic proceeding first to make a void in our mind,\nand afterwards to admit into it, one by one, after investigation, such\nand such a concept, or such and such a principle. The illusion of\nthe clean sweep and total reconstruction can never be too vigorously\ncondemned.\n\nIs it from the void that we set out to think? Do we think in void, and\nwith nothing? Common ideas of necessity form the groundwork for the\nbroidery of our advanced thought. Further, even if we succeeded in our\nimpossible task, should we, in so doing, have corrected the causes\nof error which are today graven upon the very structure of our\nintelligence, such as our past life has made it? These errors would not\ncease to act imperceptibly upon the work of revision intended to apply\nthe remedy.\n\nIt is from within, by an effort of immanent purgation, that the\nnecessary reform must be brought about. And philosophy's first task is\nto institute critical reflection upon the obscure beginnings of thought,\nwith a view to shedding light upon its spontaneous virgin condition,\nbut without any vain claim to lift it out of the current in which it is\nactually plunged.\n\nOne conclusion is already plain: the groundwork of common-sense is sure,\nbut the form is suspicious.\n\nIn common-sense is contained, at any rate virtually and in embryo, all\nthat can ever be attained of reality, for reality is verification, not\nconstruction.\n\nEverything has its starting-point in construction and verification. Thus\nphilosophical research can only be a conscious and deliberate return to\nthe facts of primal intuition. But common-sense, being prepossessed in a\npractical direction, has doubtless subjected these facts to a process of\ninterested alteration, which is artificial in proportion to the labour\nbestowed. Such is Mr Bergson's fundamental hypothesis, and it is\nfar-reaching. \"Many metaphysical difficulties probably arise from our\nhabit of confounding speculation and practice; or of pushing an idea\nin the direction of utility, when we think we fathom it in theory;\nor, lastly, of employing in thought the forms of action.\" (Preface to\n\"Matter and Memory\". First edition.)\n\nThe work of reform will consist therefore in freeing our intelligence\nfrom its utilitarian habits, by endeavouring at the outset to become\nclearly conscious of them.\n\nNotice how far presumption is in favour of our hypothesis. Whether we\nregard organic life in the genesis and preservation of the individual,\nor in the evolution of species, we see its natural direction to be\ntowards utility: but the effort of thought comes after the effort of\nlife; it is not added from outside, it is the continuance and the flower\nof the former effort. Must we not expect from this that it will preserve\nits former habits? And what do we actually observe? The first gleam\nof human intelligence in prehistoric times is revealed to us by an\nindustry; the cut flint of the primitive caves marks the first stage\nof the road which was one day to end in the most sublime philosophies.\nAgain, every science has begun by practical arts. Indeed, our science of\ntoday, however disinterested it may have become, remains none the less\nin close relation with the demands of our action; it permits us to speak\nof and to handle things rather than to see them in their intimate and\nprofound nature. Analysis, when applied to our operations of knowledge,\nshows us that our understanding parcels out, arrests, and quantifies,\nwhereas reality, as it appears to immediate intuition, is a moving\nseries, a flux of blended qualities.\n\nThat is to say, our understanding solidifies all that it touches. Have\nwe not here exactly the essential postulates of action and speech? To\nspeak, as to act, we must have separable elements, terms and objects\nwhich remain inert while the operation goes on, maintaining between\nthemselves the constant relations which find their most perfect and\nideal presentment in mathematics.\n\nEverything tends, then, to incline us towards the hypothesis in\nquestion. Let us regard it henceforward as expressing a fact.\n\nThe forms of knowledge elaborated by common-sense were not originally\nintended to allow us to see reality as it is.\n\nTheir task was rather, and remains so, to enable us to grasp its\npractical aspect. It is for that they are made, not for philosophical\nspeculation.\n\nNow these forms nevertheless have existed in us as inveterate habits,\nsoon becoming unconscious, even when we have reached the point of\ndesiring knowledge for its own sake.\n\nBut in this new stage they preserve the bias of their original\nutilitarian function, and carry this mark with them everywhere, leaving\nit upon the fresh tasks which we are fain to make them accomplish.\n\nAn inner reform is therefore imperative today, if we are to succeed in\nunearthing and sifting, in our perception of nature, under the veinstone\nof practical symbolism, the true intuitional content.\n\nThis attempt at return to the standpoint of pure contemplation and\ndisinterested experience is a task very different from the task of\nscience. It is one thing to regard more and more or less and less\nclosely with the eyes made for us by utilitarian evolution: it is\nanother to labour at remaking for ourselves eyes capable of seeing, in\norder to see, and not in order to live.\n\nPhilosophy understood in this manner--and we shall see more and\nmore clearly as we go on that there is no other legitimate method of\nunderstanding it--demands from us an almost violent act of reform and\nconversion.\n\nThe mind must turn round upon itself, invert the habitual direction of\nits thought, climb the hill down which its instinct towards action has\ncarried it, and go to seek experience at its source, \"above the critical\nbend where it inclines towards our practical use and becomes, properly\nspeaking, human experience.\" (\"Matter and Memory\", page 203.) In short,\nby a twin effort of criticism and expansion, it must pass outside\ncommon-sense and synthetic understanding to return to pure intuition.\n\nPhilosophy consists in reliving the immediate over again, and in\ninterpreting our rational science and everyday perception by its light.\nThat, at least, is the first stage. We shall find afterwards that that\nis not all.\n\nHere is a genuinely new conception of philosophy. Here, for the first\ntime, philosophy is made specifically distinct from science, yet remains\nno less positive.\n\nWhat science really does is to preserve the general attitude of\ncommon-sense, with its apparatus of forms and principles.\n\nIt is true that science develops and perfects it, refines and extends\nit, and even now and again corrects it. But science does not change\neither the direction or the essential steps.\n\nIn this philosophy, on the contrary, what is at first suspected and\nfinally modified, is the setting of the points before the journey\nbegins.\n\nNot that, in saying so, we mean to condemn science; but we must\nrecognise its just limits. The methods of science proper are in their\nplace and appropriate, and lead to a knowledge which is true (though\nstill symbolical), so long as the object studied is the world of\npractical action, or, to put it briefly, the world of inert matter.\n\nBut soul, life, and activity escape it, and yet these are the spring and\nultimate basis of everything: and it is the appreciation of this\nfact, with what it entails, that is new. And yet, new as Mr Bergson's\nconception of philosophy may deservedly appear, it does not any the\nless, from another point of view, deserve to be styled classic and\ntraditional.\n\nWhat it really defines is not so much a particular philosophy as\nphilosophy itself, in its original function.\n\nEverywhere in history we find its secret current at its task.\n\nAll great philosophers have had glimpses of it, and employed it in\nmoments of discovery. Only as a general rule they have not clearly\nrecognised what they were doing, and so have soon turned aside.\n\nBut on this point I cannot insist without going into lengthy detail,\nand am obliged to refer the reader to the fourth chapter of \"Creative\nEvolution\", where he will find the whole question dealt with.\n\nOne remark, however, has still to be made. Philosophy, according to\nMr Bergson's conception, implies and demands time; it does not aim at\ncompletion all at once, for the mental reform in question is of the kind\nwhich requires gradual fulfilment. The truth which it involves does\nnot set out to be a non-temporal essence, which a sufficiently powerful\ngenius would be able, under pressure, to perceive in its entirety at one\nview; and that again seems to be very new.\n\nI do not, of course, wish to abuse systems of philosophy. Each of them\nis an experience of thought, a moment in the life of thought, a method\nof exploring reality, a reagent which reveals an aspect. Truth undergoes\nanalysis into systems as does light into colours.\n\nBut the mere name system calls up the static idea of a finished\nbuilding. Here there is nothing of the kind. The new philosophy desires\nto be a proceeding as much as, and even more than, to be a system.\nIt insists on being lived as well as thought. It demands that thought\nshould work at living its true life, an inner life related to itself,\neffective, active, and creative, but not on that account directed\ntowards external action. \"And,\" says Mr Bergson, \"it can only be\nconstructed by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers,\nand of many observers, completing, correcting, and righting one\nanother.\" (Preface to \"Creative Evolution\".)\n\nLet us see how it begins, and what is its generating act.\n\n\nIII.\n\nHow are we to attain the immediate? How are we to realise this\nperception of pure fact which we stated to be the philosopher's first\nstep?\n\nUnless we can clear up this doubt, the end proposed will remain to our\ngaze an abstract and lifeless ideal. This is, then, the point which\nrequires instant explanation. For there is a serious difficulty in which\nthe very employment of the word \"immediate\" might lead us astray.\n\nThe immediate, in the sense which concerns us, is not at all, or at\nleast is no longer for us the passive experience, the indefinable\nsomething which we should inevitably receive, provided we opened our\neyes and abstained from reflection.\n\nAs a matter of fact, we cannot abstain from reflection: reflection is\ntoday part of our very vision; it comes into play as soon as we open\nour eyes. So that, to come on the trail of the immediate, there must be\neffort and work. How are we to guide this effort? In what will this work\nconsist? By what sign shall we be able to recognise that the result has\nbeen obtained?\n\nThese are the questions to be cleared up. Mr Bergson speaks of them\nchiefly in connection with the realities of consciousness, or,\nmore generally speaking, of life. And it is here, in fact, that the\nconsequences are most weighty and far-reaching. We shall need to refer\nto them again in detail. But to simplify my explanation, I will here\nchoose another example: that of inert matter, of the perception on which\nthe physical is based. It is in this case that the divergence between\ncommon perception and pure perception, however real it may be, assumes\nleast proportions.\n\nTherefore it appears most in place in the sketch I desire to trace of an\nexceedingly complex work, where I can only hope, evidently, to indicate\nthe main lines and general direction.\n\nWe readily believe that when we cast our eyes upon surrounding objects,\nwe enter into them unresistingly and apprehend them all at once in their\nintrinsic nature. Perception would thus be nothing but simple passive\nregistration. But nothing could be more untrue, if we are speaking of\nthe perception which we employ without profound criticism in the\ncourse of our daily life. What we here take to be pure fact is, on\nthe contrary, the last term in a highly complicated series of mental\noperations. And this term contains as much of us as of things.\n\nIn fact, all concrete perception comes up for analysis as an\nindissoluble mixture of construction and fact, in which the fact is only\nrevealed through the construction, and takes on its complexion. We all\nknow by experience how incapable the uneducated person is of explaining\nthe simple appearance of the least fact, without embodying a crowd of\nfalse interpretations. We know to a less extent, but it is also true,\nthat the most enlightened and adroit person proceeds in just the same\nmanner: his interpretation is better, but it is still interpretation.\n\nThat is why accurate observation is so difficult; we see or we do not\nsee, we notice such and such an aspect, we read this or that, according\nto our state of consciousness at the time, according to the direction of\nthe investigation on which we are engaged.\n\nWho was it defined art as nature seen through a mind? Perception, too,\nis an art.\n\nThis art has its processes, its conventions, and its tools. Go into a\nlaboratory and study one of those complex instruments which make our\nsenses finer or more powerful; each of them is literally a sheaf of\nmaterialised theories, and by means of it all acquired science is\nbrought to bear on each new observation of the student. In exactly the\nsame way our organs of sense are actual instruments constructed by the\nunconscious work of the mind in the course of biological evolution;\nthey too sum up and give concrete form and expression to a system\nof enlightening theories. But that is not all. The most elementary\npsychology shows us the amount of thought, in the correct sense of the\nterm, recollection, or inference, which enters into what we should be\ntempted to call pure perception.\n\nEstablishment of fact is not the simple reception of the faithful\nimprint of that fact; it is invariably interpreted, systematised, and\nplaced in pre-existing forms which constitute veritable theoretical\nframes. That is why the child has to learn to perceive. There is an\neducation of the senses which he acquires by long training. One day,\nwhich aid of habit, he will almost cease to see things: a few lines, a\nfew glimpses, a few simple signs noted in a brief passing glance, will\nenable him to recognise them; and he will hardly retain any more of\nreality than its schemes and symbols.\n\n\"Perception,\" says Mr Bergson on this subject, \"becomes in the end only\nan opportunity of recollection.\" (\"Matter and Memory\", page 59.)\n\nAll concrete perception, it is true, is directed less upon the\npresent than the past. The part of pure perception in it is small, and\nimmediately covered and almost buried by the contribution of memory.\n\nThis infinitesimal part acts as a bait. It is a summons to recollection,\nchallenging us to extract from our previous experience, and construct\nwith our acquired wealth a system of images which permits us to read the\nexperience of the moment.\n\nWith our scheme of interpretation thus constituted we encounter the few\nfugitive traits which we have actually perceived. If the theory we have\nelaborated adapts itself, and succeeds in accounting for, connecting,\nand making sense of these traits, we shall finally have a perception\nproperly so called.\n\nPerception then, in the usual sense of the word, is the resolution of a\nproblem, the verification of a theory.\n\nThus are explained \"errors of the senses,\" which are in reality errors\nof interpretation. Thus too, and in the same manner, we have the\nexplanation of dreams.\n\nLet us take a simple example. When you read a book, do you spell each\nsyllable, one by one, to group the syllables afterwards into words, and\nthe words into phrases, thus travelling from print to meaning? Not at\nall: you grasp a few letters accurately, a few downstrokes in their\ngraphical outline; then you guess the remainder, travelling in the\nreverse direction, from a probable meaning to the print which you\nare interpreting. This is what causes mistakes in reading, and the\nwell-known difficulty in seeing printing errors.\n\nThis observation is confirmed by curious experiments. Write some\neveryday phrase or other on a blackboard; let there be a few intentional\nmistakes here and there, a letter or two altered, or left out. Place the\nwords in a dark room in front of a person who, of course, does not\nknow what has been written. Then turn on the light without allowing the\nobserver sufficient time to spell the writing.\n\nIn spite of this, he will in most cases read the entire phrase, without\nhesitation or difficulty.\n\nHe has restored what was missing, or corrected what was at fault.\n\nNow, ask him what letters he is certain he saw, and you will find he\nwill tell you an omitted or altered letter as well as a letter actually\nwritten.\n\nThe observer then thinks he sees in broad light a letter which is not\nthere, if that letter, in virtue of the general sense, ought to appear\nin the phrase. But you can go further, and vary the experiment.\n\nSuppose we write the word \"tumult\" correctly. After doing so, to direct\nthe memory of the observer into a certain trend of recollection, call\nout in his ear, during the short time the light is turned on, another\nword of different meaning, for example, the word \"railway.\"\n\nThe observer will read \"tunnel\"; that is to say, a word, the graphical\noutline of which is like that of the written word, but connected in\nsense with the order of recollection called up.\n\nIn this mistake in reading, as in the spontaneous correction of the\nprevious experiment, we see very clearly that perception is always the\nfulfilment of guesswork.\n\nIt is the direction of this work that we are concerned to determine.\n\nAccording to the popular idea, perception has a completely speculative\ninterest: it is pure knowledge. Therein lies the fundamental mistake.\n\nNotice first of all how much more probable it is, a priori, that the\nwork of perception, just as any other natural and spontaneous work,\nshould have a utilitarian signification.\n\n\"Life,\" says Mr Bergson with justice, \"is the acceptance from objects of\nnothing but the useful impression, with the response of the appropriate\nreactions.\" (\"Laughter\", page 154.)\n\nAnd this view receives striking objective confirmation if, with the\nauthor of \"Matter and Memory\", we follow the progress of the perceptive\nfunctions along the animal series from the protoplasm to the higher\nvertebrates; or if, with him, we analyse the task of the body, and\ndiscover that the nervous system is manifested in its very structure as,\nbefore all, an instrument of action. Have we not already besides proof\nof this in the fact that each of us always appears in his own eyes to\noccupy the centre of the world he perceives?\n\nThe \"Riquet\" of Anatole France voices Mr Bergson's view: \"I am always in\nthe centre of everything, and men and beasts and things, for or against\nme, range themselves around.\"\n\nBut direct analysis leads us still more plainly to the same conclusion.\n\nLet us take the perception of bodies. It is easy to show--and I regret\nthat I cannot here reproduce Mr Bergson's masterly demonstration--that\nthe division of matter into distinct objects with sharp outlines is\nproduced by a selection of images which is completely relative to our\npractical needs.\n\n\"The distinct outlines which we assign to an object, and which bestow\nupon it its individuality, are nothing but the graph of a certain kind\nof influence which we should be able to employ at a certain point in\nspace: it is the plan of our future actions which is submitted to our\neyes, as in a mirror, when we perceive the surfaces and edges of things.\nRemove this action, and in consequence the high roads which it makes\nfor itself in advance by perception, in the web of reality, and\nthe individuality of the body will be reabsorbed in the universal\ninteraction which is without doubt reality itself.\" Which is tantamount\nto saying that \"rough bodies are cut in the material of nature by a\nperception of which the scissors follow, in some sort, the dotted line\nalong which the action would pass.\" (\"Creative Evolution\", page 12.)\n\nBodies independent of common experience do not then appear, to an\nattentive criticism, as veritable realities which would have an\nexistence in themselves. They are only centres of co-ordination for our\nactions. Or, if you prefer it, \"our needs are so many shafts of light\nwhich, when played upon the continuity of perceptible qualities, produce\nin them the outline of distinct bodies.\" (\"Matter and Memory\", page\n220.) Does not science too, after its own fashion, resolve the atom into\na centre of intersecting relations, which finally extend by degrees to\nthe entire universe in an indissoluble interpenetration?\n\nA qualitative continuity, imperceptibly shaded off, over which pass\nquivers that here and there converge, is the image by which we are\nforced to recognise a superior degree of reality.\n\nBut is this perceptible material, this qualitative continuity, the pure\nfact in matter? Not yet. Perception, we said just now, is always in\nreality complicated by memory. There is more truth in this than we had\nseen. Reality is not a motionless spectrum, extending to our view\nits infinite shades; it might rather be termed a leaping flame in the\nspectrum. All is in passage, in process of becoming.\n\nOn this flux consciousness concentrates at long intervals, each time\ncondensing into one \"quality\" an immense period of the inner history of\nthings. \"In just this way the thousand successive positions of a runner\ncontract into one single symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives,\nwhich art reproduces, and which becomes for everybody the representation\nof a man running.\" (\"Matter and Memory\", page 233.)\n\nIn the same way again, a red light, continuing one second, embodies such\na large number of elementary pulsations that it would take 25,000\nyears of our time to see its distinct passage. From here springs the\nsubjectivity of our perception. The different qualities correspond,\nroughly speaking, to the different rhythms of contraction or\ndilution, to the different degrees of inner tension in the perceiving\nconsciousness.\n\nPushing the case to its limits, and imagining a complete expansion,\nmatter would resolve into colourless disturbances, and become the \"pure\nmatter\" of the natural philosopher.\n\nLet us now unite in one single continuity the different periods of the\npreceding dialectic. Vibration, qualities, and bodies are none of them\nreality by themselves; but all the same they are part of reality. And\nabsolute reality would be the whole of these degrees and moments, and\nmany others as well, no doubt. Or rather, to secure absolute intuition\nof matter, we should have on the one hand to get rid of all that our\npractical needs have constructed, restore on the other all the effective\ntendencies they have extinguished, follow the complete scale of\nqualitative concentrations and dilutions, and pass, by a kind of\nsympathy, into the incessantly moving play of all the possible\ninnumerable contractions or resolutions; with the result that in the\nend we should succeed, by a simultaneous view as it were, in grasping,\naccording to their infinitely various modes, the phases of this matter\nwhich, though at present latent, admit of \"perception.\"\n\nThus, in the case before us, absolute knowledge is found to be the\nresult of integral experience; and though we cannot attain the term, we\nsee at any rate in what direction we should have to work to reach it.\n\nNow it must be stated that our realisable knowledge is at every moment\npartial and limited rather than exterior and relative, for our effective\nperception is related to matter in itself as the part to the whole. Our\nleast perceptions are actually based on pure perception, and \"we are\naware of the elementary disturbances which constitute matter, in the\nperceptible quality in which they suffer contraction, as we are aware of\nthe beating of our heart in the general feeling that we have of living.\"\n(\"The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods\", 7th\nJuly 1910.)\n\nBut the preoccupation of practical action, coming between reality and\nourselves, produces the fragmentary world of common-sense, much as an\nabsorbing medium resolves into separate rays the continuous spectrum\nof a luminous body; whilst the rhythm of duration, and the degree of\ntension peculiar to our consciousness, limit us to the apprehension of\ncertain qualities only.\n\nWhat then have we to do to progress towards absolute knowledge? Not to\nquit experience: quite the contrary; but to extend it and diversify it\nby science, while, at the same time, by criticism, we correct in it the\ndisturbing effects of action, and finally quicken all the results thus\nobtained by an effort of sympathy which will make us familiar with the\nobject until we feel its profound throbbing and its inner wealth.\n\nIn connection with this last vital point, which is decisive, call to\nmind a celebrated page of Sainte-Beuve where he defines his method:\n\"Enter into your author, make yourself at home in him, produce him under\nhis different aspects, make him live, move, and speak as he must have\ndone; follow him to his fireside and in his domestic habits, as closely\nas you can...\n\n\"Study him, turn him round and round, ask him questions at your leisure;\nplace him before you...Every feature will appear in its turn, and take\nthe place of the man himself in this expression...\n\n\"An individual reality will gradually blend with and become incarnate in\nthe vague, abstract, and general type...There is our man...\" Yes, that\nis exactly what we want: it could not be better put. Transpose this page\nfrom the literary to the metaphysical order, and you have intuition, as\ndefined by Mr Bergson. You have the return to immediacy.\n\nBut a new problem then arises: Is not our intuition of immediacy in\ndanger of remaining inexpressible? For our language has been formed in\nview of practical life, not of pure knowledge.\n\n\nIV.\n\nThe immediate perception of reality is not all; we have still to\ntranslate this perception into intelligible language, into a connected\nchain of concepts; failing which, it would seem, we should not have\nknowledge in the strict sense of the word, we should not have truth.\n\nWithout language, intuition, supposing it came to birth, would remain\nintransmissible and incommunicable, and would perish in a solitary cry.\nBy language alone are we enabled to submit it to a positive test: the\nletter is the ballast of the mind, the body which allows it to act, and\nin acting to scatter the unreal delusions of dream.\n\nThe act of pure intuition demands so great an inner tension from thought\nthat it can only be very rare and very fugitive: a few rapid gleams here\nand there; and these dawning glimpses must be sustained, and afterwards\nunited, and that again is the work of language.\n\nBut while language is thus necessary, no less necessary is a criticism\nof ordinary language, and of the methods familiar to the understanding.\nThese forms of reflected knowledge, these processes of analysis really\nconvey secretly all the postulates of practical action. But it is\nimperative that language should translate, not betray; that the body of\nformulae should not stifle the soul of intuition. We shall see in what\nthe work of reform and conversion imposed on the philosopher precisely\nconsists.\n\nThe attitude of the ordinary proceedings of common thought can be stated\nin a few words. Place the object studied before yourself as an exterior\n\"thing.\" Then place yourself outside it, in perspective, at points of\nvantage on a circumference, whence you can only see the object of your\ninvestigation at a distance, with such interval as would be sufficient\nfor the contemplation of a picture; in short, move round the object\ninstead of entering boldly into it. But these proceedings lead to what I\nshall term analysis by concepts; that is to say, the attempt to resolve\nall reality into general ideas.\n\nWhat are concepts and abstract ideas really, but distant and simplified\nviews, species of model drawings, giving only a few summary features of\ntheir object, which vary according to direction and angle? By means of\nthem we claim to determine the object from outside, as if, in order to\nknow it, it were sufficient to enclose it in a system of logical sides\nand angles.\n\nAnd perhaps in this way we do really grasp it, perhaps we do establish\nits precise description, but we do not penetrate it.\n\nConcepts translate relations resulting from comparisons by which each\nobject is finally expressed as a function of what it is not. They\ndismember it, divide it up piece by piece, and mount it in various\nframes. They lay hold of it only by ends and corners, by resemblances\nand differences. Is not that obviously what is done by the converting\ntheories which explain the soul by the body, life by matter, quality\nby movements, space itself by pure number? Is not that what is done\ngenerally by all criticisms, all doctrines which connect one idea to\nanother, or to a group of other ideas?\n\nIn this way we reach only the surface of things, the reciprocal\ncontacts, mutual intersections, and parts common, but not the organic\nunity nor the inner essence.\n\nIn vain we multiply our points of view, our perspectives and plane\nprojections: no accumulation of this kind will reconstruct the concrete\nsolid. We can pass from an object directly perceived to the pictures\nwhich represent it, the prints which represent the pictures, the scheme\nrepresenting the prints, because each stage contains less than the one\nbefore, and is obtained from it by simple diminution.\n\nBut, inversely, you may take all the schemes, prints, pictures you\nlike--supposing that it is not absurd to conceive as given what is by\nnature interminable and inexhaustible, lending itself to indefinite\nenumeration and endless development and multiplicity--but you will never\nrecompose the profound and original unity of the source.\n\nHow, by forcing yourself to seek the object outside itself, where it\ncertainly is not, except in echo and reflection, would you ever find\nits intimate and specific reality? You are but condemning yourself to\nsymbolism, for one \"thing\" can only be in another symbolically.\n\nTo go further still, your knowledge of things will remain irremediably\nrelative, relative to the symbols selected and the points of view\nadopted. Everything will happen as in a movement of which the appearance\nand formula vary with the spot from which you regard it, with the marks\nto which you relate it.\n\nAbsolute revelation is only given to the man who passes into the object,\nflings himself upon its stream, and lives within its rhythm. The\nthesis which maintains the inevitable relativity of all human knowledge\noriginates mainly from the metaphors employed to describe the act of\nknowledge. The subject occupies this point, the object that; how are we\nto span the distance? Our perceptory organs fill the interval; how are\nwe to grasp anything but what reaches us in the receiver at the end of\nthe wire?\n\nThe mind itself is a projecting lantern playing a shaft of light on\nnature; how should it do otherwise than tint nature its own colour?\n\nBut these difficulties all arise out of the spatial metaphors employed;\nand these metaphors in their turn do little but illustrate and\ntranslate the common method of analysis by concepts: and this method is\nessentially regulated by the practical needs of action and language.\n\nThe philosopher must adopt an attitude entirely inverse; not keep at a\ndistance from things, but listen in a manner to their inward breathing,\nand, above all, supply the effort of sympathy by which he establishes\nhimself in the object, becomes on intimate terms with it, tunes himself\nto its rhythm, and, in a word, lives it. There is really nothing\nmysterious or strange in this.\n\nConsider your daily judgments in matters of art, profession, or sport.\n\nBetween knowledge by theory and knowledge by experience, between\nunderstanding by external analogy and perception by profound intuition,\nwhat difference and divergence there is!\n\nWho has absolute knowledge of a machine, the student who analyses it in\nmechanical theorems, or the engineer who has lived in comradeship with\nit, even to sharing the physical sensation of its laboured or easy\nworking, who feels the play of its inner muscles, its likes and\ndislikes, who notes its movements and the task before it, as the machine\nitself would do were it conscious, for whom it has become an extension\nof his own body, a new sensori-motor organ, a group of prearranged\ngestures and automatic habits?\n\nThe student's knowledge is more useful to the builder, and I do not wish\nto claim that we should ever neglect it; but the only true knowledge\nis that of the engineer. And what I have just said does not concern\nmaterial objects only. Who has absolute knowledge of religion, he who\nanalyses it in psychology, sociology, history, and metaphysics, or he\nwho, from within, by a living experience, participates in its essence\nand holds communion with its duration?\n\nBut the external nature of the knowledge obtained by conceptual analysis\nis only its least fault. There are others still more serious.\n\nIf concepts actually express what is common, general, unspecific, what\nshould make us feel the need of recasting them when we apply them to a\nnew object?\n\nDoes not their ground, their utility, and their interest exactly consist\nin sparing us this labour?\n\nWe regard them as elaborated once for all. They are building-material,\nready-hewn blocks, which we have only to bring together. They are atoms,\nsimple elements--a mathematician would say prime factors--capable of\nassociating with infinity, but without undergoing any inner modification\nin contact with it. They admit linkage; they can be attached externally,\nbut they leave the aggregate as they went into it.\n\nJuxtaposition and arrangement are the geometrical operations which\ntypify the work of knowledge in such a case; or else we must fall back\non metaphors from some mental chemistry, such as proportioning and\ncombination.\n\nIn all cases, the method is still that of alignment and blending of\npre-existent concepts.\n\nNow the mere fact of proceeding thus is equivalent to setting up the\nconcept as a symbol of an abstract class. That being done, explanation\nof a thing is no more than showing it in the intersection of several\nclasses, partaking of each of them in definite proportions: which is\nthe same as considering it sufficiently expressed by a list of general\nframes into which it will go. The unknown is then, on principle, and\nin virtue of this theory, referred to the already known; and it thereby\nbecomes impossible ever to grasp any true novelty or any irreducible\noriginality.\n\nOn principle, once more, we claim to reconstruct nature with pure\nsymbols; and it thereby becomes impossible ever to reach its concrete\nreality, \"the invisible and present soul.\"\n\nThis intuitional coinage in fixed standard concepts, this creation of\nan easily handled intellectual cash, is no doubt of evident practical\nutility. For knowledge in the usual sense of the word is not a\ndisinterested operation; it consists in finding out what profit we can\ndraw from an object, how we are to conduct ourselves towards it, what\nlabel we can suitably attach to it, under what already known class\nit comes, to what degree it is deserving of this or that title which\ndetermines an attitude we must take up, or a step we must perform. Our\nend is to place the object in its approximate class, having regard to\nadvantageous employment or to everyday language. Then, and only then,\nwe find our pigeon-holes all ready-made; and the same parcel of reagents\nmeets all cases. A universal catechism is here in existence to meet\nevery research; its different clauses define so many unshifting points\nof view, from which we regard each object, and our study is subsequently\nlimited to applying a kind of nomenclature to the preconstructed frames.\n\nOnce again the philosopher has to proceed in exactly the opposite\ndirection. He has not to confine himself to ready-made business\nconcepts, of the ordinary kind, suits cut to an average model, which fit\nnobody because they almost fit everybody; but he has to work to measure,\nincessantly renew his plant, continually recreate his mind, and meet\neach new problem with a fresh adaptive effort. He must not go from\nconcepts to things, as if each of them were only the cutting-point\nof several concurrent generalities, an ideal centre of intersecting\nabstractions; on the contrary, he must go from things to concepts,\nincessantly creating new thoughts, and incessantly recasting the old.\n\nThere could be no solution of the problem in a more or less ingenious\nmosaic or tessellation of rigid concepts, pre-existing to be employed.\nWe need plastic fluid, supple and living concepts, capable of being\ncontinually modelled on reality, of delicately following its infinite\ncurves. The philosopher's task is then to create concepts much more than\nto combine them. And each of the concepts he creates must remain open\nand adjustable, ready for the necessary renewal and adaptation, like\na method or a programme: it must be the arrow pointing to a path which\ndescends from intuition to language, not a boundary marking a terminus.\nIn this way only does philosophy remain what it ought to be: the\nexamination into the consciousness of the human mind, the effort towards\nenlargement and depth which it attempts unremittingly, in order to\nadvance beyond its present intellectual condition.\n\nDo you want an example? I will take that of human personality. The\nego is one; the ego is many: no one contests this double formula. But\neverything admits of it; and what is its lesson to us? Observe what is\nbound to happen to the two concepts of unity and multiplicity, by\nthe mere fact that we take them for general frames independent of the\nreality contained, for detached language admitting empty and blank\ndefinition, always representable by the same word, no matter what\nthe circumstances: they are no longer living and coloured ideas, but\nabstract, motionless, and neutral forms, without shades or gradations,\nwithout distinction of case, characterising two points of view from\nwhich you can observe anything and everything. This being so, how\ncould the application of these forms help us to grasp the original and\npeculiar nature of the unity and multiplicity of the ego? Still further,\nhow could we, between two such entities, statically defined by\ntheir opposition, ever imagine a synthesis? Correctly speaking, the\ninteresting question is not whether there is unity, multiplicity,\ncombination, one with the other, but to see what sort of unity,\nmultiplicity, or combination realises the case in point; above all,\nto understand how the living person is at once multiple unity and\none multiplicity, how these two poles of conceptual dissociation are\nconnected, how these two diverging branches of abstraction join at\nthe roots. The interesting point, in a word, is not the two symbolical\ncolourless marks indicating the two ends of the spectrum; it is the\ncontinuity between, with its changing wealth of colouring, and the\ndouble progress of shades which resolve it into red and violet.\n\nBut it is impossible to arrive at this concrete transition unless we\nbegin from direct intuition and descend to the analysing concepts.\n\nAgain, the same duty of reversing our familiar attitude, of inverting\nour customary proceeding, becomes ours for another reason. The\nconceptual atomism of common thought leads it to place movement in a\nlower order than rest, fact in a lower order than becoming. According\nto common thought, movement is added to the atom, as a supplementary\naccident to a body previously at rest; and, by becoming, the\npre-existent terms are strung together like pearls on a necklace.\nIt delights in rest, and endeavours to bring to rest all that moves.\nImmobility appears to it to be the base of existence. It decomposes\nand pulverises every change and every phenomenon, until it finds\nthe invariable element in them. It is immobility which it esteems\nas primary, fundamental, intelligible of itself; and motion, on the\ncontrary, which it seeks to explain as a function of immobility. And\nso it tends, out of progresses and transitions, to make things. To see\ndistinctly, it appears to need a dead halt. What indeed are concepts but\nlogical look-out stations along the path of becoming? what are they\nbut motionless external views, taken at intervals, of an uninterrupted\nstream of movement?\n\nEach of them isolates and fixes an aspect, \"as the instantaneous\nlightning flashes on a storm-scene in the darkness.\" (\"Matter and\nMemory\", page 209.)\n\nPlaced together, they make a net laid in advance, a strong meshwork in\nwhich the human intelligence posts itself securely to spy the flux of\nreality, and seize it as it passes. Such a proceeding is made for the\npractical world, and is out of place in the speculative. Everywhere we\nare trying to find constants, identities, non-variants, states; and we\nimagine ideal science as an open eye which gazes for ever upon objects\nthat do not move. The constant is the concrete support demanded by our\naction: the matter upon which we operate must not escape our grasp and\nslip through our hands, if we are to be able to work it. The constant,\nagain, is the element of language, in which the word represents its\ninert permanence, in which it constitutes the solid fulcrum, the\nfoundation and landmark of dialectic progress, being that which can be\ndiscarded by the mind, whose attention is thus free for other tasks. In\nthis respect analysis by concepts is the natural method of common-sense.\nIt consists in asking from time to time what point the object studied\nhas reached, what it has become, in order to see what one could derive\nfrom it, or what it is fitting to say of it.\n\nBut this method has only a practical reach. Reality, which in its\nessence is becoming, passes through our concepts without ever letting\nitself be caught, as a moving body passes fixed points. When we filter\nit, we retain only its deposit, the result of the becoming drifted down\nto us.\n\nDo the dams, canals, and buoys make the current of the river? Do the\nfestoons of dead seaweed ranged along the sand make the rising tide? Let\nus beware of confounding the stream of becoming with the sharp outline\nof its result. Analysis by concepts is a cinematograph method, and it\nis plain that the inner organisation of the movement is not seen in the\nmoving pictures. Every moment we have fixed views of moving objects.\nWith such conceptual sections taken in the stream of continuity, however\nmany we accumulate, should we ever reconstruct the movement itself, the\ndynamic connection, the march of the images, the transition from one\nview to another? This capacity for movement must be contained in the\npicture apparatus, and must therefore be given in addition to the views\nthemselves; and nothing can better prove how, after all, movement is\nnever explicable except by itself, never grasped except in itself.\n\nBut if we take movement as our principle, it is, on the contrary,\npossible, and even easy, to slacken speed by imperceptible degrees, and\nstop dead.\n\nFrom a dead stop we shall never get our movement again; but rest can\nvery well be conceived as the limit of movement, as its arrest or\nextinction; for rest is less than movement.\n\nIn this way the true philosophical method, which is the inverse of the\ncommon method, consists in taking up a position from the very outset\nin the bosom of becoming, in adopting its changing curves and variable\ntension, in sympathising with the rhythm of its genesis, in perceiving\nall existence from within, as a growth, in following it in its inner\ngeneration; in short, in promoting movement to fundamental reality,\nand, inversely, in degrading fixed states to the rank of secondary and\nderived reality.\n\nAnd thus, to come back to the example of the human personality, the\nphilosopher must seek in the ego not so much a ready-made unity or\nmultiplicity as, if I may venture the expression, two antagonistic and\ncorrelative movements of unification and plurification.\n\nThere is then a radical difference between philosophic intuition and\nconceptual analysis. The latter delights in the play of dialectic, in\nfountains of knowledge, where it is interested only in the immovable\nbasins; the former goes back to the source of the concepts, and seeks\nto possess it where it gushes out. Analysis cuts the channels; intuition\nsupplies the water. Intuition acquires and analysis expends.\n\nIt is not a question of banning analysis; science could not do without\nit, and philosophy could not do without science. But we must reserve for\nit its normal place and its just task.\n\nConcepts are the deposited sediment of intuition: intuition produces the\nconcepts, not the concepts intuition. From the heart of intuition you\nwill have no difficulty in seeing how it splits up and analyses into\nconcepts, concepts of such and such a kind or such and such a shade. But\nby successive analyses you will never reconstruct the least intuition,\njust as, no matter how you distribute water, you will never reconstruct\nthe reservoir in its original condition.\n\nBegin from intuition: it is a summit from which we can descend by\ninfinite slopes; it is a picture which we can place in an infinite\nnumber of frames. But all the frames together will not recompose the\npicture, and the lower ends of all the slopes will not explain how\nthey meet at the summit. Intuition is a necessary beginning; it is the\nimpulse which sets the analysis in motion, and gives it direction; it is\nthe sounding which brings it to solid bottom; the soul which assures its\nunity. \"I shall never understand how black and white interpenetrate,\nif I have not seen grey, but I understand without trouble, after once\nseeing grey, how we can regard it from the double point of view of black\nand white.\" (\"Introduction to Metaphysics.\")\n\nHere are some letters which you can arrange in chains in a thousand\nways: the indivisible sense running along the chain, and making one\nphrase of it, is the original cause of the writing, not its consequence.\nThus it is with intuition in relation to analysis. But beginnings and\ngenerative activities are the proper object of the philosopher. Thus\nthe conversion and reform incumbent on him consist essentially in a\ntransition from the analytic to the intuitive point of view.\n\nThe result is that the chosen instrument of philosophic thought is\nmetaphor; and of metaphor we know Mr Bergson to be an incomparable\nmaster. What we have to do, he says himself, is \"to elicit a certain\nactive force which in most men is liable to be trammelled by mental\nhabits more useful to life,\" to awaken in them the feeling of the\nimmediate, original, and concrete. But \"many different images, borrowed\nfrom very different orders of things, can, by their convergent action,\ndirect consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain\nintuition to be seized. By choosing images as unlike as possible, we\nprevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it is\nintended to call up, since it would in that case be immediately routed\nby its rivals. In making them all, despite their different aspects,\ndemand of our mind the same kind of attention, and in some way the same\ndegree of tension, we accustom our consciousness little by little to a\nquite peculiar and well-determined disposition, precisely the one which\nit ought to adopt to appear to itself unmasked.\" (\"Introduction to\nMetaphysics\".)\n\nStrictly speaking, the intuition of immediacy is inexpressible. But it\ncan be suggested and called up. How? By ringing it round with concurrent\nmetaphors. Our aim is to modify the habits of imagination in ourselves\nwhich are opposed to a simple and direct view, to break through the\nmechanical imagery in which we have allowed ourselves to be caught; and\nit is by awakening other imagery and other habits that we can succeed in\nso doing.\n\nBut then, you will say, where is the difference between philosophy and\nart, between metaphysical and aesthetic intuition? Art also tends to\nreveal nature to us, to suggest to us a direct vision of it, to lift the\nveil of illusion which hides us from ourselves; and aesthetic intuition\nis, in its own way, perception of immediacy. We revive the feeling of\nreality obliterated by habit, we summon the deep and penetrating soul of\nthings: the object is the same in both cases; and the means are also the\nsame; images and metaphors. Is Mr Bergson only a poet, and does his work\namount to nothing but the introduction of impressionism in metaphysics?\n\nIt is an old objection. If the truth be told, Mr Bergson's immense\nscientific knowledge should be sufficient refutation.\n\nOnly those who have not read the mass of carefully proved and positive\ndiscussions could give way thus to the impressions of art awakened by\nwhat is truly a magic style. But we can go further and put it better.\n\nThat there are analogies between philosophy and art, between\nmetaphysical and aesthetic intuition, is unquestionable and uncontested.\n\nAt the same time, the analogies must not be allowed to hide the\ndifferences.\n\nArt is, to a certain extent, philosophy previous to analysis, previous\nto criticism and science; the aesthetic intuition is metaphysical\nintuition in process of birth, bounded by dream, not proceeding to the\ntest of positive verification. Reciprocally, philosophy is the art which\nfollows upon science, and takes account of it, the art which uses the\nresults of analysis as its material, and submits itself to the demands\nof stern criticism; metaphysical intuition is the aesthetic intuition\nverified, systematised, ballasted by the language of reason.\n\nPhilosophy then differs from art in two essential points: first of all,\nit rests upon, envelops, and supposes science; secondly, it implies a\ntest of verification in its strict meaning. Instead of stopping at the\nacts of common-sense, it completes them with all the contributions of\nanalysis and scientific investigation.\n\nWe said just now of common-sense that, in its inmost depths, it\npossesses reality: that is only quite exact when we mean common-sense\ndeveloped in positive science; and that is why philosophy takes the\nresults of science as its basis, for each of these results, like\nthe facts and data of common perception, opens a way for critical\npenetration towards the immediate. Just now I was comparing the two\nkinds of knowledge which the theorist and the engineer can have of a\nmachine, and I allowed the advantage of absolute knowledge to\npractical experience, whilst theory seemed to me mainly relative to the\nconstructive industry. That is true, and I do not go back upon it. But\nthe most experienced engineer, who did not know the mechanism of his\nmachine, who possessed only unanalysed feelings about it, would have\nonly an artist's, not a philosopher's knowledge. For absolute intuition,\nin the full sense of the word, we must have integral experience; that is\nto say, a living application of rational theory no less than of working\ntechnique.\n\nTo journey towards living intuition, starting from complete science and\ncomplete sensation, is the philosopher's task; and this task is governed\nby standards unknown to art.\n\nMetaphysical intuition offers a victorious resistance to the test of\nthorough and continued experiment, to the test of calculation as to that\nof working, to the complete experiment which brings into play all the\nvarious deoxidising agents of criticism; it shows itself capable of\nwithstanding analysis without dissolving or succumbing; it abounds in\nconcepts which satisfy the understanding, and exalt it; in a word, it\ncreates light and truth on all mental planes; and these characteristics\nare sufficient to distinguish it in a profound degree from aesthetic\nintuition.\n\nThe latter is only the prophetic type of the former, a dream or\npresentiment, a veiled and still uncertain dawn, a twilight myth\npreceding and proclaiming, in the half-darkness, the full day of\npositive revelation...\n\nEvery philosophy has two faces, and must be studied in two\nmovements--method and teaching.\n\nThese are its two moments, its two aspects, no doubt co-ordinate and\nmutually dependent, but none the less distinct.\n\nWe have just examined the method of the new philosophy inaugurated by\nMr Bergson. To what teaching has this method led us, and to what can we\nforesee that it will lead us?\n\nThis is what we have still to find.\n\n\n\n\nII. Teaching.\n\nThe sciences properly so called, those that are by agreement termed\npositive, present themselves as so many external and circumferential\npoints from which we view reality. They leave us on the outside of\nthings, and confine themselves to investigating from a distance.\n\nThe views they give us resemble the brief perspectives of a town which\nwe obtain in looking at it from different angles on the surrounding\nhills.\n\nLess even than that: for very soon, by increasing abstraction,\nthe coloured views give place to regular lines, and even to simple\nconventional notes, which are more practical in use and waste less\ntime. And so the sciences remain prisoners of the symbol, and all the\ninevitable relativity involved in its use. But philosophy claims to\npierce within reality, establish itself in the object, follow its\nthousand turns and folds, obtain from it a direct and immediate feeling,\nand penetrate right into the concrete depths of its heart; it is not\ncontent with an analysis, but demands an intuition.\n\nNow there is one existence which, at the outset, we know better and more\nsurely than any other; there is a privileged case in which the effort\nof sympathetic revelation is natural and almost easy to us; there is one\nreality at least which we grasp from within, which we perceive in its\ndeep and internal content. This reality is ourselves. It is typical of\nall reality, and our study may fitly begin here. Psychology puts us\nin direct contact with it, and metaphysics attempt to generalise this\ncontact. But such a generalisation can only be attempted if, to begin\nwith, we are familiar with reality at the point where we have immediate\naccess to it.\n\nThe path of thought which the philosopher must take is from the inner to\nthe outer being.\n\n\nI.\n\n\"Know thyself\": the old maxim has remained the motto of philosophy\nsince Socrates, the motto at least which marks its initial moment, when,\ninclining towards the depth of the subject, it commences its true work\nof penetration, whilst science continues to extend on the surface. Each\nphilosophy in turn has commented upon and applied this old motto. But Mr\nBergson, more than anyone else, has given it, as he does everything\nelse he takes up, a new and profound meaning. What was the current\ninterpretation before him? Speaking only of the last century, we may\nsay that, under the influence of Kant, criticism had till now been\nprincipally engaged in unravelling the contribution of the subject\nin the act of consciousness, in establishing our perception of things\nthrough certain representative forms borrowed from our own constitution.\nSuch was, even yesterday, the authenticated way of regarding the\nproblem. And it is precisely this attitude which Mr Bergson, by a\nvolte-face which will remain familiar to him in the course of his\nresearches, reverses from the outset.\n\n\"It has appeared to me,\" says he, (\"Essay on the Immediate Data of\nConsciousness\", Conclusion.) \"that there was ground for setting oneself\nthe inverse problem, and asking whether the most apparent states of the\nego itself, which we think we grasp directly, are not most of the time\nperceived through certain forms borrowed from the outer world, which in\nthis way gives us back what we have lent it. A priori, it seems fairly\nprobable that this is what goes on. For supposing that the forms of\nwhich we are speaking, to which we adapt matter, come entirely from the\nmind, it seems difficult to apply them constantly to objects without\nsoon producing the colouring of the objects in the forms; therefore\nin using these forms for the knowledge of our own personality, we\nrisk taking a reflection of the frame in which we place them--that is,\nactually, the external world--for the very colouring of the ego. But\nwe can go further, and state that forms applicable to things cannot be\nentirely our own work; that they must result from a compromise between\nmatter and mind; that if we give much to this matter, we doubtless\nreceive something from it; and that, in this way, when we try to possess\nourselves again after an excursion into the outer world, we no longer\nhave our hands free.\"\n\nTo avoid such a consequence, there is, we must admit, a conceivable\nloophole. It consists in maintaining on principle an absolute analogy,\nan exact similitude between internal reality and external objects. The\nforms which suit the one would then also suit the other.\n\nBut it must be observed that such a principle constitutes in the highest\ndegree a metaphysical thesis which it would be on all hands illegal to\nassert previously as a postulate of method. Secondly, and above all, it\nmust be observed that on this head experience is decisive, and manifests\nmore plainly every day the failure of the theories which try to\nassimilate the world of consciousness to that of matter, to copy\npsychology from physics. We have here two different \"orders.\" The\napparatus of the first does not admit of being employed in the second.\nHence the necessity of the attitude adopted by Mr Bergson. We have\nan effort to make, a work of reform to undertake, to lift the veil of\nsymbols which envelops our usual representation of the ego, and thus\nconceals us from our own view, in order to find out what we are in\nreality, immediately, in our inmost selves. This effort and this work\nare necessary, because, \"in order to contemplate the ego in its original\npurity, psychology must eliminate or correct certain forms which bear\nthe visible mark of the outer world.\" (\"Essay on the Immediate Data\nof Consciousness\", Conclusion.) What are these forms? Let us confine\nourselves to the most important. Things appear to us as numerable\nunits, placed side by side in space. They compose numerical and spatial\nmultiplicity, a dust of terms between which geometrical ties are\nestablished.\n\nBut space and number are the two forms of immobility, the two schemes of\nanalysis, by which we must not let ourselves be obsessed. I do not say\nthat there is no place to give them, even in the internal world. But the\nmore deeply we enter into the heart of psychological life, the less they\nare in place.\n\nThe fact is, there are several planes of consciousness, situated at\ndifferent depths, marking all the intervening degrees between pure\nthought and bodily action, and each mental phenomenon interests all\nthese planes simultaneously, and is thus repeated in a thousand higher\ntones, like the harmonies of one and the same note.\n\nOr, if you prefer it, the life of the spirit is not the uniform\ntransparent surface of a mere; rather it is a gushing spring which,\nat first pent in, spreads upwards and outwards, like a sheaf of corn,\npassing through many different states, from the dark and concentrated\nwelling of the source to the gleam of the scattered tumbling spray; and\neach of its moods presents in its turn a similar character, being itself\nonly a thread within the whole. Such without doubt is the central and\nactivating idea of the admirable book entitled \"Matter and Memory\". I\ncannot possibly condense its substance here, or convey its astonishing\nsynthetic power, which succeeds in contracting a complete metaphysic,\nand in gripping it so firmly that the examination ends by passing to\nthe discussion of a few humble facts relative to the philosophy of the\nbrain! But its technical severity and its very conciseness, combined\nwith the wealth it contains, render it irresumable; and I can only in a\nfew words indicate its conclusions.\n\nFirst of all, however little we pride ourselves on positive method, we\nmust admit the existence of an internal world, of a spiritual activity\ndistinct from matter and its mechanism. No chemistry of the brain, no\ndance of atoms, is equivalent to the least thought, or indeed to the\nleast sensation.\n\nSome, it is true, have brought forward a thesis of parallelism,\naccording to which each mental phenomenon corresponds point by point\nto a phenomenon in the brain, without adding anything to it, without\ninfluencing its course, merely translating it into another tongue,\nso that a glance sufficiently penetrating to follow the molecular\nrevolutions and the fluxes of nervous production in their least\nepisodes would immediately read the inmost secrets of the associated\nconsciousness.\n\nBut no one will deny that a thesis of this kind is only in reality a\nhypothesis, that it goes enormously beyond the certain data of current\nbiology, and that it can only be formulated by anticipating future\ndiscoveries in a preconceived direction. Let us be candid: it is not\nreally a thesis of positive science, but a metaphysical thesis in the\nunpleasant meaning of the term. Taking it at its best, its worth today\ncould only be one of intelligibleness. And intelligible it is not.\n\nHow are we to understand a consciousness destitute of activity and\nconsequently without connection with reality, a kind of phosphorescence\nwhich emphasises the lines of vibration in the brain, and renders in\nmiraculous duplicate, by its mysterious and useless light, certain\nphenomena already complete without it?\n\nOne day Mr Bergson came down into the arena of dialectic, and,\ntalking to his opponents in their own language, pulled their\n\"psycho-physiological paralogism\" to pieces before their eyes; it\nis only by confounding in one and the same argument two systems of\nincompatible notations, idealism and realism, that we succeed in\nenunciating the parallelist thesis. This reasoning went home, all\nthe more as it was adapted to the usual form of discussions between\nphilosophers. But a more positive and more categorical proof is to\nbe found all through \"Matter and Memory\". From the precise example of\nrecollection analysed to its lowest depths, Mr Bergson completely grasps\nand measures the divergence between soul and body, between mind and\nmatter. Then, putting into practice what he said elsewhere about the\ncreation of new concepts, he arrives at the conclusion--these are his\nown expressions--that between the psychological fact and its counterpart\nin the brain there must be a relation sui generis, which is neither\nthe determination of the one by the other, nor their reciprocal\nindependence, nor the production of the latter by the former, nor of the\nformer by the latter, nor their simple parallel concomitance; in short,\na relation which answers to none of the ready-made concepts which\nabstraction puts at our service, but which may be approximately\nformulated in these terms: (\"Report of the French Philosophical\nSociety\", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)\n\n\"Given a psychological state, that part of the state which admits of\nplay, the part which would be translated by an attitude of the body\nor by bodily actions, is represented in the brain; the remainder is\nindependent of it, and has no equivalent in the brain. So that to\none and the same state of the brain there may be many different\npsychological states which correspond, though not all kinds of states.\nThey are psychological states which all have in common the same motor\nscheme. Into one and the same frame many pictures may go, but not all\npictures. Let us take a lofty abstract philosophical thought. We do\nnot conceive it without adding to it an image representing it, which we\nplace beneath.\n\n\"We do not represent the image to ourselves, again, without supporting\nit by a design which resumes its leading features. We do not imagine\nthis design itself without imagining and, in so doing, sketching certain\nmovements which would reproduce it. It is this sketch, and this sketch\nonly, which is represented in the brain. Frame the sketch, there is a\nmargin for the image. Frame the image again, there remains a margin, and\na still larger margin, for the thought. The thought is thus relatively\nfree and indeterminate in relation to the activity which conditions it\nin the brain, for this activity expresses only the motive articulation\nof the idea, and the articulation may be the same for ideas\nabsolutely different. And yet it is not complete liberty nor absolute\nindetermination, since any kind of idea, taken at hazard, would not\npresent the articulation desired.\n\n\"In short, none of the simple concepts furnished us by philosophy could\nexpress the relation we seek, but this relation appears with tolerable\nclearness to result from experiment.\"\n\nThe same analysis of facts tells us how the planes of consciousness,\nof which I spoke just now, are arranged, the law by which they are\ndistributed, and the meaning which attaches to their disposition. Let us\nneglect the intervening multiples, and look only at the extreme poles of\nthe series.\n\nWe are inclined to imagine too abrupt a severance between gesture and\ndream, between action and thought, between body and mind. There are not\ntwo plane surfaces, without thickness or transition, placed one above\nthe other on different levels; it is by an imperceptible degradation of\nincreasing depth, and decreasing materiality, that we pass from one term\nto the other.\n\nAnd the characteristics are continually changing in the course of the\ntransition. Thus our initial problem confronts us again, more acutely\nthan ever: are the forms of number and space equally suitable on all\nplanes of consciousness?\n\nLet us consider the most external of these planes of life, and one which\nis in contact with the outer world, the one which receives directly the\nimpressions of external reality. We live as a rule on the surface of\nourselves, in the numerical and spatial dispersion of language and\ngesture. Our deeper ego is covered as it were with a tough crust,\nhardened in action: it is a skein of motionless and numerable habits,\nside by side, and of distinct and solid things, with sharp outlines and\nmechanical relations. And it is for the representation of the phenomena\nwhich occur within this dead rind that space and number are valid.\n\nFor we have to live, I mean live our common daily life, with our body,\nwith our customary mechanism rather than with our true depths. Our\nattention is therefore most often directed by a natural inclination to\nthe practical worth and useful function of our internal states, to the\npublic object of which they are the sign, to the effect they produce\nexternally, to the gestures by which we express them in space. A\nsocial average of individual modalities interests us more than the\nincommunicable originality of our deeper life. The words of language\nbesides offer us so many symbolic centres round which crystallise groups\nof motor mechanisms set up by habit, the only usual elements of our\ninternal determinations. Now, contact with society has rendered these\nmotor mechanisms practically identical in all men. Hence, whether it be\na question of sensation, feeling, or ideas, we have these neutral\ndry and colourless residua, which spread lifeless over the surface of\nourselves, \"like dead leaves on the water of a pond.\" (\"Essay on the\nImmediate Data,\" page 102.)\n\nThus the progress we have lived falls into the rank of a thing that can\nbe handled. Space and number lay hold of it. And soon all that remains\nof what was movement and life is combinations formed and annulled, and\nforces mechanically composed in a whole of juxtaposed atoms, and to\nrepresent this whole a collection of petrified concepts, manipulated in\ndialectic like counters.\n\nQuite different appears the true inner reality, and quite different\nare its profound characteristics. To begin with, it contains nothing\nquantitative; the intensity of a psychological state is not a\nmagnitude, nor can it be measured. The \"Essay on the Immediate Data of\nConsciousness\" begins with the proof of this leading statement. If it\nis a question of a simple state, such as a sensation of light or weight,\nthe intensity is measured by a certain quality of shade which indicates\nto us approximately, by an association of ideas and thanks to our\nacquired experience, the magnitude of the objective cause from which it\nproceeds. If, on the contrary, it is a question of a complex state,\nsuch as those impressions of profound joy or sorrow which lay hold of\nus entirely, invading and overwhelming us, what we call their intensity\nexpresses only the confused feeling of a qualitative progress, and\nincreasing wealth. \"Take, for example, an obscure desire, which has\ngradually become a profound passion. You will see that the feeble\nintensity of this desire consisted first of all in the fact that it\nseemed to you isolated and in a way foreign to all the rest of your\ninner life. But little by little it penetrated a larger number of\npsychic elements, dyeing them, so to speak, its own colour; and now\nyou find your point of view on things as a whole appears to you to have\nchanged. Is it not true that you become aware of a profound passion,\nonce it has taken root, by the fact that the same objects no longer\nproduce the same impression upon you? All your sensations, all your\nideas, appear to you refreshed by it; it is like a new childhood.\" (Loc.\ncit., page 6.)\n\nThere is here none of the homogeneity which is the property of\nmagnitude, and the necessary condition of measurement, giving a view of\nthe less in the bosom of the more. The element of number has vanished,\nand with it numerical multiplicity extended in space. Our inner states\nform a qualitative continuity; they are prolonged and blended into one\nanother; they are grouped in harmonies, each note of which contains an\necho of the whole; they are encircled by an innumerable degradation of\nhalos, which gradually colour the total content of consciousness; they\nlive each in the bosom of his fellow.\n\n\"I am the scent of roses,\" were the words Condillac put in the mouth of\nhis statue; and these words translate the immediate truth exactly, as\nsoon as observation becomes naive and simple enough to attain pure fact.\nIn a passing breath I breathe my childhood; in the rustle of leaves, in\na ray of moonlight, I find an infinite series of reflections and dreams.\nA thought, a feeling, an act, may reveal a complete soul. My ideas,\nmy sensations, are like me. How would such facts be possible, if the\nmultiple unity of the ego did not present the essential characteristic\nof vibrating in its entirety in the depths of each of the parts descried\nor rather determined in it by analysis? All physical determinations\nenvelop and imply each other reciprocally. And the fact that the soul\nis thus present in its entirety in each of its acts, its feelings,\nfor example, or its ideas in its sensations, its recollections in its\npercepts, its inclinations in its obvious states, is the justifying\nprinciple of metaphors, the source of all poetry, the truth which\nmodern philosophy proclaims with more force every day under the name of\nimmanence of thought, the fact which explains our moral responsibility\nwith regard to our affections and our beliefs themselves; and finally,\nit is the best of us, since it is this which ensures our being able\nto surrender ourselves, genuinely and unreservedly, and this which\nconstitutes the real unity of our person.\n\nLet us push still further into the hidden retreat of the soul. Here we\nare in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego takes shape,\nwhere the spring within us gushes up, in the warm secrecy of the\ndarkness which ushers our trembling being into birth. Distinctions fail\nus. Words are useless now. We hear the wells of consciousness at their\nmysterious task like an invisible shiver of running water through the\nmossy shadow of the caves. I dissolve in the joy of becoming. I abandon\nmyself to the delight of being a pulsing reality. I no longer know\nwhether I see scents, breathe sounds, or smell colours. Do I love? Do I\nthink? The question has no longer a meaning for me. I am, in my complete\nself, each of my attitudes, each of my changes. It is not my sight which\nis indistinct or my attention which is idle. It is I who have resumed\ncontact with pure reality, whose essential movement admits no form of\nnumber. He who thus makes the really \"deep\" and \"inner\" effort necessary\nto becoming--were it only for an elusive moment--discovers, under the\nsimplest appearance, inexhaustible sources of unsuspected wealth; the\nrhythm of his duration becomes amplified and refined; his acts become\nmore conscious; and in what seemed to him at first sudden severance or\ninstantaneous pulsation he discovers complex transitions imperceptibly\nshaded off, musical transitions full of unexpected repetitions and\nthreaded movements.\n\nThus, the deeper we go in consciousness, the less suitable become these\nschemes of separation and fixity existing in spatial and numerical\nforms. The inner world is that of pure quality. There is no measurable\nhomogeneity, no collection of atomically constructed elements. The\nphenomena distinguished in it by analysis are not composing units, but\nphases. And it is only when they reach the surface, when they come in\ncontact with the external world, when they are incarnated in language\nor gesture, that the categories of matter become adapted to them. In\nits true nature, reality appears as an uninterrupted flow, an impalpable\nshiver of fluid changing tones, a perpetual flux of waves which ebb and\nbreak and dissolve into one another without shock or jar. Everything is\nceaseless change; and the state which appears the most stable is already\nchange, since it continues and grows old. Constant quantities are\nrepresented only by the materialisation of habit or by means of\npractical symbols. And it is on this point that Mr Bergson rightly\ninsists. (\"Creative Evolution\", page 3.)\n\n\"The apparent discontinuity of psychological life is due, then, to\nthe fact that our attention is concentrated on it in a series of\ndiscontinuous acts; where there is only a gentle slope, we think we\nsee, when we follow the broken line of our attention, the steps of a\nstaircase. It is true that our psychological life is full of surprises.\nA thousand incidents arise which seem to contrast with what precedes\nthem, and not to be connected with what follows. But the gap in their\nappearances stands out against the continuous background on which they\nare represented, and to which they owe the very intervals that separate\nthem; they are the drumbeats which break into the symphony at intervals.\nOur attention is fixed upon them because they interest it more, but\neach of them proceeds from the fluid mass of our entire psychological\nexistence. Each of them is only the brightest point in a moving zone\nwhich understands all that we feel, think, wish; in fact, all that we\nare at a given moment. It is this zone which really constitutes our\nstate. But we may observe that states defined in this way are not\ndistinct elements. They are an endless stream of mutual continuity.\"\n\nAnd do not think that perhaps such a description represents only or\nprincipally our life of feeling. Reason and thought share the same\ncharacteristic, as soon as we penetrate their living depth, whether it\nbe a question of creative invention or of those primordial judgments\nwhich direct our activity. If they evidence greater stability, it is in\npermanence of direction, because our past remains present to us.\n\nFor we are endowed with memory, and that perhaps is, on the whole, our\nmost profound characteristic. It is by memory we enlarge ourselves and\ndraw continually upon the wealth of our treasuries. Hence comes the\ncompletely original nature of the change which constitutes us. But it\nis here that we must shake off familiar representations! Common-sense\ncannot think in terms of movement. It forges a static conception of it,\nand destroys it by arresting it under pretext of seeing it better. To\ndefine movement as a series of positions, with a generating law, with a\ntime-table or correspondence sheet between places and times, is surely\na ready-made presentation. Are we not confusing the trajectory and its\nperformance, the points traversed and the traversing of the points, the\nresult of the genesis of the result; in short, the quantitative distance\nover which the flight extends, and the qualitative flight which puts\nthis distance behind it? In this way the very mobility which is the\nessence of movement vanishes. There is the same common mistake about\ntime. Analytic and synthetic thought can see in time only a string of\ncoincidences, each of them instantaneous, a logical series of relations.\nIt imagines the whole of it to be a graduated slide-rule, in which the\nluminous point called the present is the geometrical index.\n\nThus it gives form to time in space, \"a kind of fourth dimension,\"\n(\"Essay on the Immediate Data\".) or at least it reduces it to nothing\nmore than an abstract scheme of succession, \"a stream without bottom\nor sides, flowing without determinable strength, in an indefinable\ndirection.\" (\"Introduction to Metaphysics\".) It requires time to be\nhomogeneous, and every homogeneous medium is space, \"for as homogeneity\nconsists here in the absence of any quality, it is not clear how two\nforms of homogeneity could be distinguished one from the other.\" (\"Essay\non the Immediate Data\", page 74.)\n\nQuite different appears real duration, the duration which is lived.\nIt is pure heterogeneity. It contains a thousand different degrees of\ntension or relaxation, and its rhythm varies without end. The magic\nsilence of calm nights or the wild disorder of a tempest, the still joy\nof ecstasy or the tumult of passion unchained, a steep climb towards\na difficult truth or a gentle descent from a luminous principle to\nconsequences which easily follow, a moral crisis or a shooting pain,\ncall up intuitions admitting no comparison with one another. We have\nhere no series of moments, but prolonged and interpenetrating phases;\ntheir sequence is not a substitution of one point for another, but\nrather resembles a musical resolution of harmony into harmony. And\nof this ever-new melody which constitutes our inner life every moment\ncontains a resonance or an echo of past moments. \"What are we really,\nwhat is our character, except the condensation of the history which we\nhave lived since our birth, even before our birth, since we bring with\nus our prenatal dispositions? Without doubt we think only with a small\npart of our past; but it is with our complete past, including our\noriginal bias of soul, that we desire, wish, and act.\" (\"Creative\nEvolution\", pages 5-6.) This is what makes our duration irreversible,\nand its novelty perpetual, for each of the states through which it\npasses envelops the recollection of all past states. And thus we see,\nin the end, how, for a being endowed with memory, \"existence consists\nin change, change in ripening, ripening in endless self-creation.\"\n(\"Creative Evolution\", page 8.)\n\nWith this formula we face the capital problem in which psychology and\nmetaphysics meet, that of liberty. The solution given by Mr Bergson\nmarks one of the culminating points of his philosophy. It is from this\nsummit that he finds light thrown on the riddle of inner being. And it\nis the centre where all the lines of his research converge.\n\nWhat is liberty? What must we understand by this word? Beware of the\nanswer you are going to give. Every definition, in the strict sense of\nthe term, will imply the determinist thesis in advance, since, under\npain of going round in a circle, it will be bound to express liberty\nas a function of what it is not. Either psychological liberty is\nan illusive appearance, or, if it is real, we can only grasp it by\nintuition, not by analysis, in the light of an immediate feeling. For a\nreality is verified, not constructed; and we are now or never in one\nof those situations where the philosopher's task is to create some new\nconcept, instead of abiding by a combination of previous elements.\n\nMan is free, says common-sense, in so far as his action depends only on\nhimself. \"We are free,\" says Mr Bergson, (\"Essay on the Immediate Data\nof Consciousness\", page 131.) \"when our acts proceed from our entire\npersonality, when they express it, when they exhibit that indefinable\nresemblance to it which we find occasionally between the artist and his\nwork.\" That is all we need seek; two conceptions which are equivalent\nto each other, two concordant formulae. It is true that this amounts to\ndetermining the free act by its very originality, in the etymological\nsense of the word: which is at bottom only another way of declaring it\nincommensurable with every concept, and reluctant to be confined by any\ndefinition. But, after all, is not that the only true immediate fact?\n\nThat our spiritual life is genuine action, capable of independence,\ninitiative, and irreducible novelty, not mere result produced from\noutside, not simple extension of external mechanism, that it is so much\nours as to constitute every moment, for him who can see, an essentially\nincomparable and new invention, is exactly what represents for us the\nname of liberty. Understood thus, and decidedly it is like this that\nwe must understand it, liberty is a profound thing: we seek it only in\nthose moments of high and solemn choice which come into our life, not\nin the petty familiar actions which their very insignificance submits to\nall surrounding influences, to every wandering breeze. Liberty is rare;\nmany live and die and have never known it. Liberty is a thing which\ncontains an infinite number of degrees and shades; it is measured by\nour capacity for the inner life. Liberty is a thing which goes on in us\nunceasingly: our liberty is potential rather than actual. And lastly, it\nis a thing of duration, not of space and number, not the work of moments\nor decrees. The free act is the act which has been long in preparing,\nthe act which is heavy with our whole history, and falls like a ripe\nfruit from our past life.\n\nBut how are we to establish positive verification of these views? How\nare we to do away with the danger of illusion? The proof will in this\ncase result from a criticism of adverse theories, along with direct\nobservation of psychological reality freed from the deceptive forms\nwhich warp the common perception of it. And it will here be an easy task\nto resume Mr Bergson's reasoning in a few words.\n\nThe first obstacle which confronts affirmation of our liberty comes\nfrom physical determinism. Positive science, we are told, presents the\nuniverse to us as an immense homogeneous transformation, maintaining\nan exact equivalence between departure and arrival. How can we possibly\nhave after that the genuine creation which we require in the act we call\nfree?\n\nThe answer is that the universality of the mechanism is at bottom only\na hypothesis which is still awaiting demonstration. On the one hand it\nincludes the parallelist conception which we have recognised as effete.\nAnd on the other it is plain that it is not self-sufficient. At least it\nrequires that somewhere or other there should be a principle of position\ngiving once for all what will afterwards be maintained. In actual\nfact, the course of phenomena displays three tendencies: a tendency to\nconservation, beyond question; but also a tendency to collapse, as in\nthe diminution of energy; and a tendency to progress, as in biological\nevolution. To make conservation the sole law of matter implies an\narbitrary decree, denoting only those aspects of reality which will\ncount for anything. By what right do we thus exclude, with vital effort,\neven the feeling of liberty which in us is so vigorous?\n\nWe might say, it is true, that our spiritual life, if it is not a simple\nextension of external mechanism, yet proceeds according to an internal\nmechanism equally severe, but of a different order. This would bring\nus to the hypothesis of a kind of psychological mechanism; and in many\nrespects this seems to be the common-sense hypothesis. I need not\ndwell upon it, after the numerous criticisms already made. Inner\nreality--which does not admit number--is not a sequence of distinct\nterms, allowing a disconnected waste of absolute causality.\n\nAnd the mechanism of which we dream has no true sense--for, after all,\nit has a sense--except in relation to the superficial phenomena which\ntake place in our dead rind, in relation to the automaton which we are\nin daily life. I am ready to admit that it explains our common actions,\nbut here it is our profound consciousness which is in question, not the\nplay of our materialised habits.\n\nWithout insisting, then, too strongly on this mongrel conception, let\nus pass to the direct examination of inner psychological reality.\nEverything is ready for the conclusion. Our duration, which is\ncontinually accumulating itself, and always introducing some irreducible\nnew factor, prevents any kind of state, even if superficially identical,\nfrom repeating itself in depth. \"We shall never again have the soul we\nhad this evening.\" Each of our moments remains essentially unique. It is\nsomething new added to the surviving past; not only new, but unable to\nbe foreseen.\n\nFor how can we speak of foresight which is not simple conjecture, how\ncan we conceive an absolute extrinsic determination, when the act in\nbirth only makes one with the finished sum of its conditions, when these\nconditions are complete only on the threshold of the action beginning,\nincluding the fresh and irreducible contribution added by its very date\nin our history? We can only explain afterwards, we can only foresee when\nit is too late, in retrospect, when the accomplished action has fallen\ninto the plan of matter.\n\nThus our inner life is a work of enduring creation: of phases which\nmature slowly, and conclude at long intervals the decisive moments of\nemancipating discovery. Undoubtedly matter is there, under the forms of\nhabit, threatening us with automatism, seeking at every moment to devour\nus, stealing a march on us whenever we forget. But matter represents in\nus only the waste of existence, the mortal fall of weakened reality, the\nswoon of the creative action falling back inert; while the depths of our\nbeing still pulse with the liberty which, in its true function, employs\nmechanism itself only as a means of action.\n\nNow, does not this conception make a singular exception of us in\nnature, an empire within an empire? That is the question we have yet to\ninvestigate.\n\n\nII.\n\nWe have just attempted to grasp what being is in ourselves; and we have\nfound that it is becoming, progress, and growth, that it is a creative\nprocess which never ceases to labour incessantly; in a word, that it\nis duration. Must we come to the same conclusion about external being,\nabout existence in general?\n\nLet us consider that external reality which is nearest us, our body. It\nis known to us both externally by our perceptions and internally by our\naffections. It is then a privileged case for our inquiry. In addition,\nand by analogy, we shall at the same time study the other living bodies\nwhich everyday induction shows us to be more or less like our own. What\nare the distinctive characteristics of these new realities? Each of them\npossesses a genuine individuality to a far greater degree than inorganic\nobjects; whilst the latter are hardly limited at all except in\nrelation to the needs of the former, and so do not constitute beings in\nthemselves, the former evidence a powerful internal unity which is only\nfurther emphasised by their prodigious complication, and form wholes\nwith are naturally complete. These wholes are not collections of\njuxtaposed parts: they are organisms; that is to say, systems of\nconnected functions, in which each detail implies the whole, and where\nthe various elements interpenetrate. These organisms change and modify\ncontinually; we say of them not only that they are, but that they live;\nand their life is mutability itself, a flight, a perpetual flux. This\nuninterrupted flight cannot in any way be compared to a geometrical\nmovement; it is a rhythmic succession of phases, each of which contains\nthe resonance of all those which come before; each state lives on in\nthe state following; the life of the body is memory; the living being\naccumulates its past, makes a snowball of itself, serves as an open\nregister for time, ripens, and grows old. Despite all resemblances, the\nliving body always remains, in some measure, an absolutely original and\nunique invention, for there are not two specimens exactly alike; and,\namong inert objects, it appears as the reservoir of indetermination,\nthe centre of spontaneity, contingence, and genuine action, as if in the\ncourse of phenomena nothing really new could be produced except by its\nagency.\n\nSuch are the characteristic tendencies of life, such the aspects\nwhich it presents to immediate observation. Whether spiritual activity\nunconsciously presides over biological evolution, or whether it simply\nprolongs it, we always find here and there the essential features of\nduration.\n\nBut I spoke just now of \"individuality.\" Is it really one of the\ndistinctive marks of life? We know how difficult it is to define it\naccurately. Nowhere, not even in man, is it fully realised; and there\nare beings in existence in which it seems a complete illusion, though\nevery part of them reproduces their complete unity.\n\nTrue, but we are now dealing with biology, in which geometrical\nprecision is inadmissible, where reality is defined not so much by the\npossession of certain characteristics as by its tendency to accentuate\nthem. It is as a tendency that individuality is more particularly\nmanifested; and if we look at it in this light, no one can deny that\nit does constitute one of the fundamental tendencies of life. Only\nthe truth is that the tendency to individuality remains always and\neverywhere counterbalanced, and therefore limited, by an opposing\ntendency, the tendency to association, and above all to reproduction.\nThis necessitates a correction in our analysis. Nature, in many\nrespects, seems to take no interest in individuals. \"Life appears to\nbe a current passing from one germ to another through the medium of a\ndeveloped organism.\" (\"Creative Evolution\", page 29.)\n\nIt seems as if the organism played the part of a thoroughfare. What is\nimportant is rather the continuity of progress of which the individuals\nare only transitory phases. Between these phases again there are no\nsharp severances; each phase resolves and melts imperceptibly into that\nwhich follows. Is not the real problem of heredity to know how, and up\nto what point, a new individual breaks away from the individuals which\nproduced it? Is not the real mystery of heredity the difference, not the\nresemblance, occurring between one term and another?\n\nWhatever be its solution, all the individual phases mutually extend and\ninterpenetrate one another. There is a racial memory by which the past\nis continually accumulated and preserved. Life's history is embodied\nin its present. And that is really the ultimate reason of the perpetual\nnovelty which surprised us just now. The characteristics of biological\nevolution are thus the same as those of human progress. Once again we\nfind the very stuff of reality in duration. \"We must not then speak any\nlonger of life in general as an abstraction, or a mere heading under\nwhich we write down all living beings.\" (\"Creative Evolution\", page 28.)\nOn the contrary, to it belongs the primordial function of reality. It\nis a very real current transmitted from generation to generation,\norganising and passing through bodies, without failing or becoming\nexhausted in any one of them.\n\nWe may, already, then, draw one conclusion: Reality, at bottom, is\nbecoming. But such a thesis runs counter to all our familiar ideas.\nIt is imperative that we should submit it to the test of critical\nexamination and positive verification.\n\nOne system of metaphysics, I said some time ago, underlies common-sense,\nanimating and informing it. According to this system, which is the\ninverse of that which we have just intimated, reality in its very depths\nis fixity and permanence. This is the completely static conception which\nsees in being exactly the opposite of becoming: we cannot become, it\nseems to say, except in so far as we are not. It does not, however, mean\nto deny movement. But it represents it as fluctuation round invariable\ntypes, as a whirling but captive eddy. Every phenomenon appears to it as\na transformation which ends where it began, and the result is that the\nworld takes the form of an eternal equilibrium in which \"nothing is\ncreated, nothing destroyed.\" The idea does not need much forcing to end\nin the old supposition of a cyclic return which restores everything to\nits original conditions. Everything is thus conceived in astronomical\nperiods. All that is left of the universe henceforward is a whirl of\natoms in which nothing counts but certain fixed quantities translated by\nour systems of equations; the rest has vanished \"in algebraical smoke.\"\nThere is therefore nothing more or less in the effect than in the group\nof causes; and the causal relation moves towards identity as towards its\nasymptote.\n\nSuch a view of nature is open to many objections, even if it were only\na question of inorganised matter. Simple physics already betoken the\ninsufficiency of a purely mechanic conception. The stream of phenomena\nflows in an irreversible direction and obeys a determined rhythm. \"If I\nwish to prepare myself a glass of sugar and water, I may do what I like,\nbut I must wait for my sugar to melt.\" (\"Creative Evolution\", page\n10.) Here are facts which pure mechanism does not take into account,\nregarding as it does only statically conceived relations, and making\ntime into a measure only, something like a common denominator of\nconcrete successions, a certain number of coincidences from which all\ntrue duration remains absent, which would remain unchanged even if the\nworld's history, instead of opening out in consecutive phases, were to\nbe unfolded before our eyes all at once like a fan. Do we not indeed\nspeak today of aging and atomic separation. If the quantity of energy\nis preserved, at least its quality is continually deteriorating. By\nthe side of something which remains constant, the world also contains\nsomething which is being used up, dissipated, exhausted, decomposed.\n\nFurther still, a specimen of metal, in its molecular structure,\npreserves an indelible trace of the treatment it has undergone; natural\nphilosophers tell us that there is a \"memory of solids.\" These are all\nvery positive facts which pure mechanism passes over. In addition,\nmust we not first of all postulate what will afterwards be preserved or\ndeteriorated? Whence we get another aspect of things: that of genesis\nand creation; and in reality we register the ascending effort of life as\na reality no less startling than mechanic inertia.\n\nFinally, we have a double movement of ascent and descent: such is what\nlife and matter appear to immediate observation. These two currents\nmeet each other, and grapple. It is the drama of evolution, of which\nMr Bergson once gave a masterly explanation, in stating the high place\nwhich man fills in nature:\n\n\"I cannot regard the general evolution and progress of life in the whole\nof the organised world, the co-ordination and subordination of vital\nfunctions to one another in the same living being, the relations which\npsychology and physiology combined seem bound to establish between brain\nactivity and thought in man, without arriving at this conclusion, that\nlife is an immense effort attempted by thought to obtain of matter\nsomething which matter does not wish to give it. Matter is inert; it is\nthe seat of necessity; it proceeds mechanically. It seems as if thought\nseeks to profit by this mechanical inclination in matter to utilise it\nfor actions, and thus to convert all the creative energy it contains, at\nleast all that this energy possesses which admits of play and external\nextraction, into contingent movements in space and events in time which\ncannot be foreseen. With laborious research it piles up complications\nto make liberty out of necessity, to compose for itself a matter so\nsubtile, and so mobile, that liberty, by a veritable physical paradox,\nand thanks to an effort which cannot last long, succeeds in maintaining\nits equilibrium on this very mobility.\n\n\"But it is caught in the snare. The eddy on which it was poised seizes\nand drags it down. It becomes prisoner of the mechanism it has set up.\nAutomatism lays hold of it, and life, inevitably forgetting the end\nwhich it had determined, which was only to be a means in view of a\nsuperior end, is entirely used up in an effort to preserve itself by\nitself. From the humblest of organised beings to the higher vertebrates\nwhich come immediately before man, we witness an attempt which is always\nfoiled and always resumed with more and more art. Man has triumphed;\nwith difficulty, it is true, and so incompletely that a moment's lapse\nand inattention on his part surrender him to automatism again. But\nhe has triumphed...\" (\"Report of the French Philosophical Society\",\nmeeting, 2nd May 1901.)\n\nAnd Mr Bergson adds in another place: (\"Creative Evolution\", pages\n286-287.) \"With man consciousness breaks the chain. In man and in man\nonly it obtains its freedom. The whole history of life, till man, had\nbeen the history of an effort of consciousness to lift matter, and of\nthe more or less complete crushing of consciousness by matter falling\nupon it again. The enterprise was paradoxical; if indeed we can speak\nhere, except paradoxically, of enterprise and effort. The task was to\ntake matter, which is necessity itself, and create an instrument of\nliberty, construct a mechanical system to triumph over mechanism, to\nemploy the determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net\nit had spread. But everywhere, except in man, consciousness let itself\nbe caught in the net of which it sought to traverse the meshes. It\nremained taken in the mechanisms it had set up. The automatism which it\nclaimed to be drawing towards liberty enfolds it and drags it down. It\nhas not the strength to get away, because the energy with which it had\nsupplied itself for action is almost entirely employed in maintaining\nthe exceedingly subtile and essentially unstable equilibrium into which\nit has brought matter. But man does not merely keep his machine going,\nhe succeeds in using it as it pleases him.\n\n\"He owes it without doubt to the superiority of his brain, which allows\nhim to construct an unlimited number of motor mechanisms, to oppose new\nhabits to old time after time, and to master automatism by dividing\nit against itself. He owes it to his language, which furnishes\nconsciousness with an immaterial body in which to become incarnate, thus\ndispensing it from depending exclusively upon material bodies, the flux\nof which would drag it down and soon engulf it. He owes it to social\nlife, which stores and preserves efforts as language stores thought,\nthereby fixing a mean level to which individuals will rise with\nease, and which, by means of this initial impulse, prevents average\nindividuals from going to sleep and urges better people to rise higher.\nBut our brain, our society, and our language are only the varied outer\nsigns of one and the same internal superiority. Each after its fashion,\nthey tell us the unique and exceptional success which life has won at a\ngiven moment of its evolution. They translate the difference in nature,\nand not in degree only, which separates man from the rest of the animal\nworld. They let us see that if, at the end of the broad springboard from\nwhich life took off, all others came down, finding the cord stretched\ntoo high, man alone has leapt the obstacle.\"\n\nBut man is not on that account isolated in nature: \"As the smallest\ngrain of dust forms part of our entire solar system, and is involved\nalong with it in this undivided downward movement which is materiality\nitself, so all organised beings from the humblest to the highest, from\nthe first origins of life to the times in which we live, and in all\nplaces as at all times, do but demonstrate to our eyes a unique impulse\ncontrary to the movement of matter, and, in itself, indivisible. All\nliving beings are connected, and all yield to the same formidable\nthrust. The animal is supported by the plant, man rides the animal, and\nthe whole of humanity in space and time is an immense army galloping by\nthe side of each of us, before and behind us, in a spirited charge which\ncan upset all resistance, and leap many obstacles, perhaps even death.\"\n(\"Creative Evolution\", pages 293-294.)\n\nWe see with what broad and far-reaching conclusions the new philosophy\ncloses. In the forcible poetry of the pages just quoted its original\naccent rings deep and pure. Some of its leading theses, moreover, are\nnoted here. But now we must discover the solid foundation of underlying\nfact.\n\nLet us take first the fact of biological evolution. Why has it been\nselected as the basis of the system? Is it really a fact, or is it only\na more or less conjectural and plausible theory?\n\nNotice in the first instance that the argument from evolution appears at\nleast as a weapon of co-ordination and research admitted in our day by\nall philosophers, rejected only on the inspiration of preconceived ideas\nwhich are completely unscientific; and that it succeeds in the task\nallotted to it is doubtless already the proof that it responds to\nsome part of reality. And besides, we can go further. \"The idea of\ntransformism is already contained in germ in the natural classification\nof organised beings. The naturalist brings resembling organisms\ntogether, divides the group into sub-groups, within which the\nresemblance is still greater, and so on; throughout the operation, the\ncharacteristics of the group appear as general themes upon which each of\nthe sub-groups executes its particular variations.\n\n\"Now this is precisely the relation we find in the animal world and in\nthe vegetable world between that which produces and what is produced; on\nthe canvas bequeathed by the ancestor to his posterity, and possessed\nin common by them, each broiders his original pattern.\" (\"Creative\nEvolution\", pages 24-25.)\n\nWe may, it is true, ask ourselves whether the genealogical method\npermits results so far divergent as those presented to us by variety\nof species. But embryology answers by showing us the highest and most\ncomplex forms of life attained every day from very elementary forms; and\npalaeontology, as it develops, allows us to witness the same spectacle\nin the universal history of life, as if the succession of phases through\nwhich the embryo passes were only a recollection and an epitome of the\ncomplete past whence it has come. In addition, the phenomena of sudden\nchanges, recently observed, help us to understand more easily the\nconception which obtrudes itself under so many heads, by diminishing the\nimportance of the apparent lacunae in genealogical continuity. Thus the\ntrend of all our experience is the same.\n\nNow there are some certainties which are only centres of concurrent\nprobabilities; there are some truths determined only by succession of\nfacts, but yet, by their intersection and convergence, sufficiently\ndetermined.\n\n\"That is how we measure the distance from an inaccessible point, by\nregarding it time after time from the points to which we have access.\"\n(\"Report of the French Philosophical Society\", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)\n\nIs not that the case here? The affirmative seems all the more inevitable\ninasmuch as the language of transformism is the only language known to\nthe biology of today. Evolution can, it is true, be transposed, but not\nsuppressed, since in any actual state there would always remain this\nstriking fact that the living forms met with as remains in geological\nlayers are ranged by the natural affinity of their characteristics in an\norder of succession parallel to the succession of the ages. We are not\nreally then inventing a hypothesis in beginning with the affirmation of\nevolution. But what we have to do is to appreciate its object.\n\nEvolution! We meet the word everywhere today. But how rare is the true\nidea! Let us ask the astronomers who originate cosmogonical hypotheses,\nand invent a primitive nebula, the natural philosophers who dream that\nby the deterioration of energy and the dissipation of movement the\nmaterial world will obtain final rest in the inertia of a homogeneous\nequilibrium, let us ask the biologists and psychologists who are enemies\nof fixed species and inquisitive about ancestral history. What they\nare anxious to discern in evolution is the persistent influence of an\ninitial cause once given, the attraction of a fixed end, a collection\nof laws before the eternity of which change becomes negligible like\nan appearance. Now he who thinks of the universe as a construction of\nunchangeable relations denies by his method the evolution of which he\nspeaks, since he transforms it into a calculable effect necessarily\nproduced by a regulated play of generating conditions, since he\nimplicitly admits the illusive character of a becoming which adds\nnothing to what is given.\n\nFinality itself, if he keeps the name, does not save him from his error,\nfor finality in his eyes is nothing but an efficient cause projected\ninto the future. So we see him fixing stages, marking periods, inserting\nmeans, putting in milestones, continually destroying movement by halting\nit before his gaze. And we all do the same by instinctive inclination.\nOur concept of law, in its classical form, is not general: it represents\nonly the law of co-existence and of mechanism, the static relation\nbetween two numerically disconnected terms; and in order to grasp\nevolution we shall doubtless have to invent a new type of law: law in\nduration, dynamic relation. For we can, and we must, conceive that there\nis an evolution of natural laws; that these laws never define anything\nbut a momentary state of things; that they are in reality like streaks\ndetermined in the flux of becoming by the meeting of contrary currents.\n\"Laws,\" says Monsieur Boutroux, \"are the bed down which passes the\ntorrent of facts; they have dug it, though they follow it.\" Yet we\nsee the common theories of evolution appealing to the concepts of the\npresent to describe the past, forcing them back to prehistoric times,\nand beyond the reasoning of today, placing at the beginning what is\nonly conceivable in the mind of the contemporary thinker; in a word,\nimagining the same laws as always existing and always observed. This\nis the method which Mr Bergson so justly criticises in Spencer: that of\nreconstructing evolution with fragments of its product.\n\nIf we wish thoroughly to grasp the reality of things, we must think\notherwise. Neither of these ready-made concepts, mechanism and finality,\nis in place, because both of them imply the same postulate, viz. that\n\"everything is given,\" either at the beginning or at the end, whilst\nevolution is nothing if it is not, on the contrary, \"that which gives.\"\nLet us take care not to confound evolution and development. There is\nthe stumbling-block of the usual transformist theories, and Mr Bergson\ndevotes to it a closely argued and singularly penetrating criticism, by\nan example which he analyses in detail. (\"Creative Evolution\", chapter\ni.) These theories either do not explain the birth of variation, and\nlimit themselves to an attempt to make us understand how, once born,\nit becomes fixed, or else through need of adaptation they look for a\nconception of its birth. But in both cases they fail.\n\n\"The truth is that adaptation explains the windings of the movement of\nevolution, but not the general directions of the movement, still less\nthe movement itself. The road which leads to the town is certainly\nobliged to climb the hills and go down the slopes; it adapts itself to\nthe accidents of the ground; but the accidents of the ground are not\nthe cause of the road, any more than they have imparted its direction.\"\n(\"Creative Evolution\", pages 111-112.)\n\nAt the bottom of all these errors there are only prejudices of practical\naction. That is of course why every work appears to be an outside\nconstruction beginning with previous elements; a phase of anticipation\nfollowed by a phase of execution, calculation, and art, an effective\nprojecting cause, and a concerted goal, a mechanism which hurls to\na finality which aims. But the genuine explanation must be sought\nelsewhere. And Mr Bergson makes this plain by two admirable analyses in\nwhich he takes to pieces the common ideas of disorder and nothingness in\norder to explain their meaning relative to our proceedings in industry\nor language.\n\nLet us come back to facts, to immediate experience, and try to translate\nits pure data simply. What are the characteristics of vital evolution?\nFirst of all it is a dynamic continuity, a continuity of qualitative\nprogress; next, it is essentially a duration, an irreversible rhythm, a\nwork of inner maturation. By the memory inherent in it, the whole of its\npast lives on and accumulates, the whole of its past remains for ever\npresent to it; which is tantamount to saying that it is experience.\n\nIt is also an effort of perpetual invention, a generation of continual\nnovelty, indeducible and capable of defying all anticipation, as it\ndefies all repetition. We see it at its task of research in the groping\nattempts exhibited by the long-sought genesis of species; we see it\ntriumphant in the originality of the least state of consciousness, of\nthe least body, of the tiniest cell, of which the infinity of times and\nspaces does not offer two identical specimens.\n\nBut the reef which lies in its way, and on which too often it founders,\nis habit; habit would be a better and more powerful means of action if\nit remained free, but in so far as it congeals and becomes materialised,\nis a hindrance and an obstacle. First of all we have the average types\nround which fluctuates an action which is decreasing and becoming\nreduced in breadth. Then we have the residual organs, the proofs of dead\nlife, the encrustations from which the stream of consciousness gradually\nebbs; and finally we have the inert gear from which all real life has\ndisappeared, the masses of shipwrecked \"things\" rearing their spectral\noutlines where once rolled the open sea of mind. The concept of\nmechanism suits the phenomena which occur within the zone of wreckage,\non this shore of fixities and corpses. But life itself is rather\nfinality, if not in the anthropomorphic sense of premeditated design,\nplan, or programme, at least in this sense, that it is a continually\nrenewed effort of growth and liberation. And it is from here we get Mr\nBergson's formulae: vital impetus and creative evolution.\n\nIn this conception of being consciousness is everywhere, as original and\nfundamental reality, always present in a myriad degrees of tension or\nsleep, and under infinitely various rhythms.\n\nThe vital impulse consists in a \"demand for creation\"; life in its\nhumblest stage already constitutes a spiritual activity; and its effort\nsends out a current of ascending realisation which again determines the\ncounter-current of matter. Thus all reality is contained in a double\nmovement of ascent and descent. The first only, which translates an\ninner work of creative maturation, is essentially durable; the second\nmight, in strictness, be almost instantaneous, like that of an escaping\nspring; but the one imposes its rhythm on the other. From this point of\nview mind and matter appear not as two things opposed to each other, as\nstatic terms in fixed antithesis, but rather as two inverse directions\nof movement; and, in certain respects, we must therefore speak not so\nmuch of matter or mind as of spiritualisation and materialisation, the\nlatter resulting automatically from a simple interruption of the former.\n\"Consciousness or superconsciousness is the rocket, the extinguished\nremains of which fall into matter.\" (\"Creative Evolution\", page 283.)\n\nWhat image of universal evolution is then suggested? Not a cascade of\ndeduction, nor a system of stationary pulsations, but a fountain which\nspreads like a sheaf of corn and is partially arrested, or at least\nhindered and delayed, by the falling spray. The fountain itself, the\nreality which is created, is vital activity, of which spiritual activity\nrepresents the highest form; and the spray which falls is the creative\nact which falls, it is reality which is undone, it is matter and\ninertia. In a word, the supreme law of genesis and fall, the double play\nof which constitutes the universe, comprises a psychological formula.\n\nEverything begins in the manner of an invention, as the fruit of\nduration and creative genius, by liberty, by pure mind; then comes\nhabit, a kind of body, as the body is already a group of habits; and\nhabit, taking root, being a work of consciousness which escapes it and\nturns against it, is little by little degraded into mechanism in which\nthe soul is buried.\n\n\nIII.\n\nThe main lines and general perspective of Mr Bergson's philosophy now\nperhaps begin to appear. Certainly I am the first to feel how powerless\na slender resume really is to translate all its wealth and all its\nstrength.\n\nAt least I wish I could have contributed to making its movement, and\nwhat I may call its rhythm, clearer to perception. It is from the books\nof the master himself that a more complete revelation must be sought.\nAnd the few words which I am still going to add as conclusion are only\nintended to sketch the principal consequences of the doctrine, and allow\nits distant reach to be seen.\n\nThe evolution of life would be a very simple and easy thing to\nunderstand if it were fulfilled along one single trajectory and followed\na straight path. \"But we are here dealing with a shell which has\nimmediately burst into fragments, which, being themselves species of\nshells, have again burst into fragments destined to burst again, and so\non for a very long time.\" (\"Creative Evolution\", page 107.) It is, in\nfact, the property of a tendency to develop itself in the expansion\nwhich analyses it. As for the causes of this dispersion into kingdoms,\nthen into species, and finally into individuals, we can distinguish two\nseries: the resistance which matter opposes to the current of life sent\nthrough it, and the explosive force--due to an unstable equilibrium of\ntendencies--carried by the vital impulse within itself. Both unite\nin making the thrust of life divide in more and more diverging but\ncomplementary directions, each emphasising some distinct aspect of its\noriginal wealth. Mr Bergson confines himself to the branches of the\nfirst order--plant, animal, and man. And in the course of a minute and\nsearching discussion he shows us the characteristics of these lines in\nthe moods or qualities signified by the three words--torpor, instinct,\nand intelligence: the vegetable kingdom constructing and storing\nexplosives which the animal expends, and man creating a nervous system\nfor himself which permits him to convert the expense into analysis. Let\nus leave aside, as we must, the many suggestive views scattered lavishly\nabout, the many flashes of light which fall on all faces of the problem,\nand let us confine ourselves to seeing how we get a theory of knowledge\nfrom this doctrine. There we have yet another proof of the striking and\nfertile originality of the new philosophy.\n\nMore than one objection has been brought against Mr Bergson on this\nhead. That is quite natural: how could such a novelty be exactly\nunderstood at once? It is also very desirable; it is the demands for\nenlightenment which lead a doctrine to full consciousness of itself,\nto precision and perfection. But we must be afraid of false objections,\nthose which arise from an obstinate translation of the new philosophy\ninto an old language steeped in a different metaphysic. With what has\nMr Bergson been reproached? With misunderstanding reason, with ruining\npositive science, with being caught in the illusion of getting knowledge\notherwise than by intelligence, or of thinking otherwise than\nby thought; in short, of falling into a vicious circle by making\nintellectualism turn round upon itself. Not one of these reproaches has\nany foundation.\n\nLet us begin by a few preliminary remarks to clear the ground. First of\nall, there is one ridiculous objection which I quote only to record.\nI mean that which suspects at the bottom of the theories which we are\ngoing to discuss some dark background, some prepossession of irrational\nmysticism. On the contrary, the truth is, we have here perhaps better\nthan anywhere, the spectacle of pure thought face to face with things.\nBut it is a complete thought, not thought reduced to some partial\nfunctions, but sufficiently sure of its critical power to sacrifice none\nof its resources. Here, we may say, really is the genuine positivism,\nwhich reinstates all spiritual reality. It does not in any way lead to a\nmisunderstanding or depreciation of science. Even where contingency and\nrelativity are most visible in it, in the domain of inert matter, Mr\nBergson goes so far as to say that physical science touches an absolute.\nIt is true that it touches this absolute rather than sees it.\nMore particularly it perceives all its reactions on a system of\nrepresentative forms which it presents to it, and observes the effect\non the veil of theory with which it envelops it. At certain moments,\nall the same, the veil becomes almost transparent. And in any case the\nscholar's thought guesses and grazes reality in the curve drawn by the\nsuccession of its increasing syntheses. But there are two orders of\nscience. Formerly it was from the mathematician that we borrowed the\nideal of evidence. Hence came the inclination always to seek the most\ncertain knowledge from the most abstract side. The temptation was to\nmake a kind of less severe and rigorous mathematics of biology itself.\nNow if such a method suits the study of inert matter because in a manner\ngeometrical, so much so that our knowledge of it thus acquired is more\nincomplete than inexact, this is not at all the case for the things of\nlife. Here, if we were to conduct scientific research always in the\nsame grooves and according to the same formulae, we should immediately\nencounter symbolism and relativity. For life is progress, whilst the\ngeometrical method is commensurable only with things. Mr Bergson\nis aware of this; and his rare merit has been to disengage specific\noriginality from biology, while elevating it to a typical and standard\nscience.\n\nBut let us come to the heart of the problem. What was Kant's point of\ndeparture in the theory of knowledge? In seeking to define the structure\nof the mind according to the traces of itself which it must have left in\nits works, and in proceeding by a reflective analysis ascending from\na fact to its conditions, he could only regard intelligence as a thing\nmade, a fixed system of categories and principles.\n\nMr Bergson adopts an inverse attitude. Intelligence is a product of\nevolution: we see it slowly and uninterruptedly constructed along a line\nwhich rises through the vertebrates to man. Such a point of view is the\nonly one which conforms to the real nature of things, and the actual\nconditions of reality; the more we think of it, the more we perceive\nthat the theory of knowledge and the theory of life are bound up with\none another. Now what do we conclude from this point of view? Life,\nconsidered in the direction of \"knowledge,\" evolves on two diverging\nlines which at first are confused, then gradually separate, and finally\nend in two opposed forms of organisation, intelligence and instinct.\nSeveral contrary potentialities interpenetrated at their common source,\nbut of this source each of these kinds of activity preserves or rather\naccentuates only one tendency; and it will be easy to mark its dual\ncharacter.\n\nInstinct is sympathy; it has no clear consciousness of itself; it does\nnot know how to reflect; it is hardly capable of varying its steps; but\nit operates with incomparable certainty because it remains lodged in\nthings, in communion with their rhythm and with inner feeling of them.\nThe history of animals in this respect supplies many remarkable examples\nwhich Mr Bergson analyses and discusses in detail. As much might be\nsaid of the work which produces a living body, and of the effort which\npresides over its growth, maintenance, and functions. Take a natural\nphilosopher who has long breathed the atmosphere of the laboratory, who\nhas by long practice acquired what we call \"experience\"; he has a\nkind of intimate feeling for his instruments, their resources, their\nmovements, their working tendencies; he perceives them as extensions\nof himself; he possesses them as groups of habitual actions, thus\ndiscoursing by manipulations as easily and spontaneously as others\ndiscourse in calculation. Doubtless that is only an image; but transpose\nit and generalise it, and it will help you to understand the kind of\naction which divines instinct. But intelligence is something quite\ndifferent. We are talking, of course, of the analytic and synthetic\nintelligence which we use in our acts of current thought, which works\nthroughout our daily action and forms the fundamental thread of our\nscientific operations. I need not here go back to the criticism of its\nordinary proceedings. But I must now note the service which suits them,\nthe domain in which they apply and are valid, and what they teach us\nthereby about the meaning, reach, and natural task of intelligence.\n\nWhilst instinct vibrates in sympathetic harmony with life, it is about\ninert matter that intelligence is granted; it is a rider to our faculty\nof action; it triumphs in geometry; it feels at home among the objects\nin which our industry finds its supports and its tools. In a word,\n\"our logic is primarily the logic of solids.\" (Preface to \"Creative\nEvolution\".) But if we enter the vital order its incompetence is\nmanifestly apparent.\n\nIt is very important that deduction should be so impotent in biology.\nStill more impotent is it perhaps in matters of art or religion; whilst,\non the contrary, it works marvels so long as it has only to foresee\nmovements or transformations in bodies. What does this mean, if not\nthat intelligence and materiality go together, that language with its\nanalytic steps is regulated by the movements of matter? Philosophy\nonce again then must leave it behind, for the duty of philosophy is to\nconsider everything in its relation to life.\n\nDo not conclude, however, that the philosopher's duty is to renounce\nintelligence, place it under tutelage, or abandon it to the blind\nsuggestions of feeling and will. It has not even the right to do so.\nInstinct, with us who have evolved along the grooves of intelligence,\nhas remained too weak to be sufficient for us. Besides, intelligence\nis the only path by which light could dawn in the bosom of primitive\ndarkness. But let us look at present reality in all its complexity, all\nits wealth. Round intelligence itself exists a halo of instinct. This\nhalo represents the remains of the first nebulous vapour at the expense\nof which intelligence was constituted like a brilliantly condensed\nnucleus; and it is still today the atmosphere which gives it life, the\nfringe of touch, and delicate probing, inspiring contact and divining\nsympathy, which we see in play in the phenomena of discovery, as also in\nthe acts of that \"attention to life,\" and that \"sense of reality\" which\nis the soul of good sense, so widely distinct from common-sense. And\nthe peculiar task of the philosopher is to reabsorb intelligence in\ninstinct, or rather to reinstate instinct in intelligence; or better\nstill, to win back to the heart of intelligence all the initial\nresources which it must have sacrificed. This is what is meant by return\nto the primitive, and the immediate, to reality and life. This is the\nmeaning of intuition.\n\nCertainly the task is difficult. We at once suspect a vicious circle.\nHow can we go beyond intelligence except by intelligence itself? We are\napparently inside our thought, as incapable of coming out of it as is a\nballoon of rising above the atmosphere. True, but on this reasoning we\ncould just as well prove that it is impossible for us to acquire any\nnew habit whatsoever, impossible for life to grow and go beyond itself\ncontinually.\n\nWe must avoid drawing false conclusions from the simile of the balloon.\nThe question here is to know what are the real limits of the atmosphere.\nIt is certain that the synthetic and critical intelligence, left to\nits own strength, remains imprisoned in a circle from which there is no\nescape.\n\nBut action removes the barrier. If intelligence accepts the risk of\ntaking the leap into the phosphorescent fluid which bathes it, and to\nwhich it is not altogether foreign, since it has broken off from it and\nin it dwell the complementary powers of the understanding, intelligence\nwill soon become adapted and so will only be lost for a moment to\nreappear greater, stronger, and of fuller content. It is action again\nunder the name of experience which removes the danger of illusion or\ngiddiness, it is action which verifies; by a practical demonstration,\nby an effort of enduring maturation which tests the idea in intimate\ncontact with reality and judges it by its fruits.\n\nIt always falls therefore to intelligence to pronounce the grand verdict\nin the sense that only that can be called true which will finally\nsatisfy it; but we mean an intelligence duly enlarged and transformed\nby the very effect of the action it has lived. Thus the objection of\n\"irrationalism\" directed against the new philosophy falls to the ground.\n\nThe objection of \"non-morality\" fares no better. But is has been made,\nand people have thought fit to accuse Mr Bergson's work of being the too\ncalm production of an intelligence too indifferent, too coldly lucid,\ntoo exclusively curious to see and understand, untroubled and unthrilled\nby the universal drama of life, by the tragic reality of evil. On the\nother hand, not without contradiction, the new philosophy has been\ncalled \"romantic,\" and people have tried to find in it the essential\ntraits of romanticism: its predilection for feeling and imagination, its\nunique anxiety for vital intensity, its recognised right to all which\nis to be, whence its radical inability to establish a hierarchy of moral\nqualifications. Strange reproach! The system in question is not yet\npresented to us as a finished system. Its author manifests a plain\ndesire to classify his problems. And he is certainly right in proceeding\nso: there is a time for everything, and on occasion we must learn to be\njust an eye focussed upon being. But that does not at all exclude the\npossibility of future works, treating in due order of the problem of\nhuman destiny, and perhaps even in the work so far completed we may\ndescry some attempts to bring this future within ken.\n\nBut universal evolution, though creative, is not for all that quixotic\nor anarchist. It forms a sequence. It is a becoming with direction,\nundoubtedly due, not to the attraction of a clearly preconceived goal,\nor the guidance of an outer law, but to the actual tendency of the\noriginal thrust. In spite of the stationary eddies or momentary\nbackwashes we observe here and there, its stream moves in a definite\ndirection, ever swelling and broadening. For the spectator who regards\nthe general sweep of the current, evolution is growth. On the other\nhand, he who thinks this growth now ended is under a simple delusion:\n\"The gates of the future stand wide open.\" (\"Creative Evolution\", page\n114.) In the stage at present attained man is leading; he marks the\nculminating point at which creation continues; in him, life has already\nsucceeded, at least up to a certain point; from him onwards it advances\nwith consciousness capable of reflection; is it not for that very reason\nresponsible for the result? Life, according to the new philosophy, is\na continual creation of what is new: new--be it well understood--in the\nsense of growth and progress in relation to what has gone before.\nLife, in a word, is mental travel, ascent in a path of growing\nspiritualisation. Such at least is the intense desire, and such the\nfirst tendency which launched and still inspires it. But it may faint,\nhalt, or travel down the hill. This is an undeniable fact; and once\nrecognised does it not awake in us the presentiment of a directing law\nimmanent in vital effort, a law doubtless not to be found in any code,\nnor yet binding through the stern behest of mechanical necessity, but\na law which finds definition at every moment, and at every moment also\nmarks a direction of progress, being as it were the shifting tangent to\nthe curve of becoming?\n\nLet us did that according to the new philosophy the whole of our past\nsurvives for ever in us, and by means of us results in action. It is\nthen literally true that our acts do to a certain extent involve\nthe whole universe, and its whole history: the act which we make it\naccomplish will exist henceforward for ever, and will for ever tinge\nuniversal duration with its indelible shade. Does not that imply an\nimperious, urgent, solemn, and tragic problem of action? Nay, more;\nmemory makes a persistent reality of evil, as of good. Where are we to\nfind the means to abolish and reabsorb the evil? What in the individual\nis called memory becomes tradition and joint responsibility in the race.\n\nOn the other hand, a directing law is immanent in life, but in the\nshape of an appeal to endless transcendence. In dealing with this future\ntranscendent to our daily life, with this further shore of present\nexperience, where are we to seek the inspiring strength? And is there\nnot ground for asking ourselves whether intuitions have not arisen here\nand there in the course of history, lighting up the dark road of the\nfuture for us with a prophetic ray of dawn? It is at this point that the\nnew philosophy would find place for the problem of religion.\n\nBut this word \"religion,\" which has not come once so far from Mr\nBergson's pen, coming now from mine, warns me that it is time to end. No\nman today would be justified in foreseeing the conclusions to which the\ndoctrine of creative evolution will one day undoubtedly lead on this\npoint. More than any other, I must forget here what I myself may have\nelsewhere tried to do in this order of ideas. But it was impossible\nnot to feel the approach of the temptation. Mr Bergson's work is\nextraordinarily suggestive. His books, so measured in tone, so tranquil\nin harmony, awaken in us a mystery of presentiment and imagination; they\nreach the hidden retreats where the springs of consciousness well up.\nLong after we have closed them we are shaken within; strangely moved,\nwe listen to the deepening echo, passing on and on. However valuable\nalready their explicit contents may be, they reach still further than\nthey aimed. It is impossible to tell what latent germs they foster. It\nis impossible to guess what lies behind the boundless distance of the\nhorizons they expose. But this at least is sure: these books have verily\nbegun a new work in the history of human thought.\n\n\n\n\nADDITIONAL EXPLANATIONS\n\n\n\n\nI. Mr Bergson's Work and the General Directions of Contemporary Thought.\n\nA broad survey of the new philosophy was bound to be somewhat rapid\nand summary; and now that this is completed it will doubtless not be\nsuperfluous to come back, on the same plan as before, to some more\nimportant or more difficult individual points, and to examine by\nthemselves the most prominent centres on which we should focus the light\nof our attention. Not that I intend to probe in minute detail the folds\nand turns of a doctrine which admits of infinite development: how can I\nclaim to exhaust a work of such profound thought that the least passing\nexample employed takes its place as a particular study? Still less do\nI wish to undertake a kind of analytic resume; no undertaking could be\nless profitable than that of arranging paragraph headings to repeat too\nbriefly, and therefore obscurely, what a thinker has said without any\nextravagance of language, yet with every requisite explanation.\n\nThe critic's true task, as I understand it, in no way consists in\ndrawing up a table of contents strewn with qualifying notes. His task\nis to read and enable others to read between the lines, between the\nchapters, and between the successive works, what constitutes the dynamic\ntie between them, all that the linear form of writing and language has\nnot allowed the author himself to elucidate.\n\nHis task is, as far as possible, to master the accompaniment of\nunderlying thought which produced the resonant atmosphere of the\ninquirer's intuition, the rhythm and toning of the image, resulting in\nthe shade of light which falls upon his vision. His task, in a word,\nis to help understanding, and therefore to point out and anticipate the\nmisunderstandings to be feared. Now it seems to me that there are a few\npoints round which the errors of interpretation more naturally gather,\nproducing some astounding misconceptions of Mr Bergson's philosophy. It\nis these points only that I propose to clear up. But at the same time I\nshall use the opportunity to supply information about authorities, which\nI have hitherto deliberately omitted, to avoid riddling with references\npages which were primarily intended to impart a general impression.\n\nLet us begin by glancing at the milieu of thought in which Mr Bergson's\nphilosophy must have had birth. For the last thirty years new currents\nare traceable. In what direction do they go? And what distance have they\nalready gone? What, in short, are the intellectual characteristics of\nour time? We must endeavour to distinguish the deeper tendencies, those\nwhich herald and prepare and near future.\n\nOne of the essential and frequently cited features of the generation\nin which Taine and Renan were the most prominent leaders was the\npassionate, enthusiastic, somewhat exclusive and intolerant cult of\npositive science. This science, in its days of pride, was considered\nunique, displayed on a plane by itself, always uniformly competent,\ncapable of gripping any object whatever with the same strength, and of\ninserting it in the thread of one and the same unbroken connection.\nThe dream of that time, despite all verbal palliations, was a universal\nscience of mathematics: mathematics, of course, with their bare and\nbrutal rigour softened and shaded off, where feasible; if possible,\nsupple and sensitive; in ideal, delicate, buoyant, and judicious; but\nmathematics governed from end to end by an equal necessity. Conceived as\nthe sole mistress of truth, this science was expected in days to come\nto fulfil all the needs of man, and unreservedly to take the place of\nancient spiritual discipline. Genuine philosophy had had its day:\nall metaphysics seemed deception and fantasy, a simple play of empty\nformulae or puerile dreams, a mythical procession of abstraction and\nphantom; religion itself paled before science, as poetry of the grey\nmorning before the splendour of the rising sun.\n\nHowever, after all this pride came the turn of humility, and humility of\nthe very lowest. This deified science, borne down in its hour of triumph\nby too heavy a weight, had necessarily been recognised as powerless to\ngo beyond the order of relations, and radically incapable of telling\nus the origin, end, and basis of things. It analysed the conditions of\nphenomena, but was ill-suited ever to grasp any real cause, or any deep\nessence. Further, it became the Unknowable, before which the human mind\ncould only halt in despair. And in this way destitution arose out of\nambition itself, since thought, after trusting too exclusively to its\ngeometrical strength, was compelled at the end of its effort to confess\nitself beaten when confronted with the only questions to which no man\nmay ever be indifferent.\n\nThis double attitude is no longer that of the contemporary generation.\nThe prestige of illusion has vanished. In the religion of science we see\nnow nothing but idolatry. The haughty affirmation of yesterday appears\ntoday, not as expressing a positive fact or a result duly established,\nbut as bringing forward a thesis of perilous and unconscious\nmetaphysics. Let us go even further. If true intelligence is mental\nexpansion and aptitude for understanding widely different things, each\nin its originality, to the same degree, we must say that the claim to\nreduce reality to one only of its modes, to know it in one only of its\nforms, is an unintelligent claim. That is, in brief formula, the\nverdict of the present generation. Not, of course, that it in any\nway misconceives or disdains the true value of science, whether as an\ninstrument of action for the conquest of nature, or as intelligible\nlanguage, allowing us to know our whereabouts in things and \"talk\" them.\n\nIt is aware that in all circumstances positive methods have their\nevidence to produce, and that, where they pronounce within the limits of\ntheir power, nothing can stand against their verdict. But it considers\nfirst of all that science was conceived of late under much too stiff and\nnarrow a form, under the obsession of too abstract a mathematical\nideal which corresponds to one aspect of reality only, and that\nthe shallowest. And it considers afterwards that science, even when\nbroadened and made flexible, being concerned only with what is, with\nfact and datum, remains radically powerless to solve the problem of\nhuman life. Nowhere does science penetrate to the very depth of things,\nand there is nothing in the world but \"things.\"\n\nExperience has shown where the dream of universal mathematics leads us.\nNumber is driven to the heart of phenomena and nature dissected with\nthis delicate scalpel. Speaking in more general terms, we adopt spatial\nrelation as the perfect example of intelligible relation. I do not wish\nto deny the use of such a method now and again, the services it may\nrender, or the beauty of construction peculiar to the systems it\ninspires. But we must see what price we pay for these advantages. Do\nwe choose geometry for an informing and regulating science? The more\nwe advance towards the concrete and the living, the more we feel the\nnecessity of altering the pure mathematical type. The sciences, as they\nget further from inert matter, unless they agree to reform, pale and\nweaken; they become vague, impotent, anaemic; they touch little but\nthe trite surface of their object, the body, not the soul; in them\nsymbolism, artifice, and relativity become increasingly evident; at\nlength, arbitrary and conventional elements crop up and devour them. In\na word, the claim to treat the living as inert matter conduces to the\nmisconception in life of life itself, and the retention of nothing but\nthe material waste.\n\nThis experience furnishes us with a lesson. There is not so much one\nscience as several sciences, each distinguished by an autonomous method,\nand divided into two great kingdoms.\n\nLet us therefore from the outset follow Mr Bergson in tracing a very\nsharp line of demarcation between the inert and the living. Two orders\nof knowledge will thereby become separate, one in which the frames of\ngeometrical understanding are in place, the other where new means and a\nnew attitude are required. The essential task of the present hour will\nnow appear to us in a precise light; it will henceforward consist,\nwithout any disregard of a glorious past, in an effort to found as\nspecifically distinct methods of instruction those sciences which take\nfor objects the successive moments of life in its different degrees,\nbiology, psychology, sociology;--then in an effort to reconstruct,\nsetting out from these new sciences and according to their spirit, the\nlike of what ancient philosophy had attempted, setting out from geometry\nand mechanics. By so doing we shall succeed in throwing knowledge open\nto receive all the wealth of reality, while at the same time we shall\nreinstate the sense of mystery and the thrill of higher anxieties.\nA further result will be that the phantom of the Unknowable will be\nexorcised, since it no longer represents anything but the relative and\nmomentary limit of each method, the portion of being which escapes its\npartial grip.\n\nThis is one of the first controlling ideas of the contemporary\ngeneration. Others result from it. More particularly, it is for the same\nbody of motives, in the same sense, and with the same restrictions, that\nwe distrust intellectualism; I mean the tendency to live uniquely by\nintelligence, to think as if the whole of thought consisted in analytic,\nclear and reasoning understanding.\n\nOnce again, it is not a question of some blind abandonment to sentiment,\nimagination, or will, nor do we claim to restrict the legitimate rights\nof intellectuality in judgment. But around critical reason there is a\nquickening atmosphere in which dwell the powers of intuition, there is a\nhalf-light of gradual tones in which insertion into reality is effected.\nIf by rationalism we mean the attitude which consists in cabining\nourselves within the zone of geometrical light in which language\nevolves, we must admit that rationalism supposes something other than\nitself, that it hangs suspended by a generating act which escapes it.\n\nThe method therefore which we seek to employ everywhere today is\nexperience; but complete experience, anxious to neglect no aspect of\nbeing nor any resource of mind; shaded experience, not extending on the\nsurface only, in a homogeneous and uniform manner; on the contrary,\nan experience distributed in depth over multiple planes, adopting a\nthousand different forms to adapt itself to the different kinds of\nproblems; in short, a creative and informing experience, a veritable\ngenesis, a genuine action of thought, a work and movement of life by\nwhich the guiding principles, forms of intelligibility, and criteria of\nverification obtain birth and stability in habits. And here again it\nis by borrowing Mr Bergson's own formula from him that we shall most\naccurately describe the new spirit.\n\nThat the attitude and fundamental procedure of this new spirit are in\nno way a return to scepticism or a reaction against thought cannot\nbe better demonstrated than by this resurrection of metaphysics, this\nrenaissance of idealism, which is certainly one of the most distinctive\nfeatures of our epoch. Undoubtedly philosophy in France has never known\nso prosperous and so pregnant a moment. Notwithstanding, it is not\na return to the old dreams of dialectic construction. Everything is\nregarded from the point of view of life, and there is a tendency more\nand more to recognise the primacy of spiritual activity. But we wish to\nunderstand and employ this activity and this life in all its wealth,\nin all its degrees, and by all its functions: we wish to think with the\nwhole of thought, and go to the truth with the whole of our soul; and\nthe reason of which we recognise the sovereign weight is reason laden\nwith its complete past history.\n\nAnd what is that, really, but realism? By realism I mean the gift of\nourselves to reality, the work of concrete realisation, the effort to\nconvert every idea into action, to regulate the idea by the action as\nmuch as the action by the idea, to live what we think and think what we\nlive. But that is positivism, you will say; certainly it is positivism.\nBut how changed! Far from considering as positive only that which can\nbe an object of sensation or calculation, we begin by greeting the great\nspiritual realities with this title. The deep and living aspiration of\nour day is in everything to seek the soul, the soul which specifies and\nquickens, seek it by an effort towards the revealing sympathy which\nis genuine intelligence, seek it in the concrete, without dissolving\nthought in dreams or language, without losing contact with the body or\ncritical control, seek it, in fine, as the most real and genuine part of\nbeing.\n\nHence its return to questions which were lately declared out of date\nand closed; hence its taste for problems of aesthetics and morality,\nits close siege of social and religious problems, its homesickness for a\nfaith harmonising the powers of action and the powers of thought; hence\nits restless desire to hark back to tradition and discipline.\n\nA new philosophy was required to answer this new way of looking at\nthings. Already, in 1867, Ravaisson in his celebrated \"Report\" wrote\nthese prophetic lines: \"Many signs permit us to foresee in the near\nfuture a philosophical epoch of which the general character will be the\npredominance of what may be called spiritualist realism or positivism,\nhaving as generating principle the consciousness which the mind has in\nitself of an existence recognised as being the source and support of\nevery other existence, being none other than its action.\"\n\nThis prophetic view was further commented on in a work where Mr Bergson\nspeaks with just praise of this shrewd and penetrating sense of what was\ncoming: \"What could be bolder or more novel than to come and predict\nto the physicists that the inert will be explained by the living, to\nbiologists that life will only be understood by thought, to philosophers\nthat generalities are not philosophic?\" (\"Notice on the Life and Works\nof M. Felix Ravaisson-Molien\", in the Reports of the Academy of Moral\nand Political Sciences, 1904.)\n\nBut let us give each his due. What Ravaisson had only anticipated Mr\nBergson himself accomplishes, with a precision which gives body to the\nimpalpable and floating breath of first inspiration, with a depth which\nrenews both proof and theses alike, with a creative originality which\nprevents the critic who is anxious for justice and precision from\ninsisting on any researches establishing connection of thought.\n\nOne reason for the popularity today enjoyed by this new philosophy is\ndoubtless to be found in the very tendencies of the milieu in which\nit is produced and in the aspirations which work it. But, after once\nremarking these desires, we must further not forget that Mr Bergson has\ncontributed more than anyone else to awaken them, determine them,\nand make them become conscious of themselves. Let us therefore try to\nunderstand in itself and by itself the work of genius of which just now\nwe were seeking the dawning gleams. What synthetic formula will be best\nable to tell us the essential direction of its movement? I will borrow\nit from the author himself: \"It seems to me,\" he writes, (\"Philosophic\nIntuition\" in the \"Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale\", November 1911.)\n\"that metaphysics are trying at this moment to simplify themselves, to\ncome nearer to life.\" Every philosophy tends to become incarnate in a\nsystem which constitutes for it a kind of body of analysis.\n\nRegarded literally, it appears to be an infinite complication, a complex\nconstruction with a thousand alcoves of high architecture, \"in which\nmeasures have been taken to provide ample lodging for all problems.\"\n(Ibid.) Do not let us be deceived by this appearance: it signifies only\nthat language is incommensurable with thought, that speech admits of\nendless multiplication in approximations incapable of exhausting their\nobject. But before constructing such a body for itself, all philosophy\nis a soul, a mind, and begins with the simple unity of a generating\nintuition. Here is the fitting point at which to see its essence; this\nis what determines it much better than its conceptual expression, which\nis always contingent and incomplete. \"A philosophy worthy of the name\nhas never said but one thing; and that thing it has rather attempted to\nsay than actually said. And it has only said one thing, because it has\nonly seen one point: and that was not so much vision as contact; this\ncontact supplied an impulse, this impulse a movement, and if this\nmovement, which is a kind of vortex of a certain particular form, is\nonly visible to our eyes by what it has picked up on its path, it is no\nless true that other dust might equally well have been raised, and that\nit would still have been the same vortex.\" (\"Philosophic Intuition\" in\nthe \"Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale\", November 1911.)\n\nHence comes the fact that a philosophy is at bottom much more\nindependent of its natal environment than one might at first suppose;\nhence also the fact that ancient philosophies, though apparently\nrelative to a science which is out of date, remain always living and\nworthy of study.\n\nWhat, then, is the original intuition of Mr Bergson's philosophy, the\ncreative intuition whence it comes forth? We cannot hesitate long: it\nis the intuition of duration. That is the perspective centre to which we\nmust indefatigably return; that is the principle which we must labour\nto expose in its full light; and that is, finally, the source of light\nwhich will illumine us. Now a philosophy is not only an expressed\nintuition; it is further and above all an acting intuition, gradually\ndetermined and realised, and tested by its explanatory works; and it is\nby its fruits that we can understand and judge it. Hence the review upon\nwhich we are entering.\n\n\n\n\nII. Immediacy.\n\nThe philosopher's first duty is in clear language to declare his\nstarting-point, with what a mathematician would call the \"tangent to\nthe origin\" of the path along which he is travelling, as afterwards\nthe critic's first duty is to describe this initial attitude. I have\ntherefore first of all to indicate the directing idea of the new\nphilosophy. But it is not a question of extracting a quintessence, or of\nfencing the soul of doctrine within a few summary formulae. A system\nis not to be resumed in a phrase, for every proposition isolated is\na proposition falsified. I wish merely to elucidate the methodical\nprinciple which inspires the beginning of Mr Bergson's philosophy.\n\nTo philosophy itself falls the task and belongs the right to define\nitself gradually as it becomes constituted. On this point, an\nanticipation of experience seems hardly possible; here, as elsewhere,\nthe finding of a synthetic formula is a final rather than preliminary\nquestion. However, we are obliged from the outset of the work to\ndetermine the programme of the inquiry, if only to direct our research.\nIt is the same on the threshold of every science. There, it is true, the\nanalogy ceases. For in any science properly speaking the determination\nof beginning consists in the indication of an object, and a matter, and\nbeyond that, to each new object a new science reciprocally corresponds,\nthe existence of the one involving the legitimacy of the other. But if\nthe various sciences--I mean the positive sciences--divide different\nobjects thus between them, philosophy cannot, in its turn, come forward\nas a particular science, having a distinct object, the designation of\nwhich would be sufficient to characterise and circumscribe it. Such was\nalways the traditional conception: such will ours continue to be. For,\nas a matter of fact, every object has a philosophy and all matter can\nbe regarded philosophically. In short, philosophy is chiefly a way of\nperceiving and thinking, an attitude and a proceeding: the peculiar and\nspecific in it is more an intuition than a content, a spirit rather than\na domain.\n\nWhat, then, is the characteristic function of philosophy, at least its\ninitial function, that which marks its opening?\n\nTo criticise the works of knowledge spontaneously effected; that is to\nsay, to scrutinise their direction, reach, and conditions: that is today\nthe unanimous answer of philosophers when questioned about the goal of\ntheir labours. In other terms, what they study is not so much such\nand such a particular \"thing\" as the relation of mind to each of the\nrealities to be studied. Their object, if we must employ the word, is\nknowledge itself, it is the act of knowing regarded from the point of\nview of its meaning and value. Philosophy thus appears as a new \"order\"\nof knowledge, co-extensive with what is knowable, as a kind of knowledge\nof the second degree, in which it is less a question of learning than\nof understanding, in which we aim at progressing in depth rather than in\nextent; not effort to extend the quantity of knowledge, but reflection\non the quality of this knowledge. Spontaneous thought--vulgar or\nscientific--is a direct, simple, and practical thought turned towards\nthings and partial to useful results; seeking what is formulable rather\nthan what is true, or at least so fond of formulae which can be handled,\nmanipulated, or transmitted, that it is always tempted to see the truth\nin them; a thought which, moreover, sets out from more or less unguarded\npostulates, abandons itself to the motive impulses of habits contracted,\nand goes straight on indefinitely without self-examination. Philosophy,\non the contrary, desires to be thought about thought, thought retracing\nits life and work, knowledge labouring to know itself, fact which\naspires to fact about itself, mental effort to become free, to become\nentirely transparent and luminous in its own eyes, and, if need be, to\neffect self-reform by dissipating its natural illusions. What we have\nbefore our eyes then are the initial postulates themselves, the\nfirst spontaneous thoughts, the obscure origins of reason; and we are\nproceeding towards a point of departure rather than arrival.\n\nThe new philosophy does not refuse to carry out this first critical\ntask; but it carries it out in its own way after determining more\nprecisely the real conditions of the problem. At the hour when\nmethodical research begins, the philosopher's mind is not clean-swept;\nand it would be chimerical to wish to place oneself from the beginning,\nby some act of transcendence, outside common thought. This thought\ncannot be inspected and judged from outside. It constitutes, whether we\nwish it or no, the sole concrete and positive point of departure. Let us\nadd that common-sense constitutes also our sole point of insertion into\nreality. It can only then be a question of purifying it, not in any way\nof replacing it. But we must distinguish in it what is pure fact, and\nwhat is ulterior arrangement, in order to see what are the problems\nwhich really are presented, and what are, on the contrary, the false\nproblems, the illusory problems, those which relate only to our\nartifices of language.\n\nThe search for facts is then the first necessary moment of all\nphilosophy.\n\nBut common thought comes before us at the outset as a piece of very\ncomposite alluvial ground. It is a beginning of positive science, and\nalso a residue of all philosophical opinions which have had some\nvogue. That, however, is not its primary basis. Primum vivere, deinde\nphilosophari, says the proverb. In certain respects, \"speculation is a\nluxury, whilst action is a necessity.\" (\"Creative Evolution\", page 47.)\nBut \"life requires us to apprehend things in the relation they have\nto our needs.\" (\"Laughter\", page 154.) Hence comes the fundamental\nutilitarianism of common-sense. Therefore if we wish to define it in\nitself and for itself, and no longer as a first approximation of\nsuch and such a system of metaphysics, it appears to us no longer as\nrudimentary science and philosophy, but as an organisation of thought in\nview of practical life. Thus it is that outside all speculative opinion\nit is effectively lived by all. Its proper language, we may say, is the\nlanguage of customary perception and mechanical fabrication, therefore\na language relative to action, made to express action, modelled upon\naction, translating things by the relations they maintain to our action;\nI mean our corporal and synthetic action, which very evidently implies\nthought, since it is a question of the action of a reasonable being, but\nwhich thus contains a thought which is itself eminently practical.\n\nHowever, we are here regarding common-sense considered as a source of\nfact. Its utilitarianism then becomes a kind of spontaneous metaphysics\nfrom which we must detach ourselves. But is it not the very task of\npositive science to execute this work of purification? Nothing of the\nkind, despite appearances and despite intentions. Let us examine more\nclosely. The general categories of common thought, according to Mr\nBergson, (\"Philosophic Intuition\" in the \"Metaphysical and Moral\nReview\", November 1911, page 825.) remain those of science; the main\nroads traced by our senses through the continuity of reality are still\nthose along which science will pass; perception is an infant science\nand science an adult perception; so much so that customary knowledge and\nscientific knowledge, both of them destined to prepare our action upon\nthings, are of necessity two visions of the same kind, though of unequal\nprecision and reach. It does not follow that science does not practise\na certain disinterestedness as far as immediate mechanical utility is\nconcerned; it does not follow that it has no value as knowledge. But it\ndoes not set itself genuinely free from the habits contracted in common\nexperience, and to inform its research it preserves the postulates of\ncommon-sense; so that it always grasps things by their \"actable\" side,\nby their point of contact with our faculty for action, under the forms\nby which we handle them conceptually or practically, and all it attains\nof reality is that by which nature is a possible object of language or\nindustry.\n\nLet us turn now towards another aspect of natural thought, to\ndiscover in it the germ of the necessary criticism. By the side of\n\"common-sense,\" which is the first rough-draft of positive science,\nthere is \"good sense,\" which differs from it profoundly, and marks the\nbeginning of what we shall later on call philosophic intuition. (Cf. an\naddress on \"Good Sense and Classical Studies\", delivered by Mr Bergson\nat the Concours general prize distribution, 30th July 1895.) It is a\nsense of what is real, concrete, original, living, an art of equilibrium\nand precision, a fine touch for complexities, continually feeling like\nthe antennae of some insects. It contains a certain distrust of the\nlogical faculty in respect of itself; it wages incessant war upon\nintellectual automatism, upon ready-made ideas and linear deduction;\nabove all, it is anxious to locate and to weigh, without any oversights;\nit arrests the development of every principle and every method at the\nprecise point where too brutal an application would offend the delicacy\nof reality; at every moment it collects the whole of our experience and\norganises it in view of the present. It is, in a word, thought which\nkeeps its freedom, activity which remains awake, suppleness of\nattitude, attention to life, an ever-renewed adjustment to suit ever-new\nsituations.\n\nIts revealing virtue is derived from this moving contact with fact, and\nthis living effort of sympathy. This is what we must tend to transpose\nfrom the practical to the speculative order.\n\nWhat, then, will be for us the beginning of philosophy? After taking\ncognisance of common utilitarianism, and to emerge from the relativity\nin which it buries us, we seek a departure-point, a criterion, something\nwhich decides the raising of inquiry. Where are we to find such a\nprinciple, except in the very action of thought; I mean, this time, its\naction of profound life independent of all practical aim? We shall thus\nonly be imitating the example of Descartes when solving the problem\nof temporary doubt. What we shall term return to the immediate,\nthe primitive, the pure fact, will be the taking of each perception\nconsidered as an act lived, a coloured moment of the Cogito, and this\nwill be for us a criterion and departure-point.\n\nLet us specify this point. Immediate data or primitive data or pure data\nare apprehended by us under forms of disinterested action; I mean that\nthey are first of all lived rather than conceived, that before becoming\nmaterial for science, they appear as moments of life; in brief, that\nperception of them precedes their use.\n\nIt is at this stage previous to language that we are by these pure data\nin intimate communion with reality itself, and the whole of our critical\ntask is to return to them through a regressive analysis, the goal\nof which is gradually to make our clear intelligence equal to our\nprimordial intuition. The latter already constitutes a thought, a\npreconceptual thought which is the intrinsic light of action, which is\naction itself so far as it is luminous. Thus there is no question here\nof restricting in any degree the part played by thought, but only of\ndistinguishing between the perceptive and theoretic functions of mind.\n\nWhat is \"the image\" of which Mr Bergson speaks at the beginning of\n\"Matter and Mind\" except, when grasped in its first movement, the flash\nof conscious existence \"in which the act of knowledge coincides with\nthe generating act of reality\"? (\"Report of the French Philosophical\nSociety\", philosophical vocabulary, article \"Immediate\".)\n\nLet us forget all philosophical controversies about realism and\nidealism; let us try to reconstruct for ourselves a simplicity, a\nvirginal and candid glance, freeing us from the habits contracted in\nthe course of practical life. These then are our \"images\": not things\npresented externally, nor states felt internally, not portraits of\nexterior beings nor projections of internal moods, but appearances, in\nthe etymological sense of the word, appearances lived simply, without\nour being distinguished from them, as yet neither subjective nor\nobjective, marking a moment of consciousness previous to the work of\nreflection, from which proceeds the duality of subject and object. And\nsuch also, in every order, appear the \"immediate feelings\"; as action in\nbirth, previous to language. (Cf. \"Matter and Memory\", Foreword to the\n7th edition.)\n\nWhy depart from the immediate thus conceived as action and life? Because\nit is quite impossible to do otherwise, for every initial fact can\nbe only such a pulsation of consciousness in its lived act, and the\nfundamental and primitive direction of the least word, were it in an\nenunciation of a problem or a doubt, can only be such a direction of\nlife and action. And we must certainly accord to this immediacy a value\nof absolute knowledge, since it realises the coincidence of being and\nknowledge.\n\nBut let us not think that the perception of immediacy is simple passive\nperception, that it is sufficient to open our eyes to obtain it, today\nwhen our utilitarian education is completed and has passed into the\nstate of habit. There is a difference between common experience and\nthe initial action of life; the first is a practical limitation of\nthe second. Hence it follows that a previous criticism is necessary to\nreturn from one to the other, a criticism always in activity, always\nopen as a way of progressive investigation, always ready for the\nreiteration and the renewal of effort.\n\nIn this task of purification there is doubtless always to be feared an\nillusion of remaining in the primitive stage. By what criteria, by what\nsigns can we recognise that we have touched the goal? Pure fact is\nshown to be such on the one hand because it remains independent of all\ntheoretical symbolism, because the critique of language allows it to\nexist thus as an indissoluble residue, because we are unable not to\n\"live\" it, even when we free ourselves from the anxiety of utility; on\nthe other hand, because it dominates all systems, and imposes itself\nequally upon them all as the common source from which they derive by\ndiverging analyses, and in which they become reconciled. Assuredly,\nto attain it, to extricate it, we must appeal to the revelations of\nscience, to the exercise of deliberate thought. But this employment of\nanalysis against analysis does not in any way constitute a circle, for\nit tends only to destroy prejudices which have become unconscious: it is\na simple artifice destined to break off habits and to scatter illusions\nby changing the points of view. Once set free, once again become capable\nof direct and simple view, what we accept as fact is what bears no trace\nof synthetic elaboration. It is true that here a last objection presents\nitself: how shall we think this limit, purely given, to any degree at\nall in fact, if it must precede all language?\n\nThe answer is easy. Why speak thus of limit? This word has two senses:\nat one time it designates a last term in a series of approximations,\nand at another a certain internal character of convergence, a certain\nquality of progression.\n\nNow, it is the second sense only which suits the case before us.\nImmediacy contains no matter statically defined, and no thing. The\nnotion of fact is quite relative. What is fact in one case may become\nconstruction in another. For example, the percepts of common experience\nare facts for the physicist, and constructions for the philosopher; the\nsame applies to a table of numerical results, for the scholar who is\ntrying to establish a theory, or for the observer and the psychologist.\nWe may then conceive a series in which each term is fact in relation\nto those which follow it, and constructed in relation to those which\nprecede it. The expression \"primitive fact\" then determines not so\nmuch a final object as a direction of thought, a movement of critical\nretrogression, a journey from the most to the least elaborate, and\nthe \"contact with pure immediacy\" is only the effort, more and more\nprolonged, to convert the elements of experience into real and profound\naction.\n\n\n\n\nIII. Theory of Perception.\n\nOf what the work of return to immediacy consists, and how the intuition\nwhich it calls up reveals absolute fact, we shall see by an example, if\nwe study more closely a capital point of Mr Bergson's philosophy, the\ntheory of external perception.\n\nIf the act of perceiving realises the lived communion of the subject\nand object in the image, we must admit that here we have the perfect\nknowledge which we wish to obtain always: we resign ourselves to\nconception only for want of perception, and our ideal is to convert all\nconception into perception. Doubtless we might define philosophy by this\nsame ideal, as an effort to expand our perceptive power until we render\nit capable of grasping all the wealth and all the depth of reality at a\nsingle glance. Too true it is that such an ideal remains inaccessible to\nus. Something, however, is given us already in aesthetic intuition. Mr\nBergson has pointed it out in some admirable pages, (\"Laughter\",\npages 153-161.) and has explained to us also how philosophy pursues an\nanalogous end. (First lecture on \"The Perception of Change\", delivered\nat Oxford, 26th May 1911.)\n\nBut philosophy must be conceived as an art implying science and\ncriticism, all experience and all reason. It is when we look at\nmetaphysics in this way that they become a positive order of veritable\nknowledge. Kant has conclusively established that what lies beyond\nlanguage can only be attained by direct vision, not by dialectic\nprogress. His mistake was that he afterwards believed such a vision for\never impossible; and whence did this mistake arise, if not from the fact\nthat, for his new vision, he exacted intuitive faculties quite different\nfrom those at man's disposal. Here again the artist will be our\nexample and model. He appeals to no transcendent sense, but detaches\ncommon-sense from its utilitarian prejudices. Let us do the same: we\nshall obtain a similar result without lying ourselves open to Kant's\nobjections. This work is everywhere possible, and it is, par excellence,\nthe work of philosophy: let us try then to sketch it in relation to the\nperception of matter.\n\nWe must distinguish two senses of the word \"perception.\" This word means\nfirst of all simple apprehension of immediacy, grasp of primitive fact.\nWhen we use it in this sense, we will agree to say pure perception.\nIt is perhaps in place to see in it nothing but a limit which concrete\nexperience never presents unmixed, a direction of research rather than\nthe possession of a thing.\n\nHowever that may be, the first sense is the fundamental sense, and what\nit designates must be at the root of all ordinary perception; I mean, of\nevery mental operation which results in the construction of a percept:\na term formed by analogy with concept, representing the result of a\ncomplex work of analysis and synthesis, with judgment from externals.\nWe live the images in an act of pure perception, whilst the objects of\nordinary perception are, for example, the bodies of which we speak in\ncommon language.\n\nWith regard to the relation of the two senses which we have just\ndistinguished, common opinion seems very precise. It might be thus\nresumed: at the point of departure we have simple sensations, similar to\nqualitative atoms (this is the part of pure perception), and afterwards\ntheir arrangement into connected systems, which are percepts.\n\nBut criticism does not authorise this manner of looking at it. Nowhere\ndoes knowledge begin by separate elements. Such elements are always a\nproduct of analysis. So there is a problem to solve to regain the\nbasis of pure perception which is hidden and obscured by our familiar\npercepts.\n\nDo not suppose that the solution of this problem is easy. One method\nonly is of any use: to plunge into reality, to become immersed in it, in\na long-pursued effort to assimilate all the records of common-sense and\npositive science. \"For we do not obtain an intuition of reality, that is\nto say, an intellectual sympathy with its inmost content, unless we\nhave gained its confidence by long companionship with its superficial\nmanifestations. And it is not a question merely of assimilating the\nleading facts; we must accumulate and melt them down into such an\nenormous mass that we are sure, in this fusion, of neutralising in one\nanother all the preconceived and premature ideas which observers may\nhave unconsciously allowed to form the sediment of their observations.\nThus, and only thus, is crude materiality to be disengaged from known\nfacts.\" (\"Introduction to Metaphysics\" in the \"Metaphysical and Moral\nReview\", January 1903. For the correct interpretation of this passage\n(\"intellectual sympathy\") it must not be forgotten that before \"Creative\nEvolution\", Mr Bergson employed the word \"intelligence\" in a wider\nacceptation, more akin to that commonly received.)\n\nA directing principle controls this work and reintroduces order and\nconvergence, after dispensing with them at the outset; viz. that,\ncontrary to common opinion, perception as practised in the course of\ndaily life, \"natural\" perception does not aim at a goal of disinterested\nknowledge, but one of practical utility, or rather, if it is knowledge,\nit is only knowledge elaborated in view of action and speech.\n\nNeed we repeat here the proofs by which we have already established in\nthe most positive manner that such is really the meaning of ordinary\nperception, the underlying reason which causes it to take the place of\npure perception? We perceive by habit only what is useful to us, what\ninterests us practically; very often, too, we think we are perceiving\nwhen we are merely inferring, as for example when we seem to see a\ndistance in depth, a succession of planes, of which in reality we judge\nby differences of colouring or relief.\n\nOur senses supplement one another. A slow education has gradually taught\nus to co-ordinate their impressions, especially those of touch to those\nof vision. (H. Bergson, \"Note on the Psychological Origins of Our Belief\nin the Law of Causality\". Vol. i. of the \"Library of the International\nPhilosophical Congress\", 1900.)\n\nTheoretical forms come between nature and us: a veil of symbols envelops\nreality; thus, finally, we no longer see things themselves, we are\ncontent to read the labels on them.\n\nMoreover, our perception appears to analysis completely saturated with\nmemories, and that in view of our practical insertion in the present. I\nwill not come back to this point which has been so lucidly explained\nby Mr Bergson in a lecture on \"Dream\" (\"Report of the International\nPsychological Institute\", May 1901.) and an article on \"Intellectual\nEffort\", (\"Philosophical Review\", January 1902.) the reading of which\ncannot be too strongly recommended as an introduction to the first\nchapter of \"Matter and Memory\", in which further arguments are to be\nfound. I will only add one remark, following Mr Bergson, as always:\nperception is not simply contemplation, but consciousness of an original\nvisual emotion combined with a complete group of actions in embryo,\ngestures in outline, and the graze of movement within, by which we\nprepare to grasp the object, describe its lines, test its functions,\nsound it, move it, and handle it in a thousand ways. (This is attested\nby the facts of apraxia or psychic blindness. Cf. \"Matter and Memory\",\nchapter ii.)\n\nFrom the preceding observations springs the utilitarian and practical\nnature of common perception. Let us attempt now to see of what the\nelaboration which it makes reality undergo consists. This time I am\nsumming up the fourth chapter of \"Matter and Memory\". First of all, we\nchoose between the images, emphasising the strong, extinguishing\nthe weak, although both have, a priori, the same interest for pure\nknowledge; we make this choice above all by according preference to\nimpressions of touch, which are the most useful from the practical point\nof view. This selection determines the parcelling up of matter into\nindependent bodies, and the artificial character of our proceeding is\nthus made plain. Does not science, indeed, conclude in the same way,\nshowing us--as soon as she frees herself even to a small extent from\ncommon-sense--full continuity re-established by \"moving strata,\" and all\nbodies resolved into stationary waves and knots of intersecting fluxes?\nAlready, then, we shall be nearer pure perception if we cease to\nconsider anything but the perceptible stuff in which numerically\ndistinct percepts are cut. Even there, however, a utilitarian division\ncontinues. Our senses are instruments of abstraction, each of them\ndiscerning a possible path of action. We may say that corporal life\nfunctions in the manner of an absorbing milieu, which determines the\ndisconnected scale of simple qualities by extinguishing most of the\nperceptible radiations. In short, the scale of sensations, with its\nnumerical aspect, is nothing but the spectrum of our practical activity.\nCommonly we perceive only averages and wholes, which we contract into\ndistinct \"qualities\". Let us disengage from this rhythm what is peculiar\nto ourselves.\n\nAbove all, let us strive to disengage ourselves from homogeneous space,\nthis substratum of fixity, this arbitrary scheme of measurement and\ndivision, which, to our greater advantage, subtends the natural,\nqualitative, and undivided extension of images. (We usually represent\nhomogeneous space as previous to the heterogeneous extension of images:\nas a kind of empty room which we furnish with percepts. We must reverse\nthis order, and conceive, on the contrary, that extension precedes\nspace.) And we shall finally have pure perception in so far as it is\naccessible to us.\n\nThere is no disputing the absolute value of this pure perception. The\nimpotence of speculative reason, as demonstrated by Kant, is perhaps,\nat bottom, only the impotence of an intelligence in bondage to certain\nnecessities of the corporal life, and exercised upon a matter which it\nhas had to disorganise for the satisfaction of our needs. Our knowledge\nof things is then no longer relative to the fundamental structure of our\nmind, but only to its superficial and acquired habits, to the contingent\nform which it takes on from our corporal functions and our lower needs.\n\nThe relativity of knowledge is therefore not final. In unmaking what our\nneeds have made we re-establish intuition in its original purity, and\nresume contact with reality. (\"Matter and Memory\", page 203.)\n\nThat is how things are really presented. Here we are confronted by the\nmoving continuity of images. Pure perception is complete perception.\nFrom it we pass to ordinary perception by diminution, throwing shadows\nhere and there: the reality perceived by common-sense is nothing\nelse actually than universal interaction rendered visible by its very\ninterruption at certain points.\n\nWhence we have this double conclusion already formulated higher up: the\nrelation of perception to matter is that of the part to the whole, and\nour consciousness is rather limited than relative. It must be stated\nthat primarily we perceive things in themselves, not in us; the\nsubjectivity of our current perception comes from our work of outlining\nit in the bosom of reality, but the root of pure perception plunges into\nfull objectivity. If, at each point of matter, we were to succeed in\npossessing the stream of total interaction of which it marks a wave, and\nif we were to succeed in seeing the multiplicity of these points as a\nqualitative heterogeneous flux without number or severance, we should\ncoincide with reality itself. It is true that such an ideal, while\ninaccessible on the one hand, would not succeed on the other without\nrisk to knowledge; in fact, says Mr Bergson, (\"Matter and Memory\", page\n38.) \"to perceive all the influences of all the points of all bodies\nwould be to descend to the state of material object.\"\n\nBut a solution of this double difficulty remains possible, a dynamic\nand approximate solution, which consists in looking for the absolute\nintuition of matter in such a mobilisation of our perspective faculties\nthat we become capable of following, according to the circumstances,\nall the paths of virtual perception of which the common anxiety for the\npractical has made us choose one only, and capable of realising all the\ninfinitely different modes of qualification and discernment.\n\nBut we have still to see how this \"complete experience\" can be\npractically thought.\n\n\n\n\nIV. Critique of Language.\n\nThe perception of reality does not obtain the full value of knowledge,\nexcept when once socialised, once made the common property of men, and\nthereby also tested and verified.\n\nThere is one means only of doing that; viz. to analyse it into\nmanageable and portable concepts. By language I mean the product of this\nconceptualisation. Thus language is necessary; for we must always speak,\nwere it only to utter the impotence of words. Not less necessary is a\ncritique of spontaneous language, of the laws which govern it, of the\npostulates which it embraces, of the methods which convey its implicit\ndoctrines. Synthetic forms are actually theories already; they effect\nan adaptation of reality to the demands of practical use. If it is\nimpossible to escape them, it is at least fitting not to employ them\nexcept with due knowledge, and when properly warned against the illusion\nof the false problems which they might arouse.\n\nLet us first of all consider thought in itself, in its concrete life.\nWhat are the principal characteristics, the essential steps? We readily\nsay, analysis and synthesis.\n\nNothing can be known except in contrast, correlation, or negation\nof another thing; and the act of knowledge, considered in itself,\nis unification. Thus number appears as a fundamental category, as an\nabsolute condition of intelligibility; some go so far as to regard\natomism as a necessary method. But that is inexact. No doubt the use\nof number and the resulting atomism are imposed by definition, we might\nsay, on the thought which proceeds by conceptual analysis, and then by\nunifying construction; that is to say, on synthetic thought. But, in\ngreater depth, thought is dynamic continuity and duration. Its essential\nwork does not consist in discerning and afterwards in assembling\nready-made elements. Let us see in it rather a kind of creative\nmaturation, and let us attempt to grasp the nature of this causal\nactivity. (H. Bergson, \"Intellectual Effort\" in the \"Philosophical\nReview\", January 1902.)\n\nThe act of thought is always a complex play of moving representations,\nan evolution of life in which incessant inner reactions occur. That is\nto say, it is movement. But there are several planes of thought, from\nintuition to language, and we must distinguish between the thought which\nmoves on the surface among terms displayed on a single plane, and the\nthought with goes deeper and deeper from one plane to another.\n\nWe do not think solely by concepts or images; we think, first of all,\naccording to Mr Bergson's expression, by dynamic schemes. What is a\ndynamic scheme? It is motive rather than representative, inexpressible\nin itself, but a source of language containing not so much the images\nor concepts in which it will develop as the indication of the path to be\nfollowed in order to obtain them. It is not so much system as movement,\nprogress, genesis; it does not mark the gaze directed upon the various\npoints of one plane of deliberate contemplation so much as an effort to\npass through successive planes of thought in a direction leading from\nintuition to analysis. We might define it by its function of calling up\nimages and concepts, representations which, for one and the same\nscheme, are neither strictly determined nor anything in particular in\nthemselves, concurrent representations which have in common one and the\nsame logical power.\n\nThe representations called up form a body to the scheme, and the\nrelation of the scheme to the concepts and images which it calls up\nresembles, mutatis mutandis, the relation pointed out by Mr Bergson\nbetween an idea and its basis in the brain. In short, it is the very act\nof creative thought which the dynamic scheme interprets, the act not yet\nfixed in \"results.\"\n\nNothing is easier than to illustrate the existence of this scheme.\nLet us merely remark a few facts of current observation. Recall, for\nexample, the suggestive anxiety we experience when we seek to remember\na name; the precise syllables of the name still escape us, but we feel\nthem approaching, and already we possess something of them, since we\nimmediately reject those which do not answer to a certain direction of\nexpectancy; and by endeavouring to secure a more intimate feeling of\nthis direction we suddenly arouse the desired recollection.\n\nIn the same way, what does it mean to have the sense of a complex\nsituation in active life, if not that we perceive it, not as a static\ngroup of explicit details, but as a meeting of powers allied or hostile,\nconvergent or divergent, directed towards this or that, of which the\naggregate whole tends of itself to awaken in us the initial reactions\nwhich analyse it?\n\nIn the same way again, how do we learn, how can we assimilate a\nvast system of conceits or images? Our task is not to concentrate an\nenumerative attention on each individual factor; we should never get\naway from them, the weight would be too heavy.\n\nWhat we entrust to memory is really a dynamic scheme permitting us to\n\"regain\" what we should not have succeeded in \"retaining.\" In reality\nour only \"knowledge\" is through such a scheme, which contains in the\nstate of potential implication an inexhaustible multiplicity ready to be\ndeveloped in actual representations.\n\nHow, finally, is any discovery made? Finding is solving a problem; and\nto solve a problem we must always begin by supposing it solved. But of\nwhat does such a hypothesis consist?\n\nIt is not an anticipated view of the solution, for then all would be\nat an end; nor is it a simple formula putting in the present indicative\nwhat the enunciation expressed in the future or the imperative, for then\nnothing would be begun. It is exactly a dynamic scheme; that is to say,\na method in the state of directed tension; and often, the discovery\nonce realised as theory or system, capable of unending developments\nand resurrections, remains by the best of itself a method and a dynamic\nscheme.\n\nBut one last example will perhaps reveal the truth still more. \"Anyone\nwho has attempted literary composition knows well that when the subject\nhas been long studied, all the documents collected, all the notes taken,\nwe need, to embark on the actual work of composition, something more, an\neffort, often very painful, to place oneself suddenly in the very heart\nof the subject, and to seek as deep down as possible an impulse to which\nafterwards we shall only have to let ourselves go. This impulse,\nonce received, projects the mind on a road where it finds both the\ninformation which it had collected and a thousand other details as well;\nit develops and analyses itself in terms, the enumeration of which would\nhave no end; the further we advance, the more we discover; we shall\nnever succeed in saying everything; and yet, if we turn sharply round\ntowards the impulse we feel behind ourselves, to grasp it, it escapes;\nfor it was not a thing but a direction of movement, and though\nindefinitely extensible, it is simplicity itself.\" (H. Bergson,\n\"Metaphysical and Moral Review\", January 1903. The whole critique of\nlanguage is implicitly contained in this \"Introduction to Metaphysics\".)\n\nThe thought, then, which proceeds from one representation to another in\none and the same plane is one kind; that which follows one and the same\nconceptual direction through descending planes is another. Creative and\nfertile thought is the thought which adopts the second kind of work. The\nideal is a continual oscillation from one plane to the other, a restless\nalternative of intuitive concentration and conceptual expansion. But\nour idleness takes exception to this, for the feeling of effort appears\nprecisely in the traject from the dynamic scheme to the images and\nconcepts, in the passing from one plane of thought to another.\n\nThus the natural tendency is to remain in the last of these planes, that\nof language. We know what dangers threaten us there.\n\nSuppose we have some idea or other and the word representing it. Do not\nsuppose that to this word there is one corresponding sense only, nor\neven a finished group of various distinct and rigorously separable\nsenses. On the contrary, there is a whole scale corresponding, a\ncomplete continuous spectrum of unstable meanings which tend unceasingly\nto resolve into one another. Dictionaries attempt to illuminate them.\nThe task is impossible. They co-ordinate a few guiding marks; but who\nshall say what infinite transitions underlie them?\n\nA word designates rather a current of thought than one or several halts\non a logical path. Here again a dynamic continuity exists previous\nto the parcelling out of the acceptations. What, then, should be the\nattitude of the mind?\n\nA supple moving attitude more attentive to the curve of change than to\nthe possible halting-points along the road. But this is not the case at\nall; the effort would be too great, and what happens, on the contrary,\nis this. For the spectrum a chromatic scale of uniform tints is very\nquickly substituted. This is in itself an undesirable simplification,\nfor it is impossible to reconstitute the infinity of real shades by\ncombinations of fundamental colours each representing the homogeneous\nshore, which each region of the spectrum finally becomes.\n\nHowever cleverly we proportion these averages, we get, at most, some\nvulgar counterfeit: orange, for example, is not a mixture of yellow\nand red, although this mixture may recall to those who have known it\nelsewhere the simple and original sensation of orange. Again, a second\nsimplification, still more undesirable, succeeds the first.\n\nThere are no longer any colours at all; black lines serve as\nguide-marks. We are therefore with pure concepts decidedly in full\nsymbolism. And it is with symbols that we shall henceforward be trying\nto reconstruct reality.\n\nI need not go back to the general characteristics or the inconveniences\nof this method. Concepts resemble photographic views; concrete thickness\nescapes them. However exact, varied, or numerous we suppose them, they\ncan certainly recall their object, but not reveal it to any one who had\nnot had any direct intuition of it. Nothing is easier than to trace the\nplan of a body in four dimensions; all the same, this drawing does not\nadmit \"visualisation in space\" as is the case with ordinary bodies,\nfor want of a previous intuition which it would awaken: thus it is with\nconcepts in relation to reality. Like photographs and like plans, they\nare extracted from reality, but we are not able to say that they were\ncontained in it; and many of them besides are not so much as extracts;\nthey are simple systematised notes, in fact, notes made upon notes. In\nother terms, concepts do not represent pieces, parts, or elements of\nreality. Literally they are nothing but simple symbolic notations. To\nwish to make integral factors of them would be as strange an illusion as\nthat of seeing in the co-ordinates of a geometric point the constitutive\nessence of that point.\n\nWe do not make things with symbols, any more than we should reconstruct\na picture with the qualifications which classify it.\n\nWhence, then, comes the natural inclination of thought towards the\nconcept? From the fact that thought delights in artifices which\nfacilitate analysis and language.\n\nThe first of these artifices is that from which results the possibility\nof decomposition or recomposition according to arbitrary laws. For\nthat we need a previous substitution of symbols for things. Nothing\ndemonstrates this better than the celebrated arguments which we owe to\nZeno of Elea. Mr Bergson returns to the discussion of them over and over\nagain. (\"Essay on the Immediate Data\", pages 85-86; \"Matter and Memory\",\npages 211-213, \"Creative Evolution\", pages 333-337.)\n\nThe nerve of the reasoning there consists in the evident absurdity\nthere would be in conceiving an inexhaustible exhausted, an unachievable\nachieved; in short, a total actually completed, and yet obtained by the\nsuccessive addition of an infinite number of terms.\n\nBut the question is to know whether a movement can be considered as a\nnumerical multiplicity. Virtual divisibility there is, no doubt, but not\nactual division; divisibility is indefinite, whereas an actual division,\nif it respects the inner articulations of reality, is bound to halt at a\nlimited number of phases.\n\nWhat we divide and measure is the track of the movement once\naccomplished, not the movement itself: it is the trajectory, not the\ntraject. In the trajectory we can count endless positions; that is to\nsay, possible halts. Let us not suppose that the moving body meets these\nelements all ready-marked. Hence what the Eleatic dialectic illustrates\nis a case of incommensurability; the radical inability of analysis\nto end a certain task; our powerlessness to explain the fact of\nthe transit, if we apply to it such and such modes of numerical\ndecomposition or recomposition, which are valid only for space; the\nimpossibility of conceiving becoming as susceptible of being cut up into\narbitrary segments, and afterwards reconstructed by summing of terms\naccording to some law or other; in short, it is the nature of movement,\nwhich is without division, number, or concept.\n\nBut thought delights in analyses regulated by the sole consideration\nof easy language; hence its tendency to an arithmetic and geometry of\nconcepts, in spite of the disastrous consequences; and thus the Eleatic\nparadox is no less instructive in its specious character than in the\nsolution which it embodies.\n\nAt bottom, natural thought, I mean thought which abandons itself to\nits double inclination of synthetic idleness and useful industry, is\na thought haunted by anxieties of the operating manual, anxieties of\nfabrication.\n\nWhat does it care about the fluxes of reality and dynamic depths? It is\nonly interested in the outcrops scattered here and there over the firm\nsoil of the practical, and it solidifies \"terms\" like stakes plunged in\na moving ground. Hence comes the configuration of its spontaneous logic\nto a geometry of solids, and hence come concepts, the instantaneous\nmoments taken in transitions.\n\nScientific thought, again, preserves the same habits and the same\npreferences. It seeks only what repeats, what can be counted.\nEverywhere, when it theorises, it tends to establish static relations\nbetween composing unities which form a homogeneous and disconnected\nmultiplicity.\n\nIts very instruments bias it in that direction. The apparatus of the\nlaboratory really grasps nothing but arrangement and coincidence; in a\nword, states not transitions. Even in cases of contrary appearance, for\nexample, when we determine a weight by observing the oscillation of a\nbalance and not its rest, we are interested in regular recurrence, in\na symmetry, in something therefore which is of the nature of an\nequilibrium and a fixity all the same. The reason of it is that science,\nlike common-sense, although in a manner a little different, aims only in\nactual fact at obtaining finished and workable results.\n\nLet us imagine reality under the figure of a curve, a rhythmic\nsuccession of phases of which our concepts mark so many tangents. There\nis contact at one point, but at one point only. Thus our logic is valid\nas infinitesimal analysis, just as the geometry of the straight line\nallows us to define each state of curve. It is thus, for example,\nthat vitality maintains a relation of momentary tangency to the\nphysico-chemical structure. If we study this relation and analogous\nrelations, this fact remains indisputably legitimate. Let us not think,\nhowever, that such a study, even when repeated in as many points as we\nwish, can ever suffice.\n\nWe must afterwards by genuine integration attain moving continuity. That\nis exactly the task represented by the return to intuition, with its\nproper instrument, the dynamic scheme. From this tangential point of\nview we try to grasp the genesis of the curve as envelope, or rather,\nand better still, the birth of successive tangents as instantaneous\ndirections. Speaking non-metaphorically, we cling to genetic methods\nof conceptualisation and proceed from the generating principle to its\nconceptual derivatives.\n\nBut our thought finds it very difficult to sustain such an effort long.\nIt is partial to rectilineal deduction, actual becoming horrifies it. It\ndesires immediately to find \"things\" sharply determined and very\nclear. That is why immediately a tangent is constructed, it follows\nits movement in a straight line to infinity. Thus are produced\nlimit-concepts, the ultimate terms, the atoms of language. As a rule\nthey go in pairs, in antithetic couples, every analysis being dichotomy,\nsince the discernment of one path of abstraction determines in contrast,\nas a complementary remainder, the opposite path of direction. Hence,\naccording to the selection effected among concepts, and the relative\nweight which is attributed to them, we get the antinomies between which\na philosophy of analysis must for ever remain oscillating and torn in\nsunder. Hence comes the parcelling up of metaphysics into systems, and\nits appearance of regulated play \"between antagonistic schools which get\nup on the stage together, each to win applause in turn.\" (H. Bergson,\n\"Report of the French Philosophical Society\", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)\n\nThe method followed to find a genuine solution must be inverse; not\ndialectic combination of pre-existing concepts, but, setting out from a\ndirect and really lived intuition, a descent to ever new concepts along\ndynamic schemes which remain open. From the same intuition spring many\nconcepts: \"As the wind which rushes into the crossroads divides into\ndiverging currents of air, which are all only one and the same gust.\"\n(\"Creative Evolution\", page 55.)\n\nThe antinomies are resolved genetically, whilst in the plane of language\nthey remain irreducible. With a heterogeneity of shades, when we mix the\ntints and neutralise them by one another, we easily create homogeneity;\nbut take the result of this work, that is to say, the average final\ncolour, and it will be impossible to reconstitute the wealth of the\noriginal.\n\nDo you desire a precise example of the work we must accomplish? Take\nthat of change; (Cf. two lectures delivered by Mr Bergson at Oxford on\n\"The Perception of Change\", 26th and 27th May 1911.) no other is more\nsignificant or clearer. It shows us two necessary movements in the\nreform of our habits of imagination or conception.\n\nLet us try first of all to familiarise ourselves with the images which\nshow us the fixity deriving from becoming.\n\nTwo colliding waves, two rollers meeting, typify rest by extinction and\ninterference. With the movement of a stone, and the fluidity of running\nwater, we form the instantaneous position of a ricochet. The very\nmovement of the stone, seen in the successive positions of the tangent\nto the trajectory, is stationary to our view.\n\nWhat is dynamic stability, except non-variation arising from variation\nitself? Equilibrium is produced from speed. A man running solidifies\nthe moving ground. In short, two moving bodies regulated by each other\nbecome fixed in relation to each other.\n\nAfter this, let us try to perceive change in itself, and then represent\nit to ourselves according to its specific and original nature.\n\nThe common conception needs reform on two principal points:\n\n(1) All change is revealed in the light of immediate intuition, not as\na numerical series of states, but a rhythm of phases, each of which\nconstitutes an indivisible act, in such a way that each change has its\nnatural inner articulations, forbidding us to break it up according to\narbitrary laws, like a homogeneous length.\n\n(2) Change is self-sufficient; it has no need of a support, a moving\nbody, a \"thing\" in motion. There is no vehicle, no substance, no spatial\nreceptacle, resembling a theatre-scene, no material dummy successively\ndraped in coloured stuffs; on the contrary, it is the body or the atom\nwhich should be subordinately defined as symbols of completed becoming.\n\nOf movement thus conceived, indivisible and substantial, what better\nimage can we have than a musical evolution, a phrase in melody? That\nis how we must work to conceive reality. If such a conception at first\nappears obscure, let us credit experience, for ideas are gradually\nilluminated by the very use we make of them, \"the clarity of a concept\nbeing hardly anything, at bottom, but the assurance once obtained\nthat we can handle it profitably.\" (H. Bergson, \"Introduction to\nMetaphysics\".)\n\nIf we require to reach a conception of this kind with regard to change,\nthe Eleatic dialectic is there to establish it beyond dispute, and\npositive science comes to the same conclusion, since it shows us\neverywhere nothing but movements placed upon movements, never fixed\n\"things,\" except as temporary symbols of what we leave at a given moment\noutside the field of study.\n\nIn any case, the difficulty of such a conception need not stop us; it is\nlittle more than a difficulty of the imaginative order. And as for the\nconception itself, or rather the corresponding intuition, it will share\nthe fate of all its predecessors: to our contemporaries it will be a\nscandal, a century later a stroke of genius, after some centuries common\nevidence, and finally an instinctive axiom.\n\n\n\n\nV. The Problem of Consciousness. Duration and Liberty.\n\nArmed with the method we have just described, Mr Bergson turned first of\nall toward the problem of the ego: taking up his position in the centre\nof mind, he has attempted to establish its independent reality by\nexamining its profound nature.\n\nThe first chapter of the \"Essay on the Immediate Data\" contains a\ndecisive criticism of the conceptions which claim to introduce number\nand measure into the domain of the facts of consciousness.\n\nNot that it is our business to reject as false the notion of\npsychological intensity; but this notion demands interpretation, and the\nleast that we can say against the attempt to turn it into a notion of\nsize is that in doing so we are misunderstanding the specific character\nof the object studied. The same reproach must be levelled against\nassociation of ideas, the system of mechanical psychology of which the\ntype is presented us by Taine and Stuart Mill. Already in chapters ii.\nand iii. of the \"Essay\", and again all through \"Matter and Memory\", the\nsystem is riddled with objections, each of which would be sufficient to\nshow its radical flaw. All the aspects, all the phenomena of mental life\ncome up for successive review. In respect of each of them we have\nan illustration of the insufficiency of the atomism which seeks to\nrecompose the soul with fixed elements, by a massing of units exterior\nto one another, everywhere and always the same: this is a grammatical\nphilosophy which believes reality to be composed of parts which admit\nof number just as language is made of words placed side by side; it is a\nmaterialist philosophy which improperly transfers the proceedings of the\nphysical sciences to the sciences of the inner life.\n\nOn the contrary, we must represent the state of consciousness to\nourselves as variable according to the whole of which it forms a part.\nHere and there, although it always bears the same name, it is no longer\nthe same thing. \"The more the ego becomes itself again, the more also\ndo its states of consciousness, instead of being in juxtaposition,\npenetrate one another, blend with one another, and tinge one another\nwith the colouring of all the rest. Thus each of us has his manner of\nloving or hating, and this love or hate reflect our entire personality.\"\n(\"Essay on the Immediate Data\", pages 125-126.)\n\nAt bottom Mr Bergson is bringing forward the necessity, in the case\nbefore us, of substituting a new notion of continuous qualitative\nheterogeneity for the old notion of numerical and spatial continuity.\nAbove all, he is emphasising the still more imperious necessity of\nregarding each state as a phase in duration; and we are here touching on\nhis principal and leading intuition, the intuition of real duration.\n\nHistorically this was Mr Bergson's starting-point and the origin of\nhis thought: a criticism of time under the form in which common-sense\nimagines it, in which science employs it. He was the first to notice\nthe fact that scientific time has no \"duration.\" Our equations really\nexpress only static relations between simultaneous phenomena; even the\ndifferential quotients they may contain in reality mark nothing but\npresent tendencies; no change would take place in our calculations if\nthe time were given in advance, instantaneously fulfilled, like a linear\nwhole of points in numerical order, with no more genuine duration than\nthat contained in the numerical succession. Even in astronomy there\nis less anticipation than judgment of constancy and stability, the\nphenomena being almost strictly periodic, while the hazard of prediction\nbears only upon the minute divergence between the actual phenomenon and\nthe exact period attributed to it. Notice under what figure common-sense\nimagines time: as an inert receptacle, a homogeneous milieu, neutral and\nindifferent; in fact, a kind of space.\n\nThe scholar makes use of a like image; for he defines time by its\nmeasurement, and all measurement implies interpretation in space.\nFor the scholar the hour is not an interval, but a coincidence, an\ninstantaneous arrangement, and time is resolved into a dust of fixities,\nas in those pneumatic clocks in which the hand moves forward in jerks,\nmarking nothing but a sequence of pauses.\n\nSuch symbols are sufficient, at least for a first approximation, when\nit is only a question of matter, the mechanism of which, strictly\nconsidered, contains nothing \"durable.\" But in biology and psychology\nquite different characteristics become essential; age and memory,\nheterogeneity of musical phases, irreversible rhythm \"which cannot be\nlengthened or shortened at will.\" (\"Creative Evolution\", page 10.)\n\nThen it is that the return of time becomes necessary to duration.\nHow are we to describe this duration? It is a melodious evolution of\nmoments, each of which contains the resonance of those preceding and\nannounces the one which is going to follow; it is a process of enriching\nwhich never ceases, and a perpetual appearance of novelty; it is an\nindivisible, qualitative, and organic becoming, foreign to space,\nrefractory to number.\n\nSummon the image of a stream of consciousness passing through the\ncontinuity of the spectrum, and becoming tinged successively with each\nof its shades. Or rather imagine a symphony having feeling of itself,\nand creating itself; that is how we should conceive duration.\n\nThat duration thus conceived is really the basis of ourselves Mr Bergson\nproves by a thousand examples, and by a marvellous employment of the\nintrospective method which he has helped to make so popular. We cannot\nquote these admirable analyses here. A single one will serve as model,\nspecially selected as referring to one of the most ordinary moments of\nour life, to show plainly that the perception of real duration always\naccompanies us in secret.\n\n\"At the moment when I write these lines a clock near me is striking the\nhour; but my distracted ear is only aware of it after several strokes\nhave already sounded; that is, I have not counted them. And yet an\neffort of introspective attention enables me to total the four strokes\nalready struck and add them to those which I hear. If I then withdraw\ninto myself and carefully question myself about what has just happened,\nI become aware that the first four sounds had struck my ear and even\nmoved my consciousness, but that the sensations produced by each of\nthem, instead of following in juxtaposition, had blended into one\nanother in such a way as to endow the whole with a peculiar aspect and\nmake of it a kind of musical phrase. In order to estimate in retrospect\nthe number of strokes which have sounded, I attempted to reconstitute\nthis phrase in thought: my imagination struck one, then two, then three,\nand so long as it had not reached the exact number four, my sensibility,\non being questioned, replied that the total effect differed in quality.\nIt had therefore noted the succession of the four strokes in a way of\nits own, but quite otherwise than by addition, and without bringing in\nthe image of a juxtaposition of distinct terms. In fact, the number of\nstrokes struck was perceived as quality, not as quantity: duration is\nthus presented to immediate consciousness, and preserves this form so\nlong as it does not give place to a symbolical representation drawn from\nspace.\" (\"Essay on the Immediate Data\", pages 95-96.)\n\nAnd now are we to believe that return to the feeling of real duration\nconsists in letting ourselves go, and allowing ourselves an idle\nrelaxation in dream or dissolution in sensation, \"as a shepherd\ndozing watches the water flow\"? Or are we even to believe, as has been\nmaintained, that the intuition of duration reduces \"to the spasm of\ndelight of the mollusc basking in the sun\"? This is a complete mistake!\nWe should fall back into the misconceptions which I was pointing out in\nconnection with immediacy in general; we should be forgetting that\nthere are several rhythms of duration, as there are several kinds of\nconsciousness; and finally, we should be misunderstanding the character\nof a creative invention perpetually renewed, which is that of our inner\nlife.\n\nFor it is in duration that we are free, not in spatialised time, as all\ndeterminist conceptions suppose in contradiction.\n\nI shall not go back to the proofs of this thesis; they were condensed\nsome way back after the third chapter of the \"Essay on the Immediate\nData\". But I will borrow from Mr Bergson himself a few complementary\nexplanations, in order, as far as possible, to forestall any\nmisunderstanding. \"The word liberty,\" he says, \"has for me a sense\nintermediate between those which we assign as a rule to the two terms\nliberty and free-will. On one hand, I believe that liberty consists\nin being entirely oneself, in acting in conformity with oneself; it\nis then, to a certain degree, the 'moral liberty' of philosophers, the\nindependence of the person with regard to everything other than\nitself. But that is not quite this liberty, since the independence I\nam describing has not always a moral character. Further, it does not\nconsist in depending on oneself as an effect depends on the cause which\nof necessity determines it. In this, I should come back to the sense of\n'free-will.' And yet I do not accept this sense completely either,\nsince free-will, in the usual meaning of the term, implies the equal\npossibility of two contraries, and on my theory we cannot formulate, or\neven conceive in this case the thesis of the equal possibility of the\ntwo contraries, without falling into grave error about the nature of\ntime. I might say then, that the object of my thesis, on this particular\npoint, has been precisely to find a position intermediate between 'moral\nliberty' and 'free-will.' Liberty, such as I understand it, is situated\nbetween these two terms, but not at equal distances from both. If I were\nobliged to blend it with one of the two, I should select 'free-will.'\"\n(\"Report of the French Philosophical Society\", philosophical vocabulary,\narticle \"Liberty\".)\n\nAfter all, when we place ourselves in the perspective of homogeneous\ntime; that is to say, when we substitute for the real and profound ego\nits image refracted through space, the act necessarily appears either\nas the resultant of a mechanical composition of elements, or as an\nincomprehensible creation ex nihilo.\n\n\"We have supposed that there is a third course to pursue; that is, to\nplace ourselves back in pure duration...Then we seemed to see action\narise from its antecedents by an evolution sui generis, in such a way\nthat we discover in this action the antecedents which explain it, while\nat the same time it adds something absolutely new to them, being an\nadvance upon them as the fruit upon the flower. Liberty is in no way\nreduced thereby, as has been said, to obvious spontaneity. At most this\nwould be the case in the animal world, where the psychological life is\nprincipally that of the affections. But in the case of man, a thinking\nbeing, the free act can be called a synthesis of feelings and ideas, and\nthe evolution which leads to it a reasonable evolution.\" (\"Matter and\nMemory\", page 205.)\n\nFinally, in a most important letter, (\"Report of the French\nPhilosophical Society\", meeting, 26th February 1903.) Mr Bergson\nbecomes a little more precise still. We must certainly not confuse the\naffirmation of liberty with the negation of physical determinism; \"for\nthere is more in this affirmation than in this negation.\" All the same,\nliberty supposes a certain contingence. It is \"psychological causality\nitself,\" which must not be represented after the model of physical\ncausality.\n\nIn opposition to the latter, it implies that between two moments of a\nconscious being there is not an equivalence admitting of deduction, that\nin the transition from one to the other there is a genuine creation.\nWithout doubt the free act is not without explanatory reasons.\n\n\"But these reasons have determined us only at the moment when they have\nbecome determining; that is, at the moment when the act was virtually\naccomplished, and the creation of which I speak is entirely contained in\nthe progress by which these reasons have become determining.\" It is true\nthat all this implies a certain independence of mental life in relation\nto the mechanism of matter; and that is why Mr Bergson was obliged to\nset himself the problem of the relations between body and mind.\n\nWe know that the solution of this problem is the principal object of\n\"Matter and Memory\". The thesis of psycho-physiological parallelism is\nthere peremptorily refuted.\n\nThe method which Mr Bergson has followed to do so will be found set out\nby himself in a communication to the French Philosophical Society, which\nit is important to study as introduction. (\"Report\" of meeting, 2nd\nMay 1901.) The paralogism included in the very enunciation of the\nparallelist thesis is explained in a memoire presented to the Geneva\nInternational Philosophical Congress in 1904. (\"Revue de Metaphysique et\nde Morale\", November 1904.) But the actual proof is made by the analysis\nof the memoire which fills chapters ii. and iii. of the work cited\nabove. (An extremely suggestive resume of these theses will be found\nin the second lecture on \"The Perception of Change\".) It is there\nestablished, by the most positive arguments, (Instead of brutally\nconnecting the two extremes of matter and mind, one regarded in its\nhighest action, the other in its most rudimentary mechanism, thus\ndooming to certain failure any attempt to explain their actual union, Mr\nBergson studies their living contact at the point of intersection marked\nby the phenomena of perception and memory: he compares the higher\npoint of matter--the brain--and the lower point of mind--certain\nrecollections--and it is between these two neighbouring points that he\nnotes a difference, by a method no longer dialectic but experimental.)\nthat all our past is self-preserved in us, that this preservation only\nmakes one with the musical character of duration, with the indivisible\nnature of change, but that one part only is conscious of it, the part\nconcerned with action, to which present conceptions supply a body of\nactuality.\n\nWhat we call our present must be conceived neither as a mathematical\npoint nor as a segment with precise limits: it is the moment of our\nhistory brought out by our attention to life, and nothing, in strict\njustice, would prevent it from extending to the whole of this\nhistory. It is not recollection then, but forgetfulness which demands\nexplanation.\n\nAccording to a dictum of Ravaisson, of which Mr Bergson makes use, the\nexplanation must be sought in the body: \"it is materiality which causes\nforgetfulness in us.\"\n\nThere are, in fact, several planes of memory, from \"pure recollection\"\nnot yet interpreted in distinct images down to the same recollection\nactualised in embryo sensations and movements begun; and we descend from\nthe one to the other, from the life of simple \"dream\" to the life of\npractical \"drama,\" along \"dynamic schemes.\" The last of these planes is\nthe body; a simple instrument of action, a bundle of motive habits, a\ngroup of mechanisms which mind has set up to act. How does it operate in\nthe work of memory? The task of the brain is every moment to thrust back\ninto unconsciousness all that part of our past which is not at the\ntime useful. Minute study of facts shows that the brain is employed in\nchoosing from the past, in diminishing, simplifying, and extracting\nfrom it all that can contribute to present experience; but it is not\nconcerned to preserve it. In short, the brain can only explain absences,\nnot presences. That is why the analysis of memory illustrates the\nreality of mind, and its independence relative to matter. Thus is\ndetermined the relation of soul to body, the penetrating point which it\ninserts and drives into the plane of action. \"Mind borrows from matter\nperceptions from which it derives its nourishment, and gives them back\nto it in the form of movement, on which it has impressed its liberty.\"\n(\"Matter and Memory\", page 279.)\n\nThis, then, is how the cycle of research closes, by returning to the\ninitial problem, the problem of perception. In the two opposing systems\nby which attempts have been made to solve it, Mr Bergson discovers a\ncommon postulate, resulting in a common impotence. From the idealistic\npoint of view we do not succeed in explaining how a world is expressed\nexternally, nor from the realistic point of view how an ego is expressed\ninternally. And this double failure comes again from the underlying\nhypothesis, according to which the duality of the subject and object is\nconceived as primitive, radical, and static. Our duty is diametrically\nopposed. We have to consider this duality as gradually elaborated, and\nthe problem concerning it must be first stated, and then solved as a\nfunction of time rather than of space. Our representation begins by\nbeing impersonal, and it is only later that it adopts our body as\ncentre. We emerge gradually from universal reality, and our realising\nroots are always sunk in it. But this reality in itself is already\nconsciousness, and the first moment of perception always puts us back\ninto the initial state previous to the separation of the subject and\nobject. It is by the work of life, and by action, that this separation\nis effected, created, accentuated, and fixed. And the common mistake of\nrealism and idealism is to believe it effected in advance, whereas it is\nrelatively second to perception.\n\nHence comes the absolute value of immediate intuition. For from what\nsource could an irreducible relativity be produced in it? It would be\nabsurd to make it depend on the constitution of our brain, since our\nbrain itself, so far as it is a group of images, is only a part of the\nuniverse, presenting the same characteristics as the whole; and in so\nfar as it is a group of mechanisms become habits, is only a result of\nthe initial action of life, of original perceptive discernment. And, on\nthe other hand, no less absurd would be the fear that the subject\ncan ever be excluded or eliminated from its own knowledge, since, in\nreality, the subject, like the object, is in perception, not perception\nin the subject--at least not primitively. So that it is by a trick of\nspeech that the theses of fundamental relativity take root: they vanish\nwhen we return to immediacy; that is to say, when we present problems as\nthey ought to be presented, in terms which do not suppose any conceptual\nanalysis yet accomplished.\n\n\n\n\nVI. The Problem of Evolution: Life and Matter.\n\nAfter the problem of consciousness Mr Bergson was bound to approach that\nof evolution, for psychological liberty is only truly conceivable if\nit begins in some measure with the first pulsation of corporal life.\n\"Either sensation has no raison d'etre or it is a beginning of liberty\";\nthat is what the \"Essay on the Immediate Data\" (Page 25.) already told\nus.\n\nIt was easy then to foresee the necessity of a general theoretical frame\nin which our duration might take a position which would render it more\nintelligible by removing its appearance of singular exception.\n\nThus in 1901, I wrote (\"Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale\", May\n1901) with regard to the new philosophy considered as a philosophy of\nbecoming: \"It has been prepared by contemporary evolution, which is\ninvestigates and perfects, sifting it from its ore of materialism, and\nturning it into genuine metaphysics. Is not this the philosophy suited\nto the century of history? Perhaps it indicates that a period has\narrived in which mathematics, losing its role as the regulating science,\nis about to give place to biology.\" This is the programme carried\nout, in what an original manner we are well aware, by the doctrine of\nCreative Evolution.\n\nWhen we examine ancient knowledge, one characteristic of it is at once\nvisible. It studies little but certain privileged moments of changing\nreality, certain stable forms, certain states of equilibrium.\nAncient geometry, for example, is almost always limited to the static\nconsideration of figures already traced. Modern science is quite\ndifferent. Has not the greatest progress which it has realised in the\nmathematical order really been the invention of infinitesimal analysis;\nthat is to say, an effort to substitute the process for the resultant,\nto follow the moving generation of phenomena and magnitudes in its\ncontinuity, to place oneself along becoming at any moment whatsoever, or\nrather, by degrees at all successive moments? This fundamental tendency,\ncoupled with the development of biological research, was bound to\nincline it towards a doctrine of evolution; and hence the success of\nSpencer.\n\nBut time, which is everywhere in modern science the chief variable, is\nonly a time-length, indefinitely and arbitrarily divisible. There is\nno genuine duration, nothing really tending to evolution in Spencer's\nevolution: no more than there is in the periodic working of a turbine or\nin the stationary tremble of a diapason. Is not this what is emphasised\nby the perpetual employment of mechanical images and vulgar engineering\nmetaphors, the least fault of which is to suppose a homogeneous time,\nand a motionless theatre of change which is at bottom only space? \"In\nsuch a doctrine we still talk of time, we pronounce the word, but we\nhardly think of the thing; for time is here robbed of all effect.\"\n(\"Creative Evolution\", page 42.)\n\nWhence comes a latent materialism, ready to grasp the chance of\nself-expression. Whence the automatic return to the dream of universal\narithmetic, which Laplace, Du Bois-Reymond, and Huxley have expressed\nwith such precision. (Ibid., page 41.)\n\nIn order to escape such consequences we must, with Mr Bergson,\nreintroduce real duration, that is to say, creative duration into\nevolution, we must conceive life according to the mode exhibited with\nregard to change in general. And it is science itself which calls us\nto this task. What does science actually tell us when we let it speak\ninstead of prescribing to it answers which conform to our\npreferences? Vitality, at every point of its becoming, is a tangent to\nphysico-chemical mechanism. But physico-chemistry does not reveal its\nsecret any more than the straight line produces the curve.\n\nConsider the development of an embryo. It summarises the history of\nspecies; ontogenesis, we are told, reproduces phylogenesis. And what do\nwe observe then?\n\nNow that a long sequence of centuries is contracted for us into a short\nperiod, and that our view is thus capable of a synthesis which before\nwas too difficult, we see appearing the rhythmic organisation, the\nmusical character, which the slowness of the transitions at first\nprevented us from seeing. In each state of the embryo there is something\nbesides an instantaneous structure, something besides a conservative\nplay of actions and reactions; there is a tendency, a direction, an\neffort, a creative activity. The stage traversed is less interesting\nthan the traversing itself; this again is an act of generating impulse,\nrather than an effect of mechanical inertia. So must the case be, by\nanalogy, with general evolution. We have there, as it were, a vision\nof biological duration in miniature; expansion and relaxation of its\ntension bring its homogeneity to notice, but at the same time, properly\nspeaking, evolution disappears.\n\nAnd further, Mr Bergson establishes by direct and positive arguments\nthat life is genuine creation. A similar conclusion is presented as the\nenvelope of his whole doctrine.\n\nIt is imposed first of all by immediate evidence, for we cannot deny\nthat the history of life is revealed to us under the aspect of a\nprogress and an ascent. And this impulse implies initiative and choice,\nconstituting an effort which we are not authorised by the facts to\npronounce fatalistic: \"A simple glance at the fossil species shows us\nthat life could have done without evolution, or could have evolved only\nwithin very restricted limits, had it chosen the far easier path open to\nit of becoming cramped in its primitive forms; certain Foraminifera have\nnot varied since the silurian period; the Lingulae, looking unmoved upon\nthe innumerable revolutions which have upheaved our planet, are today\nwhat they were in the most distant times of the palaeozoic era.\"\n(\"Creative Evolution\", page 111.) Moreover, if, in us, life is\nindisputably creation and liberty, how would it not, to some extent, be\nso in universal nature? \"Whatever be the inmost essence of what is and\nwhat is being made, we are of it: (\"Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale\",\nNovember 1911.) a conclusion by analogy is therefore legitimate. But\nabove all, this conclusion is verified by its aptitude for solving\nproblems of detail, and for taking account of observed facts, and in\nthis respect I regret that I can only refer the reader to the whole body\nof admirable discussions and analyses drawn up by Mr Bergson with regard\nto \"the plant and the animal,\" or \"the development of animal life.\"\"\n(\"Creative Evolution\", chapter ii.)\n\nAs regards matter, two main laws stand out from the whole of our\nscience, relative to its nature and its phenomena: a law of conservation\nand a law of degradation. On the one hand, we have mechanism,\nrepetition, inertia, constants, and invariants: the play of the material\nworld, from the point of view of quantity, offers us the aspect of\nan immense transformation without gain or loss, a homogeneous\ntransformation tending to maintain in itself an exact equivalence\nbetween the departure and arrival point. On the other hand, from the\npoint of view of quality, we have something which is being used up,\nlowered, degraded, exhausted: energy expended, movement dissipated,\nconstructions breaking up, weights falling, levels becoming equalised,\nand differences effaced. The travel of the material world appears then\nas a loss, a movement of fall and descent.\n\nIn addition, there is only a tendency to conservation, a tendency which\nis never realised except imperfectly; while, on the contrary, we notice\nthat the failure of the vital impulse is most infallibly interpreted by\nthe appearance of mechanism. Reality falling asleep or breaking up\nis the figure under which we finally observe matter: matter then is\nsecondary.\n\nFinally, according to Mr Bergson, matter is defined as a kind of\ndescent; this descent as the interruption of an ascent; this ascent\nitself as growth; and thus a principle of creation is at the base of\nthings.\n\nSuch a view seems obscure and disturbing to the mathematical\nunderstanding. It cannot accustom itself to the idea of a becoming which\nis more than a simple change of distribution, and more than a simple\nexpression of latent wealth. When confronted with such an idea, it\nalways harks back to its eternal question: How has something come out\nof nothing? The question is false; for the idea of nothing is only\na pseudo-idea. Nothing is unthinkable, since to think nothing is\nnecessarily to think or not to think something; and according to Mr\nBergson's formula, (Cf. the discussion on existence and non-existence in\nchapter iv. of \"Creative Evolution\", pages 298-322.) \"the representation\nof void is always a full representation.\" When I say: \"There is\nnothing,\" it is not that I perceive a \"nothing.\" I never perceive\nexcept what is. But I have not perceived what I was seeking, what I was\nexpecting, and I express my deception in the language of my desire. Or\nelse I am speaking a language of construction, implying that I do not\nyet possess what I intend to make.\n\nLet us abruptly forget these idols of practical action and language.\nThe becoming of evolution will then appear to us in its true light, as\nphases of gradual maturation, rounded at intervals by crises of creative\ndiscovery. Continuity and discontinuity will thus admit possibility of\nreconciliation, the one as an aspect of ascent towards the future, the\nother as an aspect of retrospection after the event. And we shall\nsee that the same key will in addition disclose to us the theory of\nknowledge.\n\n\n\n\nVII. The Problem of Knowledge: Analysis and Intuition.\n\nWe know what importance has been attached since Kant to the problem of\nreason: it would seem sometimes that all future philosophy is a return\nto it; that it is no longer called to speak of anything else. Besides,\nwhat we understand by reason, in the broad sense, is, in the human mind,\nthe power of light, the essential operation of which is defined as an\nact of directing synthesis, unifying the experience and rendering it by\nthat very fact intelligible. Every movement of thought shows this power\nin exercise. To bring it everywhere to the front would be the proper\ntask of philosophy; at least it is in this manner that we understand it\ntoday. But from what point of view and by what method do we ordinarily\nconstruct this theory of knowledge?\n\nThe spontaneous works of mind, perception, science, art, and morality\nare the departure-point of the inquiry and its initial matter. We do not\nask ourselves whether but how they are possible, what they imply, and\nwhat they suppose; a regressive analysis attempts by critical reflection\nto discern in them their principles and requisites. The task, in short,\nis to reascend from production to producing activity, which we regard as\nsufficiently revealed by its natural products.\n\nPhilosophy, in consequence, is no longer anything but the science of\nproblems already solved, the science which is confined to saying why\nknowledge is knowledge and action action, of such and such a kind, and\nsuch and such a quality. And in consequence also reason can no longer\nappear anything but an original datum postulated as a simple fact, as\na complete system come down ready-made from heaven, at bottom a kind of\nnon-temporal essence, definable without respect to duration, evolution,\nor history, of which all genesis and all progress are absurd. In vain do\nwe persist in maintaining that it is originally an act; we always come\nround to the fact that the method followed compels us to consider this\nact only when once accomplished, and when once expressed in results. The\ninevitable consequence is that we imprison ourselves hopelessly in the\naffirmation of Kantian relativism.\n\nSuch a system can only be true as a partial and temporary truth: at the\nmost, it is a moment of truth. \"If we read the \"Critique of Pure Reason\"\nclosely, we become aware that Kant has made the critique, not of reason\nin general, but of a reason fashioned to the habits and demands of\nCartesian mechanism or Newtonian physics.\" (H. Bergson, \"Report of\nFrench Philosophical Society\", meeting, 2nd May 1901.) Moreover,\nhe plainly studies only adult reason, its present state, a plane of\nthought, a sectional view of becoming. For Kant, men progress perhaps\nin reason, but reason itself has no duration: it is the fixed spot, the\natmosphere of dead eternity in which every mental action is displayed.\nBut this could not be the final and complete truth. Is it not a fact\nthat human intelligence has been slowly constituted in the course of\nbiological evolution? To know it, we have not so much to separate it\nstatically from its works, as to replace it in its history.\n\nLet us begin with life, since, in any case, whether we will or no, it is\nalways in life and by life that we are.\n\nLife is not a brute force, a blind mechanism, from which one could never\nconceive that thought would spring. From its first pulsation, life\nis consciousness, spiritual activity, creative effort tending towards\nliberty; that is, discernment already luminous, although the quality is\nat first faint and diffused. In other terms, life is at bottom of the\npsychological nature of a tendency. But \"the essence of a tendency is\nto develop in sheaf-form, creating, by the mere fact of its growth,\ndiverging directions between which its impulse will be divided.\"\n(\"Creative Evolution\", page 108.)\n\nAlong these different paths the complementary potentialities are\nproduced and intensified, separating in the very process, their original\ninterpretation being possible only in the state of birth. One of them\nends in what we call intelligence. This latter therefore has become\ngradually detached from a less intense but fuller luminous condition, of\nwhich it has retained only certain characteristics to accentuate them.\n\nWe see that we must conceive the word mind--or, if we prefer the word,\nthought--as extending beyond intelligence. Pure intelligence, or the\nfaculty of critical reflection and conceptual analysis, represents only\none form of thought in its entirety, a function, a determination or\nparticular adaptation, the part organised in view of practical action,\nthe part consolidated as language. What are its characteristics? It\nunderstands only what is discontinuous, inert, and fixed, that which has\nneither change nor duration; it bathes in an atmosphere of spatiality;\nit uses mathematics continually; it feels at home only among \"things,\"\nand everything is reduced by it to solid atoms; it is naturally\n\"materialist,\" owing to the very fact that it naturally grasps \"forms\"\nonly. What do we mean by that except that its object of election is the\nmechanism of matter? But it supposes life; it only remains living itself\nby continual loans from a vaster and fuller activity from which it\nis sprung. And this return to complementary powers is what we call\nintuition.\n\nFrom this point of view it becomes easy to escape Kantian relativity. We\nare confronted by an intelligence which is doubtless no longer a faculty\nuniversally competent, but which, on the contrary, possesses in its own\ndomain a greater power of penetration. It is arranged for action. Now\naction would not be able to move in irreality. Intelligence, then, makes\nus acquainted, if not with all reality, at least with some of it,\nnamely that part by which reality is a possible object of mechanical or\nsynthetic action.\n\nMore profoundly, intuition falls into analysis as life into matter: they\nare two aspects of the same movement. That is why, \"provided we only\nconsider the general form of physics, we can say that it touches the\nabsolute.\" (\"Creative Evolution\", page 216.)\n\nIn other terms, language and mechanism are regulated by each other. This\nexplains at once the success of mathematical science in the order of\nmatter, and its non-success in the order of life.\n\nFor, when confronted with life, intelligence fails. \"Being a deposit\nof the evolutive movement along its path, how could it be applied\nthroughout the evolutive movement itself? We might as well claim that\nthe part equals the whole, that the effect can absorb its cause into\nitself, or that the pebble left on the shore outlines the form of the\nwave which brought it.\" (Preface to \"Creative Evolution\".)\n\nIs not that as good as saying that life is unknowable? Must we conclude\nthat it is impossible to understand it?\n\n\"We should be forced to do so, if life had employed all the psychic\npotentialities it contains in making pure understandings; that is to\nsay, in preparing mathematicians. But the line of evolution which ends\nin man is not the only one. By other divergent ways other forms\nof consciousness have developed, which have not been able to free\nthemselves from external constraint, nor regain the victory over\nthemselves as intelligence has done, but which, none the less for\nthat, also express something immanent and essential in the movement of\nevolution.\n\n\"By bringing them into connection with one another, and making them\nafterwards amalgamate with intelligence, should we not thus obtain a\nconsciousness co-extensive with life, and capable, by turning sharply\nround upon the vital thrust which it feels behind it, of obtaining a\ncomplete, though doubtless vanishing vision?\" (\"Creative Evolution\",\nPreface.) It is precisely in this that the act of philosophic intuition\nconsists. \"We shall be told that, even so, we do not get beyond our\nintelligence, since it is with our intelligence, and through our\nintelligence, that we observe all the other forms of consciousness. And\nwe should be right in saying so, if we were pure intelligences, if\nthere had not remained round our conceptual and logical thought a vague\nnebula, made of the very substance at the expense of which the luminous\nnucleus, which we call intelligence, has been formed. In it reside\ncertain complementary powers of the understanding, of which we have only\na confused feeling when we remain shut up in ourselves, but which will\nbecome illumined and distinct when they perceive themselves at work, so\nto speak, in the evolution of nature. They will thus learn what effort\nthey have to make to become more intense, and to expand in the actual\ndirection of life.\" (\"Creative Evolution\", Preface.) Does that mean\nabandonment to instinct, and descent with it into infra-consciousness\nagain? By no means. On the contrary, our task is to bring instinct to\nenrich intelligence, to become free and illumined in it; and this ascent\ntowards super-consciousness is possible in the flash of an intuitive\nact, as it is sometimes possible for the eye to perceive, as a pale and\nfugitive gleam, beyond what we properly term light, the ultra-violet\nrays of the spectrum.\n\nCan we say of such a doctrine that it seeks to go, or that it goes\n\"against intelligence\"? Nothing authorises such an accusation, for\nlimitation of a sphere is not misappreciation of every legitimate\nexercise. But intelligence is not the whole of thought, and its natural\nproducts do not completely exhaust or manifest our power of light.\n\nBesides, that intelligence and reason are not things completed, for ever\narrested in their inner structure, that they evolve and expand, is a\nfact: the place of discovery is precisely the residual fringe of which\nwe were speaking above. In this respect, the history of thought would\nfurnish examples in plenty. Intuitions at first obscure, and only\nanticipated, facts originally admitting no comparison, and as it were\nirrational, become instructive and luminous by the fruitful use made of\nthem, and by the fertility which they manifest. In order to grasp the\ncomplex content of reality, the mind must do itself violence, must\nawaken its sleeping powers of revealing sympathy, must expand till it\nbecomes adapted to what formerly shocked its habits so much as almost\nto seem contradictory to it. Such a task, moreover, is possible: we work\nout its differential every moment, and its complete whole appears in the\nsequence of centuries.\n\nAt bottom, the new theory of knowledge has nothing new in it except\nthe demand that all the facts shall be taken into account: it renews\nduration in the thinking mind, and places itself at the point of view of\ncreative invention, not only at that of subsequent demonstration. Hence\nits conception of experience, which, for it, is not simple information,\nfitted into pre-existing frames, but elaboration of the frames\nthemselves.\n\nHence the problem of reason changes its aspect. A great mistake has been\nmade in thinking that Mr Bergson's doctrine misunderstands it: to deny\nit and to place it are two different things. In its inmost essence,\nreason is the demand for unity; that is why it is displayed as a faculty\nof synthesis, and why its essential act is presented as apperception\nof relation. It is unifying activity, not so much by a dialectic of\nharmonious construction as by a view of reciprocal implication. But\nall that, however shaded we suppose it, entails a previous analysis.\nTherefore if we place ourselves in a perspective of intuition, I mean,\nof complete perception, the demand for reason appears second only,\nwithout being deprived, however, of its true task: it is an echo and\na recollection, an appeal and a promise of profound continuity, our\noriginal anticipation and our final hope, in the bosom of the elementary\natomism which characterises the transitory region of language; and\nreason thus marks the zone of contact between intelligence and instinct.\n\nIs thought only possible under the law of number? Does reality only\nbecome an object of knowledge as a system of distinct but regulated\nfactors and moments? Do ideas exist only by their mutual relations,\nwhich first of all oppose them and afterwards force intelligence to move\nendlessly from one term to another? If such were the case, reason would\ncertainly be first, as alone making an intelligible continuity out of\ndiscontinuous perception and restoring total unity to each temporary\npart by a synthetic dialectic. But all this really has meaning\nonly after analysis has taken place. The demand for rational unity\nconstitutes in the bosom of atomism something like a murmur of deep\nunderlying continuity: it expresses in the very language of atomism,\natomism's basic irreality. There is no question of misunderstanding\nreason, but only of putting it in its proper place. In a perspective\nof complete intuition nothing would require to be unified. Reason would\nthen be reabsorbed in perception. That is to say, its present task is\nto measure and correct in us the limits, gaps, and weaknesses of the\nperceptive faculty. In this respect not a man of us thinks of denying\nit its task. But we try with Mr Bergson to reduce this task to its true\nworth and genuine importance. For we are decidedly tired of hearing\n\"Reason\" invoked in solemn and moving tones, as if to write the\nvenerable name with the largest of capital R's were a magic solution of\nall problems.\n\nMind, in fact, sets out from unity rather than arrives at it; and the\norder which it appears to discover subsequently in an experience which\nat first is manifold and incoherent is only a refraction of the original\nunity through the prism of a spontaneous analysis. Mr Bergson admirably\npoints out (\"Creative Evolution\", pages 240-244 and 252-257.) that there\nare two types of order, geometric and vital, the one a static hierarchy\nof relations, the other a musical continuity of moments. These two types\nare opposed, as space to duration and matter to mind; but the negation\nof one coincides with the position of the other. It is therefore\nimpossible to abolish both at once. The idea of disorder does not\ncorrespond to any genuine reality. It is essentially relative, and\narises only when we do not meet the type of order which we were\nexpecting; and then it expresses our deception in the language of our\nexpectation, the absence of the expected order being equivalent, from\nthe practical point of view, to the absence of all order. Regarded in\nitself, this notion is only a verbal entity, unduly taking form as the\ncommon basis of two antithetic types. How therefore do we come to speak\nof a \"perceptible diversity\" which mind has to regulate and unify?\nThis is only true at most of the disjointed experience employed\nby common-sense. Reason, accepting this preliminary analysis,\nand proceeding to language, seeks to organise it according to the\nmathematical type. But it is the vital type which corresponds to\nabsolute reality, at least when it is a question of the Whole; and only\nintuition has re-access to it, by soaring above synthetic dissociations.\n\n\n\n\nVIII. Conclusion.\n\nAs my last word and closing formula I come back to the leitmotiv of my\nwhole study: Mr Bergson's philosophy is a philosophy of duration.\n\nLet us regard it from this point of view, as contact with creative\neffort, if we wish to conceive aright the original notions which it\nproposes to us about liberty, life, and intuition.\n\nLet us say once more that it appears as the enthronement of positive\nmetaphysics: positive, that is to say, capable of continuous, regular,\nand collective progress, no longer forcibly divided into irreducible\nschools, \"each of which retains its place, chooses its dice, and begins\na never-ending match with the rest.\" (\"Introduction to Metaphysics\"\nin the \"Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale\", January 1903. Psychology,\naccording to Mr Bergson, studies the human mind in so far as it operates\nin a useful manner to a practical end; metaphysics represent the effort\nof this same mind to free itself from the conditions of useful action,\nand regain possession of itself as pure creative energy. Now experience,\nthe experience of the laboratory, allows us to measure with more and\nmore accuracy the divergence between these two planes of life; hence the\npositive character of the new metaphysics.)\n\nLet us next say that until the present moment it constitutes the only\ndoctrine which is truly a metaphysic of experience, since no other, at\nbottom, explains why thought, in its work of discovery and verification,\nremains in subjection to a law of probation by durable action. We\nhave now only to show how it evades certain criticisms which have been\nlevelled against its tendencies.\n\nSome have wanted to see in it a kind of atheist monism. Mr Bergson has\nanswered this point himself. What he rejects, and what he is right in\nrejecting, are the doctrines which confine themselves to personifying\nthe unity of nature or the unity of knowledge in God as motionless first\ncause. God would really be nothing, since he would do nothing. But he\nadds: \"The considerations put forward in my \"Essay on the Immediate\nData\" result in an illustration of the fact of liberty; those of \"Matter\nand Memory\" lead us, I hope, to put our finger on mental reality; those\nof \"Creative Evolution\" present creation as a fact: from all this we\nderive a clear idea of a free and creating God, producing matter and\nlife at once, whose creative effort is continued, in a vital\ndirection, by the evolution of species and the construction of human\npersonalities.\" (Letter to P. de Tonquedec, published in the \"Studies\"\nof 20th February 1912, and quoted here as found in the \"Annals of\nChristian Philosophy\", March 1912.) How can we help finding in these\nwords, according to the actual expression of the author, the most\ncategorical refutation \"of monism and pantheism in general\"?\n\nNow to go further and become more precise, Mr Bergson points out that we\nmust \"approach problems of quite a different kind, those of morality.\"\nAbout these new problems the author of \"Creative Evolution\" has as yet\nsaid nothing; and he will say nothing, so long as his method does not\nlead him, on this point, to results as positive, after their manner,\nas those of his other works, because he does not consider that mere\nsubjective opinions are in place in philosophy. He therefore denies\nnothing; he is waiting and searching, always in the same spirit: what\nmore could we ask of him?\n\nOne thing only is possible today: to discern in the doctrine already\nexisting the points of a moral and religious philosophy which present\nthemselves in advance for ultimate insertion.\n\nThis is what we are permitted to attempt. But let us fully understand\nwhat is at issue. The question is only to know whether, as has been\nclaimed, there is incompatibility between Mr Bergson's point of view and\nthe religious or moral point of view; whether the premisses laid down\nblock the road to all future development in the direction before us; or\nwhether, on the contrary, such a development is invited by some parts at\nleast of the previous work. The question is not to find in this work\nthe necessary and sufficient bases, the already formed and visible\nlineaments of what will one day complete it. To imagine that the\nreligious and moral problem is bound to be regarded by Mr Bergson as\narising when it is too late for revision, as admitting proposition and\nsolution only as functions of a previous theoretical philosophy beyond\nwhich we should not go; that in his eyes the solution of this problem\nwill be deduced from principles already laid down without any call for\nthe introduction of new facts or new points of view, without any need to\nbegin from a new intuition; that his view precludes all considerations\nof strictly spiritual life, of inner and profound action, regarding\nthings in relation to God and in an eternal perspective: such a view\nwould be illegitimate and unreasonable, first of all, because Mr Bergson\nhas said nothing of the kind, and secondly, because it is contrary to\nall his tendencies.\n\nAfter the \"Essay on the Immediate Data\" critics proceeded to confine\nhim in an irreducible static dualism; after \"Matter and Memory\" they\ncondemned him as failing for ever to explain the juxtaposition of the\ntwo points of view, utility and truth: why should we require that after\n\"Creative Evolution\" he should be forbidden to think anything new, or\ndistinguish, for example, different orders of life?\n\nThe problems must be approached one after the other, and, in the\nsolution of each of them, it is proper to introduce only the necessary\nelements. But each result is only \"temporarily final.\" Let us lose the\nstrange habit of asking an author continually to do something other\nthan he has done, or, in what he has done, to give us the whole of his\nthought.\n\nTill now, Mr Bergson has always considered each new problem according\nto its specific and original nature, and, to solve it, he has always\nsupplied a new effort of autonomous adaptation: why should it be\notherwise for the future? I seek vainly for the decree forbidding him\nthe right to study the problem of biological evolution in itself,\nand for the necessity which compels him to abide now by the premisses\ncontained in his past work. (For Mr Bergson, the religious sentiment,\nas the sentiment of obligation, contains a basis of \"immediate datum\"\nrendering it indissoluble and irreducible.)\n\nThe only point which we have to examine is this: will the moral and\nreligious question compel Mr Bergson to break with the conclusions of\nhis previous studies, and can we not, on the contrary, foresee points of\ngeneral agreement?\n\nIn the depths of ourselves we find liberty; in the depths of universal\nbeing we find a demand for creation. Since evolution is creative,\neach of its moments works for the production of an indeducible and\ntranscendent future. This future must not be regarded as a simple\ndevelopment of the present, a simple expression of germs already given.\nConsequently we have no authority for saying that there is for ever\nonly one order of life, only one plane of action, only one rhythm of\nduration, only one perspective of existence. And if disconnections and\nabrupt leaps are visible in the economy of the past--from matter to\nlife, from the animal to man--we have no authority again for claiming\nthat we cannot observe today something analogous in the very essence of\nhuman life, that the point of view of the flesh, and the point of view\nof the spirit, the point of view of reason, and the point of view of\ncharity are a homogeneous extension of it. And apart from that, taking\nlife in its first tendency, and in the general direction of its current,\nit is ascent, growth, upward effort, and a work of spiritualising and\nemancipating creation: by that we might define Good, for Good is a path\nrather than a thing.\n\nBut life may fail, halt, or travel downwards. \"Life in general is\nmobility itself; the particular manifestations of life accept this\nmobility only with regret, and constantly fall behind. While it is\nalways going forward, they would be glad to mark time. Evolution in\ngeneral would take place as far as possible in a straight line; special\nevolution is a circular advance. Like dust-eddies raised by the passing\nwind, living bodies are self-pivoted and hung in the full breeze of\nlife.\" (\"Creative Evolution\", page 139.) Each species, each individual,\neach function tends to take itself as its end; mechanism, habit, body,\nand letter, which are, strictly speaking, pure instruments, actually\nbecome principles of death. Thus it comes about that life is exhausted\nin efforts towards self-preservation, allows itself to be converted\nby matter into captive eddies, sometimes even abandons itself to the\ninertia of the weight which it ought to raise, and surrenders to the\ndownward current which constitutes the essence of materiality: it is\nthus that Evil would be defined, as the direction of travel opposed\nto Good. Now, with man, thought, reflection, and clear consciousness\nappear. At the same time also properly moral qualifications appear: good\nbecomes duty, evil becomes sin. At this precise moment, a new problem\nbegins, demanding the soundings of a new intuition, yet connected at\nclear and visible points with previous problems.\n\nThis is the philosophy which some are pleased to say is closed by nature\nto all problems of a certain order, problems of reason or problems of\nmorality. There is no doctrine, on the contrary, which is more open, and\nnone which, in actual fact, lends itself better to further extension.\n\nIt is not my duty to state here what I believe can be extracted from it.\nStill less is it my duty to try to foresee what Mr Bergson's conclusions\nwill be. Let us confine ourselves to taking it in what it has expressly\ngiven us of itself. From this point of view, which is that of pure\nknowledge, I must again, as I conclude, emphasise its exceptional\nimportance and its infinite reach. It is possible not to understand it.\nSuch is frequently the case: thus it always has been in the past, each\ntime that a truly new intuition has arisen among men; thus it will be\nuntil the inevitable day when disciples more respectful of the letter\nthan the spirit will turn it, alas, into a new scholastic. What does\nit matter! The future is there; despite misconceptions, despite\nincomprehensions, there is henceforth the departure-point of all\nspeculative philosophy; each day increases the number of minds which\nrecognise it; and it is better not to dwell upon the proofs of several\nof those who are unable or unwilling to see it.\n\n\n\n\nIndex.\n\nAbsolute, the.\n\nAdaptation, value of.\n\nAnalysis, conceptual, contrasted with intuition.\n\nAppearances.\n\nArt, and philosophy.\n\nAtomism.\n\nAutomatism.\n\nAutomaton, of daily life.\n\nBeing, as becoming.\n\nBrain, work of.\n\nCausality, psychological.\n\nChange.\n\nCommon-sense.\n\nConcepts, analysis by and functions of, as symbols, creation of, as\ngeneral frames, practical reach of, inferior to intuition, further\ndiscussed.\n\nConsciousness.\n\nConservation, law of.\n\nConstants, search for, represented.\n\nContinuity, qualitative.\n\nCriticism, of language.\n\nDeduction, impotence of.\n\nDegradation, law of.\n\nDeterminism, physical.\n\nDiscontinuity, apparent.\n\nDisorder.\n\nDu Bois-Reymond.\n\nDuration, real, perpetually new, and thought, and time, pure.\n\nDynamic connection, schemes.\n\nEgo, encrustations of the.\n\nEleatic dialectic.\n\nEmbryology, evidence of.\n\nEvil, a reality.\n\nEvolution, drama of, biological, value and meaning of, not\nindispensable, distinguished from development, as dynamic continuity, as\nactivity, further discussed.\n\nExistence, as change.\n\nExperience.\n\nFact.\n\nFreedom.\n\nFree-will.\n\nGenesis, law of.\n\nGood, a reality, a path.\n\nHabit, as obstacle.\n\nHeredity.\n\nHeterogeneity.\n\nHomogeneity, absence of.\n\nHuxley.\n\nImages.\n\nImmediacy.\n\nImmediate, the.\n\nInert, the.\n\nInstinct, is sympathy, contrasted with intelligence.\n\nIntellectualism, distrusted.\n\nIntelligence, product of evolution, and instinct, broad meaning of.\n\nIntuition, as starting-point, intransmissible without language,\naesthetic, triumph of, and duration, and analysis.\n\nIntuitional effort, content.\n\nKant, his point of departure, conclusions of, escape from.\n\nKnowledge, absolute, utilitarian nature of, new theory of.\n\nLanguage, dangers of.\n\nLaplace.\n\nLaw, concept of.\n\nLiberty, personal importance of.\n\nLife, tendencies of, is finality, is progress, further discussed.\n\nLimit-concepts.\n\nMaterialism.\n\nMechanism, psychological, failure of.\n\nMemory, problem of, perception complicated by, importance of, racial,\nplanes of, memory of solids.\n\nMetaphor, justification of.\n\nMethod, philosophical.\n\nMill, Stuart.\n\nMotor-schemes, mechanisms.\n\nMysticism.\n\nNon-morality.\n\nNothingness.\n\nNumber.\n\nOntogenesis.\n\nPalaeontology, evidence of.\n\nParallelism.\n\nParalogism.\n\nPerception, an art, affected by memory, further explained, fulfilment\nof guesswork, utilitarian signification, subjectivity of, pure\nand ordinary, further discussed, relation to matter, perception of\nimmediacy.\n\nPhilosophy, duty of, function of.\n\nPhylogenesis.\n\nPlanes, of consciousness.\n\nProgress, and reality.\n\nQuality, and inner world.\n\nQuantity, and quality.\n\nRationalism.\n\nRavaisson.\n\nRealism.\n\nReality, contact with, a flux, recognition of, absolute, elusive nature\nof, personal, essentially qualitative, pure, inner, contrasting views\nabout, further discussed.\n\nReason.\n\nRelation, between mind and matter.\n\nReligion, its place in philosophy.\n\nRenan.\n\nRomanticism.\n\nSchemes, dynamic.\n\nScience, prisoner of symbolism, cult of, impotence of.\n\nSense, good, and common-sense.\n\nSpace.\n\nSpencer, criticism of, success and weakness of.\n\nSpiritualism.\n\nSymbolism.\n\nSympathy.\n\nTaine.\n\nThought, methods of common.\n\nTime, required by Mr Bergson's philosophy, in space, and common-sense,\nand duration.\n\nTorpor.\n\nTransformism, errors of.\n\nUtility, as goal of perception.\n\nVariation.\n\nZeno of Elea.\n\nZone, of feeling.","title":"A New Philosophy : $b Henri Bergson","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":46565}