Chapter IX: Pragmatism and Idealism in the Philosophy of Bergson386 (4)

[328] I do not think that this is a fair preliminary description of the problem of teleology. A person who believes in the realization of purpose in some experiences with which he thinks himself to be acquainted does not plead for the guidance of the universe by finite minds, but simply for a view of it that shall include the truth of human purposes. And of course there may be in the universe beings other than ourselves who also realize purposes.

[329] Italics and exclamation mine.

[330] Italics mine. There is a large element of truth in this great idea of Professor Bosanquet’s, connecting [for our purposes] his philosophy with the theism and the personalism for which we are contending as the only true and real basis for Humanism.

[331] Readers who remember Green’s _Prolegomena to Ethics_ will remember that it is one of the difficulties of that remarkable, but one-sided, production (exposed, I think, with many other defects in Professor Taylor’s brilliant, but unduly intellectualistic _Problem of Conduct_) that it also seems to teach a kind of “Determinism” in ethics, in what our nature is unduly communicated to us by the Absolute, or the “Eternal Consciousness.” This whole way of looking at things must largely be abandoned to-day.

[332] See below, p. 226.

[333] It is, I am inclined to think, the existence of this contradiction in Dr. Bosanquet’s Lectures that will cause the average intelligent person to turn away from them as not affording an adequate account of the reality of the world of persons and things with which he knows himself to be directly and indirectly acquainted. Another way of stating the same thing would be to say that Absolutism fails to take any adequate recognition of that most serious contradiction (or “defect”) in our experience of which we have already spoken as the great dualism of modern times, the opposition between reason and faith an opposition that is not relieved either by the greatest of the continually increasing discoveries of science, or by any, or all, of the systems of all the thinkers. Hegelianism in general assures us that from the point of view of a “higher synthesis” this opposition does not exist or that it is somehow “transcended.” And its method of effecting this synthesis is to convert the opposition between faith and reason into the opposition between what it calls “Understanding” and what it calls “Reason” [an opposition that is to some extent a fictitious one, “reason” being, to begin with, but another name for our power of framing general conceptions or notions, and not therefore different from “understanding”]. It removes, that is to say, the opposition between two different phases or aspects of our experience by denying the existence of one of them altogether. It changes the opposition between knowledge and faith into an opposition between an alleged lower and an alleged higher way of _knowing_. This alleged higher way of knowing, however, is, when we look into it, but the old ideal of the perfect demonstration of _all the supposed contents_ of our knowledge (principles and facts alike) that has haunted modern philosophy from the time of Descartes. It is an unattainable ideal because no philosophy in the world can begin without some assumption (either of “fact” or of principle), and because our knowledge of the world comes to us in a piecemeal fashion--under the conditions of time and space. A fact prior to all the issues of the demand of Rationalism for a supposedly perfect demonstration is the _existence of the conscious beings_ (Dr. Bosanquet himself, for example) who seek this supposed certainty in order that they may act better--in ignorance of the fact that complete initial certainty on our part as to all the issues and aspects of our actions would tend to destroy the personal character of our choice as moral agents, as beings who may occasionally act beyond the given and the calculable, and set up precedents and ideals for ourselves and for others--for humanity. It is this underlying faith then in the reality of our moral and spiritual nature that we would alone oppose (and only in a relative sense) to the supposed certainties of a completely rational, or _a priori_, demonstration, the whole contention of humanism being that it is in the interests of the former reality that the latter certainties exist. The apparent opposition between faith and reason would be surmounted by a philosophy that should make consciousness of ourselves _as persons_ the primal certainty, and all other forms of consciousness or of knowledge secondary and tributary, as it were, to this.

[334] I am aware that there is a difference between the “universal” of ordinary formal logic and Dr. Bosanquet’s (or Hegel’s) “concrete universal,” but it is needless for me to think of it here. Dr. Bosanquet uses in his Lectures the phrase “logical universal” for his “concrete universal” or his principle of positive coherence. It is always logical coherence that he has in view.

[335] “For everywhere it is creative Logic, the nature of the whole working in the detail, which constitutes experience, and is appreciable in so far as experience has value.” Now Logic of itself does not thus “work” or “do” anything. It is men or persons who do things by the help of logic and reasoning and other things--realities and forces, etc.

[336] Cf. p. 31. “We are minds,” he says, “_i.e._ living microcosms, not with hard and fast limits, but determined by our range and powers which fluctuate very greatly.” My point simply is that this is too intellectualistic a conception of man’s personality. We have minds, but we are not minds.

[337] See p. 192. “But as the self is essentially a world of content engaged in certain transformations”; and p. 193, “a conscious being ... is a world ... in which the Absolute begins to reveal its proper nature.” How can a “world of content” [that is to say, the “sphere of discourse” of what some person is thinking for some purpose or other] be “engaged” in certain transformations? It is the _person_, or the thinker, who is transforming the various data of his experience for his purposes as a man among men. It is time that philosophy ceased to make itself ridiculous by calmly writing down such abstractions as if they were facts.

[338] Cf. “Mind as the significance and interpretation of reality,” p. 27.

[339] “Mind has nothing of its own but the active form of totality, everything positive it draws from Nature.”

[340] This again is an abstraction, and how on earth can it be said that “mind” and conscious life “reflect” merely certain abstractions (or creations) of their own? They have invented such terms as “content” for certain purposes, and their own being and nature is therefore more than these terms. Mind is not a “content”; it makes all other things “contents” for itself.

[341] It has even there, according to Dr. Bosanquet, only its purely theoretic function of working after its own perfection in the way of attaining to a logical “universal.” “The peculiarity of mind for us, is to be a world of experience working itself out towards harmony and completeness.” This is simply not true.

[342] “Finite consciousness, whether animal or human, did not make its body.”

[343] “Thus there is nothing in mind _which the physical counterpart cannot represent_.” (Italics mine.)

[344] “What we call the individual, then, is not a fixed essence, but a living world of content representing a certain range of externality.” P. 289.

[345] “The _system of the universe_, as was said in an earlier Lecture, might be described as _a representative system_. Nature, or externality[!] lives in the lives of conscious beings. (Italics mine.)

[346] “Spirit is a light, a focus, a significance[!] which can only be by contact with a ‘nature’ an external world.”

[347] “For, on the other hand, it has been urged and we feel, that it is _thought which constructs and sustains the fabric of experience_, and that it is thought-determinations which invest even sense-experience _with its value_ and _its meaning_. . . . The ultimate tendency of thought, we have seen, is not to generalise, but to _constitute a world_,” p. 55. Again, “the true office of thought, we begin to see, _is to build up_, _to inspire with meaning_, _to intensify_, _to vivify_. The object which thought, in the true sense, has worked upon, is not a relic of decaying sense, _but is a living world_, analogous to a perception of the beautiful, in which every thought-determination adds fresh point and deeper bearing to every element of the whole,” p. 58. And on p. 178 he says that he sees no objection to an idealist recognising the “use made of” “laws” and “_dispositions_” in recent psychology. [How one wishes that Dr. Bosanquet had really worked into his philosophy the idea that every mental “element” is in a sense a “disposition” to _activity_!] Some of these statements of Dr. Bosanquet’s have almost a pragmatist ring about them, a suggestion of a _living_ and dynamic (rather than a merely intellectualistic) conception of thought. They may therefore be associated by the reader with the concessions to Pragmatism by other rationalists of which we spoke in an early chapter (see p. 74).

[348] See Chapter III. p. 90.

[349] I must say that apart from any questions in detail about this rejection of teleology by Dr. Bosanquet, there is something inexplicable about it to me. He cannot retain his own great notion of “wholeness” without the idea of “end,” because “wholeness” is a demand of thought that is guided by some idea of purpose or end.

[350] See p. 90.

[351] Italics mine.

[352] P. 225.

[353] See p. 90.

[354] Having already given instances of this abstractionism in the case of such things as the “self” and the “universal” and “spirit,” it will suffice to point out here in addition (1) its tendency to talk of “experience” and “experiences” _as if there could be such things apart from the prior real existence of the experients or the experiencing persons_ with whom we are acquainted in our daily life, and (2) its tendency to talk of getting at “the heart of actual life and love” in a “system” which leaves no place for the real existence of either gods or men who live and love. And then I trust that it may not be regarded as an impertinence to allege as another puzzling piece of abstractionism on the part of Dr. Bosanquet, that he has allowed himself to speak and think in his book as if his theory of the “concrete universal” were practically a new thing in the thought of our time--apart altogether, that is to say, from the important work in this same direction of other Neo-Hegelian writers, and apart, too, from the unique work of Hegel in the same connexion.

[355] See below, p. 230.

[356] This is revealed in the main in its exposition of the world as the logical system of a single complete individual experience--a tendency that students of philosophy know to exist in Neo-Hegelianism generally from Green to Bradley. I admit that this tendency is literally a different thing from solipsism in the ordinary sense, as the inability of a particular finite person to prove to himself that any person or thing exists except himself. It is still, however, it seems to me, possible to regard as solipsistic the tendency to set forth the universe as the experience, or the thought, of a single experient or a single thinker, even although the impersonalism of Dr. Bosanquet’s logical “whole” conflicts somewhat with the individuality of his Absolute.

[357] Cf. p. 160.

[358] The well-known inability of Mr. Bradley, for example, to be content with the reality of any portion or any phase of reality that falls short of what he regards as absolute reality, and with the merely relative meaning that he attaches to any category of the “finite.” Also the well-known Neo-Hegelian tendency to make an opponent forge the weapon by which he is to be dislodged from any particular point of view. In the case of Dr. Bosanquet this tendency takes the form of making out any one who holds to a belief in the real existence of finite conscious persons to hold the absurd position of believing in “an impervious and isolated self,” a thing, of course, that no one who knows anything about biology or ethics, or social psychology, really does.

[359] As another instance of Dr. Bosanquet’s unintentional unfairness to his opponents, I would note his positive injustice to Theism as such. What many of us think of (however imperfectly) and believe in as God is invariably to him “a theistic Demiurge in his blankness and isolation.” I do not believe in such an abstract Demiurge any more than I believe in the separate, isolated self that he conjures up to his mind when he thinks of personality. The problem of the twentieth century may well be what Dr. Ward has signalised as the relation of God to the “Absolute” of the Hegelian metaphysicians, but this suggestion simply means to me the discovery on the part of philosophers of terms and concepts more adequate to the Supreme Being than either the Absolute, or the external deity rejected by Dr. Bosanquet.

[360] Stéphane Mallarmé, according to Nordau in _Degeneration_, p. 103.

[361] And the general reader must remember that the “whole” is always (with all due respect to his high dialectic ability and his high temper of mind and his scholarship) a kind of _ignis fatuus_ in Dr. Bosanquet’s book, a kind of shadow thrown by the lamps and the tools of his own choosing in his Quixotic search. The “whole” is the “perfected individuality” of the individual who sets out to find truth in this great world of ours with all its _real possibilities_ of gain and loss. It is the completion of the “system” of truth to which the truth-seeker would fain reduce the entire universe, that becomes for him (for the time being) the mere “subject-matter” of his thought. It is, that is to say, in both cases, a purely formal conception--an abstraction, although to Dr. Bosanquet it is the reality implied in the very existence and activity of the individual thinker. But the latter is the case to him only because he looks upon man as _existing to think_ instead of as _thinking to exist_.

[362] That is to say, for the scholar and the lover of Dante and Dante’s world.

[363] For he was not merely a “mind,” reflecting “Italy” and “minds” and “experiences.”

[364] And that, we might add, is still kept alive by some of our humanists and educators of to-day as the ideal for both primary and secondary education.

[365] This is a thing that the beginner is taught in lectures introductory to the study of the philosophy of Kant--in regard to Kant’s relation to the barren, dogmatic formalism of Wolff--a one-sided interpreter of the philosophy of Leibniz. I am quite aware that Dr. Bosanquet does not merely use the Principle of Non-Contradiction in the aggressive, or polemical, manner of Mr. Bradley in _Appearance and Reality_. The principle of positive coherence at which he aims, begins, to some extent, where Mr. Bradley stopped. But it is still the idea of consistency or inconsistency, with certain presuppositions of his own, that rules his thinking; it determines, from the very outset of his Lectures, what he accepts and what he rejects.

[366] See p. 152 and p. 156, note 2.

[367] I use this word “must” in a logical as well as in an ethical sense, seeing that all judgment implies a belief in the reality of a world of persons independent of the mere fact of “judgment” as a piece of mental process.

[368] See p. 145.

[369] On p. 345 the words are: “_When we consider the naïve or elementary life of morality and religion_”; and on p. 346: “_The naïve, or simple self of every-day morality and religion_,” and the marginal heading of the page upon which these words occur is “_The naïve good self compared to grasp of a fundamental principle alone_.” Could anything more clearly indicate what the Kantians call a confusion of categories [in the case in point the categories of “goodness” and the categories of “truth”] or what Aristotle calls a μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος, the unconscious treatment of one order of facts by the terms and conceptions of another order of facts. To Dr. Bosanquet as the Neo-Hellenist that he is in his professed creed, badness is practically stupidity, and “lack of unification of life,” and “failure of theoretical grasp.” This confusion between goodness and wisdom is again indicated on p. 347 in the words: “_A man is good in so far as his being is ‘unified at’ all in any sphere of wisdom or activity_.” [This is simply not true, and its falsity is a more unforgivable thing in the case of Dr. Bosanquet than it is in the case of the pragmatists who also tend to make the ‘moral’ a kind of ‘unification’ or ‘effectiveness’ in ‘purpose.’] As a proof of Dr. Bosanquet’s transformation of the facts of the ethical life in the interest of logical theory, we can point to p. 334: “_Our actions and ideas issue from our world as a conclusion from its premises, or as a poem from its author’s spirit_,” or to p. 53, where it is definitely stated that the “_self, as it happens to be_,” cannot, in any of its “three aspects,” “_serve as a test of reality_.” To do the latter, it must, in his opinion, follow the law of the “universal,” _i.e._ _become a logical conception_. Now of course (1) _it is not the self “as it happens to be”_ that is chiefly dealt with in ethics, but rather the _self as it ought to be_. And (2) the ethical self, or the “person,” does not follow the “law of the universal” [a logical law] but the law of right and wrong [an ethical law]. As a proof of the subordination of the facts of conduct to the facts of aesthetics, we may take the words on p. 348 where aesthetic excellence is said to be “_goodness in the wider or_ (‘_shall we say_’) _in the narrower sense_.” Now the distinction between ethics and aesthetics is not one of degree, but one of kind.

And as another illustration of his tendency to transform ethical facts in the light of a metaphysical, or a logical, theory [they are the same thing to him] we may quote the emphatic declaration on p. 356: “_Our effort has been to bring the conception of moral_ and individual initiative _nearer to the idea of logical determination_,” or the equally outspoken declaration on p. 353: “_But metaphysical theory, viewing the self in its essential basis_ of moral solidarity with the natural and social world ... _cannot admit_ that the independence of the self, _though a fact, is more than a partial fact_.” Or the words at the top of this same page: “The primary principle _that should govern the whole discussion_ is this, that the attitude of moral judgment and responsibility for decisions _is only one among other attitudes_ and spheres of experience.” These last words alone would prove definitely the non-ethical character of “Individuality and Value.” The ethical life is to its author only a “_quatenus consideratur_,” only a possible point of view, only an aspect of reality, only an aspect, therefore, of a “logical system.” Now if the ethical life of the world is to count for anything at all, it may be said that the ethical life is no mere aspect of the life of the self, and no mere aspect of the life of the world, seeing that “nature” in the sense of mere “physical nature” does not come into the sphere of morality at all. It is rather the activity of the “whole self,” or the “normative” reflection of the self as a whole upon all the merely partial or subordinate aspects of its activity, upon bodily life, economic life, intellectual activity, and so on that constitutes the world of morality.

[370] See p. 147, and p. 244.

[371] Good and evil to Dr. Bosanquet are two quasi-rational systems in active antagonism as claiming to attach different “principles and predicates” to identical data. The essence of their antagonism to Dr. Bosanquet is not, however, that evil is contemplated, as it must be sooner or later, in repentance for example as _wrong_, but rather that the “evil” is an imperfect “_logical_ striving (p. 351) of the self _after unity_” which is in “contradiction with a _fuller_ and sounder striving” after the same. The evil self is to him merely the vehicle of a logical contradiction in the self.

[372] This is seen in his admission (on p. 351) that the “bad will” no less than the “good will” is a logical necessity, when taken along with his doctrine about mind and body, his doctrine of the “dependence” (p. 318) of the finite individual upon the external mechanical world. Dr. Bosanquet, of course, thinks that even in this apparent Determinism he is justifiably supplementing the ordinary ideas about the “self” as “creative” and “originative” (p. 354), by the wider recognition that I am more or less completely doing the work of the “universe” as a “member” in a “greater self.” And he adds in the same sentence the words that “_I am in a large measure continuous with the greater_ (p. 355) _self_,” and “_dyed with its colours_”--a further step in Determinism, as it were, and a step which, with the preceding one to which we have just referred, no critic can fail to connect with the Determinism that we have already found to be implicated in his doctrine of the “self,” and in his general doctrine that the “external” must be frankly accepted as a factor in the universe.

[373] By the “spectator” fallacy we mean his tendency to talk and think of the self as it is for a spectator or student, looking at matters from the outside, and not as the self is for the man himself.

[374] Wollaston is the English ethical philosopher who, according to Leslie Stephen’s account, thought, after thirty years of meditation, that the only reason he had for not breaking his wife’s head with a stick was, that this would be tantamount to a denial that his wife was his wife.

[375] See _Idola Theatri_ by Henry Sturt (the editor of the well-known “Personal Idealism” volume) of Oxford--a book that enumerates and examines many of the fallacies of the Neo-Hegelian school. Mr. Sturt’s first chapter is entitled the “Passive Fallacy,” which he calls, with some degree of justice, the prime mistake of the idealistic philosophy, meaning by this the “ignoring” of the “kinetic” and the “dynamic” character of our experience.

[376] It is Natural Theology that is the subject proper of the _Gifford Lectures_.

[377] See p. 149 of Chapter VI.

[378] With, we might almost say, the pragmatists and the humanists.

[379] This is really their main distinguishing characteristic and merit.

[380] See p. 162.

[381] “Indeed, I do not conceal my belief that in the main the work has been done.”--_Preface._

[382] I think that the confession is a praiseworthy one in view of the fact of the prejudice of Rationalism, that philosophy has nothing to do with convictions but only with knowledge.

[383] By belief I have understood throughout this book simply man’s working sense for reality, and I am inclined to think that this is almost the best definition that could be given of it--our working sense for reality. It is at least, despite its apparent evasiveness, most in harmony with the pragmatist-humanist inclusion of will elements and feeling elements in our knowledge and in our apprehension of reality. It is also in harmony with the conception of reality which may, in my opinion, be extracted from both Pragmatism and Idealism--that reality is what it proves itself to be in the daily transformation of our experience. By the retention of the term “working” in this attempted definition I express my agreement with the idea that action, and the willingness to act, is an essential element in belief. The outstanding positions in the definitions of belief that are generally given in philosophical dictionaries are, firstly, that belief is a conviction or subjective apprehension of truth or reality in distinction from demonstrable knowledge or direct evidence; and, secondly, that feeling elements and action elements enter into it. I am inclined to think that the sharp antithesis between belief and knowledge, or the tendency of philosophical books to emphasise the difference between belief and knowledge, is a characteristic, or consequence, of our modern way of looking at things, of our break with the unfortunate, medieval conception of faith and of the higher reason. The study of the facts either of the history of religion or of the history of science, will convince us, I think, that it is always belief, and that it still is belief (as the working sense for reality), that is man’s measure of reality, our knowledge about the universe being at all times but a more or less perfect working out of our beliefs and of their implications--of our sense of the different ways in which the world affects us, and of the ways in which we are affected towards it. Nor do I think, as I have indicated in different places, that “reality” can be defined apart from belief, reality being that in which we believe for all purposes, theoretical and practical and emotional. In the conception of reality as a world of intersubjective intercourse in which beings, or persons at different stages of development, share in a common spiritual life, we have attained so far (and only so far) to the truth that is common to an idealism of the type of Dr. Bosanquet’s, and to pragmatist-humanism when properly developed and interpreted. There are, I find, upon thinking of the matter, any number of philosophers and thinkers who interpret belief, in the larger sense of the term, as our complete and final estimate of reality, and as therefore not exclusive of, but inclusive of knowledge in the ordinary sense of the term.

[384] He even says in the Abstract of his first lecture upon the “Central Experiences,” that Lord Gifford’s desire that his lecturers should “try to communicate” a “grave experience” is the demand that “introduces us to the double task of philosophy. It [philosophy] needs the best of logic, but also the best of life, and neither can be had in philosophy without the other.”

[385] _Treatise upon Human Nature_, sect. vii. (Green and Grose, i. 547).

[386] I had originally the idea of calling this chapter by the more modest title of a note upon “pragmatist elements” in the teaching of Bergson. I have allowed myself to call it a chapter partly for the sake of symmetry, and partly because the footnotes and the criticism (of his Idealism) have carried it beyond the limits of a note. I find, too, (as I have partly indicated in my preface) in the teaching of Bergson so many things that make up almost the very body of truth and fact upon which Pragmatism, and Humanism, and Idealism all repose (or ought to repose) that I quote them directly in my footnotes. They indicate to me the scope and the territory of my entire subject. And they are a confirmation to me of much that I had myself arrived at before I read a line of Bergson.

[387] “Our intelligence, as it leaves the hands of nature, has for its chief object the unorganised solid” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 162); “of immobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea” (_ibid._ 164). “The aspect of life that is accessible to the intellect--as indeed to our senses, of which our intellect is the extension--is that which offers a hold to action” (_ibid._ 170). “We see that the intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigour, the stiffness, and the brutality of the instrument _not designed_ for such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us much in this matter. When we think of the cardinal, urgent, and constant need we have to preserve our bodies and to raise our souls, of the special facilities given to each of us in this field to experiment continually on ourselves and on others, of the palpable injury by which the wrongness of a medical or a pedagogical practice is made manifest and punished at once, we are amazed at the stupidity and especially at the persistence of errors. We may easily find their origin in the natural obstinacy _with which we treat the living like the lifeless_, and think all reality, however fluid, under the form of the sharply-defined solid. _We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. The intellect is characterised by a natural inability to comprehend life_” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 174). (Italics mine.)

[388] “I look and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart. But what I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a _selection made by my senses to serve as a light to my conduct_; what I know of myself is what comes to the surface, what participates in my actions. My senses and my consciousness, therefore, give me no more than a _practical simplification_ of reality in the vision they furnish me of myself and of things, the differences that are useless to man are obliterated, the resemblances that are useful to him are emphasised; ways are traced out for me in advance along which my activity is to travel. These ways are the ways which all mankind has trod before me. Things have been classified with a view to the use I can derive from them” (_Laughter_, p. 151). “Life implies the acceptance of the _utilitarian_ side of things in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions; all other impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred” (_ibid._ p. 131). These last words give us a glimpse of a very important part of Bergson’s teaching--his idea, namely (Voltaire has it in his _Micromégas_), that “matter” is greater than our perceptions, that our perceptions reveal to us only those aspects of the physical universe with which we are practically concerned.

[389] Some years ago psychologists began to distinguish a “structural” from a “functional” psychology, meaning by the former what is otherwise called Psycho-Physics or (to some extent) Experimental Psychology.

[390] Cf. “At first sight it may seem prudent to leave the consideration of facts to positive science, to let physics and chemistry busy themselves with matter, the biological and psychological sciences _with life_. The task of the philosopher is then clearly defined. _He takes facts and laws_ from the _scientist’s hand_, and whether he tries to go beyond them in order to reach their deeper causes, or whether he thinks it impossible to go further, and even proves it by the analysis of scientific knowledge, in both cases he has for _the facts and relations, handed over by science, the sort of respect that is due to a final verdict_. To this knowledge he adds a critique of the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks proper, a metaphysic; but the _matter_ of knowledge he regards as the affair of science, and not of philosophy” (_Creative Evolution_, pp. 204–5). [All this represents only too faithfully what even some of our Neo-Kantians have been saying, and teaching, although there is an error in their whole procedure here.]

[391] Schopenhauer’s phrase. See my book upon _Schopenhauer’s System_.

[392] It is chiefly in _Matter and Memory_ (in which, by the way, there are pages and pages of criticism of the rationalism of philosophy that are as valuable as anything we have in philosophy since the time of Descartes--Kant not excepted) that we are to look for the detailed philosophy of sensation and of perception, and the detailed philosophy of science upon which this protest of Bergson’s against the excesses of “conceptualism” rests. I indicate, too, at different places in this chapter some of the other special considerations upon which it rests. The gist of the whole is to be found, perhaps, in his contention that our science and our philosophy of the past centuries have both regarded “perception” as teaching us (somehow) what things _are_ independently of their effect upon us, and of their place in the moving equilibrium of things--the truth being on the contrary (with Pragmatism and Humanism) that our knowledge has throughout a necessary relation to ourselves and to our place in the universe, and to our liberation from matter in the life of the spirit.

[393] He expresses this idea in the following way in the Introduction to _Matter and Memory_: “Psychology has for its object the study of the human mind for practical utility,” whereas in “metaphysics” we see “this same mind striving (the idea, as we say elsewhere, is not free from difficulty) to transcend the conditions of useful action and to come back to itself _as to a pure creative energy_.” Or in the following sentences from his _Creative Evolution_: “We must remember that philosophy, as we define it, _has not yet become completely conscious of itself_. Physics understands its role when it pushes matter into the direction of spatiality; but has metaphysics understood its role when it has simply trodden the steps of physics, in the chimerical hope of going farther in the same direction? _Should not its own task be, on the contrary, to remount the incline that physics descends, to bring matters back to its origins, and to build up progressively a cosmology which would be, so to speak, a reversed psychology._ All that which seems _positive_ to the physicist and to the geometrician would become, from this new point of view, an interruption or inversion of the true positivity which _would have to be defined in psychological terms_” (pp. 219–20, italics mine).

[394] As an indication of what the acceptance of the dynamic instead of the static view of matter on the part of Bergson means, I cite the phrase (or the conception) on p. 82 of _Matter and Memory_, the effect that “_matter is here as elsewhere the vehicle of an action_,” or the even more emphatic declaration on p. 261 of _Creative Evolution_, “_There are no things, there are only actions_.” It is impossible, of course, that these mere extracts can convey to the mind of the casual reader the same significance that they obtain in their setting in the pages of Bergson, although it is surely almost a matter of common knowledge about his teaching, that one of the first things it does is to begin with the same activistic or “actionistic” view of nature and matter that seems to be the stock in trade of the physics of our time since the discoveries pertaining to radio-activity, etc. Being only a layman in such matters, I may be excused for quoting from a recent booklet (whose very presence in the series in which it appears is to people like myself a guarantee of its scientific reliability) in which I find this same activistic view of matter that I find in Bergson. “What are the processes by which the primary rock material is shifted? There is the wind that, etc. etc.... There are the streams and rivers that, etc.... There is the sea constantly wearing away, etc.... Then there are ‘subtle’ physical and ‘chemical’ forces. And the action of plants.... Hence by various mechanical, organic, and chemical processes the materials originally scattered through the rocks of the earth’s crust, and floating in the air or water, are collected into layers and form beds of sand, clay, limestone, salt, and the various mineral fuels, including peat and coal” (_The Making of the Earth_, by Professor Gregory, F.R.S., of Glasgow University: Williams and Norgate).

It is only right to state here, or to remind the reader in this matter of a “dynamic” view of matter, that Bergson not only dissipates matter into force or energy or activity (as do the physicists of to-day), but also actually credits the world of matter and life with a kind of consciousness (and why not be courageous about it?) in which what I have already called the “susceptibility of everything to everything else,” or the _action_ of everything upon everything else, becomes credible and intelligible. “_No doubt, also, the material universe itself, defined as the totality of images, is a kind of consciousness in which everything compensates and neutralises everything else, a consciousness of which all the potential parts, balancing each other by a reaction which is always equal to the action, reciprocally hinder each from standing out_” (_Matter and Memory_, p. 313).

[395] See Chapter III., and also the references to Mach, Ostwald, Poincaré, and others, in the second chapter and elsewhere.

[396] “There is no intelligence in which some traces of instinct are not to be discovered, more, no instinct that is not surrounded with a fringe of intelligence” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 143).

[397] “We will not dwell here upon a point we have dealt with in former works. Let us merely recall that a theory [the theory of contemporary physiological psychology] such as that according to which consciousness is attached to certain neurons, and is thrown off from their work like a phosphorescence, may be accepted by the scientist for the detail of analysis; _it is a convenient mode of expression. But it is nothing else. In reality, a living being is a centre of action._ It represents a certain sum of contingency entering into the world, that is to say, a certain quantity of possible action--a quantity variable with individuals and especially with species. The nervous system of an animal marks out the flexible lines on which its action will run (although the potential energy is accumulated in the muscles rather than in the nervous system itself); its nervous centres indicate, by their development and their configuration, the more or less extended choice it will have among more or less numerous and complicated actions. Now, since the awakening of consciousness in a living creature is the more complete, the greater the latitude of choice allowed to it and the larger the amount of action bestowed upon it, it is clear that the development of consciousness will appear to be dependent on that of the nervous centres. On the other hand, every state of consciousness being, in one aspect of it, a question put to the motor activity and even the beginning of a reply, there is no psychical event that does not imply the entry into play of the cortical mechanisms. Everything seems, therefore, to happen _as if_ consciousness sprang from the brain, and _as if_ the detail of conscious activity were modelled on that of the cerebral activity. In reality consciousness does not spring from the brain, but brain and consciousness correspond because equally they measure ... the quantity of _choice_ that the living being has at its disposal” (_Creative Evolution_, pp. 266–7).

[398] “Instead of starting from _affection_ [or ‘sensation’ in the old sense of the haphazard sensation] of which we can say nothing, since there is no reason why it should be what it is rather than anything else, we start from _action_, that is to say, from our power of effecting changes in things, a faculty attested by consciousness, and towards which all the powers of the organised body are seen to converge. So we place ourselves at once in the midst of extended images [to Bergson as an idealist things are at the same time images or ideas for a consciousness in other things, or in us, or in beings other than ourselves], and in this material universe we perceive centres of indetermination characteristic of life” (_Matter and Memory_, p. 67).

[399] Cf. the words in the Preface to _Matter and Memory_: “_The whole personality, which, normally narrowed down by action, expands with the unscrewing of the vice in which it has allowed itself to be squeezed_,” or the words in the same place about the task of metaphysics being the attempt of the “_mind striving to transcend the conditions of useful action_.”

[400] We refer elsewhere in this chapter to Bergson’s idea that living beings are “centres of indetermination,” that is to say, creatures who hold their place in nature and that of their species by “persisting in their own being” (the language of Spinoza) by acting and reacting upon some of the many forces of nature that act upon them, and by avoiding the action of other forces and other animals. “They allow to pass through them,” he says, “so to speak, those external influences which are indifferent to them; the others isolated become ‘perceptions’ by their very isolation” (_Matter and Memory_, pp. 28, 29). We also refer to Bergson’s idea that the life-force has expressed itself along different grades of being (mineral, animal, and so on). Both these ideas are a partial explanation of what we mean by the presence of a spiritual activity in both inanimate and animate nature. So also is Bergson’s idea that the purely mechanical explanation either of nature or of life is but a device of the intellect for the purposes of description. More specifically it is expressed, too, in his idea that “Our representation of matter is the measure of our possible action upon bodies; it results from the discarding of what has no interest for our needs, or more generally for our functions” (_Matter and Memory_, p. 30), or that “Consciousness” is just this choice of “attaining to” or attending to “certain parts and certain aspects of those parts” of the “material universe” (_ibid._ p. 31), or that “sense-perception” is an “elementary question to my motor activity.” “The truth is that my nervous system, interposed between the objects which affect my body and those which I can influence, is a mere conductor, transmitting, sending back, or inhibiting movement. This conductor is composed of an enormous number of threads which stretch from the periphery to the centre, and from the centre to the periphery. As many threads pass from the periphery to the centre, so many points of space are there able to make an appeal to my will, and to put, so to speak, _an elementary question to my motor activity. Every such question is what is termed a perception_” (_ibid._ 40, 41; italics mine). Or, as he puts it, on p. 313, “No doubt the choice of perception from among images in general is the effect of a _discernment which foreshadows spirit_.... But to touch the reality of spirit we must place ourselves at the _point where an individual consciousness_, continuing and retaining the past in a present enriched by it, _thus escapes the law of necessity_, the law which ordains that the past shall ever follow itself in a present which merely repeats it in another form, and that all things shall ever be flowing away. _When we pass from pure perception to memory, we definitely abandon matter for spirit._”

[401] Bergson is always able to detect the relapses even of “mechanism” and of the mechanical philosophy of science into “finalism,” as when he says on p. 72 of his _Creative Evolution_, “To sum up, if the accidental variations that bring about evolution are insensible variations, some good genius must be appealed to--the genius of the future species--in order to preserve and accumulate these variations, for “selection” will not look after this. If, on the other hand, the accidental variations are sudden, then, for the previous function to go on, or for a new function to take its place, all the changes that have happened together must be complementary. So we have to fall back on the good genius again to obtain the convergence of simultaneous changes, as before to be assured of the continuity of direction of successive variations.”

[402] We must remember that to Bergson evolution has taken place along different lines--those of Automatism (in plant-life), Instinct (in animal life), and Intelligence (in human life and the higher animals), and that along none of those lines are we to fall into the errors either of materialism, or of “Darwinism” (the belief in “accidental variations”), or of the “design-philosophy,” or even of theories like “neo-Lamarckianism” or neo-vitalism. To him all these philosophies are but imperfect and hypothetical attempts to grasp “movement” and “life” which both “_transcend finality, if we understand by finality the realisation of an idea conceived or conceivable in advance_” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 236).

[403] “Paleyism” or “Miltonism” are still good names for the thing, I have read in some competent book upon Evolution.

[404] See below, p. 261.

[405] To Bergson concepts are just as hypothetical in the realm of science, as they are to thinkers like Mach and Poincaré, and Professor Ward of Cambridge. See the following, for example, from _Matter and Memory_ (p. 263): “We shall never explain by means of particles, whatever these may be, the simple properties of matter; at most we can thus follow out into corpuscles as artificial as the _corpus_, the body itself--the actions and reactions of this body with regard to all the others. This is precisely the object of chemistry. It studies bodies rather than _matter_; and so we understand why it stops at the atom, which is still endowed with the general properties of matter. But the materiality of the atom dissolves more and more under the eyes of the physicist. We have no reason, for instance, for representing the atom to ourselves as a solid, rather than as a liquid or gaseous, nor for picturing the reciprocal action of atoms by shocks rather than in any other way.” Or, the following characteristic passage from the same book (p. 280) in respect of the hypothetical character of the concepts of “pure _time_” and “pure _space_”: “Homogeneous _space_ and homogeneous _time_ are then neither properties of things nor essential conditions of our faculty of knowing them; they express, in an abstract form, the double work of solidification and of division, which we effect on the moving continuity of the real in order to obtain there a fulcrum for our action, in order to fix within it starting-points for our operation, in short, to introduce into it real changes. They are the _diagrammatic designs_ of our eventual action upon matter.”

[406] Like his celebrated contemporary Eucken, and like many other thinkers of their time, Bergson is profoundly convinced of the one-sidedness of the so-called scientific culture of our day, and of the error of any and all conceptions of education and of social policy that are based upon it. Although I refer below to the limitations of his view that the intellect is adapted only to matter and to mechanical construction, I append the following quotation as symptomatic of his value as a spiritual teacher in our scientific age: “As regards human intelligence (_Creative Evolution_, pp. 145–6) it has not been sufficiently noted that mechanical invention has been from the first its essential feature, _that even to-day our social life gravitates around the manufacture and use of artificial instruments_.... This we hardly realise, _because it takes longer to change ourselves than to change our tools_.... In thousands of years, when seen from the distance, _only the broad lines of our present age will be visible_, our wars and our revolutions will count for little, even supposing they are remembered at all, but the steam-engine, and the procession of inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of prehistoric times; it will serve to define an age.”

[407] I find this in Bergson’s whole attribution of much of our “perceptual” and “scientific” knowledge of things to the “needs of action,” and in the detailed reasons that we attempt on pp. 236–238 to indicate for his polemic against rationalism.

[408] This confirmation I find in Bergson’s whole philosophy of perception and sensation referred to on p. 236, and in his idea of a living being as a “centre of action” or “a centre of indetermination.” In fact it is obvious that he is one of the very greatest of the upholders of the “freedom” of the life of the individual, and of the fact that each new individual contributes something new of its own to the sum-total of existence, to the life of its species, and to the life of the world. Of course there is no more an explanation in his teaching of the causes of “variation” or the differences at birth between the off-spring of men and of animals, than there is in the philosophy of Darwin.

[409] The idea of this necessity is confirmed in Bergson’s whole philosophy of man’s life as a life of action, as a constant surmounting of obstacles, as a life that reacts in its own way upon the life of nature, upon the life of the human species as such, upon the infinite life and energy and “love” of God--if we may soar to this great thought. See, for example, what he writes in explanation of the “discordance” of which he speaks thus: “Our freedom, in the very movements by which it is affirmed, creates the growing habits that will stifle it if it fails to renew itself by a constant effort: it is dogged by automatism. The letter kills the spirit. And our most ardent enthusiasm, as soon as it is externalised into action, is so naturally congealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, the one takes so easily the shape of the other, that we might confuse them together, doubt our sincerity, deny goodness and love.” The explanatory words are the following. [They are quite typical of the kind of philosophy of life that Bergson thinks of as alone worthy of the name of a philosophy of the living. And the reference to “love,” as the highest “dynamic” force in this world of ours, occurs at their close.] “The profound cause of this discordance lies in an irremediable difference of rhythm. Life is general, is mobility itself; particular manifestations of life accept this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. It is always going ahead; they want to mark time. Evolution in general would fain go on in a straight line; each special evolution is a kind of circle. Like eddies of dust raised by the wind as it passes, the living turn on themselves, borne up by the great blast of life. They are therefore relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility so well that we treat each of them as a _thing_ rather than as a _progress_, forgetting that the very permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement. At times, however, in a fleeting vision, the invisible breath that bears them is materialised before our eyes. We have this _sudden illumination before certain forms of maternal love_, so striking and in most animals so touching, observable even in the solicitude of the plant for its seed. This _love, in which some have seen the great mystery of life, may possibly deliver us life’s secret_. It shows us each generation leaning over the generation that shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the movement by which life is transmitted” (_Creative Evolution_, pp. 134–5; italics mine). It is surely needless to point out how much truer to human nature, truer therefore to an important part of reality, this life-philosophy is than the abstractionism of Professor Bosanquet in the preceding chapter.

[410] This insistence is, I think, amply confirmed by the very fact of the _immediate_ contact with life and reality indicated in the quotation that is given in the preceding note upon the “motive-awakening,” or the “dynamic” character of the philosophy of Bergson. It is also confirmed in his manifest insistence upon the one fact that all philosophy must assume (and has for ever assumed) the fact of life, the fact of the life and thought of God that underlies all our life and all our thought.

[411] This position of the pragmatists is certainly confirmed by Bergson’s entire doctrine of the brain and of the intellect--that their main service is, in the first instance, to interpret the “life” of things, its relation to our own will and to our practical activity. I have suggested, too, in this chapter that it is obviously a characteristic, or a consequence, of the philosophy of Bergson that our highest thought about ourselves and about the world should be relative to, and provocative, of our highest emotion.