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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1347 ***
+
+A NEW PHILOSOPHY: HENRI BERGSON
+
+by Edouard le Roy
+
+Translated from the French by Vincent Benson
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+This little book is due to two articles published under the same title
+in the "Revue des Deux Mondes", 1st and 15th February 1912.
+
+Their object was to present Mr Bergson's philosophy to the public at
+large, giving as short a sketch as possible, and describing, without too
+minute details, the general trend of his movement. These articles I
+have here reprinted intact. But I have added, in the form of continuous
+notes, some additional explanations on points which did not come within
+the scope of investigation in the original sketch.
+
+I need hardly add that my work, though thus far complete, does not in
+any way claim to be a profound critical study. Indeed, such a study,
+dealing with a thinker who has not yet said his last word, would today
+be premature. I have simply aimed at writing an introduction which will
+make it easier to read and understand Mr Bergson's works, and serve as a
+preliminary guide to those who desire initiation in the new philosophy.
+
+I have therefore firmly waived all the paraphernalia of technical
+discussions, and have made no comparisons, learned or otherwise, between
+Mr Bergson's teaching and that of older philosophies.
+
+I can conceive no better method of misunderstanding the point at
+issue, I mean the simple unity of productive intuition, than that of
+pigeon-holing names of systems, collecting instances of resemblance,
+making up analogies, and specifying ingredients. An original philosophy
+is not meant to be studied as a mosaic which takes to pieces, a compound
+which analyses, or a body which dissects. On the contrary, it is by
+considering it as a living act, not as a rather clever discourse, by
+examining the peculiar excellence of its soul rather than the formation
+of its body, that the inquirer will succeed in understanding it.
+Properly speaking, I have only applied to Mr Bergson the method which
+he himself justifiably prescribes in a recent article ("Revue de
+Metaphysique et de Morale", November 1911), the only method, in fact,
+which is in all senses of the word fully "exact." I shall none the less
+be glad if these brief pages can be of any interest to professional
+philosophers, and have endeavoured, as far as possible, to allow them
+to trace, under the concise formulae employed, the scheme which I have
+refused to develop.
+
+It has become evident to me that even today the interpretation of Mr
+Bergson's position is in many cases full of faults, which it would
+undoubtedly be worth while to assist in removing. I may or may not have
+succeeded in my attempt, but such, at any rate, is the precise end I had
+in view.
+
+In conclusion, I may say that I have not had the honour of being Mr
+Bergson's pupil; and, at the time when I became acquainted with his
+outlook, my own direct reflection on science and life had already
+produced in me similar trains of thought. I found in his work
+the striking realisation of a presentiment and a desire. This
+"correspondence," which I have not exaggerated, proved at once a help
+and a hindrance to me in entering into the exact comprehension of so
+profoundly original a doctrine. The reader will thus understand that I
+think it in place to quote my authority to him in the following lines
+which Mr Bergson kindly wrote me after the publication of the articles
+reproduced in this volume: "Underneath and beyond the method you have
+caught the intention and the spirit...Your study could not be more
+conscientious or true to the original. As it advances, condensation
+increases in a marked degree: the reader becomes aware that the
+explanation is undergoing a progressive involution similar to the
+involution by which we determine the reality of Time. To produce this
+feeling, much more has been necessary than a close study of my works: it
+has required deep sympathy of thought, the power, in fact, of rethinking
+the subject in a personal and original manner. Nowhere is this sympathy
+more in evidence than in your concluding pages, where in a few words you
+point out the possibilities of further developments of the doctrine. In
+this direction I should myself say exactly what you have said."
+
+Paris, 28th March 1912.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+Preface
+
+
+GENERAL VIEW
+
+
+I. Method.
+
+Scope of Henri Bergson's Philosophy. Material and Authorities.
+Investigation of Common-sense. Value of Science. Perception Discussed.
+Practical Life and Reality. Concepts and Symbolism. Intuition and
+Analysis. Use of Metaphor. The Philosopher's Task.
+
+
+II. Teaching.
+
+The Ego. Space and Number. Parallelism. Henri Bergson's View of Mind
+and Matter. Qualitative Continuity. Memory. Real Duration Heterogeneous.
+Liberty and Determinism. Meaning of Reality. Evolution and Automatism.
+Triumph of Man. The Vital Impulse. Objections Refuted. Place of Religion
+in the New Philosophy.
+
+
+ADDITIONAL EXPLANATIONS
+
+I. Henri Bergson's Work and the General Directions of Contemporary
+Thought.
+
+Mathematics and Philosophy. The Inert and the Living. Realism and
+Positivism. Henri Bergson and the Intuition of Duration.
+
+
+II. Immediacy.
+
+Necessity of Criticism. Utilitarianism of Common-sense. Perception of
+Immediacy.
+
+
+III. Theory of Perception.
+
+Pure and Ordinary Perception. Kant's Position. Relation of Perception to
+Matter. Complete Experience.
+
+
+IV. Critique of Language.
+
+Dynamic Schemes. Dangers of Language. The Eleatic Dialectic. Scientific
+Thought and the Task of Intuition. Discussion of Change.
+
+
+V. The Problem of Consciousness: Duration and Liberty.
+
+States as Phases in Duration. The Scientific View of Time. Duration
+and Freedom. Liberty and Determinism in the Light of Henri Bergson's
+Philosophy.
+
+
+VI. The Problem of Evolution: Life and Matter.
+
+Evolution and Creation. Laws of Conservation and Degradation. Quantity
+and Quality. Secondary Value of Matter.
+
+
+VII. The Problem of Knowledge: Analysis and Intuition.
+
+Difficulties of Kant's Position. Insufficiency of Intelligence. Henri
+Bergson and the Problem of Reason. Geometric and Vital Types of Order.
+
+
+VIII. Conclusion.
+
+Moral and Religious Problems. Henri Bergson's Position.
+
+
+
+
+A NEW PHILOSOPHY
+
+
+
+
+GENERAL VIEW
+
+
+
+
+I. Method.
+
+There is a thinker whose name is today on everybody's lips, who is
+deemed by acknowledged philosophers worthy of comparison with the
+greatest, and who, with his pen as well as his brain, has overleapt all
+technical obstacles, and won himself a reading both outside and inside
+the schools. Beyond any doubt, and by common consent, Mr Henri Bergson's
+work will appear to future eyes among the most characteristic, fertile,
+and glorious of our era. It marks a never-to-be-forgotten date in
+history; it opens up a phase of metaphysical thought; it lays down a
+principle of development the limits of which are indeterminable; and it
+is after cool consideration, with full consciousness of the exact value
+of words, that we are able to pronounce the revolution which it effects
+equal in importance to that effected by Kant, or even by Socrates.
+
+Everybody, indeed, has become aware of this more or less clearly. Else
+how are we to explain, except through such recognition, the sudden
+striking spread of this new philosophy which, by its learned rigorism,
+precluded the likelihood of so rapid a triumph?
+
+Twenty years have sufficed to make its results felt far beyond
+traditional limits: and now its influence is alive and working from one
+pole of thought to the other; and the active leaven contained in it can
+be seen already extending to the most varied and distant spheres:
+in social and political spheres, where from opposite points, and not
+without certain abuses, an attempt is already being made to wrench it
+in contrary directions; in the sphere of religious speculation, where
+it has been more legitimately summoned to a distinguished, illuminative,
+and beneficent career; in the sphere of pure science, where, despite old
+separatist prejudices, the ideas sown are pushing up here and there;
+and lastly, in the sphere of art, where there are indications that it
+is likely to help certain presentiments, which have till now remained
+obscure, to become conscious of themselves. The moment is favourable to
+a study of Mr Bergson's philosophy; but in the face of so many attempted
+methods of employment, some of them a trifle premature, the point of
+paramount importance, applying Mr Bergson's own method to himself, is
+to study his philosophy in itself, for itself, in its profound trend and
+its authenticated action, without claiming to enlist it in the ranks of
+any cause whatsoever.
+
+
+I.
+
+Mr Bergson's readers will undergo at almost every page they read an
+intense and singular experience. The curtain drawn between ourselves
+and reality, enveloping everything including ourselves in its illusive
+folds, seems of a sudden to fall, dissipated by enchantment, and display
+to the mind depths of light till then undreamt, in which reality itself,
+contemplated face to face for the first time, stands fully revealed. The
+revelation is overpowering, and once vouchsafed will never afterwards be
+forgotten.
+
+Nothing can convey to the reader the effects of this direct and intimate
+mental vision. Everything which he thought he knew already finds new
+birth and vigour in the clear light of morning: on all hands, in the
+glow of dawn, new intuitions spring up and open out; we feel them big
+with infinite consequences, heavy and saturated with life. Each of them
+is no sooner blown than it appears fertile for ever. And yet there is
+nothing paradoxical or disturbing in the novelty. It is a reply to our
+expectation, an answer to some dim hope. So vivid is the impression of
+truth, that afterwards we are even ready to believe we recognise the
+revelation as if we had always darkly anticipated it in some mysterious
+twilight at the back of consciousness.
+
+Afterwards, no doubt, in certain cases, incertitude reappears, sometimes
+even decided objections. The reader, who at first was under a magic
+spell, corrects his thought, or at least hesitates. What he has seen
+is still at bottom so new, so unexpected, so far removed from familiar
+conceptions. For this surging wave of thought our mind contains none of
+those ready-cut channels which render comprehension easy. But whether,
+in the long run, we each of us give or refuse complete or partial
+adhesion, all of us, at least, have received a regenerating shock, an
+internal upheaval not readily silenced: the network of our intellectual
+habits is broken; henceforth a new leaven works and ferments in us; we
+shall no longer think as we used to think; and be we pupils or critics,
+we cannot mistake the fact that we have here a principle of integral
+renewal for ancient philosophy and its old and timeworn problems.
+
+It is obviously impossible to sketch in brief all the aspects and all
+the wealth of so original a work. Still less shall I be able to answer
+here the many questions which arise. I must decide to pass rapidly
+over the technical detail of clear, closely-argued, and penetrating
+discussions; over the scope and exactness of the evidence borrowed from
+the most diverse positive sciences; over the marvellous dexterity of the
+psychological analysis; over the magic of a style which can call up
+what words cannot express. The solidity of the construction will not be
+evidenced in these pages, nor its austere and subtle beauty. But what
+I do at all costs wish to bring out, in shorter form, in this new
+philosophy, is its directing idea and general movement.
+
+In such an undertaking, where the end is to understand rather than to
+judge, criticism ought to take second place. It is more profitable to
+attempt to feel oneself into the heart of the teaching, to relive its
+genesis, to perceive the principle of organic unity, to come at the
+mainspring. Let our reading be a course of meditation which we live.
+The only true homage we can render to the masters of thought consists in
+ourselves thinking, as far as we can do so, in their train, under their
+inspiration, and along the paths which they have opened up.
+
+In the case before us this road is landmarked by several books which it
+will be sufficient to study one after the other, and take successively
+as the text of our reflections.
+
+In 1889 Mr Bergson made his appearance with an "Essay on the Immediate
+Data of Consciousness".
+
+This was his doctor's thesis. Taking up his position inside the human
+personality, in its inmost mind, he endeavoured to lay hold of the
+depths of life and free action in their commonly overlooked and fugitive
+originality.
+
+Some years later, in 1896, passing this time to the externals of
+consciousness, the contact surface between things and the ego, he
+published "Matter and Memory", a masterly study of perception and
+recollection, which he himself put forward as an inquiry into the
+relation between body and mind. In 1907 he followed with "Creative
+Evolution", in which the new metaphysic was outlined in its full
+breadth, and developed with a wealth of suggestion and perspective
+opening upon the distances of infinity; universal evolution, the meaning
+of life, the nature of mind and matter, of intelligence and instinct,
+were the great problems here treated, ending in a general critique of
+knowledge and a completely original definition of philosophy.
+
+These will be our guides which we shall carefully follow, step by step.
+It is not, I must confess, without some apprehension that I undertake
+the task of summing up so much research, and of condensing into a few
+pages so many and such new conclusions.
+
+Mr Bergson excels, even on points of least significance, in producing
+the feeling of unfathomed depths and infinite levels. Never has anyone
+better understood how to fulfil the philosopher's first task, in
+pointing out the hidden mystery in everything. With him we see all at
+once the concrete thickness and inexhaustible extension of the most
+familiar reality, which has always been before our eyes, where before we
+were aware only of the external film.
+
+Do not imagine that this is simply a poetical delusion. We must be
+grateful if the philosopher uses exquisite language and writes in a
+style which abounds in living images. These are rare qualities. But
+let us avoid being duped by a show of printed matter: these unannotated
+pages are supported by positive science submitted to the most minute
+inspection. One day, in 1901, at the French Philosophical Society, Mr
+Bergson related the genesis of "Matter and Memory".
+
+"Twelve years or so before its appearance, I had set myself the
+following problem: 'What would be the teaching of the physiology and
+pathology of today upon the ancient question of the connection between
+physical and moral to an unprejudiced mind, determined to forget all
+speculation in which it has indulged on this point, determined also to
+neglect, in the enunciations of philosophers, all that is not pure and
+simple statement of fact?' I set myself to solve the problem, and I
+very soon perceived that the question was susceptible of a provisional
+solution, and even of precise formulation, only if restricted to the
+problem of memory. In memory itself I was forced to determine bounds
+which I had afterwards to narrow considerably. After confining myself to
+the recollection of words I saw that the problem, as stated, was
+still too broad, and that, to put the question in its most precise and
+interesting form, I should have to substitute the recollection of the
+sound of words. The literature on aphasia is enormous. I took five
+years to sift it. And I arrived at this conclusion, that between the
+psychological fact and its corresponding basis in the brain there must
+be a relation which answers to none of the ready-made concepts furnished
+us by philosophy."
+
+Certain characteristics of Mr Bergson's manner will be remarked
+throughout: his provisional effort of forgetfulness to recreate a
+new and untrammelled mind; his mixture of positive inquiry and bold
+invention; his stupendous reading; his vast pioneer work carried on with
+indefatigable patience; his constant correction by criticism, informed
+of the minutest details and swift to follow up each of them at every
+turn. With a problem which would at first have seemed secondary and
+incomplete, but which reappears as the subject deepens and is thereby
+metamorphosed, he connects his entire philosophy; and so well does he
+blend the whole and breathe upon it the breath of life that the final
+statement leaves the reader with an impression of sovereign ease.
+
+Examples will be necessary to enable us, even to a feeble extent, to
+understand this proceeding better. But before we come to examples, a
+preliminary question requires examination. In the preface to his
+first "Essay" Mr Bergson defined the principle of a method which was
+afterwards to reappear in its identity throughout his various works; and
+we must recall the terms he employed.
+
+"We are forced to express ourselves in words, and we think, most often,
+in space. To put it another way, language compels us to establish
+between our ideas the same clear and precise distinctions, and the same
+break in continuity, as between material objects. This assimilation
+is useful in practical life and necessary in most sciences. But we
+are right in asking whether the insuperable difficulties of certain
+philosophical problems do not arise from the fact that we persist in
+placing non-spatial phenomena next one another in space, and whether,
+if we did away with the vulgar illustrations round which we dispute, we
+should not sometimes put an end to the dispute."
+
+That is to say, it is stated to be the philosopher's duty from the
+outset to renounce the usual forms of analytic and synthetic thought,
+and to achieve a direct intuitional effort which shall put him in
+immediate contact with reality. Without doubt it is this question of
+method which demands our first attention. It is the leading question.
+Mr Bergson himself presents his works as "essays" which do not aim at
+"solving the greatest problems all at once," but seek merely "to define
+the method and disclose the possibility of applying it on some essential
+points." (Preface to "Creative Evolution".) It is also a delicate
+question, for it dominates all the rest, and decides whether we shall
+fully understand what is to follow.
+
+We must therefore pause here a moment. To direct us in this preliminary
+study we have an admirable "Introduction to Metaphysis", which appeared
+as an article in the "Metaphysical and Moral Review" (January 1903): a
+short but marvellously suggestive memoire, constituting the best preface
+to the reading of the books themselves. We may say in passing, that we
+should be grateful to Mr Bergson if he would have it bound in volume
+form, along with some other articles which are scarcely to be had at all
+today.
+
+
+II.
+
+Every philosophy, prior to taking shape in a group of co-ordinated
+theses, presents itself, in its initial stage, as an attitude, a frame
+of mind, a method. Nothing can be more important than to study this
+starting-point, this elementary act of direction and movement, if
+we wish afterwards to arrive at the precise shade of meaning of the
+subsequent teaching. Here is really the fountain-head of thought; it
+is here that the form of the future system is determined, and here that
+contact with reality takes effect.
+
+The last point, particularly, is vital. To return to the direct view of
+things beyond all figurative symbols, to descend into the inmost depths
+of being, to watch the throbbing life in its pure state, and listen to
+the secret rhythm of its inmost breath, to measure it, at least so far
+as measurement is possible, has always been the philosopher's ambition;
+and the new philosophy has not departed from this ideal. But in what
+light does it regard its task? That is the first point to clear up. For
+the problem is complex, and the goal distant.
+
+"We are made as much, and more, for action than for thought," says Mr
+Bergson; "or rather, when we follow our natural impulse, it is to act
+that we think." ("L'Evolution Creatrice", page 321.) And again, "What
+we ordinarily call a fact is not reality such as it would appear to an
+immediate intuition, but an adaptation of reality to practical interests
+and the demands of social life." ("Matiere et Memoire", page 201.) Hence
+the question which takes precedence of all others is: to distinguish in
+our common representation of the world, the fact in its true sense
+from the combinations which we have introduced in view of action and
+language.
+
+Now, to rediscover nature in her fresh springs of reality, it is not
+sufficient to abandon the images and conceptions invented by human
+initiative; still less is it sufficient to fling ourselves into the
+torrent of brute sensations. By so doing we are in danger of dissolving
+our thought in dream or quenching it in night.
+
+Above all, we are in danger of committal to a path which it is
+impossible to follow. The philosopher is not free to begin the work of
+knowledge again upon other planes, with a mind which would be adequate
+to the new and virgin issue of a simple writ of oblivion.
+
+At the time when critical reflection begins, we have already been long
+engaged in action and science, by the training of individual life, as
+by hereditary and racial experience, our faculties of perception and
+conception, our senses and our understanding, have contracted habits,
+which are by this time unconscious and instinctive; we are haunted by
+all kinds of ideas and principles, so familiar today that they even pass
+unobserved. But what is it all worth?
+
+Does it, in its present state, help us to know the nature of a
+disinterested intuition?
+
+Nothing but a methodical examination of consciousness can tell us that;
+and it will take more than a renunciation of explicit knowledge to
+recreate in us a new mind, capable of grasping the bare fact exactly
+as it is: what we require is perhaps a penetrating reform, a kind of
+conversion.
+
+The rational and perceptive function we term our intelligence emerges
+from darkness through a slowly lifting dawn. During this twilight period
+it has lived, worked, acted, fashioned and informed itself. On the
+threshold of philosophical speculation it is full of more or less
+concealed beliefs, which are literally prejudices, and branded with a
+secret mark influencing its every movement. Here is an actual situation.
+Exemption from it is beyond anyone's province. Whether we will or no,
+we are from the beginning of our inquiry immersed in a doctrine which
+disguises nature to us, and already at bottom constitutes a complete
+metaphysic. This we term common-sense, and positive science is itself
+only an extension and refinement of it. What is the value of this work
+performed without clear consciousness or critical attention? Does
+it bring us into true relation with things, into relation with pure
+consciousness?
+
+This is our first and inevitable doubt, which requires solution.
+
+But it would be a quixotic proceeding first to make a void in our mind,
+and afterwards to admit into it, one by one, after investigation, such
+and such a concept, or such and such a principle. The illusion of
+the clean sweep and total reconstruction can never be too vigorously
+condemned.
+
+Is it from the void that we set out to think? Do we think in void, and
+with nothing? Common ideas of necessity form the groundwork for the
+broidery of our advanced thought. Further, even if we succeeded in our
+impossible task, should we, in so doing, have corrected the causes
+of error which are today graven upon the very structure of our
+intelligence, such as our past life has made it? These errors would not
+cease to act imperceptibly upon the work of revision intended to apply
+the remedy.
+
+It is from within, by an effort of immanent purgation, that the
+necessary reform must be brought about. And philosophy's first task is
+to institute critical reflection upon the obscure beginnings of thought,
+with a view to shedding light upon its spontaneous virgin condition,
+but without any vain claim to lift it out of the current in which it is
+actually plunged.
+
+One conclusion is already plain: the groundwork of common-sense is sure,
+but the form is suspicious.
+
+In common-sense is contained, at any rate virtually and in embryo, all
+that can ever be attained of reality, for reality is verification, not
+construction.
+
+Everything has its starting-point in construction and verification. Thus
+philosophical research can only be a conscious and deliberate return to
+the facts of primal intuition. But common-sense, being prepossessed in a
+practical direction, has doubtless subjected these facts to a process of
+interested alteration, which is artificial in proportion to the labour
+bestowed. Such is Mr Bergson's fundamental hypothesis, and it is
+far-reaching. "Many metaphysical difficulties probably arise from our
+habit of confounding speculation and practice; or of pushing an idea
+in the direction of utility, when we think we fathom it in theory;
+or, lastly, of employing in thought the forms of action." (Preface to
+"Matter and Memory". First edition.)
+
+The work of reform will consist therefore in freeing our intelligence
+from its utilitarian habits, by endeavouring at the outset to become
+clearly conscious of them.
+
+Notice how far presumption is in favour of our hypothesis. Whether we
+regard organic life in the genesis and preservation of the individual,
+or in the evolution of species, we see its natural direction to be
+towards utility: but the effort of thought comes after the effort of
+life; it is not added from outside, it is the continuance and the flower
+of the former effort. Must we not expect from this that it will preserve
+its former habits? And what do we actually observe? The first gleam
+of human intelligence in prehistoric times is revealed to us by an
+industry; the cut flint of the primitive caves marks the first stage
+of the road which was one day to end in the most sublime philosophies.
+Again, every science has begun by practical arts. Indeed, our science of
+today, however disinterested it may have become, remains none the less
+in close relation with the demands of our action; it permits us to speak
+of and to handle things rather than to see them in their intimate and
+profound nature. Analysis, when applied to our operations of knowledge,
+shows us that our understanding parcels out, arrests, and quantifies,
+whereas reality, as it appears to immediate intuition, is a moving
+series, a flux of blended qualities.
+
+That is to say, our understanding solidifies all that it touches. Have
+we not here exactly the essential postulates of action and speech? To
+speak, as to act, we must have separable elements, terms and objects
+which remain inert while the operation goes on, maintaining between
+themselves the constant relations which find their most perfect and
+ideal presentment in mathematics.
+
+Everything tends, then, to incline us towards the hypothesis in
+question. Let us regard it henceforward as expressing a fact.
+
+The forms of knowledge elaborated by common-sense were not originally
+intended to allow us to see reality as it is.
+
+Their task was rather, and remains so, to enable us to grasp its
+practical aspect. It is for that they are made, not for philosophical
+speculation.
+
+Now these forms nevertheless have existed in us as inveterate habits,
+soon becoming unconscious, even when we have reached the point of
+desiring knowledge for its own sake.
+
+But in this new stage they preserve the bias of their original
+utilitarian function, and carry this mark with them everywhere, leaving
+it upon the fresh tasks which we are fain to make them accomplish.
+
+An inner reform is therefore imperative today, if we are to succeed in
+unearthing and sifting, in our perception of nature, under the veinstone
+of practical symbolism, the true intuitional content.
+
+This attempt at return to the standpoint of pure contemplation and
+disinterested experience is a task very different from the task of
+science. It is one thing to regard more and more or less and less
+closely with the eyes made for us by utilitarian evolution: it is
+another to labour at remaking for ourselves eyes capable of seeing, in
+order to see, and not in order to live.
+
+Philosophy understood in this manner--and we shall see more and
+more clearly as we go on that there is no other legitimate method of
+understanding it--demands from us an almost violent act of reform and
+conversion.
+
+The mind must turn round upon itself, invert the habitual direction of
+its thought, climb the hill down which its instinct towards action has
+carried it, and go to seek experience at its source, "above the critical
+bend where it inclines towards our practical use and becomes, properly
+speaking, human experience." ("Matter and Memory", page 203.) In short,
+by a twin effort of criticism and expansion, it must pass outside
+common-sense and synthetic understanding to return to pure intuition.
+
+Philosophy consists in reliving the immediate over again, and in
+interpreting our rational science and everyday perception by its light.
+That, at least, is the first stage. We shall find afterwards that that
+is not all.
+
+Here is a genuinely new conception of philosophy. Here, for the first
+time, philosophy is made specifically distinct from science, yet remains
+no less positive.
+
+What science really does is to preserve the general attitude of
+common-sense, with its apparatus of forms and principles.
+
+It is true that science develops and perfects it, refines and extends
+it, and even now and again corrects it. But science does not change
+either the direction or the essential steps.
+
+In this philosophy, on the contrary, what is at first suspected and
+finally modified, is the setting of the points before the journey
+begins.
+
+Not that, in saying so, we mean to condemn science; but we must
+recognise its just limits. The methods of science proper are in their
+place and appropriate, and lead to a knowledge which is true (though
+still symbolical), so long as the object studied is the world of
+practical action, or, to put it briefly, the world of inert matter.
+
+But soul, life, and activity escape it, and yet these are the spring and
+ultimate basis of everything: and it is the appreciation of this
+fact, with what it entails, that is new. And yet, new as Mr Bergson's
+conception of philosophy may deservedly appear, it does not any the
+less, from another point of view, deserve to be styled classic and
+traditional.
+
+What it really defines is not so much a particular philosophy as
+philosophy itself, in its original function.
+
+Everywhere in history we find its secret current at its task.
+
+All great philosophers have had glimpses of it, and employed it in
+moments of discovery. Only as a general rule they have not clearly
+recognised what they were doing, and so have soon turned aside.
+
+But on this point I cannot insist without going into lengthy detail,
+and am obliged to refer the reader to the fourth chapter of "Creative
+Evolution", where he will find the whole question dealt with.
+
+One remark, however, has still to be made. Philosophy, according to
+Mr Bergson's conception, implies and demands time; it does not aim at
+completion all at once, for the mental reform in question is of the kind
+which requires gradual fulfilment. The truth which it involves does
+not set out to be a non-temporal essence, which a sufficiently powerful
+genius would be able, under pressure, to perceive in its entirety at one
+view; and that again seems to be very new.
+
+I do not, of course, wish to abuse systems of philosophy. Each of them
+is an experience of thought, a moment in the life of thought, a method
+of exploring reality, a reagent which reveals an aspect. Truth undergoes
+analysis into systems as does light into colours.
+
+But the mere name system calls up the static idea of a finished
+building. Here there is nothing of the kind. The new philosophy desires
+to be a proceeding as much as, and even more than, to be a system.
+It insists on being lived as well as thought. It demands that thought
+should work at living its true life, an inner life related to itself,
+effective, active, and creative, but not on that account directed
+towards external action. "And," says Mr Bergson, "it can only be
+constructed by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers,
+and of many observers, completing, correcting, and righting one
+another." (Preface to "Creative Evolution".)
+
+Let us see how it begins, and what is its generating act.
+
+
+III.
+
+How are we to attain the immediate? How are we to realise this
+perception of pure fact which we stated to be the philosopher's first
+step?
+
+Unless we can clear up this doubt, the end proposed will remain to our
+gaze an abstract and lifeless ideal. This is, then, the point which
+requires instant explanation. For there is a serious difficulty in which
+the very employment of the word "immediate" might lead us astray.
+
+The immediate, in the sense which concerns us, is not at all, or at
+least is no longer for us the passive experience, the indefinable
+something which we should inevitably receive, provided we opened our
+eyes and abstained from reflection.
+
+As a matter of fact, we cannot abstain from reflection: reflection is
+today part of our very vision; it comes into play as soon as we open
+our eyes. So that, to come on the trail of the immediate, there must be
+effort and work. How are we to guide this effort? In what will this work
+consist? By what sign shall we be able to recognise that the result has
+been obtained?
+
+These are the questions to be cleared up. Mr Bergson speaks of them
+chiefly in connection with the realities of consciousness, or,
+more generally speaking, of life. And it is here, in fact, that the
+consequences are most weighty and far-reaching. We shall need to refer
+to them again in detail. But to simplify my explanation, I will here
+choose another example: that of inert matter, of the perception on which
+the physical is based. It is in this case that the divergence between
+common perception and pure perception, however real it may be, assumes
+least proportions.
+
+Therefore it appears most in place in the sketch I desire to trace of an
+exceedingly complex work, where I can only hope, evidently, to indicate
+the main lines and general direction.
+
+We readily believe that when we cast our eyes upon surrounding objects,
+we enter into them unresistingly and apprehend them all at once in their
+intrinsic nature. Perception would thus be nothing but simple passive
+registration. But nothing could be more untrue, if we are speaking of
+the perception which we employ without profound criticism in the
+course of our daily life. What we here take to be pure fact is, on
+the contrary, the last term in a highly complicated series of mental
+operations. And this term contains as much of us as of things.
+
+In fact, all concrete perception comes up for analysis as an
+indissoluble mixture of construction and fact, in which the fact is only
+revealed through the construction, and takes on its complexion. We all
+know by experience how incapable the uneducated person is of explaining
+the simple appearance of the least fact, without embodying a crowd of
+false interpretations. We know to a less extent, but it is also true,
+that the most enlightened and adroit person proceeds in just the same
+manner: his interpretation is better, but it is still interpretation.
+
+That is why accurate observation is so difficult; we see or we do not
+see, we notice such and such an aspect, we read this or that, according
+to our state of consciousness at the time, according to the direction of
+the investigation on which we are engaged.
+
+Who was it defined art as nature seen through a mind? Perception, too,
+is an art.
+
+This art has its processes, its conventions, and its tools. Go into a
+laboratory and study one of those complex instruments which make our
+senses finer or more powerful; each of them is literally a sheaf of
+materialised theories, and by means of it all acquired science is
+brought to bear on each new observation of the student. In exactly the
+same way our organs of sense are actual instruments constructed by the
+unconscious work of the mind in the course of biological evolution;
+they too sum up and give concrete form and expression to a system
+of enlightening theories. But that is not all. The most elementary
+psychology shows us the amount of thought, in the correct sense of the
+term, recollection, or inference, which enters into what we should be
+tempted to call pure perception.
+
+Establishment of fact is not the simple reception of the faithful
+imprint of that fact; it is invariably interpreted, systematised, and
+placed in pre-existing forms which constitute veritable theoretical
+frames. That is why the child has to learn to perceive. There is an
+education of the senses which he acquires by long training. One day,
+which aid of habit, he will almost cease to see things: a few lines, a
+few glimpses, a few simple signs noted in a brief passing glance, will
+enable him to recognise them; and he will hardly retain any more of
+reality than its schemes and symbols.
+
+"Perception," says Mr Bergson on this subject, "becomes in the end only
+an opportunity of recollection." ("Matter and Memory", page 59.)
+
+All concrete perception, it is true, is directed less upon the
+present than the past. The part of pure perception in it is small, and
+immediately covered and almost buried by the contribution of memory.
+
+This infinitesimal part acts as a bait. It is a summons to recollection,
+challenging us to extract from our previous experience, and construct
+with our acquired wealth a system of images which permits us to read the
+experience of the moment.
+
+With our scheme of interpretation thus constituted we encounter the few
+fugitive traits which we have actually perceived. If the theory we have
+elaborated adapts itself, and succeeds in accounting for, connecting,
+and making sense of these traits, we shall finally have a perception
+properly so called.
+
+Perception then, in the usual sense of the word, is the resolution of a
+problem, the verification of a theory.
+
+Thus are explained "errors of the senses," which are in reality errors
+of interpretation. Thus too, and in the same manner, we have the
+explanation of dreams.
+
+Let us take a simple example. When you read a book, do you spell each
+syllable, one by one, to group the syllables afterwards into words, and
+the words into phrases, thus travelling from print to meaning? Not at
+all: you grasp a few letters accurately, a few downstrokes in their
+graphical outline; then you guess the remainder, travelling in the
+reverse direction, from a probable meaning to the print which you
+are interpreting. This is what causes mistakes in reading, and the
+well-known difficulty in seeing printing errors.
+
+This observation is confirmed by curious experiments. Write some
+everyday phrase or other on a blackboard; let there be a few intentional
+mistakes here and there, a letter or two altered, or left out. Place the
+words in a dark room in front of a person who, of course, does not
+know what has been written. Then turn on the light without allowing the
+observer sufficient time to spell the writing.
+
+In spite of this, he will in most cases read the entire phrase, without
+hesitation or difficulty.
+
+He has restored what was missing, or corrected what was at fault.
+
+Now, ask him what letters he is certain he saw, and you will find he
+will tell you an omitted or altered letter as well as a letter actually
+written.
+
+The observer then thinks he sees in broad light a letter which is not
+there, if that letter, in virtue of the general sense, ought to appear
+in the phrase. But you can go further, and vary the experiment.
+
+Suppose we write the word "tumult" correctly. After doing so, to direct
+the memory of the observer into a certain trend of recollection, call
+out in his ear, during the short time the light is turned on, another
+word of different meaning, for example, the word "railway."
+
+The observer will read "tunnel"; that is to say, a word, the graphical
+outline of which is like that of the written word, but connected in
+sense with the order of recollection called up.
+
+In this mistake in reading, as in the spontaneous correction of the
+previous experiment, we see very clearly that perception is always the
+fulfilment of guesswork.
+
+It is the direction of this work that we are concerned to determine.
+
+According to the popular idea, perception has a completely speculative
+interest: it is pure knowledge. Therein lies the fundamental mistake.
+
+Notice first of all how much more probable it is, a priori, that the
+work of perception, just as any other natural and spontaneous work,
+should have a utilitarian signification.
+
+"Life," says Mr Bergson with justice, "is the acceptance from objects of
+nothing but the useful impression, with the response of the appropriate
+reactions." ("Laughter", page 154.)
+
+And this view receives striking objective confirmation if, with the
+author of "Matter and Memory", we follow the progress of the perceptive
+functions along the animal series from the protoplasm to the higher
+vertebrates; or if, with him, we analyse the task of the body, and
+discover that the nervous system is manifested in its very structure as,
+before all, an instrument of action. Have we not already besides proof
+of this in the fact that each of us always appears in his own eyes to
+occupy the centre of the world he perceives?
+
+The "Riquet" of Anatole France voices Mr Bergson's view: "I am always in
+the centre of everything, and men and beasts and things, for or against
+me, range themselves around."
+
+But direct analysis leads us still more plainly to the same conclusion.
+
+Let us take the perception of bodies. It is easy to show--and I regret
+that I cannot here reproduce Mr Bergson's masterly demonstration--that
+the division of matter into distinct objects with sharp outlines is
+produced by a selection of images which is completely relative to our
+practical needs.
+
+"The distinct outlines which we assign to an object, and which bestow
+upon it its individuality, are nothing but the graph of a certain kind
+of influence which we should be able to employ at a certain point in
+space: it is the plan of our future actions which is submitted to our
+eyes, as in a mirror, when we perceive the surfaces and edges of things.
+Remove this action, and in consequence the high roads which it makes
+for itself in advance by perception, in the web of reality, and
+the individuality of the body will be reabsorbed in the universal
+interaction which is without doubt reality itself." Which is tantamount
+to saying that "rough bodies are cut in the material of nature by a
+perception of which the scissors follow, in some sort, the dotted line
+along which the action would pass." ("Creative Evolution", page 12.)
+
+Bodies independent of common experience do not then appear, to an
+attentive criticism, as veritable realities which would have an
+existence in themselves. They are only centres of co-ordination for our
+actions. Or, if you prefer it, "our needs are so many shafts of light
+which, when played upon the continuity of perceptible qualities, produce
+in them the outline of distinct bodies." ("Matter and Memory", page
+220.) Does not science too, after its own fashion, resolve the atom into
+a centre of intersecting relations, which finally extend by degrees to
+the entire universe in an indissoluble interpenetration?
+
+A qualitative continuity, imperceptibly shaded off, over which pass
+quivers that here and there converge, is the image by which we are
+forced to recognise a superior degree of reality.
+
+But is this perceptible material, this qualitative continuity, the pure
+fact in matter? Not yet. Perception, we said just now, is always in
+reality complicated by memory. There is more truth in this than we had
+seen. Reality is not a motionless spectrum, extending to our view
+its infinite shades; it might rather be termed a leaping flame in the
+spectrum. All is in passage, in process of becoming.
+
+On this flux consciousness concentrates at long intervals, each time
+condensing into one "quality" an immense period of the inner history of
+things. "In just this way the thousand successive positions of a runner
+contract into one single symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives,
+which art reproduces, and which becomes for everybody the representation
+of a man running." ("Matter and Memory", page 233.)
+
+In the same way again, a red light, continuing one second, embodies such
+a large number of elementary pulsations that it would take 25,000
+years of our time to see its distinct passage. From here springs the
+subjectivity of our perception. The different qualities correspond,
+roughly speaking, to the different rhythms of contraction or
+dilution, to the different degrees of inner tension in the perceiving
+consciousness.
+
+Pushing the case to its limits, and imagining a complete expansion,
+matter would resolve into colourless disturbances, and become the "pure
+matter" of the natural philosopher.
+
+Let us now unite in one single continuity the different periods of the
+preceding dialectic. Vibration, qualities, and bodies are none of them
+reality by themselves; but all the same they are part of reality. And
+absolute reality would be the whole of these degrees and moments, and
+many others as well, no doubt. Or rather, to secure absolute intuition
+of matter, we should have on the one hand to get rid of all that our
+practical needs have constructed, restore on the other all the effective
+tendencies they have extinguished, follow the complete scale of
+qualitative concentrations and dilutions, and pass, by a kind of
+sympathy, into the incessantly moving play of all the possible
+innumerable contractions or resolutions; with the result that in the
+end we should succeed, by a simultaneous view as it were, in grasping,
+according to their infinitely various modes, the phases of this matter
+which, though at present latent, admit of "perception."
+
+Thus, in the case before us, absolute knowledge is found to be the
+result of integral experience; and though we cannot attain the term, we
+see at any rate in what direction we should have to work to reach it.
+
+Now it must be stated that our realisable knowledge is at every moment
+partial and limited rather than exterior and relative, for our effective
+perception is related to matter in itself as the part to the whole. Our
+least perceptions are actually based on pure perception, and "we are
+aware of the elementary disturbances which constitute matter, in the
+perceptible quality in which they suffer contraction, as we are aware of
+the beating of our heart in the general feeling that we have of living."
+("The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods", 7th
+July 1910.)
+
+But the preoccupation of practical action, coming between reality and
+ourselves, produces the fragmentary world of common-sense, much as an
+absorbing medium resolves into separate rays the continuous spectrum
+of a luminous body; whilst the rhythm of duration, and the degree of
+tension peculiar to our consciousness, limit us to the apprehension of
+certain qualities only.
+
+What then have we to do to progress towards absolute knowledge? Not to
+quit experience: quite the contrary; but to extend it and diversify it
+by science, while, at the same time, by criticism, we correct in it the
+disturbing effects of action, and finally quicken all the results thus
+obtained by an effort of sympathy which will make us familiar with the
+object until we feel its profound throbbing and its inner wealth.
+
+In connection with this last vital point, which is decisive, call to
+mind a celebrated page of Sainte-Beuve where he defines his method:
+"Enter into your author, make yourself at home in him, produce him under
+his different aspects, make him live, move, and speak as he must have
+done; follow him to his fireside and in his domestic habits, as closely
+as you can...
+
+"Study him, turn him round and round, ask him questions at your leisure;
+place him before you...Every feature will appear in its turn, and take
+the place of the man himself in this expression...
+
+"An individual reality will gradually blend with and become incarnate in
+the vague, abstract, and general type...There is our man..." Yes, that
+is exactly what we want: it could not be better put. Transpose this page
+from the literary to the metaphysical order, and you have intuition, as
+defined by Mr Bergson. You have the return to immediacy.
+
+But a new problem then arises: Is not our intuition of immediacy in
+danger of remaining inexpressible? For our language has been formed in
+view of practical life, not of pure knowledge.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The immediate perception of reality is not all; we have still to
+translate this perception into intelligible language, into a connected
+chain of concepts; failing which, it would seem, we should not have
+knowledge in the strict sense of the word, we should not have truth.
+
+Without language, intuition, supposing it came to birth, would remain
+intransmissible and incommunicable, and would perish in a solitary cry.
+By language alone are we enabled to submit it to a positive test: the
+letter is the ballast of the mind, the body which allows it to act, and
+in acting to scatter the unreal delusions of dream.
+
+The act of pure intuition demands so great an inner tension from thought
+that it can only be very rare and very fugitive: a few rapid gleams here
+and there; and these dawning glimpses must be sustained, and afterwards
+united, and that again is the work of language.
+
+But while language is thus necessary, no less necessary is a criticism
+of ordinary language, and of the methods familiar to the understanding.
+These forms of reflected knowledge, these processes of analysis really
+convey secretly all the postulates of practical action. But it is
+imperative that language should translate, not betray; that the body of
+formulae should not stifle the soul of intuition. We shall see in what
+the work of reform and conversion imposed on the philosopher precisely
+consists.
+
+The attitude of the ordinary proceedings of common thought can be stated
+in a few words. Place the object studied before yourself as an exterior
+"thing." Then place yourself outside it, in perspective, at points of
+vantage on a circumference, whence you can only see the object of your
+investigation at a distance, with such interval as would be sufficient
+for the contemplation of a picture; in short, move round the object
+instead of entering boldly into it. But these proceedings lead to what I
+shall term analysis by concepts; that is to say, the attempt to resolve
+all reality into general ideas.
+
+What are concepts and abstract ideas really, but distant and simplified
+views, species of model drawings, giving only a few summary features of
+their object, which vary according to direction and angle? By means of
+them we claim to determine the object from outside, as if, in order to
+know it, it were sufficient to enclose it in a system of logical sides
+and angles.
+
+And perhaps in this way we do really grasp it, perhaps we do establish
+its precise description, but we do not penetrate it.
+
+Concepts translate relations resulting from comparisons by which each
+object is finally expressed as a function of what it is not. They
+dismember it, divide it up piece by piece, and mount it in various
+frames. They lay hold of it only by ends and corners, by resemblances
+and differences. Is not that obviously what is done by the converting
+theories which explain the soul by the body, life by matter, quality
+by movements, space itself by pure number? Is not that what is done
+generally by all criticisms, all doctrines which connect one idea to
+another, or to a group of other ideas?
+
+In this way we reach only the surface of things, the reciprocal
+contacts, mutual intersections, and parts common, but not the organic
+unity nor the inner essence.
+
+In vain we multiply our points of view, our perspectives and plane
+projections: no accumulation of this kind will reconstruct the concrete
+solid. We can pass from an object directly perceived to the pictures
+which represent it, the prints which represent the pictures, the scheme
+representing the prints, because each stage contains less than the one
+before, and is obtained from it by simple diminution.
+
+But, inversely, you may take all the schemes, prints, pictures you
+like--supposing that it is not absurd to conceive as given what is by
+nature interminable and inexhaustible, lending itself to indefinite
+enumeration and endless development and multiplicity--but you will never
+recompose the profound and original unity of the source.
+
+How, by forcing yourself to seek the object outside itself, where it
+certainly is not, except in echo and reflection, would you ever find
+its intimate and specific reality? You are but condemning yourself to
+symbolism, for one "thing" can only be in another symbolically.
+
+To go further still, your knowledge of things will remain irremediably
+relative, relative to the symbols selected and the points of view
+adopted. Everything will happen as in a movement of which the appearance
+and formula vary with the spot from which you regard it, with the marks
+to which you relate it.
+
+Absolute revelation is only given to the man who passes into the object,
+flings himself upon its stream, and lives within its rhythm. The
+thesis which maintains the inevitable relativity of all human knowledge
+originates mainly from the metaphors employed to describe the act of
+knowledge. The subject occupies this point, the object that; how are we
+to span the distance? Our perceptory organs fill the interval; how are
+we to grasp anything but what reaches us in the receiver at the end of
+the wire?
+
+The mind itself is a projecting lantern playing a shaft of light on
+nature; how should it do otherwise than tint nature its own colour?
+
+But these difficulties all arise out of the spatial metaphors employed;
+and these metaphors in their turn do little but illustrate and
+translate the common method of analysis by concepts: and this method is
+essentially regulated by the practical needs of action and language.
+
+The philosopher must adopt an attitude entirely inverse; not keep at a
+distance from things, but listen in a manner to their inward breathing,
+and, above all, supply the effort of sympathy by which he establishes
+himself in the object, becomes on intimate terms with it, tunes himself
+to its rhythm, and, in a word, lives it. There is really nothing
+mysterious or strange in this.
+
+Consider your daily judgments in matters of art, profession, or sport.
+
+Between knowledge by theory and knowledge by experience, between
+understanding by external analogy and perception by profound intuition,
+what difference and divergence there is!
+
+Who has absolute knowledge of a machine, the student who analyses it in
+mechanical theorems, or the engineer who has lived in comradeship with
+it, even to sharing the physical sensation of its laboured or easy
+working, who feels the play of its inner muscles, its likes and
+dislikes, who notes its movements and the task before it, as the machine
+itself would do were it conscious, for whom it has become an extension
+of his own body, a new sensori-motor organ, a group of prearranged
+gestures and automatic habits?
+
+The student's knowledge is more useful to the builder, and I do not wish
+to claim that we should ever neglect it; but the only true knowledge
+is that of the engineer. And what I have just said does not concern
+material objects only. Who has absolute knowledge of religion, he who
+analyses it in psychology, sociology, history, and metaphysics, or he
+who, from within, by a living experience, participates in its essence
+and holds communion with its duration?
+
+But the external nature of the knowledge obtained by conceptual analysis
+is only its least fault. There are others still more serious.
+
+If concepts actually express what is common, general, unspecific, what
+should make us feel the need of recasting them when we apply them to a
+new object?
+
+Does not their ground, their utility, and their interest exactly consist
+in sparing us this labour?
+
+We regard them as elaborated once for all. They are building-material,
+ready-hewn blocks, which we have only to bring together. They are atoms,
+simple elements--a mathematician would say prime factors--capable of
+associating with infinity, but without undergoing any inner modification
+in contact with it. They admit linkage; they can be attached externally,
+but they leave the aggregate as they went into it.
+
+Juxtaposition and arrangement are the geometrical operations which
+typify the work of knowledge in such a case; or else we must fall back
+on metaphors from some mental chemistry, such as proportioning and
+combination.
+
+In all cases, the method is still that of alignment and blending of
+pre-existent concepts.
+
+Now the mere fact of proceeding thus is equivalent to setting up the
+concept as a symbol of an abstract class. That being done, explanation
+of a thing is no more than showing it in the intersection of several
+classes, partaking of each of them in definite proportions: which is
+the same as considering it sufficiently expressed by a list of general
+frames into which it will go. The unknown is then, on principle, and
+in virtue of this theory, referred to the already known; and it thereby
+becomes impossible ever to grasp any true novelty or any irreducible
+originality.
+
+On principle, once more, we claim to reconstruct nature with pure
+symbols; and it thereby becomes impossible ever to reach its concrete
+reality, "the invisible and present soul."
+
+This intuitional coinage in fixed standard concepts, this creation of
+an easily handled intellectual cash, is no doubt of evident practical
+utility. For knowledge in the usual sense of the word is not a
+disinterested operation; it consists in finding out what profit we can
+draw from an object, how we are to conduct ourselves towards it, what
+label we can suitably attach to it, under what already known class
+it comes, to what degree it is deserving of this or that title which
+determines an attitude we must take up, or a step we must perform. Our
+end is to place the object in its approximate class, having regard to
+advantageous employment or to everyday language. Then, and only then,
+we find our pigeon-holes all ready-made; and the same parcel of reagents
+meets all cases. A universal catechism is here in existence to meet
+every research; its different clauses define so many unshifting points
+of view, from which we regard each object, and our study is subsequently
+limited to applying a kind of nomenclature to the preconstructed frames.
+
+Once again the philosopher has to proceed in exactly the opposite
+direction. He has not to confine himself to ready-made business
+concepts, of the ordinary kind, suits cut to an average model, which fit
+nobody because they almost fit everybody; but he has to work to measure,
+incessantly renew his plant, continually recreate his mind, and meet
+each new problem with a fresh adaptive effort. He must not go from
+concepts to things, as if each of them were only the cutting-point
+of several concurrent generalities, an ideal centre of intersecting
+abstractions; on the contrary, he must go from things to concepts,
+incessantly creating new thoughts, and incessantly recasting the old.
+
+There could be no solution of the problem in a more or less ingenious
+mosaic or tessellation of rigid concepts, pre-existing to be employed.
+We need plastic fluid, supple and living concepts, capable of being
+continually modelled on reality, of delicately following its infinite
+curves. The philosopher's task is then to create concepts much more than
+to combine them. And each of the concepts he creates must remain open
+and adjustable, ready for the necessary renewal and adaptation, like
+a method or a programme: it must be the arrow pointing to a path which
+descends from intuition to language, not a boundary marking a terminus.
+In this way only does philosophy remain what it ought to be: the
+examination into the consciousness of the human mind, the effort towards
+enlargement and depth which it attempts unremittingly, in order to
+advance beyond its present intellectual condition.
+
+Do you want an example? I will take that of human personality. The
+ego is one; the ego is many: no one contests this double formula. But
+everything admits of it; and what is its lesson to us? Observe what is
+bound to happen to the two concepts of unity and multiplicity, by
+the mere fact that we take them for general frames independent of the
+reality contained, for detached language admitting empty and blank
+definition, always representable by the same word, no matter what
+the circumstances: they are no longer living and coloured ideas, but
+abstract, motionless, and neutral forms, without shades or gradations,
+without distinction of case, characterising two points of view from
+which you can observe anything and everything. This being so, how
+could the application of these forms help us to grasp the original and
+peculiar nature of the unity and multiplicity of the ego? Still further,
+how could we, between two such entities, statically defined by
+their opposition, ever imagine a synthesis? Correctly speaking, the
+interesting question is not whether there is unity, multiplicity,
+combination, one with the other, but to see what sort of unity,
+multiplicity, or combination realises the case in point; above all,
+to understand how the living person is at once multiple unity and
+one multiplicity, how these two poles of conceptual dissociation are
+connected, how these two diverging branches of abstraction join at
+the roots. The interesting point, in a word, is not the two symbolical
+colourless marks indicating the two ends of the spectrum; it is the
+continuity between, with its changing wealth of colouring, and the
+double progress of shades which resolve it into red and violet.
+
+But it is impossible to arrive at this concrete transition unless we
+begin from direct intuition and descend to the analysing concepts.
+
+Again, the same duty of reversing our familiar attitude, of inverting
+our customary proceeding, becomes ours for another reason. The
+conceptual atomism of common thought leads it to place movement in a
+lower order than rest, fact in a lower order than becoming. According
+to common thought, movement is added to the atom, as a supplementary
+accident to a body previously at rest; and, by becoming, the
+pre-existent terms are strung together like pearls on a necklace.
+It delights in rest, and endeavours to bring to rest all that moves.
+Immobility appears to it to be the base of existence. It decomposes
+and pulverises every change and every phenomenon, until it finds
+the invariable element in them. It is immobility which it esteems
+as primary, fundamental, intelligible of itself; and motion, on the
+contrary, which it seeks to explain as a function of immobility. And
+so it tends, out of progresses and transitions, to make things. To see
+distinctly, it appears to need a dead halt. What indeed are concepts but
+logical look-out stations along the path of becoming? what are they
+but motionless external views, taken at intervals, of an uninterrupted
+stream of movement?
+
+Each of them isolates and fixes an aspect, "as the instantaneous
+lightning flashes on a storm-scene in the darkness." ("Matter and
+Memory", page 209.)
+
+Placed together, they make a net laid in advance, a strong meshwork in
+which the human intelligence posts itself securely to spy the flux of
+reality, and seize it as it passes. Such a proceeding is made for the
+practical world, and is out of place in the speculative. Everywhere we
+are trying to find constants, identities, non-variants, states; and we
+imagine ideal science as an open eye which gazes for ever upon objects
+that do not move. The constant is the concrete support demanded by our
+action: the matter upon which we operate must not escape our grasp and
+slip through our hands, if we are to be able to work it. The constant,
+again, is the element of language, in which the word represents its
+inert permanence, in which it constitutes the solid fulcrum, the
+foundation and landmark of dialectic progress, being that which can be
+discarded by the mind, whose attention is thus free for other tasks. In
+this respect analysis by concepts is the natural method of common-sense.
+It consists in asking from time to time what point the object studied
+has reached, what it has become, in order to see what one could derive
+from it, or what it is fitting to say of it.
+
+But this method has only a practical reach. Reality, which in its
+essence is becoming, passes through our concepts without ever letting
+itself be caught, as a moving body passes fixed points. When we filter
+it, we retain only its deposit, the result of the becoming drifted down
+to us.
+
+Do the dams, canals, and buoys make the current of the river? Do the
+festoons of dead seaweed ranged along the sand make the rising tide? Let
+us beware of confounding the stream of becoming with the sharp outline
+of its result. Analysis by concepts is a cinematograph method, and it
+is plain that the inner organisation of the movement is not seen in the
+moving pictures. Every moment we have fixed views of moving objects.
+With such conceptual sections taken in the stream of continuity, however
+many we accumulate, should we ever reconstruct the movement itself, the
+dynamic connection, the march of the images, the transition from one
+view to another? This capacity for movement must be contained in the
+picture apparatus, and must therefore be given in addition to the views
+themselves; and nothing can better prove how, after all, movement is
+never explicable except by itself, never grasped except in itself.
+
+But if we take movement as our principle, it is, on the contrary,
+possible, and even easy, to slacken speed by imperceptible degrees, and
+stop dead.
+
+From a dead stop we shall never get our movement again; but rest can
+very well be conceived as the limit of movement, as its arrest or
+extinction; for rest is less than movement.
+
+In this way the true philosophical method, which is the inverse of the
+common method, consists in taking up a position from the very outset
+in the bosom of becoming, in adopting its changing curves and variable
+tension, in sympathising with the rhythm of its genesis, in perceiving
+all existence from within, as a growth, in following it in its inner
+generation; in short, in promoting movement to fundamental reality,
+and, inversely, in degrading fixed states to the rank of secondary and
+derived reality.
+
+And thus, to come back to the example of the human personality, the
+philosopher must seek in the ego not so much a ready-made unity or
+multiplicity as, if I may venture the expression, two antagonistic and
+correlative movements of unification and plurification.
+
+There is then a radical difference between philosophic intuition and
+conceptual analysis. The latter delights in the play of dialectic, in
+fountains of knowledge, where it is interested only in the immovable
+basins; the former goes back to the source of the concepts, and seeks
+to possess it where it gushes out. Analysis cuts the channels; intuition
+supplies the water. Intuition acquires and analysis expends.
+
+It is not a question of banning analysis; science could not do without
+it, and philosophy could not do without science. But we must reserve for
+it its normal place and its just task.
+
+Concepts are the deposited sediment of intuition: intuition produces the
+concepts, not the concepts intuition. From the heart of intuition you
+will have no difficulty in seeing how it splits up and analyses into
+concepts, concepts of such and such a kind or such and such a shade. But
+by successive analyses you will never reconstruct the least intuition,
+just as, no matter how you distribute water, you will never reconstruct
+the reservoir in its original condition.
+
+Begin from intuition: it is a summit from which we can descend by
+infinite slopes; it is a picture which we can place in an infinite
+number of frames. But all the frames together will not recompose the
+picture, and the lower ends of all the slopes will not explain how
+they meet at the summit. Intuition is a necessary beginning; it is the
+impulse which sets the analysis in motion, and gives it direction; it is
+the sounding which brings it to solid bottom; the soul which assures its
+unity. "I shall never understand how black and white interpenetrate,
+if I have not seen grey, but I understand without trouble, after once
+seeing grey, how we can regard it from the double point of view of black
+and white." ("Introduction to Metaphysics.")
+
+Here are some letters which you can arrange in chains in a thousand
+ways: the indivisible sense running along the chain, and making one
+phrase of it, is the original cause of the writing, not its consequence.
+Thus it is with intuition in relation to analysis. But beginnings and
+generative activities are the proper object of the philosopher. Thus
+the conversion and reform incumbent on him consist essentially in a
+transition from the analytic to the intuitive point of view.
+
+The result is that the chosen instrument of philosophic thought is
+metaphor; and of metaphor we know Mr Bergson to be an incomparable
+master. What we have to do, he says himself, is "to elicit a certain
+active force which in most men is liable to be trammelled by mental
+habits more useful to life," to awaken in them the feeling of the
+immediate, original, and concrete. But "many different images, borrowed
+from very different orders of things, can, by their convergent action,
+direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain
+intuition to be seized. By choosing images as unlike as possible, we
+prevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it is
+intended to call up, since it would in that case be immediately routed
+by its rivals. In making them all, despite their different aspects,
+demand of our mind the same kind of attention, and in some way the same
+degree of tension, we accustom our consciousness little by little to a
+quite peculiar and well-determined disposition, precisely the one which
+it ought to adopt to appear to itself unmasked." ("Introduction to
+Metaphysics".)
+
+Strictly speaking, the intuition of immediacy is inexpressible. But it
+can be suggested and called up. How? By ringing it round with concurrent
+metaphors. Our aim is to modify the habits of imagination in ourselves
+which are opposed to a simple and direct view, to break through the
+mechanical imagery in which we have allowed ourselves to be caught; and
+it is by awakening other imagery and other habits that we can succeed in
+so doing.
+
+But then, you will say, where is the difference between philosophy and
+art, between metaphysical and aesthetic intuition? Art also tends to
+reveal nature to us, to suggest to us a direct vision of it, to lift the
+veil of illusion which hides us from ourselves; and aesthetic intuition
+is, in its own way, perception of immediacy. We revive the feeling of
+reality obliterated by habit, we summon the deep and penetrating soul of
+things: the object is the same in both cases; and the means are also the
+same; images and metaphors. Is Mr Bergson only a poet, and does his work
+amount to nothing but the introduction of impressionism in metaphysics?
+
+It is an old objection. If the truth be told, Mr Bergson's immense
+scientific knowledge should be sufficient refutation.
+
+Only those who have not read the mass of carefully proved and positive
+discussions could give way thus to the impressions of art awakened by
+what is truly a magic style. But we can go further and put it better.
+
+That there are analogies between philosophy and art, between
+metaphysical and aesthetic intuition, is unquestionable and uncontested.
+
+At the same time, the analogies must not be allowed to hide the
+differences.
+
+Art is, to a certain extent, philosophy previous to analysis, previous
+to criticism and science; the aesthetic intuition is metaphysical
+intuition in process of birth, bounded by dream, not proceeding to the
+test of positive verification. Reciprocally, philosophy is the art which
+follows upon science, and takes account of it, the art which uses the
+results of analysis as its material, and submits itself to the demands
+of stern criticism; metaphysical intuition is the aesthetic intuition
+verified, systematised, ballasted by the language of reason.
+
+Philosophy then differs from art in two essential points: first of all,
+it rests upon, envelops, and supposes science; secondly, it implies a
+test of verification in its strict meaning. Instead of stopping at the
+acts of common-sense, it completes them with all the contributions of
+analysis and scientific investigation.
+
+We said just now of common-sense that, in its inmost depths, it
+possesses reality: that is only quite exact when we mean common-sense
+developed in positive science; and that is why philosophy takes the
+results of science as its basis, for each of these results, like
+the facts and data of common perception, opens a way for critical
+penetration towards the immediate. Just now I was comparing the two
+kinds of knowledge which the theorist and the engineer can have of a
+machine, and I allowed the advantage of absolute knowledge to
+practical experience, whilst theory seemed to me mainly relative to the
+constructive industry. That is true, and I do not go back upon it. But
+the most experienced engineer, who did not know the mechanism of his
+machine, who possessed only unanalysed feelings about it, would have
+only an artist's, not a philosopher's knowledge. For absolute intuition,
+in the full sense of the word, we must have integral experience; that is
+to say, a living application of rational theory no less than of working
+technique.
+
+To journey towards living intuition, starting from complete science and
+complete sensation, is the philosopher's task; and this task is governed
+by standards unknown to art.
+
+Metaphysical intuition offers a victorious resistance to the test of
+thorough and continued experiment, to the test of calculation as to that
+of working, to the complete experiment which brings into play all the
+various deoxidising agents of criticism; it shows itself capable of
+withstanding analysis without dissolving or succumbing; it abounds in
+concepts which satisfy the understanding, and exalt it; in a word, it
+creates light and truth on all mental planes; and these characteristics
+are sufficient to distinguish it in a profound degree from aesthetic
+intuition.
+
+The latter is only the prophetic type of the former, a dream or
+presentiment, a veiled and still uncertain dawn, a twilight myth
+preceding and proclaiming, in the half-darkness, the full day of
+positive revelation...
+
+Every philosophy has two faces, and must be studied in two
+movements--method and teaching.
+
+These are its two moments, its two aspects, no doubt co-ordinate and
+mutually dependent, but none the less distinct.
+
+We have just examined the method of the new philosophy inaugurated by
+Mr Bergson. To what teaching has this method led us, and to what can we
+foresee that it will lead us?
+
+This is what we have still to find.
+
+
+
+
+II. Teaching.
+
+The sciences properly so called, those that are by agreement termed
+positive, present themselves as so many external and circumferential
+points from which we view reality. They leave us on the outside of
+things, and confine themselves to investigating from a distance.
+
+The views they give us resemble the brief perspectives of a town which
+we obtain in looking at it from different angles on the surrounding
+hills.
+
+Less even than that: for very soon, by increasing abstraction,
+the coloured views give place to regular lines, and even to simple
+conventional notes, which are more practical in use and waste less
+time. And so the sciences remain prisoners of the symbol, and all the
+inevitable relativity involved in its use. But philosophy claims to
+pierce within reality, establish itself in the object, follow its
+thousand turns and folds, obtain from it a direct and immediate feeling,
+and penetrate right into the concrete depths of its heart; it is not
+content with an analysis, but demands an intuition.
+
+Now there is one existence which, at the outset, we know better and more
+surely than any other; there is a privileged case in which the effort
+of sympathetic revelation is natural and almost easy to us; there is one
+reality at least which we grasp from within, which we perceive in its
+deep and internal content. This reality is ourselves. It is typical of
+all reality, and our study may fitly begin here. Psychology puts us
+in direct contact with it, and metaphysics attempt to generalise this
+contact. But such a generalisation can only be attempted if, to begin
+with, we are familiar with reality at the point where we have immediate
+access to it.
+
+The path of thought which the philosopher must take is from the inner to
+the outer being.
+
+
+I.
+
+"Know thyself": the old maxim has remained the motto of philosophy
+since Socrates, the motto at least which marks its initial moment, when,
+inclining towards the depth of the subject, it commences its true work
+of penetration, whilst science continues to extend on the surface. Each
+philosophy in turn has commented upon and applied this old motto. But Mr
+Bergson, more than anyone else, has given it, as he does everything
+else he takes up, a new and profound meaning. What was the current
+interpretation before him? Speaking only of the last century, we may
+say that, under the influence of Kant, criticism had till now been
+principally engaged in unravelling the contribution of the subject
+in the act of consciousness, in establishing our perception of things
+through certain representative forms borrowed from our own constitution.
+Such was, even yesterday, the authenticated way of regarding the
+problem. And it is precisely this attitude which Mr Bergson, by a
+volte-face which will remain familiar to him in the course of his
+researches, reverses from the outset.
+
+"It has appeared to me," says he, ("Essay on the Immediate Data of
+Consciousness", Conclusion.) "that there was ground for setting oneself
+the inverse problem, and asking whether the most apparent states of the
+ego itself, which we think we grasp directly, are not most of the time
+perceived through certain forms borrowed from the outer world, which in
+this way gives us back what we have lent it. A priori, it seems fairly
+probable that this is what goes on. For supposing that the forms of
+which we are speaking, to which we adapt matter, come entirely from the
+mind, it seems difficult to apply them constantly to objects without
+soon producing the colouring of the objects in the forms; therefore
+in using these forms for the knowledge of our own personality, we
+risk taking a reflection of the frame in which we place them--that is,
+actually, the external world--for the very colouring of the ego. But
+we can go further, and state that forms applicable to things cannot be
+entirely our own work; that they must result from a compromise between
+matter and mind; that if we give much to this matter, we doubtless
+receive something from it; and that, in this way, when we try to possess
+ourselves again after an excursion into the outer world, we no longer
+have our hands free."
+
+To avoid such a consequence, there is, we must admit, a conceivable
+loophole. It consists in maintaining on principle an absolute analogy,
+an exact similitude between internal reality and external objects. The
+forms which suit the one would then also suit the other.
+
+But it must be observed that such a principle constitutes in the highest
+degree a metaphysical thesis which it would be on all hands illegal to
+assert previously as a postulate of method. Secondly, and above all, it
+must be observed that on this head experience is decisive, and manifests
+more plainly every day the failure of the theories which try to
+assimilate the world of consciousness to that of matter, to copy
+psychology from physics. We have here two different "orders." The
+apparatus of the first does not admit of being employed in the second.
+Hence the necessity of the attitude adopted by Mr Bergson. We have
+an effort to make, a work of reform to undertake, to lift the veil of
+symbols which envelops our usual representation of the ego, and thus
+conceals us from our own view, in order to find out what we are in
+reality, immediately, in our inmost selves. This effort and this work
+are necessary, because, "in order to contemplate the ego in its original
+purity, psychology must eliminate or correct certain forms which bear
+the visible mark of the outer world." ("Essay on the Immediate Data
+of Consciousness", Conclusion.) What are these forms? Let us confine
+ourselves to the most important. Things appear to us as numerable
+units, placed side by side in space. They compose numerical and spatial
+multiplicity, a dust of terms between which geometrical ties are
+established.
+
+But space and number are the two forms of immobility, the two schemes of
+analysis, by which we must not let ourselves be obsessed. I do not say
+that there is no place to give them, even in the internal world. But the
+more deeply we enter into the heart of psychological life, the less they
+are in place.
+
+The fact is, there are several planes of consciousness, situated at
+different depths, marking all the intervening degrees between pure
+thought and bodily action, and each mental phenomenon interests all
+these planes simultaneously, and is thus repeated in a thousand higher
+tones, like the harmonies of one and the same note.
+
+Or, if you prefer it, the life of the spirit is not the uniform
+transparent surface of a mere; rather it is a gushing spring which,
+at first pent in, spreads upwards and outwards, like a sheaf of corn,
+passing through many different states, from the dark and concentrated
+welling of the source to the gleam of the scattered tumbling spray; and
+each of its moods presents in its turn a similar character, being itself
+only a thread within the whole. Such without doubt is the central and
+activating idea of the admirable book entitled "Matter and Memory". I
+cannot possibly condense its substance here, or convey its astonishing
+synthetic power, which succeeds in contracting a complete metaphysic,
+and in gripping it so firmly that the examination ends by passing to
+the discussion of a few humble facts relative to the philosophy of the
+brain! But its technical severity and its very conciseness, combined
+with the wealth it contains, render it irresumable; and I can only in a
+few words indicate its conclusions.
+
+First of all, however little we pride ourselves on positive method, we
+must admit the existence of an internal world, of a spiritual activity
+distinct from matter and its mechanism. No chemistry of the brain, no
+dance of atoms, is equivalent to the least thought, or indeed to the
+least sensation.
+
+Some, it is true, have brought forward a thesis of parallelism,
+according to which each mental phenomenon corresponds point by point
+to a phenomenon in the brain, without adding anything to it, without
+influencing its course, merely translating it into another tongue,
+so that a glance sufficiently penetrating to follow the molecular
+revolutions and the fluxes of nervous production in their least
+episodes would immediately read the inmost secrets of the associated
+consciousness.
+
+But no one will deny that a thesis of this kind is only in reality a
+hypothesis, that it goes enormously beyond the certain data of current
+biology, and that it can only be formulated by anticipating future
+discoveries in a preconceived direction. Let us be candid: it is not
+really a thesis of positive science, but a metaphysical thesis in the
+unpleasant meaning of the term. Taking it at its best, its worth today
+could only be one of intelligibleness. And intelligible it is not.
+
+How are we to understand a consciousness destitute of activity and
+consequently without connection with reality, a kind of phosphorescence
+which emphasises the lines of vibration in the brain, and renders in
+miraculous duplicate, by its mysterious and useless light, certain
+phenomena already complete without it?
+
+One day Mr Bergson came down into the arena of dialectic, and,
+talking to his opponents in their own language, pulled their
+"psycho-physiological paralogism" to pieces before their eyes; it
+is only by confounding in one and the same argument two systems of
+incompatible notations, idealism and realism, that we succeed in
+enunciating the parallelist thesis. This reasoning went home, all
+the more as it was adapted to the usual form of discussions between
+philosophers. But a more positive and more categorical proof is to
+be found all through "Matter and Memory". From the precise example of
+recollection analysed to its lowest depths, Mr Bergson completely grasps
+and measures the divergence between soul and body, between mind and
+matter. Then, putting into practice what he said elsewhere about the
+creation of new concepts, he arrives at the conclusion--these are his
+own expressions--that between the psychological fact and its counterpart
+in the brain there must be a relation sui generis, which is neither
+the determination of the one by the other, nor their reciprocal
+independence, nor the production of the latter by the former, nor of the
+former by the latter, nor their simple parallel concomitance; in short,
+a relation which answers to none of the ready-made concepts which
+abstraction puts at our service, but which may be approximately
+formulated in these terms: ("Report of the French Philosophical
+Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)
+
+"Given a psychological state, that part of the state which admits of
+play, the part which would be translated by an attitude of the body
+or by bodily actions, is represented in the brain; the remainder is
+independent of it, and has no equivalent in the brain. So that to
+one and the same state of the brain there may be many different
+psychological states which correspond, though not all kinds of states.
+They are psychological states which all have in common the same motor
+scheme. Into one and the same frame many pictures may go, but not all
+pictures. Let us take a lofty abstract philosophical thought. We do
+not conceive it without adding to it an image representing it, which we
+place beneath.
+
+"We do not represent the image to ourselves, again, without supporting
+it by a design which resumes its leading features. We do not imagine
+this design itself without imagining and, in so doing, sketching certain
+movements which would reproduce it. It is this sketch, and this sketch
+only, which is represented in the brain. Frame the sketch, there is a
+margin for the image. Frame the image again, there remains a margin, and
+a still larger margin, for the thought. The thought is thus relatively
+free and indeterminate in relation to the activity which conditions it
+in the brain, for this activity expresses only the motive articulation
+of the idea, and the articulation may be the same for ideas
+absolutely different. And yet it is not complete liberty nor absolute
+indetermination, since any kind of idea, taken at hazard, would not
+present the articulation desired.
+
+"In short, none of the simple concepts furnished us by philosophy could
+express the relation we seek, but this relation appears with tolerable
+clearness to result from experiment."
+
+The same analysis of facts tells us how the planes of consciousness,
+of which I spoke just now, are arranged, the law by which they are
+distributed, and the meaning which attaches to their disposition. Let us
+neglect the intervening multiples, and look only at the extreme poles of
+the series.
+
+We are inclined to imagine too abrupt a severance between gesture and
+dream, between action and thought, between body and mind. There are not
+two plane surfaces, without thickness or transition, placed one above
+the other on different levels; it is by an imperceptible degradation of
+increasing depth, and decreasing materiality, that we pass from one term
+to the other.
+
+And the characteristics are continually changing in the course of the
+transition. Thus our initial problem confronts us again, more acutely
+than ever: are the forms of number and space equally suitable on all
+planes of consciousness?
+
+Let us consider the most external of these planes of life, and one which
+is in contact with the outer world, the one which receives directly the
+impressions of external reality. We live as a rule on the surface of
+ourselves, in the numerical and spatial dispersion of language and
+gesture. Our deeper ego is covered as it were with a tough crust,
+hardened in action: it is a skein of motionless and numerable habits,
+side by side, and of distinct and solid things, with sharp outlines and
+mechanical relations. And it is for the representation of the phenomena
+which occur within this dead rind that space and number are valid.
+
+For we have to live, I mean live our common daily life, with our body,
+with our customary mechanism rather than with our true depths. Our
+attention is therefore most often directed by a natural inclination to
+the practical worth and useful function of our internal states, to the
+public object of which they are the sign, to the effect they produce
+externally, to the gestures by which we express them in space. A
+social average of individual modalities interests us more than the
+incommunicable originality of our deeper life. The words of language
+besides offer us so many symbolic centres round which crystallise groups
+of motor mechanisms set up by habit, the only usual elements of our
+internal determinations. Now, contact with society has rendered these
+motor mechanisms practically identical in all men. Hence, whether it be
+a question of sensation, feeling, or ideas, we have these neutral
+dry and colourless residua, which spread lifeless over the surface of
+ourselves, "like dead leaves on the water of a pond." ("Essay on the
+Immediate Data," page 102.)
+
+Thus the progress we have lived falls into the rank of a thing that can
+be handled. Space and number lay hold of it. And soon all that remains
+of what was movement and life is combinations formed and annulled, and
+forces mechanically composed in a whole of juxtaposed atoms, and to
+represent this whole a collection of petrified concepts, manipulated in
+dialectic like counters.
+
+Quite different appears the true inner reality, and quite different
+are its profound characteristics. To begin with, it contains nothing
+quantitative; the intensity of a psychological state is not a
+magnitude, nor can it be measured. The "Essay on the Immediate Data of
+Consciousness" begins with the proof of this leading statement. If it
+is a question of a simple state, such as a sensation of light or weight,
+the intensity is measured by a certain quality of shade which indicates
+to us approximately, by an association of ideas and thanks to our
+acquired experience, the magnitude of the objective cause from which it
+proceeds. If, on the contrary, it is a question of a complex state,
+such as those impressions of profound joy or sorrow which lay hold of
+us entirely, invading and overwhelming us, what we call their intensity
+expresses only the confused feeling of a qualitative progress, and
+increasing wealth. "Take, for example, an obscure desire, which has
+gradually become a profound passion. You will see that the feeble
+intensity of this desire consisted first of all in the fact that it
+seemed to you isolated and in a way foreign to all the rest of your
+inner life. But little by little it penetrated a larger number of
+psychic elements, dyeing them, so to speak, its own colour; and now
+you find your point of view on things as a whole appears to you to have
+changed. Is it not true that you become aware of a profound passion,
+once it has taken root, by the fact that the same objects no longer
+produce the same impression upon you? All your sensations, all your
+ideas, appear to you refreshed by it; it is like a new childhood." (Loc.
+cit., page 6.)
+
+There is here none of the homogeneity which is the property of
+magnitude, and the necessary condition of measurement, giving a view of
+the less in the bosom of the more. The element of number has vanished,
+and with it numerical multiplicity extended in space. Our inner states
+form a qualitative continuity; they are prolonged and blended into one
+another; they are grouped in harmonies, each note of which contains an
+echo of the whole; they are encircled by an innumerable degradation of
+halos, which gradually colour the total content of consciousness; they
+live each in the bosom of his fellow.
+
+"I am the scent of roses," were the words Condillac put in the mouth of
+his statue; and these words translate the immediate truth exactly, as
+soon as observation becomes naive and simple enough to attain pure fact.
+In a passing breath I breathe my childhood; in the rustle of leaves, in
+a ray of moonlight, I find an infinite series of reflections and dreams.
+A thought, a feeling, an act, may reveal a complete soul. My ideas,
+my sensations, are like me. How would such facts be possible, if the
+multiple unity of the ego did not present the essential characteristic
+of vibrating in its entirety in the depths of each of the parts descried
+or rather determined in it by analysis? All physical determinations
+envelop and imply each other reciprocally. And the fact that the soul
+is thus present in its entirety in each of its acts, its feelings,
+for example, or its ideas in its sensations, its recollections in its
+percepts, its inclinations in its obvious states, is the justifying
+principle of metaphors, the source of all poetry, the truth which
+modern philosophy proclaims with more force every day under the name of
+immanence of thought, the fact which explains our moral responsibility
+with regard to our affections and our beliefs themselves; and finally,
+it is the best of us, since it is this which ensures our being able
+to surrender ourselves, genuinely and unreservedly, and this which
+constitutes the real unity of our person.
+
+Let us push still further into the hidden retreat of the soul. Here we
+are in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego takes shape,
+where the spring within us gushes up, in the warm secrecy of the
+darkness which ushers our trembling being into birth. Distinctions fail
+us. Words are useless now. We hear the wells of consciousness at their
+mysterious task like an invisible shiver of running water through the
+mossy shadow of the caves. I dissolve in the joy of becoming. I abandon
+myself to the delight of being a pulsing reality. I no longer know
+whether I see scents, breathe sounds, or smell colours. Do I love? Do I
+think? The question has no longer a meaning for me. I am, in my complete
+self, each of my attitudes, each of my changes. It is not my sight which
+is indistinct or my attention which is idle. It is I who have resumed
+contact with pure reality, whose essential movement admits no form of
+number. He who thus makes the really "deep" and "inner" effort necessary
+to becoming--were it only for an elusive moment--discovers, under the
+simplest appearance, inexhaustible sources of unsuspected wealth; the
+rhythm of his duration becomes amplified and refined; his acts become
+more conscious; and in what seemed to him at first sudden severance or
+instantaneous pulsation he discovers complex transitions imperceptibly
+shaded off, musical transitions full of unexpected repetitions and
+threaded movements.
+
+Thus, the deeper we go in consciousness, the less suitable become these
+schemes of separation and fixity existing in spatial and numerical
+forms. The inner world is that of pure quality. There is no measurable
+homogeneity, no collection of atomically constructed elements. The
+phenomena distinguished in it by analysis are not composing units, but
+phases. And it is only when they reach the surface, when they come in
+contact with the external world, when they are incarnated in language
+or gesture, that the categories of matter become adapted to them. In
+its true nature, reality appears as an uninterrupted flow, an impalpable
+shiver of fluid changing tones, a perpetual flux of waves which ebb and
+break and dissolve into one another without shock or jar. Everything is
+ceaseless change; and the state which appears the most stable is already
+change, since it continues and grows old. Constant quantities are
+represented only by the materialisation of habit or by means of
+practical symbols. And it is on this point that Mr Bergson rightly
+insists. ("Creative Evolution", page 3.)
+
+"The apparent discontinuity of psychological life is due, then, to
+the fact that our attention is concentrated on it in a series of
+discontinuous acts; where there is only a gentle slope, we think we
+see, when we follow the broken line of our attention, the steps of a
+staircase. It is true that our psychological life is full of surprises.
+A thousand incidents arise which seem to contrast with what precedes
+them, and not to be connected with what follows. But the gap in their
+appearances stands out against the continuous background on which they
+are represented, and to which they owe the very intervals that separate
+them; they are the drumbeats which break into the symphony at intervals.
+Our attention is fixed upon them because they interest it more, but
+each of them proceeds from the fluid mass of our entire psychological
+existence. Each of them is only the brightest point in a moving zone
+which understands all that we feel, think, wish; in fact, all that we
+are at a given moment. It is this zone which really constitutes our
+state. But we may observe that states defined in this way are not
+distinct elements. They are an endless stream of mutual continuity."
+
+And do not think that perhaps such a description represents only or
+principally our life of feeling. Reason and thought share the same
+characteristic, as soon as we penetrate their living depth, whether it
+be a question of creative invention or of those primordial judgments
+which direct our activity. If they evidence greater stability, it is in
+permanence of direction, because our past remains present to us.
+
+For we are endowed with memory, and that perhaps is, on the whole, our
+most profound characteristic. It is by memory we enlarge ourselves and
+draw continually upon the wealth of our treasuries. Hence comes the
+completely original nature of the change which constitutes us. But it
+is here that we must shake off familiar representations! Common-sense
+cannot think in terms of movement. It forges a static conception of it,
+and destroys it by arresting it under pretext of seeing it better. To
+define movement as a series of positions, with a generating law, with a
+time-table or correspondence sheet between places and times, is surely
+a ready-made presentation. Are we not confusing the trajectory and its
+performance, the points traversed and the traversing of the points, the
+result of the genesis of the result; in short, the quantitative distance
+over which the flight extends, and the qualitative flight which puts
+this distance behind it? In this way the very mobility which is the
+essence of movement vanishes. There is the same common mistake about
+time. Analytic and synthetic thought can see in time only a string of
+coincidences, each of them instantaneous, a logical series of relations.
+It imagines the whole of it to be a graduated slide-rule, in which the
+luminous point called the present is the geometrical index.
+
+Thus it gives form to time in space, "a kind of fourth dimension,"
+("Essay on the Immediate Data".) or at least it reduces it to nothing
+more than an abstract scheme of succession, "a stream without bottom
+or sides, flowing without determinable strength, in an indefinable
+direction." ("Introduction to Metaphysics".) It requires time to be
+homogeneous, and every homogeneous medium is space, "for as homogeneity
+consists here in the absence of any quality, it is not clear how two
+forms of homogeneity could be distinguished one from the other." ("Essay
+on the Immediate Data", page 74.)
+
+Quite different appears real duration, the duration which is lived.
+It is pure heterogeneity. It contains a thousand different degrees of
+tension or relaxation, and its rhythm varies without end. The magic
+silence of calm nights or the wild disorder of a tempest, the still joy
+of ecstasy or the tumult of passion unchained, a steep climb towards
+a difficult truth or a gentle descent from a luminous principle to
+consequences which easily follow, a moral crisis or a shooting pain,
+call up intuitions admitting no comparison with one another. We have
+here no series of moments, but prolonged and interpenetrating phases;
+their sequence is not a substitution of one point for another, but
+rather resembles a musical resolution of harmony into harmony. And
+of this ever-new melody which constitutes our inner life every moment
+contains a resonance or an echo of past moments. "What are we really,
+what is our character, except the condensation of the history which we
+have lived since our birth, even before our birth, since we bring with
+us our prenatal dispositions? Without doubt we think only with a small
+part of our past; but it is with our complete past, including our
+original bias of soul, that we desire, wish, and act." ("Creative
+Evolution", pages 5-6.) This is what makes our duration irreversible,
+and its novelty perpetual, for each of the states through which it
+passes envelops the recollection of all past states. And thus we see,
+in the end, how, for a being endowed with memory, "existence consists
+in change, change in ripening, ripening in endless self-creation."
+("Creative Evolution", page 8.)
+
+With this formula we face the capital problem in which psychology and
+metaphysics meet, that of liberty. The solution given by Mr Bergson
+marks one of the culminating points of his philosophy. It is from this
+summit that he finds light thrown on the riddle of inner being. And it
+is the centre where all the lines of his research converge.
+
+What is liberty? What must we understand by this word? Beware of the
+answer you are going to give. Every definition, in the strict sense of
+the term, will imply the determinist thesis in advance, since, under
+pain of going round in a circle, it will be bound to express liberty
+as a function of what it is not. Either psychological liberty is
+an illusive appearance, or, if it is real, we can only grasp it by
+intuition, not by analysis, in the light of an immediate feeling. For a
+reality is verified, not constructed; and we are now or never in one
+of those situations where the philosopher's task is to create some new
+concept, instead of abiding by a combination of previous elements.
+
+Man is free, says common-sense, in so far as his action depends only on
+himself. "We are free," says Mr Bergson, ("Essay on the Immediate Data
+of Consciousness", page 131.) "when our acts proceed from our entire
+personality, when they express it, when they exhibit that indefinable
+resemblance to it which we find occasionally between the artist and his
+work." That is all we need seek; two conceptions which are equivalent
+to each other, two concordant formulae. It is true that this amounts to
+determining the free act by its very originality, in the etymological
+sense of the word: which is at bottom only another way of declaring it
+incommensurable with every concept, and reluctant to be confined by any
+definition. But, after all, is not that the only true immediate fact?
+
+That our spiritual life is genuine action, capable of independence,
+initiative, and irreducible novelty, not mere result produced from
+outside, not simple extension of external mechanism, that it is so much
+ours as to constitute every moment, for him who can see, an essentially
+incomparable and new invention, is exactly what represents for us the
+name of liberty. Understood thus, and decidedly it is like this that
+we must understand it, liberty is a profound thing: we seek it only in
+those moments of high and solemn choice which come into our life, not
+in the petty familiar actions which their very insignificance submits to
+all surrounding influences, to every wandering breeze. Liberty is rare;
+many live and die and have never known it. Liberty is a thing which
+contains an infinite number of degrees and shades; it is measured by
+our capacity for the inner life. Liberty is a thing which goes on in us
+unceasingly: our liberty is potential rather than actual. And lastly, it
+is a thing of duration, not of space and number, not the work of moments
+or decrees. The free act is the act which has been long in preparing,
+the act which is heavy with our whole history, and falls like a ripe
+fruit from our past life.
+
+But how are we to establish positive verification of these views? How
+are we to do away with the danger of illusion? The proof will in this
+case result from a criticism of adverse theories, along with direct
+observation of psychological reality freed from the deceptive forms
+which warp the common perception of it. And it will here be an easy task
+to resume Mr Bergson's reasoning in a few words.
+
+The first obstacle which confronts affirmation of our liberty comes
+from physical determinism. Positive science, we are told, presents the
+universe to us as an immense homogeneous transformation, maintaining
+an exact equivalence between departure and arrival. How can we possibly
+have after that the genuine creation which we require in the act we call
+free?
+
+The answer is that the universality of the mechanism is at bottom only
+a hypothesis which is still awaiting demonstration. On the one hand it
+includes the parallelist conception which we have recognised as effete.
+And on the other it is plain that it is not self-sufficient. At least it
+requires that somewhere or other there should be a principle of position
+giving once for all what will afterwards be maintained. In actual
+fact, the course of phenomena displays three tendencies: a tendency to
+conservation, beyond question; but also a tendency to collapse, as in
+the diminution of energy; and a tendency to progress, as in biological
+evolution. To make conservation the sole law of matter implies an
+arbitrary decree, denoting only those aspects of reality which will
+count for anything. By what right do we thus exclude, with vital effort,
+even the feeling of liberty which in us is so vigorous?
+
+We might say, it is true, that our spiritual life, if it is not a simple
+extension of external mechanism, yet proceeds according to an internal
+mechanism equally severe, but of a different order. This would bring
+us to the hypothesis of a kind of psychological mechanism; and in many
+respects this seems to be the common-sense hypothesis. I need not
+dwell upon it, after the numerous criticisms already made. Inner
+reality--which does not admit number--is not a sequence of distinct
+terms, allowing a disconnected waste of absolute causality.
+
+And the mechanism of which we dream has no true sense--for, after all,
+it has a sense--except in relation to the superficial phenomena which
+take place in our dead rind, in relation to the automaton which we are
+in daily life. I am ready to admit that it explains our common actions,
+but here it is our profound consciousness which is in question, not the
+play of our materialised habits.
+
+Without insisting, then, too strongly on this mongrel conception, let
+us pass to the direct examination of inner psychological reality.
+Everything is ready for the conclusion. Our duration, which is
+continually accumulating itself, and always introducing some irreducible
+new factor, prevents any kind of state, even if superficially identical,
+from repeating itself in depth. "We shall never again have the soul we
+had this evening." Each of our moments remains essentially unique. It is
+something new added to the surviving past; not only new, but unable to
+be foreseen.
+
+For how can we speak of foresight which is not simple conjecture, how
+can we conceive an absolute extrinsic determination, when the act in
+birth only makes one with the finished sum of its conditions, when these
+conditions are complete only on the threshold of the action beginning,
+including the fresh and irreducible contribution added by its very date
+in our history? We can only explain afterwards, we can only foresee when
+it is too late, in retrospect, when the accomplished action has fallen
+into the plan of matter.
+
+Thus our inner life is a work of enduring creation: of phases which
+mature slowly, and conclude at long intervals the decisive moments of
+emancipating discovery. Undoubtedly matter is there, under the forms of
+habit, threatening us with automatism, seeking at every moment to devour
+us, stealing a march on us whenever we forget. But matter represents in
+us only the waste of existence, the mortal fall of weakened reality, the
+swoon of the creative action falling back inert; while the depths of our
+being still pulse with the liberty which, in its true function, employs
+mechanism itself only as a means of action.
+
+Now, does not this conception make a singular exception of us in
+nature, an empire within an empire? That is the question we have yet to
+investigate.
+
+
+II.
+
+We have just attempted to grasp what being is in ourselves; and we have
+found that it is becoming, progress, and growth, that it is a creative
+process which never ceases to labour incessantly; in a word, that it
+is duration. Must we come to the same conclusion about external being,
+about existence in general?
+
+Let us consider that external reality which is nearest us, our body. It
+is known to us both externally by our perceptions and internally by our
+affections. It is then a privileged case for our inquiry. In addition,
+and by analogy, we shall at the same time study the other living bodies
+which everyday induction shows us to be more or less like our own. What
+are the distinctive characteristics of these new realities? Each of them
+possesses a genuine individuality to a far greater degree than inorganic
+objects; whilst the latter are hardly limited at all except in
+relation to the needs of the former, and so do not constitute beings in
+themselves, the former evidence a powerful internal unity which is only
+further emphasised by their prodigious complication, and form wholes
+with are naturally complete. These wholes are not collections of
+juxtaposed parts: they are organisms; that is to say, systems of
+connected functions, in which each detail implies the whole, and where
+the various elements interpenetrate. These organisms change and modify
+continually; we say of them not only that they are, but that they live;
+and their life is mutability itself, a flight, a perpetual flux. This
+uninterrupted flight cannot in any way be compared to a geometrical
+movement; it is a rhythmic succession of phases, each of which contains
+the resonance of all those which come before; each state lives on in
+the state following; the life of the body is memory; the living being
+accumulates its past, makes a snowball of itself, serves as an open
+register for time, ripens, and grows old. Despite all resemblances, the
+living body always remains, in some measure, an absolutely original and
+unique invention, for there are not two specimens exactly alike; and,
+among inert objects, it appears as the reservoir of indetermination,
+the centre of spontaneity, contingence, and genuine action, as if in the
+course of phenomena nothing really new could be produced except by its
+agency.
+
+Such are the characteristic tendencies of life, such the aspects
+which it presents to immediate observation. Whether spiritual activity
+unconsciously presides over biological evolution, or whether it simply
+prolongs it, we always find here and there the essential features of
+duration.
+
+But I spoke just now of "individuality." Is it really one of the
+distinctive marks of life? We know how difficult it is to define it
+accurately. Nowhere, not even in man, is it fully realised; and there
+are beings in existence in which it seems a complete illusion, though
+every part of them reproduces their complete unity.
+
+True, but we are now dealing with biology, in which geometrical
+precision is inadmissible, where reality is defined not so much by the
+possession of certain characteristics as by its tendency to accentuate
+them. It is as a tendency that individuality is more particularly
+manifested; and if we look at it in this light, no one can deny that
+it does constitute one of the fundamental tendencies of life. Only
+the truth is that the tendency to individuality remains always and
+everywhere counterbalanced, and therefore limited, by an opposing
+tendency, the tendency to association, and above all to reproduction.
+This necessitates a correction in our analysis. Nature, in many
+respects, seems to take no interest in individuals. "Life appears to
+be a current passing from one germ to another through the medium of a
+developed organism." ("Creative Evolution", page 29.)
+
+It seems as if the organism played the part of a thoroughfare. What is
+important is rather the continuity of progress of which the individuals
+are only transitory phases. Between these phases again there are no
+sharp severances; each phase resolves and melts imperceptibly into that
+which follows. Is not the real problem of heredity to know how, and up
+to what point, a new individual breaks away from the individuals which
+produced it? Is not the real mystery of heredity the difference, not the
+resemblance, occurring between one term and another?
+
+Whatever be its solution, all the individual phases mutually extend and
+interpenetrate one another. There is a racial memory by which the past
+is continually accumulated and preserved. Life's history is embodied
+in its present. And that is really the ultimate reason of the perpetual
+novelty which surprised us just now. The characteristics of biological
+evolution are thus the same as those of human progress. Once again we
+find the very stuff of reality in duration. "We must not then speak any
+longer of life in general as an abstraction, or a mere heading under
+which we write down all living beings." ("Creative Evolution", page 28.)
+On the contrary, to it belongs the primordial function of reality. It
+is a very real current transmitted from generation to generation,
+organising and passing through bodies, without failing or becoming
+exhausted in any one of them.
+
+We may, already, then, draw one conclusion: Reality, at bottom, is
+becoming. But such a thesis runs counter to all our familiar ideas.
+It is imperative that we should submit it to the test of critical
+examination and positive verification.
+
+One system of metaphysics, I said some time ago, underlies common-sense,
+animating and informing it. According to this system, which is the
+inverse of that which we have just intimated, reality in its very depths
+is fixity and permanence. This is the completely static conception which
+sees in being exactly the opposite of becoming: we cannot become, it
+seems to say, except in so far as we are not. It does not, however, mean
+to deny movement. But it represents it as fluctuation round invariable
+types, as a whirling but captive eddy. Every phenomenon appears to it as
+a transformation which ends where it began, and the result is that the
+world takes the form of an eternal equilibrium in which "nothing is
+created, nothing destroyed." The idea does not need much forcing to end
+in the old supposition of a cyclic return which restores everything to
+its original conditions. Everything is thus conceived in astronomical
+periods. All that is left of the universe henceforward is a whirl of
+atoms in which nothing counts but certain fixed quantities translated by
+our systems of equations; the rest has vanished "in algebraical smoke."
+There is therefore nothing more or less in the effect than in the group
+of causes; and the causal relation moves towards identity as towards its
+asymptote.
+
+Such a view of nature is open to many objections, even if it were only
+a question of inorganised matter. Simple physics already betoken the
+insufficiency of a purely mechanic conception. The stream of phenomena
+flows in an irreversible direction and obeys a determined rhythm. "If I
+wish to prepare myself a glass of sugar and water, I may do what I like,
+but I must wait for my sugar to melt." ("Creative Evolution", page
+10.) Here are facts which pure mechanism does not take into account,
+regarding as it does only statically conceived relations, and making
+time into a measure only, something like a common denominator of
+concrete successions, a certain number of coincidences from which all
+true duration remains absent, which would remain unchanged even if the
+world's history, instead of opening out in consecutive phases, were to
+be unfolded before our eyes all at once like a fan. Do we not indeed
+speak today of aging and atomic separation. If the quantity of energy
+is preserved, at least its quality is continually deteriorating. By
+the side of something which remains constant, the world also contains
+something which is being used up, dissipated, exhausted, decomposed.
+
+Further still, a specimen of metal, in its molecular structure,
+preserves an indelible trace of the treatment it has undergone; natural
+philosophers tell us that there is a "memory of solids." These are all
+very positive facts which pure mechanism passes over. In addition,
+must we not first of all postulate what will afterwards be preserved or
+deteriorated? Whence we get another aspect of things: that of genesis
+and creation; and in reality we register the ascending effort of life as
+a reality no less startling than mechanic inertia.
+
+Finally, we have a double movement of ascent and descent: such is what
+life and matter appear to immediate observation. These two currents
+meet each other, and grapple. It is the drama of evolution, of which
+Mr Bergson once gave a masterly explanation, in stating the high place
+which man fills in nature:
+
+"I cannot regard the general evolution and progress of life in the whole
+of the organised world, the co-ordination and subordination of vital
+functions to one another in the same living being, the relations which
+psychology and physiology combined seem bound to establish between brain
+activity and thought in man, without arriving at this conclusion, that
+life is an immense effort attempted by thought to obtain of matter
+something which matter does not wish to give it. Matter is inert; it is
+the seat of necessity; it proceeds mechanically. It seems as if thought
+seeks to profit by this mechanical inclination in matter to utilise it
+for actions, and thus to convert all the creative energy it contains, at
+least all that this energy possesses which admits of play and external
+extraction, into contingent movements in space and events in time which
+cannot be foreseen. With laborious research it piles up complications
+to make liberty out of necessity, to compose for itself a matter so
+subtile, and so mobile, that liberty, by a veritable physical paradox,
+and thanks to an effort which cannot last long, succeeds in maintaining
+its equilibrium on this very mobility.
+
+"But it is caught in the snare. The eddy on which it was poised seizes
+and drags it down. It becomes prisoner of the mechanism it has set up.
+Automatism lays hold of it, and life, inevitably forgetting the end
+which it had determined, which was only to be a means in view of a
+superior end, is entirely used up in an effort to preserve itself by
+itself. From the humblest of organised beings to the higher vertebrates
+which come immediately before man, we witness an attempt which is always
+foiled and always resumed with more and more art. Man has triumphed;
+with difficulty, it is true, and so incompletely that a moment's lapse
+and inattention on his part surrender him to automatism again. But
+he has triumphed..." ("Report of the French Philosophical Society",
+meeting, 2nd May 1901.)
+
+And Mr Bergson adds in another place: ("Creative Evolution", pages
+286-287.) "With man consciousness breaks the chain. In man and in man
+only it obtains its freedom. The whole history of life, till man, had
+been the history of an effort of consciousness to lift matter, and of
+the more or less complete crushing of consciousness by matter falling
+upon it again. The enterprise was paradoxical; if indeed we can speak
+here, except paradoxically, of enterprise and effort. The task was to
+take matter, which is necessity itself, and create an instrument of
+liberty, construct a mechanical system to triumph over mechanism, to
+employ the determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net
+it had spread. But everywhere, except in man, consciousness let itself
+be caught in the net of which it sought to traverse the meshes. It
+remained taken in the mechanisms it had set up. The automatism which it
+claimed to be drawing towards liberty enfolds it and drags it down. It
+has not the strength to get away, because the energy with which it had
+supplied itself for action is almost entirely employed in maintaining
+the exceedingly subtile and essentially unstable equilibrium into which
+it has brought matter. But man does not merely keep his machine going,
+he succeeds in using it as it pleases him.
+
+"He owes it without doubt to the superiority of his brain, which allows
+him to construct an unlimited number of motor mechanisms, to oppose new
+habits to old time after time, and to master automatism by dividing
+it against itself. He owes it to his language, which furnishes
+consciousness with an immaterial body in which to become incarnate, thus
+dispensing it from depending exclusively upon material bodies, the flux
+of which would drag it down and soon engulf it. He owes it to social
+life, which stores and preserves efforts as language stores thought,
+thereby fixing a mean level to which individuals will rise with
+ease, and which, by means of this initial impulse, prevents average
+individuals from going to sleep and urges better people to rise higher.
+But our brain, our society, and our language are only the varied outer
+signs of one and the same internal superiority. Each after its fashion,
+they tell us the unique and exceptional success which life has won at a
+given moment of its evolution. They translate the difference in nature,
+and not in degree only, which separates man from the rest of the animal
+world. They let us see that if, at the end of the broad springboard from
+which life took off, all others came down, finding the cord stretched
+too high, man alone has leapt the obstacle."
+
+But man is not on that account isolated in nature: "As the smallest
+grain of dust forms part of our entire solar system, and is involved
+along with it in this undivided downward movement which is materiality
+itself, so all organised beings from the humblest to the highest, from
+the first origins of life to the times in which we live, and in all
+places as at all times, do but demonstrate to our eyes a unique impulse
+contrary to the movement of matter, and, in itself, indivisible. All
+living beings are connected, and all yield to the same formidable
+thrust. The animal is supported by the plant, man rides the animal, and
+the whole of humanity in space and time is an immense army galloping by
+the side of each of us, before and behind us, in a spirited charge which
+can upset all resistance, and leap many obstacles, perhaps even death."
+("Creative Evolution", pages 293-294.)
+
+We see with what broad and far-reaching conclusions the new philosophy
+closes. In the forcible poetry of the pages just quoted its original
+accent rings deep and pure. Some of its leading theses, moreover, are
+noted here. But now we must discover the solid foundation of underlying
+fact.
+
+Let us take first the fact of biological evolution. Why has it been
+selected as the basis of the system? Is it really a fact, or is it only
+a more or less conjectural and plausible theory?
+
+Notice in the first instance that the argument from evolution appears at
+least as a weapon of co-ordination and research admitted in our day by
+all philosophers, rejected only on the inspiration of preconceived ideas
+which are completely unscientific; and that it succeeds in the task
+allotted to it is doubtless already the proof that it responds to
+some part of reality. And besides, we can go further. "The idea of
+transformism is already contained in germ in the natural classification
+of organised beings. The naturalist brings resembling organisms
+together, divides the group into sub-groups, within which the
+resemblance is still greater, and so on; throughout the operation, the
+characteristics of the group appear as general themes upon which each of
+the sub-groups executes its particular variations.
+
+"Now this is precisely the relation we find in the animal world and in
+the vegetable world between that which produces and what is produced; on
+the canvas bequeathed by the ancestor to his posterity, and possessed
+in common by them, each broiders his original pattern." ("Creative
+Evolution", pages 24-25.)
+
+We may, it is true, ask ourselves whether the genealogical method
+permits results so far divergent as those presented to us by variety
+of species. But embryology answers by showing us the highest and most
+complex forms of life attained every day from very elementary forms; and
+palaeontology, as it develops, allows us to witness the same spectacle
+in the universal history of life, as if the succession of phases through
+which the embryo passes were only a recollection and an epitome of the
+complete past whence it has come. In addition, the phenomena of sudden
+changes, recently observed, help us to understand more easily the
+conception which obtrudes itself under so many heads, by diminishing the
+importance of the apparent lacunae in genealogical continuity. Thus the
+trend of all our experience is the same.
+
+Now there are some certainties which are only centres of concurrent
+probabilities; there are some truths determined only by succession of
+facts, but yet, by their intersection and convergence, sufficiently
+determined.
+
+"That is how we measure the distance from an inaccessible point, by
+regarding it time after time from the points to which we have access."
+("Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)
+
+Is not that the case here? The affirmative seems all the more inevitable
+inasmuch as the language of transformism is the only language known to
+the biology of today. Evolution can, it is true, be transposed, but not
+suppressed, since in any actual state there would always remain this
+striking fact that the living forms met with as remains in geological
+layers are ranged by the natural affinity of their characteristics in an
+order of succession parallel to the succession of the ages. We are not
+really then inventing a hypothesis in beginning with the affirmation of
+evolution. But what we have to do is to appreciate its object.
+
+Evolution! We meet the word everywhere today. But how rare is the true
+idea! Let us ask the astronomers who originate cosmogonical hypotheses,
+and invent a primitive nebula, the natural philosophers who dream that
+by the deterioration of energy and the dissipation of movement the
+material world will obtain final rest in the inertia of a homogeneous
+equilibrium, let us ask the biologists and psychologists who are enemies
+of fixed species and inquisitive about ancestral history. What they
+are anxious to discern in evolution is the persistent influence of an
+initial cause once given, the attraction of a fixed end, a collection
+of laws before the eternity of which change becomes negligible like
+an appearance. Now he who thinks of the universe as a construction of
+unchangeable relations denies by his method the evolution of which he
+speaks, since he transforms it into a calculable effect necessarily
+produced by a regulated play of generating conditions, since he
+implicitly admits the illusive character of a becoming which adds
+nothing to what is given.
+
+Finality itself, if he keeps the name, does not save him from his error,
+for finality in his eyes is nothing but an efficient cause projected
+into the future. So we see him fixing stages, marking periods, inserting
+means, putting in milestones, continually destroying movement by halting
+it before his gaze. And we all do the same by instinctive inclination.
+Our concept of law, in its classical form, is not general: it represents
+only the law of co-existence and of mechanism, the static relation
+between two numerically disconnected terms; and in order to grasp
+evolution we shall doubtless have to invent a new type of law: law in
+duration, dynamic relation. For we can, and we must, conceive that there
+is an evolution of natural laws; that these laws never define anything
+but a momentary state of things; that they are in reality like streaks
+determined in the flux of becoming by the meeting of contrary currents.
+"Laws," says Monsieur Boutroux, "are the bed down which passes the
+torrent of facts; they have dug it, though they follow it." Yet we
+see the common theories of evolution appealing to the concepts of the
+present to describe the past, forcing them back to prehistoric times,
+and beyond the reasoning of today, placing at the beginning what is
+only conceivable in the mind of the contemporary thinker; in a word,
+imagining the same laws as always existing and always observed. This
+is the method which Mr Bergson so justly criticises in Spencer: that of
+reconstructing evolution with fragments of its product.
+
+If we wish thoroughly to grasp the reality of things, we must think
+otherwise. Neither of these ready-made concepts, mechanism and finality,
+is in place, because both of them imply the same postulate, viz. that
+"everything is given," either at the beginning or at the end, whilst
+evolution is nothing if it is not, on the contrary, "that which gives."
+Let us take care not to confound evolution and development. There is
+the stumbling-block of the usual transformist theories, and Mr Bergson
+devotes to it a closely argued and singularly penetrating criticism, by
+an example which he analyses in detail. ("Creative Evolution", chapter
+i.) These theories either do not explain the birth of variation, and
+limit themselves to an attempt to make us understand how, once born,
+it becomes fixed, or else through need of adaptation they look for a
+conception of its birth. But in both cases they fail.
+
+"The truth is that adaptation explains the windings of the movement of
+evolution, but not the general directions of the movement, still less
+the movement itself. The road which leads to the town is certainly
+obliged to climb the hills and go down the slopes; it adapts itself to
+the accidents of the ground; but the accidents of the ground are not
+the cause of the road, any more than they have imparted its direction."
+("Creative Evolution", pages 111-112.)
+
+At the bottom of all these errors there are only prejudices of practical
+action. That is of course why every work appears to be an outside
+construction beginning with previous elements; a phase of anticipation
+followed by a phase of execution, calculation, and art, an effective
+projecting cause, and a concerted goal, a mechanism which hurls to
+a finality which aims. But the genuine explanation must be sought
+elsewhere. And Mr Bergson makes this plain by two admirable analyses in
+which he takes to pieces the common ideas of disorder and nothingness in
+order to explain their meaning relative to our proceedings in industry
+or language.
+
+Let us come back to facts, to immediate experience, and try to translate
+its pure data simply. What are the characteristics of vital evolution?
+First of all it is a dynamic continuity, a continuity of qualitative
+progress; next, it is essentially a duration, an irreversible rhythm, a
+work of inner maturation. By the memory inherent in it, the whole of its
+past lives on and accumulates, the whole of its past remains for ever
+present to it; which is tantamount to saying that it is experience.
+
+It is also an effort of perpetual invention, a generation of continual
+novelty, indeducible and capable of defying all anticipation, as it
+defies all repetition. We see it at its task of research in the groping
+attempts exhibited by the long-sought genesis of species; we see it
+triumphant in the originality of the least state of consciousness, of
+the least body, of the tiniest cell, of which the infinity of times and
+spaces does not offer two identical specimens.
+
+But the reef which lies in its way, and on which too often it founders,
+is habit; habit would be a better and more powerful means of action if
+it remained free, but in so far as it congeals and becomes materialised,
+is a hindrance and an obstacle. First of all we have the average types
+round which fluctuates an action which is decreasing and becoming
+reduced in breadth. Then we have the residual organs, the proofs of dead
+life, the encrustations from which the stream of consciousness gradually
+ebbs; and finally we have the inert gear from which all real life has
+disappeared, the masses of shipwrecked "things" rearing their spectral
+outlines where once rolled the open sea of mind. The concept of
+mechanism suits the phenomena which occur within the zone of wreckage,
+on this shore of fixities and corpses. But life itself is rather
+finality, if not in the anthropomorphic sense of premeditated design,
+plan, or programme, at least in this sense, that it is a continually
+renewed effort of growth and liberation. And it is from here we get Mr
+Bergson's formulae: vital impetus and creative evolution.
+
+In this conception of being consciousness is everywhere, as original and
+fundamental reality, always present in a myriad degrees of tension or
+sleep, and under infinitely various rhythms.
+
+The vital impulse consists in a "demand for creation"; life in its
+humblest stage already constitutes a spiritual activity; and its effort
+sends out a current of ascending realisation which again determines the
+counter-current of matter. Thus all reality is contained in a double
+movement of ascent and descent. The first only, which translates an
+inner work of creative maturation, is essentially durable; the second
+might, in strictness, be almost instantaneous, like that of an escaping
+spring; but the one imposes its rhythm on the other. From this point of
+view mind and matter appear not as two things opposed to each other, as
+static terms in fixed antithesis, but rather as two inverse directions
+of movement; and, in certain respects, we must therefore speak not so
+much of matter or mind as of spiritualisation and materialisation, the
+latter resulting automatically from a simple interruption of the former.
+"Consciousness or superconsciousness is the rocket, the extinguished
+remains of which fall into matter." ("Creative Evolution", page 283.)
+
+What image of universal evolution is then suggested? Not a cascade of
+deduction, nor a system of stationary pulsations, but a fountain which
+spreads like a sheaf of corn and is partially arrested, or at least
+hindered and delayed, by the falling spray. The fountain itself, the
+reality which is created, is vital activity, of which spiritual activity
+represents the highest form; and the spray which falls is the creative
+act which falls, it is reality which is undone, it is matter and
+inertia. In a word, the supreme law of genesis and fall, the double play
+of which constitutes the universe, comprises a psychological formula.
+
+Everything begins in the manner of an invention, as the fruit of
+duration and creative genius, by liberty, by pure mind; then comes
+habit, a kind of body, as the body is already a group of habits; and
+habit, taking root, being a work of consciousness which escapes it and
+turns against it, is little by little degraded into mechanism in which
+the soul is buried.
+
+
+III.
+
+The main lines and general perspective of Mr Bergson's philosophy now
+perhaps begin to appear. Certainly I am the first to feel how powerless
+a slender resume really is to translate all its wealth and all its
+strength.
+
+At least I wish I could have contributed to making its movement, and
+what I may call its rhythm, clearer to perception. It is from the books
+of the master himself that a more complete revelation must be sought.
+And the few words which I am still going to add as conclusion are only
+intended to sketch the principal consequences of the doctrine, and allow
+its distant reach to be seen.
+
+The evolution of life would be a very simple and easy thing to
+understand if it were fulfilled along one single trajectory and followed
+a straight path. "But we are here dealing with a shell which has
+immediately burst into fragments, which, being themselves species of
+shells, have again burst into fragments destined to burst again, and so
+on for a very long time." ("Creative Evolution", page 107.) It is, in
+fact, the property of a tendency to develop itself in the expansion
+which analyses it. As for the causes of this dispersion into kingdoms,
+then into species, and finally into individuals, we can distinguish two
+series: the resistance which matter opposes to the current of life sent
+through it, and the explosive force--due to an unstable equilibrium of
+tendencies--carried by the vital impulse within itself. Both unite
+in making the thrust of life divide in more and more diverging but
+complementary directions, each emphasising some distinct aspect of its
+original wealth. Mr Bergson confines himself to the branches of the
+first order--plant, animal, and man. And in the course of a minute and
+searching discussion he shows us the characteristics of these lines in
+the moods or qualities signified by the three words--torpor, instinct,
+and intelligence: the vegetable kingdom constructing and storing
+explosives which the animal expends, and man creating a nervous system
+for himself which permits him to convert the expense into analysis. Let
+us leave aside, as we must, the many suggestive views scattered lavishly
+about, the many flashes of light which fall on all faces of the problem,
+and let us confine ourselves to seeing how we get a theory of knowledge
+from this doctrine. There we have yet another proof of the striking and
+fertile originality of the new philosophy.
+
+More than one objection has been brought against Mr Bergson on this
+head. That is quite natural: how could such a novelty be exactly
+understood at once? It is also very desirable; it is the demands for
+enlightenment which lead a doctrine to full consciousness of itself,
+to precision and perfection. But we must be afraid of false objections,
+those which arise from an obstinate translation of the new philosophy
+into an old language steeped in a different metaphysic. With what has
+Mr Bergson been reproached? With misunderstanding reason, with ruining
+positive science, with being caught in the illusion of getting knowledge
+otherwise than by intelligence, or of thinking otherwise than
+by thought; in short, of falling into a vicious circle by making
+intellectualism turn round upon itself. Not one of these reproaches has
+any foundation.
+
+Let us begin by a few preliminary remarks to clear the ground. First of
+all, there is one ridiculous objection which I quote only to record.
+I mean that which suspects at the bottom of the theories which we are
+going to discuss some dark background, some prepossession of irrational
+mysticism. On the contrary, the truth is, we have here perhaps better
+than anywhere, the spectacle of pure thought face to face with things.
+But it is a complete thought, not thought reduced to some partial
+functions, but sufficiently sure of its critical power to sacrifice none
+of its resources. Here, we may say, really is the genuine positivism,
+which reinstates all spiritual reality. It does not in any way lead to a
+misunderstanding or depreciation of science. Even where contingency and
+relativity are most visible in it, in the domain of inert matter, Mr
+Bergson goes so far as to say that physical science touches an absolute.
+It is true that it touches this absolute rather than sees it.
+More particularly it perceives all its reactions on a system of
+representative forms which it presents to it, and observes the effect
+on the veil of theory with which it envelops it. At certain moments,
+all the same, the veil becomes almost transparent. And in any case the
+scholar's thought guesses and grazes reality in the curve drawn by the
+succession of its increasing syntheses. But there are two orders of
+science. Formerly it was from the mathematician that we borrowed the
+ideal of evidence. Hence came the inclination always to seek the most
+certain knowledge from the most abstract side. The temptation was to
+make a kind of less severe and rigorous mathematics of biology itself.
+Now if such a method suits the study of inert matter because in a manner
+geometrical, so much so that our knowledge of it thus acquired is more
+incomplete than inexact, this is not at all the case for the things of
+life. Here, if we were to conduct scientific research always in the
+same grooves and according to the same formulae, we should immediately
+encounter symbolism and relativity. For life is progress, whilst the
+geometrical method is commensurable only with things. Mr Bergson
+is aware of this; and his rare merit has been to disengage specific
+originality from biology, while elevating it to a typical and standard
+science.
+
+But let us come to the heart of the problem. What was Kant's point of
+departure in the theory of knowledge? In seeking to define the structure
+of the mind according to the traces of itself which it must have left in
+its works, and in proceeding by a reflective analysis ascending from
+a fact to its conditions, he could only regard intelligence as a thing
+made, a fixed system of categories and principles.
+
+Mr Bergson adopts an inverse attitude. Intelligence is a product of
+evolution: we see it slowly and uninterruptedly constructed along a line
+which rises through the vertebrates to man. Such a point of view is the
+only one which conforms to the real nature of things, and the actual
+conditions of reality; the more we think of it, the more we perceive
+that the theory of knowledge and the theory of life are bound up with
+one another. Now what do we conclude from this point of view? Life,
+considered in the direction of "knowledge," evolves on two diverging
+lines which at first are confused, then gradually separate, and finally
+end in two opposed forms of organisation, intelligence and instinct.
+Several contrary potentialities interpenetrated at their common source,
+but of this source each of these kinds of activity preserves or rather
+accentuates only one tendency; and it will be easy to mark its dual
+character.
+
+Instinct is sympathy; it has no clear consciousness of itself; it does
+not know how to reflect; it is hardly capable of varying its steps; but
+it operates with incomparable certainty because it remains lodged in
+things, in communion with their rhythm and with inner feeling of them.
+The history of animals in this respect supplies many remarkable examples
+which Mr Bergson analyses and discusses in detail. As much might be
+said of the work which produces a living body, and of the effort which
+presides over its growth, maintenance, and functions. Take a natural
+philosopher who has long breathed the atmosphere of the laboratory, who
+has by long practice acquired what we call "experience"; he has a
+kind of intimate feeling for his instruments, their resources, their
+movements, their working tendencies; he perceives them as extensions
+of himself; he possesses them as groups of habitual actions, thus
+discoursing by manipulations as easily and spontaneously as others
+discourse in calculation. Doubtless that is only an image; but transpose
+it and generalise it, and it will help you to understand the kind of
+action which divines instinct. But intelligence is something quite
+different. We are talking, of course, of the analytic and synthetic
+intelligence which we use in our acts of current thought, which works
+throughout our daily action and forms the fundamental thread of our
+scientific operations. I need not here go back to the criticism of its
+ordinary proceedings. But I must now note the service which suits them,
+the domain in which they apply and are valid, and what they teach us
+thereby about the meaning, reach, and natural task of intelligence.
+
+Whilst instinct vibrates in sympathetic harmony with life, it is about
+inert matter that intelligence is granted; it is a rider to our faculty
+of action; it triumphs in geometry; it feels at home among the objects
+in which our industry finds its supports and its tools. In a word,
+"our logic is primarily the logic of solids." (Preface to "Creative
+Evolution".) But if we enter the vital order its incompetence is
+manifestly apparent.
+
+It is very important that deduction should be so impotent in biology.
+Still more impotent is it perhaps in matters of art or religion; whilst,
+on the contrary, it works marvels so long as it has only to foresee
+movements or transformations in bodies. What does this mean, if not
+that intelligence and materiality go together, that language with its
+analytic steps is regulated by the movements of matter? Philosophy
+once again then must leave it behind, for the duty of philosophy is to
+consider everything in its relation to life.
+
+Do not conclude, however, that the philosopher's duty is to renounce
+intelligence, place it under tutelage, or abandon it to the blind
+suggestions of feeling and will. It has not even the right to do so.
+Instinct, with us who have evolved along the grooves of intelligence,
+has remained too weak to be sufficient for us. Besides, intelligence
+is the only path by which light could dawn in the bosom of primitive
+darkness. But let us look at present reality in all its complexity, all
+its wealth. Round intelligence itself exists a halo of instinct. This
+halo represents the remains of the first nebulous vapour at the expense
+of which intelligence was constituted like a brilliantly condensed
+nucleus; and it is still today the atmosphere which gives it life, the
+fringe of touch, and delicate probing, inspiring contact and divining
+sympathy, which we see in play in the phenomena of discovery, as also in
+the acts of that "attention to life," and that "sense of reality" which
+is the soul of good sense, so widely distinct from common-sense. And
+the peculiar task of the philosopher is to reabsorb intelligence in
+instinct, or rather to reinstate instinct in intelligence; or better
+still, to win back to the heart of intelligence all the initial
+resources which it must have sacrificed. This is what is meant by return
+to the primitive, and the immediate, to reality and life. This is the
+meaning of intuition.
+
+Certainly the task is difficult. We at once suspect a vicious circle.
+How can we go beyond intelligence except by intelligence itself? We are
+apparently inside our thought, as incapable of coming out of it as is a
+balloon of rising above the atmosphere. True, but on this reasoning we
+could just as well prove that it is impossible for us to acquire any
+new habit whatsoever, impossible for life to grow and go beyond itself
+continually.
+
+We must avoid drawing false conclusions from the simile of the balloon.
+The question here is to know what are the real limits of the atmosphere.
+It is certain that the synthetic and critical intelligence, left to
+its own strength, remains imprisoned in a circle from which there is no
+escape.
+
+But action removes the barrier. If intelligence accepts the risk of
+taking the leap into the phosphorescent fluid which bathes it, and to
+which it is not altogether foreign, since it has broken off from it and
+in it dwell the complementary powers of the understanding, intelligence
+will soon become adapted and so will only be lost for a moment to
+reappear greater, stronger, and of fuller content. It is action again
+under the name of experience which removes the danger of illusion or
+giddiness, it is action which verifies; by a practical demonstration,
+by an effort of enduring maturation which tests the idea in intimate
+contact with reality and judges it by its fruits.
+
+It always falls therefore to intelligence to pronounce the grand verdict
+in the sense that only that can be called true which will finally
+satisfy it; but we mean an intelligence duly enlarged and transformed
+by the very effect of the action it has lived. Thus the objection of
+"irrationalism" directed against the new philosophy falls to the ground.
+
+The objection of "non-morality" fares no better. But is has been made,
+and people have thought fit to accuse Mr Bergson's work of being the too
+calm production of an intelligence too indifferent, too coldly lucid,
+too exclusively curious to see and understand, untroubled and unthrilled
+by the universal drama of life, by the tragic reality of evil. On the
+other hand, not without contradiction, the new philosophy has been
+called "romantic," and people have tried to find in it the essential
+traits of romanticism: its predilection for feeling and imagination, its
+unique anxiety for vital intensity, its recognised right to all which
+is to be, whence its radical inability to establish a hierarchy of moral
+qualifications. Strange reproach! The system in question is not yet
+presented to us as a finished system. Its author manifests a plain
+desire to classify his problems. And he is certainly right in proceeding
+so: there is a time for everything, and on occasion we must learn to be
+just an eye focussed upon being. But that does not at all exclude the
+possibility of future works, treating in due order of the problem of
+human destiny, and perhaps even in the work so far completed we may
+descry some attempts to bring this future within ken.
+
+But universal evolution, though creative, is not for all that quixotic
+or anarchist. It forms a sequence. It is a becoming with direction,
+undoubtedly due, not to the attraction of a clearly preconceived goal,
+or the guidance of an outer law, but to the actual tendency of the
+original thrust. In spite of the stationary eddies or momentary
+backwashes we observe here and there, its stream moves in a definite
+direction, ever swelling and broadening. For the spectator who regards
+the general sweep of the current, evolution is growth. On the other
+hand, he who thinks this growth now ended is under a simple delusion:
+"The gates of the future stand wide open." ("Creative Evolution", page
+114.) In the stage at present attained man is leading; he marks the
+culminating point at which creation continues; in him, life has already
+succeeded, at least up to a certain point; from him onwards it advances
+with consciousness capable of reflection; is it not for that very reason
+responsible for the result? Life, according to the new philosophy, is
+a continual creation of what is new: new--be it well understood--in the
+sense of growth and progress in relation to what has gone before.
+Life, in a word, is mental travel, ascent in a path of growing
+spiritualisation. Such at least is the intense desire, and such the
+first tendency which launched and still inspires it. But it may faint,
+halt, or travel down the hill. This is an undeniable fact; and once
+recognised does it not awake in us the presentiment of a directing law
+immanent in vital effort, a law doubtless not to be found in any code,
+nor yet binding through the stern behest of mechanical necessity, but
+a law which finds definition at every moment, and at every moment also
+marks a direction of progress, being as it were the shifting tangent to
+the curve of becoming?
+
+Let us did that according to the new philosophy the whole of our past
+survives for ever in us, and by means of us results in action. It is
+then literally true that our acts do to a certain extent involve
+the whole universe, and its whole history: the act which we make it
+accomplish will exist henceforward for ever, and will for ever tinge
+universal duration with its indelible shade. Does not that imply an
+imperious, urgent, solemn, and tragic problem of action? Nay, more;
+memory makes a persistent reality of evil, as of good. Where are we to
+find the means to abolish and reabsorb the evil? What in the individual
+is called memory becomes tradition and joint responsibility in the race.
+
+On the other hand, a directing law is immanent in life, but in the
+shape of an appeal to endless transcendence. In dealing with this future
+transcendent to our daily life, with this further shore of present
+experience, where are we to seek the inspiring strength? And is there
+not ground for asking ourselves whether intuitions have not arisen here
+and there in the course of history, lighting up the dark road of the
+future for us with a prophetic ray of dawn? It is at this point that the
+new philosophy would find place for the problem of religion.
+
+But this word "religion," which has not come once so far from Mr
+Bergson's pen, coming now from mine, warns me that it is time to end. No
+man today would be justified in foreseeing the conclusions to which the
+doctrine of creative evolution will one day undoubtedly lead on this
+point. More than any other, I must forget here what I myself may have
+elsewhere tried to do in this order of ideas. But it was impossible
+not to feel the approach of the temptation. Mr Bergson's work is
+extraordinarily suggestive. His books, so measured in tone, so tranquil
+in harmony, awaken in us a mystery of presentiment and imagination; they
+reach the hidden retreats where the springs of consciousness well up.
+Long after we have closed them we are shaken within; strangely moved,
+we listen to the deepening echo, passing on and on. However valuable
+already their explicit contents may be, they reach still further than
+they aimed. It is impossible to tell what latent germs they foster. It
+is impossible to guess what lies behind the boundless distance of the
+horizons they expose. But this at least is sure: these books have verily
+begun a new work in the history of human thought.
+
+
+
+
+ADDITIONAL EXPLANATIONS
+
+
+
+
+I. Mr Bergson's Work and the General Directions of Contemporary Thought.
+
+A broad survey of the new philosophy was bound to be somewhat rapid
+and summary; and now that this is completed it will doubtless not be
+superfluous to come back, on the same plan as before, to some more
+important or more difficult individual points, and to examine by
+themselves the most prominent centres on which we should focus the light
+of our attention. Not that I intend to probe in minute detail the folds
+and turns of a doctrine which admits of infinite development: how can I
+claim to exhaust a work of such profound thought that the least passing
+example employed takes its place as a particular study? Still less do
+I wish to undertake a kind of analytic resume; no undertaking could be
+less profitable than that of arranging paragraph headings to repeat too
+briefly, and therefore obscurely, what a thinker has said without any
+extravagance of language, yet with every requisite explanation.
+
+The critic's true task, as I understand it, in no way consists in
+drawing up a table of contents strewn with qualifying notes. His task
+is to read and enable others to read between the lines, between the
+chapters, and between the successive works, what constitutes the dynamic
+tie between them, all that the linear form of writing and language has
+not allowed the author himself to elucidate.
+
+His task is, as far as possible, to master the accompaniment of
+underlying thought which produced the resonant atmosphere of the
+inquirer's intuition, the rhythm and toning of the image, resulting in
+the shade of light which falls upon his vision. His task, in a word,
+is to help understanding, and therefore to point out and anticipate the
+misunderstandings to be feared. Now it seems to me that there are a few
+points round which the errors of interpretation more naturally gather,
+producing some astounding misconceptions of Mr Bergson's philosophy. It
+is these points only that I propose to clear up. But at the same time I
+shall use the opportunity to supply information about authorities, which
+I have hitherto deliberately omitted, to avoid riddling with references
+pages which were primarily intended to impart a general impression.
+
+Let us begin by glancing at the milieu of thought in which Mr Bergson's
+philosophy must have had birth. For the last thirty years new currents
+are traceable. In what direction do they go? And what distance have they
+already gone? What, in short, are the intellectual characteristics of
+our time? We must endeavour to distinguish the deeper tendencies, those
+which herald and prepare and near future.
+
+One of the essential and frequently cited features of the generation
+in which Taine and Renan were the most prominent leaders was the
+passionate, enthusiastic, somewhat exclusive and intolerant cult of
+positive science. This science, in its days of pride, was considered
+unique, displayed on a plane by itself, always uniformly competent,
+capable of gripping any object whatever with the same strength, and of
+inserting it in the thread of one and the same unbroken connection.
+The dream of that time, despite all verbal palliations, was a universal
+science of mathematics: mathematics, of course, with their bare and
+brutal rigour softened and shaded off, where feasible; if possible,
+supple and sensitive; in ideal, delicate, buoyant, and judicious; but
+mathematics governed from end to end by an equal necessity. Conceived as
+the sole mistress of truth, this science was expected in days to come
+to fulfil all the needs of man, and unreservedly to take the place of
+ancient spiritual discipline. Genuine philosophy had had its day:
+all metaphysics seemed deception and fantasy, a simple play of empty
+formulae or puerile dreams, a mythical procession of abstraction and
+phantom; religion itself paled before science, as poetry of the grey
+morning before the splendour of the rising sun.
+
+However, after all this pride came the turn of humility, and humility of
+the very lowest. This deified science, borne down in its hour of triumph
+by too heavy a weight, had necessarily been recognised as powerless to
+go beyond the order of relations, and radically incapable of telling
+us the origin, end, and basis of things. It analysed the conditions of
+phenomena, but was ill-suited ever to grasp any real cause, or any deep
+essence. Further, it became the Unknowable, before which the human mind
+could only halt in despair. And in this way destitution arose out of
+ambition itself, since thought, after trusting too exclusively to its
+geometrical strength, was compelled at the end of its effort to confess
+itself beaten when confronted with the only questions to which no man
+may ever be indifferent.
+
+This double attitude is no longer that of the contemporary generation.
+The prestige of illusion has vanished. In the religion of science we see
+now nothing but idolatry. The haughty affirmation of yesterday appears
+today, not as expressing a positive fact or a result duly established,
+but as bringing forward a thesis of perilous and unconscious
+metaphysics. Let us go even further. If true intelligence is mental
+expansion and aptitude for understanding widely different things, each
+in its originality, to the same degree, we must say that the claim to
+reduce reality to one only of its modes, to know it in one only of its
+forms, is an unintelligent claim. That is, in brief formula, the
+verdict of the present generation. Not, of course, that it in any
+way misconceives or disdains the true value of science, whether as an
+instrument of action for the conquest of nature, or as intelligible
+language, allowing us to know our whereabouts in things and "talk" them.
+
+It is aware that in all circumstances positive methods have their
+evidence to produce, and that, where they pronounce within the limits of
+their power, nothing can stand against their verdict. But it considers
+first of all that science was conceived of late under much too stiff and
+narrow a form, under the obsession of too abstract a mathematical
+ideal which corresponds to one aspect of reality only, and that
+the shallowest. And it considers afterwards that science, even when
+broadened and made flexible, being concerned only with what is, with
+fact and datum, remains radically powerless to solve the problem of
+human life. Nowhere does science penetrate to the very depth of things,
+and there is nothing in the world but "things."
+
+Experience has shown where the dream of universal mathematics leads us.
+Number is driven to the heart of phenomena and nature dissected with
+this delicate scalpel. Speaking in more general terms, we adopt spatial
+relation as the perfect example of intelligible relation. I do not wish
+to deny the use of such a method now and again, the services it may
+render, or the beauty of construction peculiar to the systems it
+inspires. But we must see what price we pay for these advantages. Do
+we choose geometry for an informing and regulating science? The more
+we advance towards the concrete and the living, the more we feel the
+necessity of altering the pure mathematical type. The sciences, as they
+get further from inert matter, unless they agree to reform, pale and
+weaken; they become vague, impotent, anaemic; they touch little but
+the trite surface of their object, the body, not the soul; in them
+symbolism, artifice, and relativity become increasingly evident; at
+length, arbitrary and conventional elements crop up and devour them. In
+a word, the claim to treat the living as inert matter conduces to the
+misconception in life of life itself, and the retention of nothing but
+the material waste.
+
+This experience furnishes us with a lesson. There is not so much one
+science as several sciences, each distinguished by an autonomous method,
+and divided into two great kingdoms.
+
+Let us therefore from the outset follow Mr Bergson in tracing a very
+sharp line of demarcation between the inert and the living. Two orders
+of knowledge will thereby become separate, one in which the frames of
+geometrical understanding are in place, the other where new means and a
+new attitude are required. The essential task of the present hour will
+now appear to us in a precise light; it will henceforward consist,
+without any disregard of a glorious past, in an effort to found as
+specifically distinct methods of instruction those sciences which take
+for objects the successive moments of life in its different degrees,
+biology, psychology, sociology;--then in an effort to reconstruct,
+setting out from these new sciences and according to their spirit, the
+like of what ancient philosophy had attempted, setting out from geometry
+and mechanics. By so doing we shall succeed in throwing knowledge open
+to receive all the wealth of reality, while at the same time we shall
+reinstate the sense of mystery and the thrill of higher anxieties.
+A further result will be that the phantom of the Unknowable will be
+exorcised, since it no longer represents anything but the relative and
+momentary limit of each method, the portion of being which escapes its
+partial grip.
+
+This is one of the first controlling ideas of the contemporary
+generation. Others result from it. More particularly, it is for the same
+body of motives, in the same sense, and with the same restrictions, that
+we distrust intellectualism; I mean the tendency to live uniquely by
+intelligence, to think as if the whole of thought consisted in analytic,
+clear and reasoning understanding.
+
+Once again, it is not a question of some blind abandonment to sentiment,
+imagination, or will, nor do we claim to restrict the legitimate rights
+of intellectuality in judgment. But around critical reason there is a
+quickening atmosphere in which dwell the powers of intuition, there is a
+half-light of gradual tones in which insertion into reality is effected.
+If by rationalism we mean the attitude which consists in cabining
+ourselves within the zone of geometrical light in which language
+evolves, we must admit that rationalism supposes something other than
+itself, that it hangs suspended by a generating act which escapes it.
+
+The method therefore which we seek to employ everywhere today is
+experience; but complete experience, anxious to neglect no aspect of
+being nor any resource of mind; shaded experience, not extending on the
+surface only, in a homogeneous and uniform manner; on the contrary,
+an experience distributed in depth over multiple planes, adopting a
+thousand different forms to adapt itself to the different kinds of
+problems; in short, a creative and informing experience, a veritable
+genesis, a genuine action of thought, a work and movement of life by
+which the guiding principles, forms of intelligibility, and criteria of
+verification obtain birth and stability in habits. And here again it
+is by borrowing Mr Bergson's own formula from him that we shall most
+accurately describe the new spirit.
+
+That the attitude and fundamental procedure of this new spirit are in
+no way a return to scepticism or a reaction against thought cannot
+be better demonstrated than by this resurrection of metaphysics, this
+renaissance of idealism, which is certainly one of the most distinctive
+features of our epoch. Undoubtedly philosophy in France has never known
+so prosperous and so pregnant a moment. Notwithstanding, it is not
+a return to the old dreams of dialectic construction. Everything is
+regarded from the point of view of life, and there is a tendency more
+and more to recognise the primacy of spiritual activity. But we wish to
+understand and employ this activity and this life in all its wealth,
+in all its degrees, and by all its functions: we wish to think with the
+whole of thought, and go to the truth with the whole of our soul; and
+the reason of which we recognise the sovereign weight is reason laden
+with its complete past history.
+
+And what is that, really, but realism? By realism I mean the gift of
+ourselves to reality, the work of concrete realisation, the effort to
+convert every idea into action, to regulate the idea by the action as
+much as the action by the idea, to live what we think and think what we
+live. But that is positivism, you will say; certainly it is positivism.
+But how changed! Far from considering as positive only that which can
+be an object of sensation or calculation, we begin by greeting the great
+spiritual realities with this title. The deep and living aspiration of
+our day is in everything to seek the soul, the soul which specifies and
+quickens, seek it by an effort towards the revealing sympathy which
+is genuine intelligence, seek it in the concrete, without dissolving
+thought in dreams or language, without losing contact with the body or
+critical control, seek it, in fine, as the most real and genuine part of
+being.
+
+Hence its return to questions which were lately declared out of date
+and closed; hence its taste for problems of aesthetics and morality,
+its close siege of social and religious problems, its homesickness for a
+faith harmonising the powers of action and the powers of thought; hence
+its restless desire to hark back to tradition and discipline.
+
+A new philosophy was required to answer this new way of looking at
+things. Already, in 1867, Ravaisson in his celebrated "Report" wrote
+these prophetic lines: "Many signs permit us to foresee in the near
+future a philosophical epoch of which the general character will be the
+predominance of what may be called spiritualist realism or positivism,
+having as generating principle the consciousness which the mind has in
+itself of an existence recognised as being the source and support of
+every other existence, being none other than its action."
+
+This prophetic view was further commented on in a work where Mr Bergson
+speaks with just praise of this shrewd and penetrating sense of what was
+coming: "What could be bolder or more novel than to come and predict
+to the physicists that the inert will be explained by the living, to
+biologists that life will only be understood by thought, to philosophers
+that generalities are not philosophic?" ("Notice on the Life and Works
+of M. Felix Ravaisson-Molien", in the Reports of the Academy of Moral
+and Political Sciences, 1904.)
+
+But let us give each his due. What Ravaisson had only anticipated Mr
+Bergson himself accomplishes, with a precision which gives body to the
+impalpable and floating breath of first inspiration, with a depth which
+renews both proof and theses alike, with a creative originality which
+prevents the critic who is anxious for justice and precision from
+insisting on any researches establishing connection of thought.
+
+One reason for the popularity today enjoyed by this new philosophy is
+doubtless to be found in the very tendencies of the milieu in which
+it is produced and in the aspirations which work it. But, after once
+remarking these desires, we must further not forget that Mr Bergson has
+contributed more than anyone else to awaken them, determine them,
+and make them become conscious of themselves. Let us therefore try to
+understand in itself and by itself the work of genius of which just now
+we were seeking the dawning gleams. What synthetic formula will be best
+able to tell us the essential direction of its movement? I will borrow
+it from the author himself: "It seems to me," he writes, ("Philosophic
+Intuition" in the "Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", November 1911.)
+"that metaphysics are trying at this moment to simplify themselves, to
+come nearer to life." Every philosophy tends to become incarnate in a
+system which constitutes for it a kind of body of analysis.
+
+Regarded literally, it appears to be an infinite complication, a complex
+construction with a thousand alcoves of high architecture, "in which
+measures have been taken to provide ample lodging for all problems."
+(Ibid.) Do not let us be deceived by this appearance: it signifies only
+that language is incommensurable with thought, that speech admits of
+endless multiplication in approximations incapable of exhausting their
+object. But before constructing such a body for itself, all philosophy
+is a soul, a mind, and begins with the simple unity of a generating
+intuition. Here is the fitting point at which to see its essence; this
+is what determines it much better than its conceptual expression, which
+is always contingent and incomplete. "A philosophy worthy of the name
+has never said but one thing; and that thing it has rather attempted to
+say than actually said. And it has only said one thing, because it has
+only seen one point: and that was not so much vision as contact; this
+contact supplied an impulse, this impulse a movement, and if this
+movement, which is a kind of vortex of a certain particular form, is
+only visible to our eyes by what it has picked up on its path, it is no
+less true that other dust might equally well have been raised, and that
+it would still have been the same vortex." ("Philosophic Intuition" in
+the "Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", November 1911.)
+
+Hence comes the fact that a philosophy is at bottom much more
+independent of its natal environment than one might at first suppose;
+hence also the fact that ancient philosophies, though apparently
+relative to a science which is out of date, remain always living and
+worthy of study.
+
+What, then, is the original intuition of Mr Bergson's philosophy, the
+creative intuition whence it comes forth? We cannot hesitate long: it
+is the intuition of duration. That is the perspective centre to which we
+must indefatigably return; that is the principle which we must labour
+to expose in its full light; and that is, finally, the source of light
+which will illumine us. Now a philosophy is not only an expressed
+intuition; it is further and above all an acting intuition, gradually
+determined and realised, and tested by its explanatory works; and it is
+by its fruits that we can understand and judge it. Hence the review upon
+which we are entering.
+
+
+
+
+II. Immediacy.
+
+The philosopher's first duty is in clear language to declare his
+starting-point, with what a mathematician would call the "tangent to
+the origin" of the path along which he is travelling, as afterwards
+the critic's first duty is to describe this initial attitude. I have
+therefore first of all to indicate the directing idea of the new
+philosophy. But it is not a question of extracting a quintessence, or of
+fencing the soul of doctrine within a few summary formulae. A system
+is not to be resumed in a phrase, for every proposition isolated is
+a proposition falsified. I wish merely to elucidate the methodical
+principle which inspires the beginning of Mr Bergson's philosophy.
+
+To philosophy itself falls the task and belongs the right to define
+itself gradually as it becomes constituted. On this point, an
+anticipation of experience seems hardly possible; here, as elsewhere,
+the finding of a synthetic formula is a final rather than preliminary
+question. However, we are obliged from the outset of the work to
+determine the programme of the inquiry, if only to direct our research.
+It is the same on the threshold of every science. There, it is true, the
+analogy ceases. For in any science properly speaking the determination
+of beginning consists in the indication of an object, and a matter, and
+beyond that, to each new object a new science reciprocally corresponds,
+the existence of the one involving the legitimacy of the other. But if
+the various sciences--I mean the positive sciences--divide different
+objects thus between them, philosophy cannot, in its turn, come forward
+as a particular science, having a distinct object, the designation of
+which would be sufficient to characterise and circumscribe it. Such was
+always the traditional conception: such will ours continue to be. For,
+as a matter of fact, every object has a philosophy and all matter can
+be regarded philosophically. In short, philosophy is chiefly a way of
+perceiving and thinking, an attitude and a proceeding: the peculiar and
+specific in it is more an intuition than a content, a spirit rather than
+a domain.
+
+What, then, is the characteristic function of philosophy, at least its
+initial function, that which marks its opening?
+
+To criticise the works of knowledge spontaneously effected; that is to
+say, to scrutinise their direction, reach, and conditions: that is today
+the unanimous answer of philosophers when questioned about the goal of
+their labours. In other terms, what they study is not so much such
+and such a particular "thing" as the relation of mind to each of the
+realities to be studied. Their object, if we must employ the word, is
+knowledge itself, it is the act of knowing regarded from the point of
+view of its meaning and value. Philosophy thus appears as a new "order"
+of knowledge, co-extensive with what is knowable, as a kind of knowledge
+of the second degree, in which it is less a question of learning than
+of understanding, in which we aim at progressing in depth rather than in
+extent; not effort to extend the quantity of knowledge, but reflection
+on the quality of this knowledge. Spontaneous thought--vulgar or
+scientific--is a direct, simple, and practical thought turned towards
+things and partial to useful results; seeking what is formulable rather
+than what is true, or at least so fond of formulae which can be handled,
+manipulated, or transmitted, that it is always tempted to see the truth
+in them; a thought which, moreover, sets out from more or less unguarded
+postulates, abandons itself to the motive impulses of habits contracted,
+and goes straight on indefinitely without self-examination. Philosophy,
+on the contrary, desires to be thought about thought, thought retracing
+its life and work, knowledge labouring to know itself, fact which
+aspires to fact about itself, mental effort to become free, to become
+entirely transparent and luminous in its own eyes, and, if need be, to
+effect self-reform by dissipating its natural illusions. What we have
+before our eyes then are the initial postulates themselves, the
+first spontaneous thoughts, the obscure origins of reason; and we are
+proceeding towards a point of departure rather than arrival.
+
+The new philosophy does not refuse to carry out this first critical
+task; but it carries it out in its own way after determining more
+precisely the real conditions of the problem. At the hour when
+methodical research begins, the philosopher's mind is not clean-swept;
+and it would be chimerical to wish to place oneself from the beginning,
+by some act of transcendence, outside common thought. This thought
+cannot be inspected and judged from outside. It constitutes, whether we
+wish it or no, the sole concrete and positive point of departure. Let us
+add that common-sense constitutes also our sole point of insertion into
+reality. It can only then be a question of purifying it, not in any way
+of replacing it. But we must distinguish in it what is pure fact, and
+what is ulterior arrangement, in order to see what are the problems
+which really are presented, and what are, on the contrary, the false
+problems, the illusory problems, those which relate only to our
+artifices of language.
+
+The search for facts is then the first necessary moment of all
+philosophy.
+
+But common thought comes before us at the outset as a piece of very
+composite alluvial ground. It is a beginning of positive science, and
+also a residue of all philosophical opinions which have had some
+vogue. That, however, is not its primary basis. Primum vivere, deinde
+philosophari, says the proverb. In certain respects, "speculation is a
+luxury, whilst action is a necessity." ("Creative Evolution", page 47.)
+But "life requires us to apprehend things in the relation they have
+to our needs." ("Laughter", page 154.) Hence comes the fundamental
+utilitarianism of common-sense. Therefore if we wish to define it in
+itself and for itself, and no longer as a first approximation of
+such and such a system of metaphysics, it appears to us no longer as
+rudimentary science and philosophy, but as an organisation of thought in
+view of practical life. Thus it is that outside all speculative opinion
+it is effectively lived by all. Its proper language, we may say, is the
+language of customary perception and mechanical fabrication, therefore
+a language relative to action, made to express action, modelled upon
+action, translating things by the relations they maintain to our action;
+I mean our corporal and synthetic action, which very evidently implies
+thought, since it is a question of the action of a reasonable being, but
+which thus contains a thought which is itself eminently practical.
+
+However, we are here regarding common-sense considered as a source of
+fact. Its utilitarianism then becomes a kind of spontaneous metaphysics
+from which we must detach ourselves. But is it not the very task of
+positive science to execute this work of purification? Nothing of the
+kind, despite appearances and despite intentions. Let us examine more
+closely. The general categories of common thought, according to Mr
+Bergson, ("Philosophic Intuition" in the "Metaphysical and Moral
+Review", November 1911, page 825.) remain those of science; the main
+roads traced by our senses through the continuity of reality are still
+those along which science will pass; perception is an infant science
+and science an adult perception; so much so that customary knowledge and
+scientific knowledge, both of them destined to prepare our action upon
+things, are of necessity two visions of the same kind, though of unequal
+precision and reach. It does not follow that science does not practise
+a certain disinterestedness as far as immediate mechanical utility is
+concerned; it does not follow that it has no value as knowledge. But it
+does not set itself genuinely free from the habits contracted in common
+experience, and to inform its research it preserves the postulates of
+common-sense; so that it always grasps things by their "actable" side,
+by their point of contact with our faculty for action, under the forms
+by which we handle them conceptually or practically, and all it attains
+of reality is that by which nature is a possible object of language or
+industry.
+
+Let us turn now towards another aspect of natural thought, to
+discover in it the germ of the necessary criticism. By the side of
+"common-sense," which is the first rough-draft of positive science,
+there is "good sense," which differs from it profoundly, and marks the
+beginning of what we shall later on call philosophic intuition. (Cf. an
+address on "Good Sense and Classical Studies", delivered by Mr Bergson
+at the Concours general prize distribution, 30th July 1895.) It is a
+sense of what is real, concrete, original, living, an art of equilibrium
+and precision, a fine touch for complexities, continually feeling like
+the antennae of some insects. It contains a certain distrust of the
+logical faculty in respect of itself; it wages incessant war upon
+intellectual automatism, upon ready-made ideas and linear deduction;
+above all, it is anxious to locate and to weigh, without any oversights;
+it arrests the development of every principle and every method at the
+precise point where too brutal an application would offend the delicacy
+of reality; at every moment it collects the whole of our experience and
+organises it in view of the present. It is, in a word, thought which
+keeps its freedom, activity which remains awake, suppleness of
+attitude, attention to life, an ever-renewed adjustment to suit ever-new
+situations.
+
+Its revealing virtue is derived from this moving contact with fact, and
+this living effort of sympathy. This is what we must tend to transpose
+from the practical to the speculative order.
+
+What, then, will be for us the beginning of philosophy? After taking
+cognisance of common utilitarianism, and to emerge from the relativity
+in which it buries us, we seek a departure-point, a criterion, something
+which decides the raising of inquiry. Where are we to find such a
+principle, except in the very action of thought; I mean, this time, its
+action of profound life independent of all practical aim? We shall thus
+only be imitating the example of Descartes when solving the problem
+of temporary doubt. What we shall term return to the immediate,
+the primitive, the pure fact, will be the taking of each perception
+considered as an act lived, a coloured moment of the Cogito, and this
+will be for us a criterion and departure-point.
+
+Let us specify this point. Immediate data or primitive data or pure data
+are apprehended by us under forms of disinterested action; I mean that
+they are first of all lived rather than conceived, that before becoming
+material for science, they appear as moments of life; in brief, that
+perception of them precedes their use.
+
+It is at this stage previous to language that we are by these pure data
+in intimate communion with reality itself, and the whole of our critical
+task is to return to them through a regressive analysis, the goal
+of which is gradually to make our clear intelligence equal to our
+primordial intuition. The latter already constitutes a thought, a
+preconceptual thought which is the intrinsic light of action, which is
+action itself so far as it is luminous. Thus there is no question here
+of restricting in any degree the part played by thought, but only of
+distinguishing between the perceptive and theoretic functions of mind.
+
+What is "the image" of which Mr Bergson speaks at the beginning of
+"Matter and Mind" except, when grasped in its first movement, the flash
+of conscious existence "in which the act of knowledge coincides with
+the generating act of reality"? ("Report of the French Philosophical
+Society", philosophical vocabulary, article "Immediate".)
+
+Let us forget all philosophical controversies about realism and
+idealism; let us try to reconstruct for ourselves a simplicity, a
+virginal and candid glance, freeing us from the habits contracted in
+the course of practical life. These then are our "images": not things
+presented externally, nor states felt internally, not portraits of
+exterior beings nor projections of internal moods, but appearances, in
+the etymological sense of the word, appearances lived simply, without
+our being distinguished from them, as yet neither subjective nor
+objective, marking a moment of consciousness previous to the work of
+reflection, from which proceeds the duality of subject and object. And
+such also, in every order, appear the "immediate feelings"; as action in
+birth, previous to language. (Cf. "Matter and Memory", Foreword to the
+7th edition.)
+
+Why depart from the immediate thus conceived as action and life? Because
+it is quite impossible to do otherwise, for every initial fact can
+be only such a pulsation of consciousness in its lived act, and the
+fundamental and primitive direction of the least word, were it in an
+enunciation of a problem or a doubt, can only be such a direction of
+life and action. And we must certainly accord to this immediacy a value
+of absolute knowledge, since it realises the coincidence of being and
+knowledge.
+
+But let us not think that the perception of immediacy is simple passive
+perception, that it is sufficient to open our eyes to obtain it, today
+when our utilitarian education is completed and has passed into the
+state of habit. There is a difference between common experience and
+the initial action of life; the first is a practical limitation of
+the second. Hence it follows that a previous criticism is necessary to
+return from one to the other, a criticism always in activity, always
+open as a way of progressive investigation, always ready for the
+reiteration and the renewal of effort.
+
+In this task of purification there is doubtless always to be feared an
+illusion of remaining in the primitive stage. By what criteria, by what
+signs can we recognise that we have touched the goal? Pure fact is
+shown to be such on the one hand because it remains independent of all
+theoretical symbolism, because the critique of language allows it to
+exist thus as an indissoluble residue, because we are unable not to
+"live" it, even when we free ourselves from the anxiety of utility; on
+the other hand, because it dominates all systems, and imposes itself
+equally upon them all as the common source from which they derive by
+diverging analyses, and in which they become reconciled. Assuredly,
+to attain it, to extricate it, we must appeal to the revelations of
+science, to the exercise of deliberate thought. But this employment of
+analysis against analysis does not in any way constitute a circle, for
+it tends only to destroy prejudices which have become unconscious: it is
+a simple artifice destined to break off habits and to scatter illusions
+by changing the points of view. Once set free, once again become capable
+of direct and simple view, what we accept as fact is what bears no trace
+of synthetic elaboration. It is true that here a last objection presents
+itself: how shall we think this limit, purely given, to any degree at
+all in fact, if it must precede all language?
+
+The answer is easy. Why speak thus of limit? This word has two senses:
+at one time it designates a last term in a series of approximations,
+and at another a certain internal character of convergence, a certain
+quality of progression.
+
+Now, it is the second sense only which suits the case before us.
+Immediacy contains no matter statically defined, and no thing. The
+notion of fact is quite relative. What is fact in one case may become
+construction in another. For example, the percepts of common experience
+are facts for the physicist, and constructions for the philosopher; the
+same applies to a table of numerical results, for the scholar who is
+trying to establish a theory, or for the observer and the psychologist.
+We may then conceive a series in which each term is fact in relation
+to those which follow it, and constructed in relation to those which
+precede it. The expression "primitive fact" then determines not so
+much a final object as a direction of thought, a movement of critical
+retrogression, a journey from the most to the least elaborate, and
+the "contact with pure immediacy" is only the effort, more and more
+prolonged, to convert the elements of experience into real and profound
+action.
+
+
+
+
+III. Theory of Perception.
+
+Of what the work of return to immediacy consists, and how the intuition
+which it calls up reveals absolute fact, we shall see by an example, if
+we study more closely a capital point of Mr Bergson's philosophy, the
+theory of external perception.
+
+If the act of perceiving realises the lived communion of the subject
+and object in the image, we must admit that here we have the perfect
+knowledge which we wish to obtain always: we resign ourselves to
+conception only for want of perception, and our ideal is to convert all
+conception into perception. Doubtless we might define philosophy by this
+same ideal, as an effort to expand our perceptive power until we render
+it capable of grasping all the wealth and all the depth of reality at a
+single glance. Too true it is that such an ideal remains inaccessible to
+us. Something, however, is given us already in aesthetic intuition. Mr
+Bergson has pointed it out in some admirable pages, ("Laughter",
+pages 153-161.) and has explained to us also how philosophy pursues an
+analogous end. (First lecture on "The Perception of Change", delivered
+at Oxford, 26th May 1911.)
+
+But philosophy must be conceived as an art implying science and
+criticism, all experience and all reason. It is when we look at
+metaphysics in this way that they become a positive order of veritable
+knowledge. Kant has conclusively established that what lies beyond
+language can only be attained by direct vision, not by dialectic
+progress. His mistake was that he afterwards believed such a vision for
+ever impossible; and whence did this mistake arise, if not from the fact
+that, for his new vision, he exacted intuitive faculties quite different
+from those at man's disposal. Here again the artist will be our
+example and model. He appeals to no transcendent sense, but detaches
+common-sense from its utilitarian prejudices. Let us do the same: we
+shall obtain a similar result without lying ourselves open to Kant's
+objections. This work is everywhere possible, and it is, par excellence,
+the work of philosophy: let us try then to sketch it in relation to the
+perception of matter.
+
+We must distinguish two senses of the word "perception." This word means
+first of all simple apprehension of immediacy, grasp of primitive fact.
+When we use it in this sense, we will agree to say pure perception.
+It is perhaps in place to see in it nothing but a limit which concrete
+experience never presents unmixed, a direction of research rather than
+the possession of a thing.
+
+However that may be, the first sense is the fundamental sense, and what
+it designates must be at the root of all ordinary perception; I mean, of
+every mental operation which results in the construction of a percept:
+a term formed by analogy with concept, representing the result of a
+complex work of analysis and synthesis, with judgment from externals.
+We live the images in an act of pure perception, whilst the objects of
+ordinary perception are, for example, the bodies of which we speak in
+common language.
+
+With regard to the relation of the two senses which we have just
+distinguished, common opinion seems very precise. It might be thus
+resumed: at the point of departure we have simple sensations, similar to
+qualitative atoms (this is the part of pure perception), and afterwards
+their arrangement into connected systems, which are percepts.
+
+But criticism does not authorise this manner of looking at it. Nowhere
+does knowledge begin by separate elements. Such elements are always a
+product of analysis. So there is a problem to solve to regain the
+basis of pure perception which is hidden and obscured by our familiar
+percepts.
+
+Do not suppose that the solution of this problem is easy. One method
+only is of any use: to plunge into reality, to become immersed in it, in
+a long-pursued effort to assimilate all the records of common-sense and
+positive science. "For we do not obtain an intuition of reality, that is
+to say, an intellectual sympathy with its inmost content, unless we
+have gained its confidence by long companionship with its superficial
+manifestations. And it is not a question merely of assimilating the
+leading facts; we must accumulate and melt them down into such an
+enormous mass that we are sure, in this fusion, of neutralising in one
+another all the preconceived and premature ideas which observers may
+have unconsciously allowed to form the sediment of their observations.
+Thus, and only thus, is crude materiality to be disengaged from known
+facts." ("Introduction to Metaphysics" in the "Metaphysical and Moral
+Review", January 1903. For the correct interpretation of this passage
+("intellectual sympathy") it must not be forgotten that before "Creative
+Evolution", Mr Bergson employed the word "intelligence" in a wider
+acceptation, more akin to that commonly received.)
+
+A directing principle controls this work and reintroduces order and
+convergence, after dispensing with them at the outset; viz. that,
+contrary to common opinion, perception as practised in the course of
+daily life, "natural" perception does not aim at a goal of disinterested
+knowledge, but one of practical utility, or rather, if it is knowledge,
+it is only knowledge elaborated in view of action and speech.
+
+Need we repeat here the proofs by which we have already established in
+the most positive manner that such is really the meaning of ordinary
+perception, the underlying reason which causes it to take the place of
+pure perception? We perceive by habit only what is useful to us, what
+interests us practically; very often, too, we think we are perceiving
+when we are merely inferring, as for example when we seem to see a
+distance in depth, a succession of planes, of which in reality we judge
+by differences of colouring or relief.
+
+Our senses supplement one another. A slow education has gradually taught
+us to co-ordinate their impressions, especially those of touch to those
+of vision. (H. Bergson, "Note on the Psychological Origins of Our Belief
+in the Law of Causality". Vol. i. of the "Library of the International
+Philosophical Congress", 1900.)
+
+Theoretical forms come between nature and us: a veil of symbols envelops
+reality; thus, finally, we no longer see things themselves, we are
+content to read the labels on them.
+
+Moreover, our perception appears to analysis completely saturated with
+memories, and that in view of our practical insertion in the present. I
+will not come back to this point which has been so lucidly explained
+by Mr Bergson in a lecture on "Dream" ("Report of the International
+Psychological Institute", May 1901.) and an article on "Intellectual
+Effort", ("Philosophical Review", January 1902.) the reading of which
+cannot be too strongly recommended as an introduction to the first
+chapter of "Matter and Memory", in which further arguments are to be
+found. I will only add one remark, following Mr Bergson, as always:
+perception is not simply contemplation, but consciousness of an original
+visual emotion combined with a complete group of actions in embryo,
+gestures in outline, and the graze of movement within, by which we
+prepare to grasp the object, describe its lines, test its functions,
+sound it, move it, and handle it in a thousand ways. (This is attested
+by the facts of apraxia or psychic blindness. Cf. "Matter and Memory",
+chapter ii.)
+
+From the preceding observations springs the utilitarian and practical
+nature of common perception. Let us attempt now to see of what the
+elaboration which it makes reality undergo consists. This time I am
+summing up the fourth chapter of "Matter and Memory". First of all, we
+choose between the images, emphasising the strong, extinguishing
+the weak, although both have, a priori, the same interest for pure
+knowledge; we make this choice above all by according preference to
+impressions of touch, which are the most useful from the practical point
+of view. This selection determines the parcelling up of matter into
+independent bodies, and the artificial character of our proceeding is
+thus made plain. Does not science, indeed, conclude in the same way,
+showing us--as soon as she frees herself even to a small extent from
+common-sense--full continuity re-established by "moving strata," and all
+bodies resolved into stationary waves and knots of intersecting fluxes?
+Already, then, we shall be nearer pure perception if we cease to
+consider anything but the perceptible stuff in which numerically
+distinct percepts are cut. Even there, however, a utilitarian division
+continues. Our senses are instruments of abstraction, each of them
+discerning a possible path of action. We may say that corporal life
+functions in the manner of an absorbing milieu, which determines the
+disconnected scale of simple qualities by extinguishing most of the
+perceptible radiations. In short, the scale of sensations, with its
+numerical aspect, is nothing but the spectrum of our practical activity.
+Commonly we perceive only averages and wholes, which we contract into
+distinct "qualities". Let us disengage from this rhythm what is peculiar
+to ourselves.
+
+Above all, let us strive to disengage ourselves from homogeneous space,
+this substratum of fixity, this arbitrary scheme of measurement and
+division, which, to our greater advantage, subtends the natural,
+qualitative, and undivided extension of images. (We usually represent
+homogeneous space as previous to the heterogeneous extension of images:
+as a kind of empty room which we furnish with percepts. We must reverse
+this order, and conceive, on the contrary, that extension precedes
+space.) And we shall finally have pure perception in so far as it is
+accessible to us.
+
+There is no disputing the absolute value of this pure perception. The
+impotence of speculative reason, as demonstrated by Kant, is perhaps,
+at bottom, only the impotence of an intelligence in bondage to certain
+necessities of the corporal life, and exercised upon a matter which it
+has had to disorganise for the satisfaction of our needs. Our knowledge
+of things is then no longer relative to the fundamental structure of our
+mind, but only to its superficial and acquired habits, to the contingent
+form which it takes on from our corporal functions and our lower needs.
+
+The relativity of knowledge is therefore not final. In unmaking what our
+needs have made we re-establish intuition in its original purity, and
+resume contact with reality. ("Matter and Memory", page 203.)
+
+That is how things are really presented. Here we are confronted by the
+moving continuity of images. Pure perception is complete perception.
+From it we pass to ordinary perception by diminution, throwing shadows
+here and there: the reality perceived by common-sense is nothing
+else actually than universal interaction rendered visible by its very
+interruption at certain points.
+
+Whence we have this double conclusion already formulated higher up: the
+relation of perception to matter is that of the part to the whole, and
+our consciousness is rather limited than relative. It must be stated
+that primarily we perceive things in themselves, not in us; the
+subjectivity of our current perception comes from our work of outlining
+it in the bosom of reality, but the root of pure perception plunges into
+full objectivity. If, at each point of matter, we were to succeed in
+possessing the stream of total interaction of which it marks a wave, and
+if we were to succeed in seeing the multiplicity of these points as a
+qualitative heterogeneous flux without number or severance, we should
+coincide with reality itself. It is true that such an ideal, while
+inaccessible on the one hand, would not succeed on the other without
+risk to knowledge; in fact, says Mr Bergson, ("Matter and Memory", page
+38.) "to perceive all the influences of all the points of all bodies
+would be to descend to the state of material object."
+
+But a solution of this double difficulty remains possible, a dynamic
+and approximate solution, which consists in looking for the absolute
+intuition of matter in such a mobilisation of our perspective faculties
+that we become capable of following, according to the circumstances,
+all the paths of virtual perception of which the common anxiety for the
+practical has made us choose one only, and capable of realising all the
+infinitely different modes of qualification and discernment.
+
+But we have still to see how this "complete experience" can be
+practically thought.
+
+
+
+
+IV. Critique of Language.
+
+The perception of reality does not obtain the full value of knowledge,
+except when once socialised, once made the common property of men, and
+thereby also tested and verified.
+
+There is one means only of doing that; viz. to analyse it into
+manageable and portable concepts. By language I mean the product of this
+conceptualisation. Thus language is necessary; for we must always speak,
+were it only to utter the impotence of words. Not less necessary is a
+critique of spontaneous language, of the laws which govern it, of the
+postulates which it embraces, of the methods which convey its implicit
+doctrines. Synthetic forms are actually theories already; they effect
+an adaptation of reality to the demands of practical use. If it is
+impossible to escape them, it is at least fitting not to employ them
+except with due knowledge, and when properly warned against the illusion
+of the false problems which they might arouse.
+
+Let us first of all consider thought in itself, in its concrete life.
+What are the principal characteristics, the essential steps? We readily
+say, analysis and synthesis.
+
+Nothing can be known except in contrast, correlation, or negation
+of another thing; and the act of knowledge, considered in itself,
+is unification. Thus number appears as a fundamental category, as an
+absolute condition of intelligibility; some go so far as to regard
+atomism as a necessary method. But that is inexact. No doubt the use
+of number and the resulting atomism are imposed by definition, we might
+say, on the thought which proceeds by conceptual analysis, and then by
+unifying construction; that is to say, on synthetic thought. But, in
+greater depth, thought is dynamic continuity and duration. Its essential
+work does not consist in discerning and afterwards in assembling
+ready-made elements. Let us see in it rather a kind of creative
+maturation, and let us attempt to grasp the nature of this causal
+activity. (H. Bergson, "Intellectual Effort" in the "Philosophical
+Review", January 1902.)
+
+The act of thought is always a complex play of moving representations,
+an evolution of life in which incessant inner reactions occur. That is
+to say, it is movement. But there are several planes of thought, from
+intuition to language, and we must distinguish between the thought which
+moves on the surface among terms displayed on a single plane, and the
+thought with goes deeper and deeper from one plane to another.
+
+We do not think solely by concepts or images; we think, first of all,
+according to Mr Bergson's expression, by dynamic schemes. What is a
+dynamic scheme? It is motive rather than representative, inexpressible
+in itself, but a source of language containing not so much the images
+or concepts in which it will develop as the indication of the path to be
+followed in order to obtain them. It is not so much system as movement,
+progress, genesis; it does not mark the gaze directed upon the various
+points of one plane of deliberate contemplation so much as an effort to
+pass through successive planes of thought in a direction leading from
+intuition to analysis. We might define it by its function of calling up
+images and concepts, representations which, for one and the same
+scheme, are neither strictly determined nor anything in particular in
+themselves, concurrent representations which have in common one and the
+same logical power.
+
+The representations called up form a body to the scheme, and the
+relation of the scheme to the concepts and images which it calls up
+resembles, mutatis mutandis, the relation pointed out by Mr Bergson
+between an idea and its basis in the brain. In short, it is the very act
+of creative thought which the dynamic scheme interprets, the act not yet
+fixed in "results."
+
+Nothing is easier than to illustrate the existence of this scheme.
+Let us merely remark a few facts of current observation. Recall, for
+example, the suggestive anxiety we experience when we seek to remember
+a name; the precise syllables of the name still escape us, but we feel
+them approaching, and already we possess something of them, since we
+immediately reject those which do not answer to a certain direction of
+expectancy; and by endeavouring to secure a more intimate feeling of
+this direction we suddenly arouse the desired recollection.
+
+In the same way, what does it mean to have the sense of a complex
+situation in active life, if not that we perceive it, not as a static
+group of explicit details, but as a meeting of powers allied or hostile,
+convergent or divergent, directed towards this or that, of which the
+aggregate whole tends of itself to awaken in us the initial reactions
+which analyse it?
+
+In the same way again, how do we learn, how can we assimilate a
+vast system of conceits or images? Our task is not to concentrate an
+enumerative attention on each individual factor; we should never get
+away from them, the weight would be too heavy.
+
+What we entrust to memory is really a dynamic scheme permitting us to
+"regain" what we should not have succeeded in "retaining." In reality
+our only "knowledge" is through such a scheme, which contains in the
+state of potential implication an inexhaustible multiplicity ready to be
+developed in actual representations.
+
+How, finally, is any discovery made? Finding is solving a problem; and
+to solve a problem we must always begin by supposing it solved. But of
+what does such a hypothesis consist?
+
+It is not an anticipated view of the solution, for then all would be
+at an end; nor is it a simple formula putting in the present indicative
+what the enunciation expressed in the future or the imperative, for then
+nothing would be begun. It is exactly a dynamic scheme; that is to say,
+a method in the state of directed tension; and often, the discovery
+once realised as theory or system, capable of unending developments
+and resurrections, remains by the best of itself a method and a dynamic
+scheme.
+
+But one last example will perhaps reveal the truth still more. "Anyone
+who has attempted literary composition knows well that when the subject
+has been long studied, all the documents collected, all the notes taken,
+we need, to embark on the actual work of composition, something more, an
+effort, often very painful, to place oneself suddenly in the very heart
+of the subject, and to seek as deep down as possible an impulse to which
+afterwards we shall only have to let ourselves go. This impulse,
+once received, projects the mind on a road where it finds both the
+information which it had collected and a thousand other details as well;
+it develops and analyses itself in terms, the enumeration of which would
+have no end; the further we advance, the more we discover; we shall
+never succeed in saying everything; and yet, if we turn sharply round
+towards the impulse we feel behind ourselves, to grasp it, it escapes;
+for it was not a thing but a direction of movement, and though
+indefinitely extensible, it is simplicity itself." (H. Bergson,
+"Metaphysical and Moral Review", January 1903. The whole critique of
+language is implicitly contained in this "Introduction to Metaphysics".)
+
+The thought, then, which proceeds from one representation to another in
+one and the same plane is one kind; that which follows one and the same
+conceptual direction through descending planes is another. Creative and
+fertile thought is the thought which adopts the second kind of work. The
+ideal is a continual oscillation from one plane to the other, a restless
+alternative of intuitive concentration and conceptual expansion. But
+our idleness takes exception to this, for the feeling of effort appears
+precisely in the traject from the dynamic scheme to the images and
+concepts, in the passing from one plane of thought to another.
+
+Thus the natural tendency is to remain in the last of these planes, that
+of language. We know what dangers threaten us there.
+
+Suppose we have some idea or other and the word representing it. Do not
+suppose that to this word there is one corresponding sense only, nor
+even a finished group of various distinct and rigorously separable
+senses. On the contrary, there is a whole scale corresponding, a
+complete continuous spectrum of unstable meanings which tend unceasingly
+to resolve into one another. Dictionaries attempt to illuminate them.
+The task is impossible. They co-ordinate a few guiding marks; but who
+shall say what infinite transitions underlie them?
+
+A word designates rather a current of thought than one or several halts
+on a logical path. Here again a dynamic continuity exists previous
+to the parcelling out of the acceptations. What, then, should be the
+attitude of the mind?
+
+A supple moving attitude more attentive to the curve of change than to
+the possible halting-points along the road. But this is not the case at
+all; the effort would be too great, and what happens, on the contrary,
+is this. For the spectrum a chromatic scale of uniform tints is very
+quickly substituted. This is in itself an undesirable simplification,
+for it is impossible to reconstitute the infinity of real shades by
+combinations of fundamental colours each representing the homogeneous
+shore, which each region of the spectrum finally becomes.
+
+However cleverly we proportion these averages, we get, at most, some
+vulgar counterfeit: orange, for example, is not a mixture of yellow
+and red, although this mixture may recall to those who have known it
+elsewhere the simple and original sensation of orange. Again, a second
+simplification, still more undesirable, succeeds the first.
+
+There are no longer any colours at all; black lines serve as
+guide-marks. We are therefore with pure concepts decidedly in full
+symbolism. And it is with symbols that we shall henceforward be trying
+to reconstruct reality.
+
+I need not go back to the general characteristics or the inconveniences
+of this method. Concepts resemble photographic views; concrete thickness
+escapes them. However exact, varied, or numerous we suppose them, they
+can certainly recall their object, but not reveal it to any one who had
+not had any direct intuition of it. Nothing is easier than to trace the
+plan of a body in four dimensions; all the same, this drawing does not
+admit "visualisation in space" as is the case with ordinary bodies,
+for want of a previous intuition which it would awaken: thus it is with
+concepts in relation to reality. Like photographs and like plans, they
+are extracted from reality, but we are not able to say that they were
+contained in it; and many of them besides are not so much as extracts;
+they are simple systematised notes, in fact, notes made upon notes. In
+other terms, concepts do not represent pieces, parts, or elements of
+reality. Literally they are nothing but simple symbolic notations. To
+wish to make integral factors of them would be as strange an illusion as
+that of seeing in the co-ordinates of a geometric point the constitutive
+essence of that point.
+
+We do not make things with symbols, any more than we should reconstruct
+a picture with the qualifications which classify it.
+
+Whence, then, comes the natural inclination of thought towards the
+concept? From the fact that thought delights in artifices which
+facilitate analysis and language.
+
+The first of these artifices is that from which results the possibility
+of decomposition or recomposition according to arbitrary laws. For
+that we need a previous substitution of symbols for things. Nothing
+demonstrates this better than the celebrated arguments which we owe to
+Zeno of Elea. Mr Bergson returns to the discussion of them over and over
+again. ("Essay on the Immediate Data", pages 85-86; "Matter and Memory",
+pages 211-213, "Creative Evolution", pages 333-337.)
+
+The nerve of the reasoning there consists in the evident absurdity
+there would be in conceiving an inexhaustible exhausted, an unachievable
+achieved; in short, a total actually completed, and yet obtained by the
+successive addition of an infinite number of terms.
+
+But the question is to know whether a movement can be considered as a
+numerical multiplicity. Virtual divisibility there is, no doubt, but not
+actual division; divisibility is indefinite, whereas an actual division,
+if it respects the inner articulations of reality, is bound to halt at a
+limited number of phases.
+
+What we divide and measure is the track of the movement once
+accomplished, not the movement itself: it is the trajectory, not the
+traject. In the trajectory we can count endless positions; that is to
+say, possible halts. Let us not suppose that the moving body meets these
+elements all ready-marked. Hence what the Eleatic dialectic illustrates
+is a case of incommensurability; the radical inability of analysis
+to end a certain task; our powerlessness to explain the fact of
+the transit, if we apply to it such and such modes of numerical
+decomposition or recomposition, which are valid only for space; the
+impossibility of conceiving becoming as susceptible of being cut up into
+arbitrary segments, and afterwards reconstructed by summing of terms
+according to some law or other; in short, it is the nature of movement,
+which is without division, number, or concept.
+
+But thought delights in analyses regulated by the sole consideration
+of easy language; hence its tendency to an arithmetic and geometry of
+concepts, in spite of the disastrous consequences; and thus the Eleatic
+paradox is no less instructive in its specious character than in the
+solution which it embodies.
+
+At bottom, natural thought, I mean thought which abandons itself to
+its double inclination of synthetic idleness and useful industry, is
+a thought haunted by anxieties of the operating manual, anxieties of
+fabrication.
+
+What does it care about the fluxes of reality and dynamic depths? It is
+only interested in the outcrops scattered here and there over the firm
+soil of the practical, and it solidifies "terms" like stakes plunged in
+a moving ground. Hence comes the configuration of its spontaneous logic
+to a geometry of solids, and hence come concepts, the instantaneous
+moments taken in transitions.
+
+Scientific thought, again, preserves the same habits and the same
+preferences. It seeks only what repeats, what can be counted.
+Everywhere, when it theorises, it tends to establish static relations
+between composing unities which form a homogeneous and disconnected
+multiplicity.
+
+Its very instruments bias it in that direction. The apparatus of the
+laboratory really grasps nothing but arrangement and coincidence; in a
+word, states not transitions. Even in cases of contrary appearance, for
+example, when we determine a weight by observing the oscillation of a
+balance and not its rest, we are interested in regular recurrence, in
+a symmetry, in something therefore which is of the nature of an
+equilibrium and a fixity all the same. The reason of it is that science,
+like common-sense, although in a manner a little different, aims only in
+actual fact at obtaining finished and workable results.
+
+Let us imagine reality under the figure of a curve, a rhythmic
+succession of phases of which our concepts mark so many tangents. There
+is contact at one point, but at one point only. Thus our logic is valid
+as infinitesimal analysis, just as the geometry of the straight line
+allows us to define each state of curve. It is thus, for example,
+that vitality maintains a relation of momentary tangency to the
+physico-chemical structure. If we study this relation and analogous
+relations, this fact remains indisputably legitimate. Let us not think,
+however, that such a study, even when repeated in as many points as we
+wish, can ever suffice.
+
+We must afterwards by genuine integration attain moving continuity. That
+is exactly the task represented by the return to intuition, with its
+proper instrument, the dynamic scheme. From this tangential point of
+view we try to grasp the genesis of the curve as envelope, or rather,
+and better still, the birth of successive tangents as instantaneous
+directions. Speaking non-metaphorically, we cling to genetic methods
+of conceptualisation and proceed from the generating principle to its
+conceptual derivatives.
+
+But our thought finds it very difficult to sustain such an effort long.
+It is partial to rectilineal deduction, actual becoming horrifies it. It
+desires immediately to find "things" sharply determined and very
+clear. That is why immediately a tangent is constructed, it follows
+its movement in a straight line to infinity. Thus are produced
+limit-concepts, the ultimate terms, the atoms of language. As a rule
+they go in pairs, in antithetic couples, every analysis being dichotomy,
+since the discernment of one path of abstraction determines in contrast,
+as a complementary remainder, the opposite path of direction. Hence,
+according to the selection effected among concepts, and the relative
+weight which is attributed to them, we get the antinomies between which
+a philosophy of analysis must for ever remain oscillating and torn in
+sunder. Hence comes the parcelling up of metaphysics into systems, and
+its appearance of regulated play "between antagonistic schools which get
+up on the stage together, each to win applause in turn." (H. Bergson,
+"Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)
+
+The method followed to find a genuine solution must be inverse; not
+dialectic combination of pre-existing concepts, but, setting out from a
+direct and really lived intuition, a descent to ever new concepts along
+dynamic schemes which remain open. From the same intuition spring many
+concepts: "As the wind which rushes into the crossroads divides into
+diverging currents of air, which are all only one and the same gust."
+("Creative Evolution", page 55.)
+
+The antinomies are resolved genetically, whilst in the plane of language
+they remain irreducible. With a heterogeneity of shades, when we mix the
+tints and neutralise them by one another, we easily create homogeneity;
+but take the result of this work, that is to say, the average final
+colour, and it will be impossible to reconstitute the wealth of the
+original.
+
+Do you desire a precise example of the work we must accomplish? Take
+that of change; (Cf. two lectures delivered by Mr Bergson at Oxford on
+"The Perception of Change", 26th and 27th May 1911.) no other is more
+significant or clearer. It shows us two necessary movements in the
+reform of our habits of imagination or conception.
+
+Let us try first of all to familiarise ourselves with the images which
+show us the fixity deriving from becoming.
+
+Two colliding waves, two rollers meeting, typify rest by extinction and
+interference. With the movement of a stone, and the fluidity of running
+water, we form the instantaneous position of a ricochet. The very
+movement of the stone, seen in the successive positions of the tangent
+to the trajectory, is stationary to our view.
+
+What is dynamic stability, except non-variation arising from variation
+itself? Equilibrium is produced from speed. A man running solidifies
+the moving ground. In short, two moving bodies regulated by each other
+become fixed in relation to each other.
+
+After this, let us try to perceive change in itself, and then represent
+it to ourselves according to its specific and original nature.
+
+The common conception needs reform on two principal points:
+
+(1) All change is revealed in the light of immediate intuition, not as
+a numerical series of states, but a rhythm of phases, each of which
+constitutes an indivisible act, in such a way that each change has its
+natural inner articulations, forbidding us to break it up according to
+arbitrary laws, like a homogeneous length.
+
+(2) Change is self-sufficient; it has no need of a support, a moving
+body, a "thing" in motion. There is no vehicle, no substance, no spatial
+receptacle, resembling a theatre-scene, no material dummy successively
+draped in coloured stuffs; on the contrary, it is the body or the atom
+which should be subordinately defined as symbols of completed becoming.
+
+Of movement thus conceived, indivisible and substantial, what better
+image can we have than a musical evolution, a phrase in melody? That
+is how we must work to conceive reality. If such a conception at first
+appears obscure, let us credit experience, for ideas are gradually
+illuminated by the very use we make of them, "the clarity of a concept
+being hardly anything, at bottom, but the assurance once obtained
+that we can handle it profitably." (H. Bergson, "Introduction to
+Metaphysics".)
+
+If we require to reach a conception of this kind with regard to change,
+the Eleatic dialectic is there to establish it beyond dispute, and
+positive science comes to the same conclusion, since it shows us
+everywhere nothing but movements placed upon movements, never fixed
+"things," except as temporary symbols of what we leave at a given moment
+outside the field of study.
+
+In any case, the difficulty of such a conception need not stop us; it is
+little more than a difficulty of the imaginative order. And as for the
+conception itself, or rather the corresponding intuition, it will share
+the fate of all its predecessors: to our contemporaries it will be a
+scandal, a century later a stroke of genius, after some centuries common
+evidence, and finally an instinctive axiom.
+
+
+
+
+V. The Problem of Consciousness. Duration and Liberty.
+
+Armed with the method we have just described, Mr Bergson turned first of
+all toward the problem of the ego: taking up his position in the centre
+of mind, he has attempted to establish its independent reality by
+examining its profound nature.
+
+The first chapter of the "Essay on the Immediate Data" contains a
+decisive criticism of the conceptions which claim to introduce number
+and measure into the domain of the facts of consciousness.
+
+Not that it is our business to reject as false the notion of
+psychological intensity; but this notion demands interpretation, and the
+least that we can say against the attempt to turn it into a notion of
+size is that in doing so we are misunderstanding the specific character
+of the object studied. The same reproach must be levelled against
+association of ideas, the system of mechanical psychology of which the
+type is presented us by Taine and Stuart Mill. Already in chapters ii.
+and iii. of the "Essay", and again all through "Matter and Memory", the
+system is riddled with objections, each of which would be sufficient to
+show its radical flaw. All the aspects, all the phenomena of mental life
+come up for successive review. In respect of each of them we have
+an illustration of the insufficiency of the atomism which seeks to
+recompose the soul with fixed elements, by a massing of units exterior
+to one another, everywhere and always the same: this is a grammatical
+philosophy which believes reality to be composed of parts which admit
+of number just as language is made of words placed side by side; it is a
+materialist philosophy which improperly transfers the proceedings of the
+physical sciences to the sciences of the inner life.
+
+On the contrary, we must represent the state of consciousness to
+ourselves as variable according to the whole of which it forms a part.
+Here and there, although it always bears the same name, it is no longer
+the same thing. "The more the ego becomes itself again, the more also
+do its states of consciousness, instead of being in juxtaposition,
+penetrate one another, blend with one another, and tinge one another
+with the colouring of all the rest. Thus each of us has his manner of
+loving or hating, and this love or hate reflect our entire personality."
+("Essay on the Immediate Data", pages 125-126.)
+
+At bottom Mr Bergson is bringing forward the necessity, in the case
+before us, of substituting a new notion of continuous qualitative
+heterogeneity for the old notion of numerical and spatial continuity.
+Above all, he is emphasising the still more imperious necessity of
+regarding each state as a phase in duration; and we are here touching on
+his principal and leading intuition, the intuition of real duration.
+
+Historically this was Mr Bergson's starting-point and the origin of
+his thought: a criticism of time under the form in which common-sense
+imagines it, in which science employs it. He was the first to notice
+the fact that scientific time has no "duration." Our equations really
+express only static relations between simultaneous phenomena; even the
+differential quotients they may contain in reality mark nothing but
+present tendencies; no change would take place in our calculations if
+the time were given in advance, instantaneously fulfilled, like a linear
+whole of points in numerical order, with no more genuine duration than
+that contained in the numerical succession. Even in astronomy there
+is less anticipation than judgment of constancy and stability, the
+phenomena being almost strictly periodic, while the hazard of prediction
+bears only upon the minute divergence between the actual phenomenon and
+the exact period attributed to it. Notice under what figure common-sense
+imagines time: as an inert receptacle, a homogeneous milieu, neutral and
+indifferent; in fact, a kind of space.
+
+The scholar makes use of a like image; for he defines time by its
+measurement, and all measurement implies interpretation in space.
+For the scholar the hour is not an interval, but a coincidence, an
+instantaneous arrangement, and time is resolved into a dust of fixities,
+as in those pneumatic clocks in which the hand moves forward in jerks,
+marking nothing but a sequence of pauses.
+
+Such symbols are sufficient, at least for a first approximation, when
+it is only a question of matter, the mechanism of which, strictly
+considered, contains nothing "durable." But in biology and psychology
+quite different characteristics become essential; age and memory,
+heterogeneity of musical phases, irreversible rhythm "which cannot be
+lengthened or shortened at will." ("Creative Evolution", page 10.)
+
+Then it is that the return of time becomes necessary to duration.
+How are we to describe this duration? It is a melodious evolution of
+moments, each of which contains the resonance of those preceding and
+announces the one which is going to follow; it is a process of enriching
+which never ceases, and a perpetual appearance of novelty; it is an
+indivisible, qualitative, and organic becoming, foreign to space,
+refractory to number.
+
+Summon the image of a stream of consciousness passing through the
+continuity of the spectrum, and becoming tinged successively with each
+of its shades. Or rather imagine a symphony having feeling of itself,
+and creating itself; that is how we should conceive duration.
+
+That duration thus conceived is really the basis of ourselves Mr Bergson
+proves by a thousand examples, and by a marvellous employment of the
+introspective method which he has helped to make so popular. We cannot
+quote these admirable analyses here. A single one will serve as model,
+specially selected as referring to one of the most ordinary moments of
+our life, to show plainly that the perception of real duration always
+accompanies us in secret.
+
+"At the moment when I write these lines a clock near me is striking the
+hour; but my distracted ear is only aware of it after several strokes
+have already sounded; that is, I have not counted them. And yet an
+effort of introspective attention enables me to total the four strokes
+already struck and add them to those which I hear. If I then withdraw
+into myself and carefully question myself about what has just happened,
+I become aware that the first four sounds had struck my ear and even
+moved my consciousness, but that the sensations produced by each of
+them, instead of following in juxtaposition, had blended into one
+another in such a way as to endow the whole with a peculiar aspect and
+make of it a kind of musical phrase. In order to estimate in retrospect
+the number of strokes which have sounded, I attempted to reconstitute
+this phrase in thought: my imagination struck one, then two, then three,
+and so long as it had not reached the exact number four, my sensibility,
+on being questioned, replied that the total effect differed in quality.
+It had therefore noted the succession of the four strokes in a way of
+its own, but quite otherwise than by addition, and without bringing in
+the image of a juxtaposition of distinct terms. In fact, the number of
+strokes struck was perceived as quality, not as quantity: duration is
+thus presented to immediate consciousness, and preserves this form so
+long as it does not give place to a symbolical representation drawn from
+space." ("Essay on the Immediate Data", pages 95-96.)
+
+And now are we to believe that return to the feeling of real duration
+consists in letting ourselves go, and allowing ourselves an idle
+relaxation in dream or dissolution in sensation, "as a shepherd
+dozing watches the water flow"? Or are we even to believe, as has been
+maintained, that the intuition of duration reduces "to the spasm of
+delight of the mollusc basking in the sun"? This is a complete mistake!
+We should fall back into the misconceptions which I was pointing out in
+connection with immediacy in general; we should be forgetting that
+there are several rhythms of duration, as there are several kinds of
+consciousness; and finally, we should be misunderstanding the character
+of a creative invention perpetually renewed, which is that of our inner
+life.
+
+For it is in duration that we are free, not in spatialised time, as all
+determinist conceptions suppose in contradiction.
+
+I shall not go back to the proofs of this thesis; they were condensed
+some way back after the third chapter of the "Essay on the Immediate
+Data". But I will borrow from Mr Bergson himself a few complementary
+explanations, in order, as far as possible, to forestall any
+misunderstanding. "The word liberty," he says, "has for me a sense
+intermediate between those which we assign as a rule to the two terms
+liberty and free-will. On one hand, I believe that liberty consists
+in being entirely oneself, in acting in conformity with oneself; it
+is then, to a certain degree, the 'moral liberty' of philosophers, the
+independence of the person with regard to everything other than
+itself. But that is not quite this liberty, since the independence I
+am describing has not always a moral character. Further, it does not
+consist in depending on oneself as an effect depends on the cause which
+of necessity determines it. In this, I should come back to the sense of
+'free-will.' And yet I do not accept this sense completely either,
+since free-will, in the usual meaning of the term, implies the equal
+possibility of two contraries, and on my theory we cannot formulate, or
+even conceive in this case the thesis of the equal possibility of the
+two contraries, without falling into grave error about the nature of
+time. I might say then, that the object of my thesis, on this particular
+point, has been precisely to find a position intermediate between 'moral
+liberty' and 'free-will.' Liberty, such as I understand it, is situated
+between these two terms, but not at equal distances from both. If I were
+obliged to blend it with one of the two, I should select 'free-will.'"
+("Report of the French Philosophical Society", philosophical vocabulary,
+article "Liberty".)
+
+After all, when we place ourselves in the perspective of homogeneous
+time; that is to say, when we substitute for the real and profound ego
+its image refracted through space, the act necessarily appears either
+as the resultant of a mechanical composition of elements, or as an
+incomprehensible creation ex nihilo.
+
+"We have supposed that there is a third course to pursue; that is, to
+place ourselves back in pure duration...Then we seemed to see action
+arise from its antecedents by an evolution sui generis, in such a way
+that we discover in this action the antecedents which explain it, while
+at the same time it adds something absolutely new to them, being an
+advance upon them as the fruit upon the flower. Liberty is in no way
+reduced thereby, as has been said, to obvious spontaneity. At most this
+would be the case in the animal world, where the psychological life is
+principally that of the affections. But in the case of man, a thinking
+being, the free act can be called a synthesis of feelings and ideas, and
+the evolution which leads to it a reasonable evolution." ("Matter and
+Memory", page 205.)
+
+Finally, in a most important letter, ("Report of the French
+Philosophical Society", meeting, 26th February 1903.) Mr Bergson
+becomes a little more precise still. We must certainly not confuse the
+affirmation of liberty with the negation of physical determinism; "for
+there is more in this affirmation than in this negation." All the same,
+liberty supposes a certain contingence. It is "psychological causality
+itself," which must not be represented after the model of physical
+causality.
+
+In opposition to the latter, it implies that between two moments of a
+conscious being there is not an equivalence admitting of deduction, that
+in the transition from one to the other there is a genuine creation.
+Without doubt the free act is not without explanatory reasons.
+
+"But these reasons have determined us only at the moment when they have
+become determining; that is, at the moment when the act was virtually
+accomplished, and the creation of which I speak is entirely contained in
+the progress by which these reasons have become determining." It is true
+that all this implies a certain independence of mental life in relation
+to the mechanism of matter; and that is why Mr Bergson was obliged to
+set himself the problem of the relations between body and mind.
+
+We know that the solution of this problem is the principal object of
+"Matter and Memory". The thesis of psycho-physiological parallelism is
+there peremptorily refuted.
+
+The method which Mr Bergson has followed to do so will be found set out
+by himself in a communication to the French Philosophical Society, which
+it is important to study as introduction. ("Report" of meeting, 2nd
+May 1901.) The paralogism included in the very enunciation of the
+parallelist thesis is explained in a memoire presented to the Geneva
+International Philosophical Congress in 1904. ("Revue de Metaphysique et
+de Morale", November 1904.) But the actual proof is made by the analysis
+of the memoire which fills chapters ii. and iii. of the work cited
+above. (An extremely suggestive resume of these theses will be found
+in the second lecture on "The Perception of Change".) It is there
+established, by the most positive arguments, (Instead of brutally
+connecting the two extremes of matter and mind, one regarded in its
+highest action, the other in its most rudimentary mechanism, thus
+dooming to certain failure any attempt to explain their actual union, Mr
+Bergson studies their living contact at the point of intersection marked
+by the phenomena of perception and memory: he compares the higher
+point of matter--the brain--and the lower point of mind--certain
+recollections--and it is between these two neighbouring points that he
+notes a difference, by a method no longer dialectic but experimental.)
+that all our past is self-preserved in us, that this preservation only
+makes one with the musical character of duration, with the indivisible
+nature of change, but that one part only is conscious of it, the part
+concerned with action, to which present conceptions supply a body of
+actuality.
+
+What we call our present must be conceived neither as a mathematical
+point nor as a segment with precise limits: it is the moment of our
+history brought out by our attention to life, and nothing, in strict
+justice, would prevent it from extending to the whole of this
+history. It is not recollection then, but forgetfulness which demands
+explanation.
+
+According to a dictum of Ravaisson, of which Mr Bergson makes use, the
+explanation must be sought in the body: "it is materiality which causes
+forgetfulness in us."
+
+There are, in fact, several planes of memory, from "pure recollection"
+not yet interpreted in distinct images down to the same recollection
+actualised in embryo sensations and movements begun; and we descend from
+the one to the other, from the life of simple "dream" to the life of
+practical "drama," along "dynamic schemes." The last of these planes is
+the body; a simple instrument of action, a bundle of motive habits, a
+group of mechanisms which mind has set up to act. How does it operate in
+the work of memory? The task of the brain is every moment to thrust back
+into unconsciousness all that part of our past which is not at the
+time useful. Minute study of facts shows that the brain is employed in
+choosing from the past, in diminishing, simplifying, and extracting
+from it all that can contribute to present experience; but it is not
+concerned to preserve it. In short, the brain can only explain absences,
+not presences. That is why the analysis of memory illustrates the
+reality of mind, and its independence relative to matter. Thus is
+determined the relation of soul to body, the penetrating point which it
+inserts and drives into the plane of action. "Mind borrows from matter
+perceptions from which it derives its nourishment, and gives them back
+to it in the form of movement, on which it has impressed its liberty."
+("Matter and Memory", page 279.)
+
+This, then, is how the cycle of research closes, by returning to the
+initial problem, the problem of perception. In the two opposing systems
+by which attempts have been made to solve it, Mr Bergson discovers a
+common postulate, resulting in a common impotence. From the idealistic
+point of view we do not succeed in explaining how a world is expressed
+externally, nor from the realistic point of view how an ego is expressed
+internally. And this double failure comes again from the underlying
+hypothesis, according to which the duality of the subject and object is
+conceived as primitive, radical, and static. Our duty is diametrically
+opposed. We have to consider this duality as gradually elaborated, and
+the problem concerning it must be first stated, and then solved as a
+function of time rather than of space. Our representation begins by
+being impersonal, and it is only later that it adopts our body as
+centre. We emerge gradually from universal reality, and our realising
+roots are always sunk in it. But this reality in itself is already
+consciousness, and the first moment of perception always puts us back
+into the initial state previous to the separation of the subject and
+object. It is by the work of life, and by action, that this separation
+is effected, created, accentuated, and fixed. And the common mistake of
+realism and idealism is to believe it effected in advance, whereas it is
+relatively second to perception.
+
+Hence comes the absolute value of immediate intuition. For from what
+source could an irreducible relativity be produced in it? It would be
+absurd to make it depend on the constitution of our brain, since our
+brain itself, so far as it is a group of images, is only a part of the
+universe, presenting the same characteristics as the whole; and in so
+far as it is a group of mechanisms become habits, is only a result of
+the initial action of life, of original perceptive discernment. And, on
+the other hand, no less absurd would be the fear that the subject
+can ever be excluded or eliminated from its own knowledge, since, in
+reality, the subject, like the object, is in perception, not perception
+in the subject--at least not primitively. So that it is by a trick of
+speech that the theses of fundamental relativity take root: they vanish
+when we return to immediacy; that is to say, when we present problems as
+they ought to be presented, in terms which do not suppose any conceptual
+analysis yet accomplished.
+
+
+
+
+VI. The Problem of Evolution: Life and Matter.
+
+After the problem of consciousness Mr Bergson was bound to approach that
+of evolution, for psychological liberty is only truly conceivable if
+it begins in some measure with the first pulsation of corporal life.
+"Either sensation has no raison d'etre or it is a beginning of liberty";
+that is what the "Essay on the Immediate Data" (Page 25.) already told
+us.
+
+It was easy then to foresee the necessity of a general theoretical frame
+in which our duration might take a position which would render it more
+intelligible by removing its appearance of singular exception.
+
+Thus in 1901, I wrote ("Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", May
+1901) with regard to the new philosophy considered as a philosophy of
+becoming: "It has been prepared by contemporary evolution, which is
+investigates and perfects, sifting it from its ore of materialism, and
+turning it into genuine metaphysics. Is not this the philosophy suited
+to the century of history? Perhaps it indicates that a period has
+arrived in which mathematics, losing its role as the regulating science,
+is about to give place to biology." This is the programme carried
+out, in what an original manner we are well aware, by the doctrine of
+Creative Evolution.
+
+When we examine ancient knowledge, one characteristic of it is at once
+visible. It studies little but certain privileged moments of changing
+reality, certain stable forms, certain states of equilibrium.
+Ancient geometry, for example, is almost always limited to the static
+consideration of figures already traced. Modern science is quite
+different. Has not the greatest progress which it has realised in the
+mathematical order really been the invention of infinitesimal analysis;
+that is to say, an effort to substitute the process for the resultant,
+to follow the moving generation of phenomena and magnitudes in its
+continuity, to place oneself along becoming at any moment whatsoever, or
+rather, by degrees at all successive moments? This fundamental tendency,
+coupled with the development of biological research, was bound to
+incline it towards a doctrine of evolution; and hence the success of
+Spencer.
+
+But time, which is everywhere in modern science the chief variable, is
+only a time-length, indefinitely and arbitrarily divisible. There is
+no genuine duration, nothing really tending to evolution in Spencer's
+evolution: no more than there is in the periodic working of a turbine or
+in the stationary tremble of a diapason. Is not this what is emphasised
+by the perpetual employment of mechanical images and vulgar engineering
+metaphors, the least fault of which is to suppose a homogeneous time,
+and a motionless theatre of change which is at bottom only space? "In
+such a doctrine we still talk of time, we pronounce the word, but we
+hardly think of the thing; for time is here robbed of all effect."
+("Creative Evolution", page 42.)
+
+Whence comes a latent materialism, ready to grasp the chance of
+self-expression. Whence the automatic return to the dream of universal
+arithmetic, which Laplace, Du Bois-Reymond, and Huxley have expressed
+with such precision. (Ibid., page 41.)
+
+In order to escape such consequences we must, with Mr Bergson,
+reintroduce real duration, that is to say, creative duration into
+evolution, we must conceive life according to the mode exhibited with
+regard to change in general. And it is science itself which calls us
+to this task. What does science actually tell us when we let it speak
+instead of prescribing to it answers which conform to our
+preferences? Vitality, at every point of its becoming, is a tangent to
+physico-chemical mechanism. But physico-chemistry does not reveal its
+secret any more than the straight line produces the curve.
+
+Consider the development of an embryo. It summarises the history of
+species; ontogenesis, we are told, reproduces phylogenesis. And what do
+we observe then?
+
+Now that a long sequence of centuries is contracted for us into a short
+period, and that our view is thus capable of a synthesis which before
+was too difficult, we see appearing the rhythmic organisation, the
+musical character, which the slowness of the transitions at first
+prevented us from seeing. In each state of the embryo there is something
+besides an instantaneous structure, something besides a conservative
+play of actions and reactions; there is a tendency, a direction, an
+effort, a creative activity. The stage traversed is less interesting
+than the traversing itself; this again is an act of generating impulse,
+rather than an effect of mechanical inertia. So must the case be, by
+analogy, with general evolution. We have there, as it were, a vision
+of biological duration in miniature; expansion and relaxation of its
+tension bring its homogeneity to notice, but at the same time, properly
+speaking, evolution disappears.
+
+And further, Mr Bergson establishes by direct and positive arguments
+that life is genuine creation. A similar conclusion is presented as the
+envelope of his whole doctrine.
+
+It is imposed first of all by immediate evidence, for we cannot deny
+that the history of life is revealed to us under the aspect of a
+progress and an ascent. And this impulse implies initiative and choice,
+constituting an effort which we are not authorised by the facts to
+pronounce fatalistic: "A simple glance at the fossil species shows us
+that life could have done without evolution, or could have evolved only
+within very restricted limits, had it chosen the far easier path open to
+it of becoming cramped in its primitive forms; certain Foraminifera have
+not varied since the silurian period; the Lingulae, looking unmoved upon
+the innumerable revolutions which have upheaved our planet, are today
+what they were in the most distant times of the palaeozoic era."
+("Creative Evolution", page 111.) Moreover, if, in us, life is
+indisputably creation and liberty, how would it not, to some extent, be
+so in universal nature? "Whatever be the inmost essence of what is and
+what is being made, we are of it: ("Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale",
+November 1911.) a conclusion by analogy is therefore legitimate. But
+above all, this conclusion is verified by its aptitude for solving
+problems of detail, and for taking account of observed facts, and in
+this respect I regret that I can only refer the reader to the whole body
+of admirable discussions and analyses drawn up by Mr Bergson with regard
+to "the plant and the animal," or "the development of animal life.""
+("Creative Evolution", chapter ii.)
+
+As regards matter, two main laws stand out from the whole of our
+science, relative to its nature and its phenomena: a law of conservation
+and a law of degradation. On the one hand, we have mechanism,
+repetition, inertia, constants, and invariants: the play of the material
+world, from the point of view of quantity, offers us the aspect of
+an immense transformation without gain or loss, a homogeneous
+transformation tending to maintain in itself an exact equivalence
+between the departure and arrival point. On the other hand, from the
+point of view of quality, we have something which is being used up,
+lowered, degraded, exhausted: energy expended, movement dissipated,
+constructions breaking up, weights falling, levels becoming equalised,
+and differences effaced. The travel of the material world appears then
+as a loss, a movement of fall and descent.
+
+In addition, there is only a tendency to conservation, a tendency which
+is never realised except imperfectly; while, on the contrary, we notice
+that the failure of the vital impulse is most infallibly interpreted by
+the appearance of mechanism. Reality falling asleep or breaking up
+is the figure under which we finally observe matter: matter then is
+secondary.
+
+Finally, according to Mr Bergson, matter is defined as a kind of
+descent; this descent as the interruption of an ascent; this ascent
+itself as growth; and thus a principle of creation is at the base of
+things.
+
+Such a view seems obscure and disturbing to the mathematical
+understanding. It cannot accustom itself to the idea of a becoming which
+is more than a simple change of distribution, and more than a simple
+expression of latent wealth. When confronted with such an idea, it
+always harks back to its eternal question: How has something come out
+of nothing? The question is false; for the idea of nothing is only
+a pseudo-idea. Nothing is unthinkable, since to think nothing is
+necessarily to think or not to think something; and according to Mr
+Bergson's formula, (Cf. the discussion on existence and non-existence in
+chapter iv. of "Creative Evolution", pages 298-322.) "the representation
+of void is always a full representation." When I say: "There is
+nothing," it is not that I perceive a "nothing." I never perceive
+except what is. But I have not perceived what I was seeking, what I was
+expecting, and I express my deception in the language of my desire. Or
+else I am speaking a language of construction, implying that I do not
+yet possess what I intend to make.
+
+Let us abruptly forget these idols of practical action and language.
+The becoming of evolution will then appear to us in its true light, as
+phases of gradual maturation, rounded at intervals by crises of creative
+discovery. Continuity and discontinuity will thus admit possibility of
+reconciliation, the one as an aspect of ascent towards the future, the
+other as an aspect of retrospection after the event. And we shall
+see that the same key will in addition disclose to us the theory of
+knowledge.
+
+
+
+
+VII. The Problem of Knowledge: Analysis and Intuition.
+
+We know what importance has been attached since Kant to the problem of
+reason: it would seem sometimes that all future philosophy is a return
+to it; that it is no longer called to speak of anything else. Besides,
+what we understand by reason, in the broad sense, is, in the human mind,
+the power of light, the essential operation of which is defined as an
+act of directing synthesis, unifying the experience and rendering it by
+that very fact intelligible. Every movement of thought shows this power
+in exercise. To bring it everywhere to the front would be the proper
+task of philosophy; at least it is in this manner that we understand it
+today. But from what point of view and by what method do we ordinarily
+construct this theory of knowledge?
+
+The spontaneous works of mind, perception, science, art, and morality
+are the departure-point of the inquiry and its initial matter. We do not
+ask ourselves whether but how they are possible, what they imply, and
+what they suppose; a regressive analysis attempts by critical reflection
+to discern in them their principles and requisites. The task, in short,
+is to reascend from production to producing activity, which we regard as
+sufficiently revealed by its natural products.
+
+Philosophy, in consequence, is no longer anything but the science of
+problems already solved, the science which is confined to saying why
+knowledge is knowledge and action action, of such and such a kind, and
+such and such a quality. And in consequence also reason can no longer
+appear anything but an original datum postulated as a simple fact, as
+a complete system come down ready-made from heaven, at bottom a kind of
+non-temporal essence, definable without respect to duration, evolution,
+or history, of which all genesis and all progress are absurd. In vain do
+we persist in maintaining that it is originally an act; we always come
+round to the fact that the method followed compels us to consider this
+act only when once accomplished, and when once expressed in results. The
+inevitable consequence is that we imprison ourselves hopelessly in the
+affirmation of Kantian relativism.
+
+Such a system can only be true as a partial and temporary truth: at the
+most, it is a moment of truth. "If we read the "Critique of Pure Reason"
+closely, we become aware that Kant has made the critique, not of reason
+in general, but of a reason fashioned to the habits and demands of
+Cartesian mechanism or Newtonian physics." (H. Bergson, "Report of
+French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.) Moreover,
+he plainly studies only adult reason, its present state, a plane of
+thought, a sectional view of becoming. For Kant, men progress perhaps
+in reason, but reason itself has no duration: it is the fixed spot, the
+atmosphere of dead eternity in which every mental action is displayed.
+But this could not be the final and complete truth. Is it not a fact
+that human intelligence has been slowly constituted in the course of
+biological evolution? To know it, we have not so much to separate it
+statically from its works, as to replace it in its history.
+
+Let us begin with life, since, in any case, whether we will or no, it is
+always in life and by life that we are.
+
+Life is not a brute force, a blind mechanism, from which one could never
+conceive that thought would spring. From its first pulsation, life
+is consciousness, spiritual activity, creative effort tending towards
+liberty; that is, discernment already luminous, although the quality is
+at first faint and diffused. In other terms, life is at bottom of the
+psychological nature of a tendency. But "the essence of a tendency is
+to develop in sheaf-form, creating, by the mere fact of its growth,
+diverging directions between which its impulse will be divided."
+("Creative Evolution", page 108.)
+
+Along these different paths the complementary potentialities are
+produced and intensified, separating in the very process, their original
+interpretation being possible only in the state of birth. One of them
+ends in what we call intelligence. This latter therefore has become
+gradually detached from a less intense but fuller luminous condition, of
+which it has retained only certain characteristics to accentuate them.
+
+We see that we must conceive the word mind--or, if we prefer the word,
+thought--as extending beyond intelligence. Pure intelligence, or the
+faculty of critical reflection and conceptual analysis, represents only
+one form of thought in its entirety, a function, a determination or
+particular adaptation, the part organised in view of practical action,
+the part consolidated as language. What are its characteristics? It
+understands only what is discontinuous, inert, and fixed, that which has
+neither change nor duration; it bathes in an atmosphere of spatiality;
+it uses mathematics continually; it feels at home only among "things,"
+and everything is reduced by it to solid atoms; it is naturally
+"materialist," owing to the very fact that it naturally grasps "forms"
+only. What do we mean by that except that its object of election is the
+mechanism of matter? But it supposes life; it only remains living itself
+by continual loans from a vaster and fuller activity from which it
+is sprung. And this return to complementary powers is what we call
+intuition.
+
+From this point of view it becomes easy to escape Kantian relativity. We
+are confronted by an intelligence which is doubtless no longer a faculty
+universally competent, but which, on the contrary, possesses in its own
+domain a greater power of penetration. It is arranged for action. Now
+action would not be able to move in irreality. Intelligence, then, makes
+us acquainted, if not with all reality, at least with some of it,
+namely that part by which reality is a possible object of mechanical or
+synthetic action.
+
+More profoundly, intuition falls into analysis as life into matter: they
+are two aspects of the same movement. That is why, "provided we only
+consider the general form of physics, we can say that it touches the
+absolute." ("Creative Evolution", page 216.)
+
+In other terms, language and mechanism are regulated by each other. This
+explains at once the success of mathematical science in the order of
+matter, and its non-success in the order of life.
+
+For, when confronted with life, intelligence fails. "Being a deposit
+of the evolutive movement along its path, how could it be applied
+throughout the evolutive movement itself? We might as well claim that
+the part equals the whole, that the effect can absorb its cause into
+itself, or that the pebble left on the shore outlines the form of the
+wave which brought it." (Preface to "Creative Evolution".)
+
+Is not that as good as saying that life is unknowable? Must we conclude
+that it is impossible to understand it?
+
+"We should be forced to do so, if life had employed all the psychic
+potentialities it contains in making pure understandings; that is to
+say, in preparing mathematicians. But the line of evolution which ends
+in man is not the only one. By other divergent ways other forms
+of consciousness have developed, which have not been able to free
+themselves from external constraint, nor regain the victory over
+themselves as intelligence has done, but which, none the less for
+that, also express something immanent and essential in the movement of
+evolution.
+
+"By bringing them into connection with one another, and making them
+afterwards amalgamate with intelligence, should we not thus obtain a
+consciousness co-extensive with life, and capable, by turning sharply
+round upon the vital thrust which it feels behind it, of obtaining a
+complete, though doubtless vanishing vision?" ("Creative Evolution",
+Preface.) It is precisely in this that the act of philosophic intuition
+consists. "We shall be told that, even so, we do not get beyond our
+intelligence, since it is with our intelligence, and through our
+intelligence, that we observe all the other forms of consciousness. And
+we should be right in saying so, if we were pure intelligences, if
+there had not remained round our conceptual and logical thought a vague
+nebula, made of the very substance at the expense of which the luminous
+nucleus, which we call intelligence, has been formed. In it reside
+certain complementary powers of the understanding, of which we have only
+a confused feeling when we remain shut up in ourselves, but which will
+become illumined and distinct when they perceive themselves at work, so
+to speak, in the evolution of nature. They will thus learn what effort
+they have to make to become more intense, and to expand in the actual
+direction of life." ("Creative Evolution", Preface.) Does that mean
+abandonment to instinct, and descent with it into infra-consciousness
+again? By no means. On the contrary, our task is to bring instinct to
+enrich intelligence, to become free and illumined in it; and this ascent
+towards super-consciousness is possible in the flash of an intuitive
+act, as it is sometimes possible for the eye to perceive, as a pale and
+fugitive gleam, beyond what we properly term light, the ultra-violet
+rays of the spectrum.
+
+Can we say of such a doctrine that it seeks to go, or that it goes
+"against intelligence"? Nothing authorises such an accusation, for
+limitation of a sphere is not misappreciation of every legitimate
+exercise. But intelligence is not the whole of thought, and its natural
+products do not completely exhaust or manifest our power of light.
+
+Besides, that intelligence and reason are not things completed, for ever
+arrested in their inner structure, that they evolve and expand, is a
+fact: the place of discovery is precisely the residual fringe of which
+we were speaking above. In this respect, the history of thought would
+furnish examples in plenty. Intuitions at first obscure, and only
+anticipated, facts originally admitting no comparison, and as it were
+irrational, become instructive and luminous by the fruitful use made of
+them, and by the fertility which they manifest. In order to grasp the
+complex content of reality, the mind must do itself violence, must
+awaken its sleeping powers of revealing sympathy, must expand till it
+becomes adapted to what formerly shocked its habits so much as almost
+to seem contradictory to it. Such a task, moreover, is possible: we work
+out its differential every moment, and its complete whole appears in the
+sequence of centuries.
+
+At bottom, the new theory of knowledge has nothing new in it except
+the demand that all the facts shall be taken into account: it renews
+duration in the thinking mind, and places itself at the point of view of
+creative invention, not only at that of subsequent demonstration. Hence
+its conception of experience, which, for it, is not simple information,
+fitted into pre-existing frames, but elaboration of the frames
+themselves.
+
+Hence the problem of reason changes its aspect. A great mistake has been
+made in thinking that Mr Bergson's doctrine misunderstands it: to deny
+it and to place it are two different things. In its inmost essence,
+reason is the demand for unity; that is why it is displayed as a faculty
+of synthesis, and why its essential act is presented as apperception
+of relation. It is unifying activity, not so much by a dialectic of
+harmonious construction as by a view of reciprocal implication. But
+all that, however shaded we suppose it, entails a previous analysis.
+Therefore if we place ourselves in a perspective of intuition, I mean,
+of complete perception, the demand for reason appears second only,
+without being deprived, however, of its true task: it is an echo and
+a recollection, an appeal and a promise of profound continuity, our
+original anticipation and our final hope, in the bosom of the elementary
+atomism which characterises the transitory region of language; and
+reason thus marks the zone of contact between intelligence and instinct.
+
+Is thought only possible under the law of number? Does reality only
+become an object of knowledge as a system of distinct but regulated
+factors and moments? Do ideas exist only by their mutual relations,
+which first of all oppose them and afterwards force intelligence to move
+endlessly from one term to another? If such were the case, reason would
+certainly be first, as alone making an intelligible continuity out of
+discontinuous perception and restoring total unity to each temporary
+part by a synthetic dialectic. But all this really has meaning
+only after analysis has taken place. The demand for rational unity
+constitutes in the bosom of atomism something like a murmur of deep
+underlying continuity: it expresses in the very language of atomism,
+atomism's basic irreality. There is no question of misunderstanding
+reason, but only of putting it in its proper place. In a perspective
+of complete intuition nothing would require to be unified. Reason would
+then be reabsorbed in perception. That is to say, its present task is
+to measure and correct in us the limits, gaps, and weaknesses of the
+perceptive faculty. In this respect not a man of us thinks of denying
+it its task. But we try with Mr Bergson to reduce this task to its true
+worth and genuine importance. For we are decidedly tired of hearing
+"Reason" invoked in solemn and moving tones, as if to write the
+venerable name with the largest of capital R's were a magic solution of
+all problems.
+
+Mind, in fact, sets out from unity rather than arrives at it; and the
+order which it appears to discover subsequently in an experience which
+at first is manifold and incoherent is only a refraction of the original
+unity through the prism of a spontaneous analysis. Mr Bergson admirably
+points out ("Creative Evolution", pages 240-244 and 252-257.) that there
+are two types of order, geometric and vital, the one a static hierarchy
+of relations, the other a musical continuity of moments. These two types
+are opposed, as space to duration and matter to mind; but the negation
+of one coincides with the position of the other. It is therefore
+impossible to abolish both at once. The idea of disorder does not
+correspond to any genuine reality. It is essentially relative, and
+arises only when we do not meet the type of order which we were
+expecting; and then it expresses our deception in the language of our
+expectation, the absence of the expected order being equivalent, from
+the practical point of view, to the absence of all order. Regarded in
+itself, this notion is only a verbal entity, unduly taking form as the
+common basis of two antithetic types. How therefore do we come to speak
+of a "perceptible diversity" which mind has to regulate and unify?
+This is only true at most of the disjointed experience employed
+by common-sense. Reason, accepting this preliminary analysis,
+and proceeding to language, seeks to organise it according to the
+mathematical type. But it is the vital type which corresponds to
+absolute reality, at least when it is a question of the Whole; and only
+intuition has re-access to it, by soaring above synthetic dissociations.
+
+
+
+
+VIII. Conclusion.
+
+As my last word and closing formula I come back to the leitmotiv of my
+whole study: Mr Bergson's philosophy is a philosophy of duration.
+
+Let us regard it from this point of view, as contact with creative
+effort, if we wish to conceive aright the original notions which it
+proposes to us about liberty, life, and intuition.
+
+Let us say once more that it appears as the enthronement of positive
+metaphysics: positive, that is to say, capable of continuous, regular,
+and collective progress, no longer forcibly divided into irreducible
+schools, "each of which retains its place, chooses its dice, and begins
+a never-ending match with the rest." ("Introduction to Metaphysics"
+in the "Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", January 1903. Psychology,
+according to Mr Bergson, studies the human mind in so far as it operates
+in a useful manner to a practical end; metaphysics represent the effort
+of this same mind to free itself from the conditions of useful action,
+and regain possession of itself as pure creative energy. Now experience,
+the experience of the laboratory, allows us to measure with more and
+more accuracy the divergence between these two planes of life; hence the
+positive character of the new metaphysics.)
+
+Let us next say that until the present moment it constitutes the only
+doctrine which is truly a metaphysic of experience, since no other, at
+bottom, explains why thought, in its work of discovery and verification,
+remains in subjection to a law of probation by durable action. We
+have now only to show how it evades certain criticisms which have been
+levelled against its tendencies.
+
+Some have wanted to see in it a kind of atheist monism. Mr Bergson has
+answered this point himself. What he rejects, and what he is right in
+rejecting, are the doctrines which confine themselves to personifying
+the unity of nature or the unity of knowledge in God as motionless first
+cause. God would really be nothing, since he would do nothing. But he
+adds: "The considerations put forward in my "Essay on the Immediate
+Data" result in an illustration of the fact of liberty; those of "Matter
+and Memory" lead us, I hope, to put our finger on mental reality; those
+of "Creative Evolution" present creation as a fact: from all this we
+derive a clear idea of a free and creating God, producing matter and
+life at once, whose creative effort is continued, in a vital
+direction, by the evolution of species and the construction of human
+personalities." (Letter to P. de Tonquedec, published in the "Studies"
+of 20th February 1912, and quoted here as found in the "Annals of
+Christian Philosophy", March 1912.) How can we help finding in these
+words, according to the actual expression of the author, the most
+categorical refutation "of monism and pantheism in general"?
+
+Now to go further and become more precise, Mr Bergson points out that we
+must "approach problems of quite a different kind, those of morality."
+About these new problems the author of "Creative Evolution" has as yet
+said nothing; and he will say nothing, so long as his method does not
+lead him, on this point, to results as positive, after their manner,
+as those of his other works, because he does not consider that mere
+subjective opinions are in place in philosophy. He therefore denies
+nothing; he is waiting and searching, always in the same spirit: what
+more could we ask of him?
+
+One thing only is possible today: to discern in the doctrine already
+existing the points of a moral and religious philosophy which present
+themselves in advance for ultimate insertion.
+
+This is what we are permitted to attempt. But let us fully understand
+what is at issue. The question is only to know whether, as has been
+claimed, there is incompatibility between Mr Bergson's point of view and
+the religious or moral point of view; whether the premisses laid down
+block the road to all future development in the direction before us; or
+whether, on the contrary, such a development is invited by some parts at
+least of the previous work. The question is not to find in this work
+the necessary and sufficient bases, the already formed and visible
+lineaments of what will one day complete it. To imagine that the
+religious and moral problem is bound to be regarded by Mr Bergson as
+arising when it is too late for revision, as admitting proposition and
+solution only as functions of a previous theoretical philosophy beyond
+which we should not go; that in his eyes the solution of this problem
+will be deduced from principles already laid down without any call for
+the introduction of new facts or new points of view, without any need to
+begin from a new intuition; that his view precludes all considerations
+of strictly spiritual life, of inner and profound action, regarding
+things in relation to God and in an eternal perspective: such a view
+would be illegitimate and unreasonable, first of all, because Mr Bergson
+has said nothing of the kind, and secondly, because it is contrary to
+all his tendencies.
+
+After the "Essay on the Immediate Data" critics proceeded to confine
+him in an irreducible static dualism; after "Matter and Memory" they
+condemned him as failing for ever to explain the juxtaposition of the
+two points of view, utility and truth: why should we require that after
+"Creative Evolution" he should be forbidden to think anything new, or
+distinguish, for example, different orders of life?
+
+The problems must be approached one after the other, and, in the
+solution of each of them, it is proper to introduce only the necessary
+elements. But each result is only "temporarily final." Let us lose the
+strange habit of asking an author continually to do something other
+than he has done, or, in what he has done, to give us the whole of his
+thought.
+
+Till now, Mr Bergson has always considered each new problem according
+to its specific and original nature, and, to solve it, he has always
+supplied a new effort of autonomous adaptation: why should it be
+otherwise for the future? I seek vainly for the decree forbidding him
+the right to study the problem of biological evolution in itself,
+and for the necessity which compels him to abide now by the premisses
+contained in his past work. (For Mr Bergson, the religious sentiment,
+as the sentiment of obligation, contains a basis of "immediate datum"
+rendering it indissoluble and irreducible.)
+
+The only point which we have to examine is this: will the moral and
+religious question compel Mr Bergson to break with the conclusions of
+his previous studies, and can we not, on the contrary, foresee points of
+general agreement?
+
+In the depths of ourselves we find liberty; in the depths of universal
+being we find a demand for creation. Since evolution is creative,
+each of its moments works for the production of an indeducible and
+transcendent future. This future must not be regarded as a simple
+development of the present, a simple expression of germs already given.
+Consequently we have no authority for saying that there is for ever
+only one order of life, only one plane of action, only one rhythm of
+duration, only one perspective of existence. And if disconnections and
+abrupt leaps are visible in the economy of the past--from matter to
+life, from the animal to man--we have no authority again for claiming
+that we cannot observe today something analogous in the very essence of
+human life, that the point of view of the flesh, and the point of view
+of the spirit, the point of view of reason, and the point of view of
+charity are a homogeneous extension of it. And apart from that, taking
+life in its first tendency, and in the general direction of its current,
+it is ascent, growth, upward effort, and a work of spiritualising and
+emancipating creation: by that we might define Good, for Good is a path
+rather than a thing.
+
+But life may fail, halt, or travel downwards. "Life in general is
+mobility itself; the particular manifestations of life accept this
+mobility only with regret, and constantly fall behind. While it is
+always going forward, they would be glad to mark time. Evolution in
+general would take place as far as possible in a straight line; special
+evolution is a circular advance. Like dust-eddies raised by the passing
+wind, living bodies are self-pivoted and hung in the full breeze of
+life." ("Creative Evolution", page 139.) Each species, each individual,
+each function tends to take itself as its end; mechanism, habit, body,
+and letter, which are, strictly speaking, pure instruments, actually
+become principles of death. Thus it comes about that life is exhausted
+in efforts towards self-preservation, allows itself to be converted
+by matter into captive eddies, sometimes even abandons itself to the
+inertia of the weight which it ought to raise, and surrenders to the
+downward current which constitutes the essence of materiality: it is
+thus that Evil would be defined, as the direction of travel opposed
+to Good. Now, with man, thought, reflection, and clear consciousness
+appear. At the same time also properly moral qualifications appear: good
+becomes duty, evil becomes sin. At this precise moment, a new problem
+begins, demanding the soundings of a new intuition, yet connected at
+clear and visible points with previous problems.
+
+This is the philosophy which some are pleased to say is closed by nature
+to all problems of a certain order, problems of reason or problems of
+morality. There is no doctrine, on the contrary, which is more open, and
+none which, in actual fact, lends itself better to further extension.
+
+It is not my duty to state here what I believe can be extracted from it.
+Still less is it my duty to try to foresee what Mr Bergson's conclusions
+will be. Let us confine ourselves to taking it in what it has expressly
+given us of itself. From this point of view, which is that of pure
+knowledge, I must again, as I conclude, emphasise its exceptional
+importance and its infinite reach. It is possible not to understand it.
+Such is frequently the case: thus it always has been in the past, each
+time that a truly new intuition has arisen among men; thus it will be
+until the inevitable day when disciples more respectful of the letter
+than the spirit will turn it, alas, into a new scholastic. What does
+it matter! The future is there; despite misconceptions, despite
+incomprehensions, there is henceforth the departure-point of all
+speculative philosophy; each day increases the number of minds which
+recognise it; and it is better not to dwell upon the proofs of several
+of those who are unable or unwilling to see it.
+
+
+
+
+Index.
+
+Absolute, the.
+
+Adaptation, value of.
+
+Analysis, conceptual, contrasted with intuition.
+
+Appearances.
+
+Art, and philosophy.
+
+Atomism.
+
+Automatism.
+
+Automaton, of daily life.
+
+Being, as becoming.
+
+Brain, work of.
+
+Causality, psychological.
+
+Change.
+
+Common-sense.
+
+Concepts, analysis by and functions of, as symbols, creation of, as
+general frames, practical reach of, inferior to intuition, further
+discussed.
+
+Consciousness.
+
+Conservation, law of.
+
+Constants, search for, represented.
+
+Continuity, qualitative.
+
+Criticism, of language.
+
+Deduction, impotence of.
+
+Degradation, law of.
+
+Determinism, physical.
+
+Discontinuity, apparent.
+
+Disorder.
+
+Du Bois-Reymond.
+
+Duration, real, perpetually new, and thought, and time, pure.
+
+Dynamic connection, schemes.
+
+Ego, encrustations of the.
+
+Eleatic dialectic.
+
+Embryology, evidence of.
+
+Evil, a reality.
+
+Evolution, drama of, biological, value and meaning of, not
+indispensable, distinguished from development, as dynamic continuity, as
+activity, further discussed.
+
+Existence, as change.
+
+Experience.
+
+Fact.
+
+Freedom.
+
+Free-will.
+
+Genesis, law of.
+
+Good, a reality, a path.
+
+Habit, as obstacle.
+
+Heredity.
+
+Heterogeneity.
+
+Homogeneity, absence of.
+
+Huxley.
+
+Images.
+
+Immediacy.
+
+Immediate, the.
+
+Inert, the.
+
+Instinct, is sympathy, contrasted with intelligence.
+
+Intellectualism, distrusted.
+
+Intelligence, product of evolution, and instinct, broad meaning of.
+
+Intuition, as starting-point, intransmissible without language,
+aesthetic, triumph of, and duration, and analysis.
+
+Intuitional effort, content.
+
+Kant, his point of departure, conclusions of, escape from.
+
+Knowledge, absolute, utilitarian nature of, new theory of.
+
+Language, dangers of.
+
+Laplace.
+
+Law, concept of.
+
+Liberty, personal importance of.
+
+Life, tendencies of, is finality, is progress, further discussed.
+
+Limit-concepts.
+
+Materialism.
+
+Mechanism, psychological, failure of.
+
+Memory, problem of, perception complicated by, importance of, racial,
+planes of, memory of solids.
+
+Metaphor, justification of.
+
+Method, philosophical.
+
+Mill, Stuart.
+
+Motor-schemes, mechanisms.
+
+Mysticism.
+
+Non-morality.
+
+Nothingness.
+
+Number.
+
+Ontogenesis.
+
+Palaeontology, evidence of.
+
+Parallelism.
+
+Paralogism.
+
+Perception, an art, affected by memory, further explained, fulfilment
+of guesswork, utilitarian signification, subjectivity of, pure
+and ordinary, further discussed, relation to matter, perception of
+immediacy.
+
+Philosophy, duty of, function of.
+
+Phylogenesis.
+
+Planes, of consciousness.
+
+Progress, and reality.
+
+Quality, and inner world.
+
+Quantity, and quality.
+
+Rationalism.
+
+Ravaisson.
+
+Realism.
+
+Reality, contact with, a flux, recognition of, absolute, elusive nature
+of, personal, essentially qualitative, pure, inner, contrasting views
+about, further discussed.
+
+Reason.
+
+Relation, between mind and matter.
+
+Religion, its place in philosophy.
+
+Renan.
+
+Romanticism.
+
+Schemes, dynamic.
+
+Science, prisoner of symbolism, cult of, impotence of.
+
+Sense, good, and common-sense.
+
+Space.
+
+Spencer, criticism of, success and weakness of.
+
+Spiritualism.
+
+Symbolism.
+
+Sympathy.
+
+Taine.
+
+Thought, methods of common.
+
+Time, required by Mr Bergson's philosophy, in space, and common-sense,
+and duration.
+
+Torpor.
+
+Transformism, errors of.
+
+Utility, as goal of perception.
+
+Variation.
+
+Zeno of Elea.
+
+Zone, of feeling.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson, by Edouard le Roy
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1347 ***