Chapter IX: Pragmatism and Idealism in the Philosophy of Bergson386 (5)

[412] It is only with some degree of care and reservation that I wish to refer to any apparent confirmation of this idea by Bergson. And, as always, I object to the idea of any ultimate separation or “dualism” between faith and knowledge--faith being implied in all “knowledge.” There is no opposition in Bergson, or in the principles of his philosophy, between faith and knowledge; it is rather his idea that “the faculty of _seeing_ should be made one with the act of _willing_” (_Creative Evolution_, 250; his italics), and that “philosophy” should “proceed, _with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal reconstruction of all things, even of life_” (_C.E._ xi.; italics mine). My reasons for finding in his writings a confirmation of the idea that it is indeed our rational and spiritual faith, rather than our demonstrable knowledge, that is to us the measure of truth and reality, are such considerations as the following (in addition to those of the clauses just quoted), his close association between the intellectual and the “volitional,” his general faith in “creative evolution,” in the idea that our “consciousness” means for us “new choices” and (real) “new possibilities,” his faith in the higher intuitions of the mind, in the spiritual nature of man, his belief that the building up of the true philosophy of the future will involve “the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting, and improving one another” (_C.E._ xiv.), etc. etc.

[413] See below, p. 257, note 1.

[414] See p. 14 in reference to Dr. Schiller’s suggestion that “freedom” may “pervade the universe.”

[415] “From time to time, however, in a fit of absent-mindedness, nature raises up souls that are more detached from life.... Were this detachment complete, did the soul no longer cleave to action by any of its perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the world has never yet seen” (_Laughter_, p. 154).

[416] Cf. p. 235.

[417] Cf. “We must break with scientific habits which are adapted to the fundamental requirements of thought, _we must do violence to the mind, go counter to the natural bent of the intellect_. But that is just the function of philosophy” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 31).

[418] “So art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself” (_Laughter_, p. 157). It is true that if we read further on this page, and elsewhere in Bergson, we will be able to see that there is for him in art and in the spiritual life a kind of intelligence and knowledge. But it is difficult to work out an expression or a characterisation of this intelligence and this knowledge. “Art,” he says, “is only a more direct vision of reality.” And again: “Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through ideality that we can resume contact with reality” (_ibid._).

[419] It is only fair to Bergson to remember that he is himself aware of the appearances of this dualism in his writings, that he apologises as it were for them, intending the distinction to be, not absolute, but relative. “Let us say at the outset that the distinctions we are going to make will be too sharply drawn, just because we wish to define in instinct what is instinctive, and in intelligence what is intelligent, _whereas all concrete instinct is mingled with intelligence, as all real intelligence is penetrated by instinct. Moreover_ [this is quite an important expression of Bergson’s objection to the old “faculty” psychology], _neither intelligence nor instinct lends itself to rigid definition; they are tendencies and not things_. Also it must not be forgotten that ... we are considering intelligence and _instinct as going out of life_ which deposits them along its course” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 143).

[420] He talks in the _Creative Evolution_ of a “real time” and a “pure duration” of a real duration that “bites” into things and leaves on them the mark of its tooth, of a “ceaseless upspringing of something new,” of “our progress in pure duration,” or a “movement which creates at once the intellectuality of mind and the materiality of things” (p. 217). I have no hesitation in saying that all this is unthinkable to me, and that it might indeed be criticised by Rationalism as inconsistent with our highest and most real view of things.

[421] He admits himself that “If our analysis is correct, it is consciousness, or rather supra-consciousness that is at the origin of life” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 275).

[422] “Now, if the same kind of action is going on everywhere, whether it is that which is striving to remake itself, I simply express this probable similitude when I speak of a centre _from which worlds shoot out as rockets in a fireworks display_--provided, however, _that I do not present_ [there is a great idea here, a true piece of ‘Kantianism’] this centre as a _thing_, but as a continuity of shooting out. God thus defined _has nothing of the already made. He is unceasing life, action, freedom._ Creation so conceived is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 262).

[423] See p. 155, note 1.

[424] It is somewhat difficult, and it is not necessary for our purposes, to explain what might be meant by the “Idealism” of Bergson--at least in the sense of a cosmology, a theory of the “real.” It is claimed for him, and he claims for himself that he is in a sense both an “idealist” and a “realist,” believing at once (1) that matter is an “abstraction” (an unreality), and (2) that there is more in matter than the qualities revealed by our perceptions. [We must remember that he objects to the idea of qualities in things in the old static sense. “_There are no things; there are only actions._”] What we might mean by his initial idealism is the following: “_Matter, in our view_, is an aggregate of images. And by ‘image’ we mean [_Matter and Memory_, the Introduction] a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a _representation_, but less than that which the realist calls a _thing_--an existence placed half-way between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation.’ This conception of matter is simply that of common sense.” ... “For common sense, then, the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is in itself pictorial, as we perceive it: _image it is, but a self-existing image_.” Now, this very idea of a “self-existing image” implies to me the whole idealism of philosophy, and Bergson is not free of it. And, of course, as we have surely seen, his “creative-evolution” philosophy is a stupendous piece of idealism, but an idealism moreover to which the science of the day is also inclining.

[425] There is so much that is positive and valuable in his teaching, that he is but little affected by formal criticism.

[426] Cf. “We have now enumerated a few of the essential features of human intelligence. But we have hitherto considered the individual in isolation, without taking account of social life. _In reality man is a being who lives in society._ If it be true [even] that the human intellect aims at fabrication, we must add that, for that as well as other purposes, it is associated with _other intellects_. Now it is difficult to imagine a society whose members do not communicate by signs,” etc. etc. (_Creative Evolution_, p. 166). Indeed all readers of Bergson know that he is constantly making use of the social factor and of “co-operation” by way of accounting for the general advance of mankind. It may be appropriate in this same connexion to cite the magnificent passage towards the close of _Creative Evolution_ in which he rises to the very heights of the idea [Schopenhauer and Hartmann had it before him, and also before the socialists and the collectivists] of humanity’s being possibly able to surmount even the greatest of the obstacles that beset it in its onward path: “As the smallest grain of dust [_Creative Evolution_, pp. 285–6] is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself, so all organised beings, from the humblest to the highest, ... do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.”

[427] Cf. p. 160 and p. 262.

[428] He comes in sight of some of them, as he often does of so many things. “It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will [_C.E._, p. 281], man or superman, had sought to realise himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world, and even by the vegetable world, at least in what these have that is positive and above the accidents of evolution.”

[429] From what has been said in this chapter about Bergson, and from the remarks that were made in the second chapter about Renouvier and the French Critical Philosophy, the reader may perhaps be willing to admit that our Anglo-American Transcendental philosophy would perhaps not have been so abstract and so rationalistic had it devoted more attention, than it has evidently given, to some of the more representative French thinkers of the nineteenth century.

[430] We must remember that nowhere in his writings does Bergson claim any great originality for his many illuminative points of view. He is at once far too much of a catholic scholar (in the matter of the history of philosophy, say), and far too much of a scientist (a man in living touch with the realities and the theories of the science of the day) for this. His findings about life and mind are the outcome of a broad study of the considerations of science and of history and of criticism. By way, for example, of a quotation from a scientific work upon biology that seems to me to reveal some apparent basis in fact (as seen by naturalists) for the “creative evolution” upon which Bergson bases his philosophy, I append the following: “We have gone far enough to see that the development of an organism from an egg is a _truly wonderful process_. We need but go back again and look at the marvellous simplicity of the egg to be convinced of it. Not only do cells _differentiate_, but cell-groups _act together like well-drilled battalions_, cleaving apart here, fusing together there, forming protective coverings or communicating channels, _apparently creating out of nothing_, a whole set of nutritive and reproductive organs, all in orderly and progressive sequence, producing in the end that orderly disposed cell aggregate, that individual life unit which we know as an earthworm. Although _the forces involved are beyond our ken_, the grosser processes are evident” (Needham, _General Biology_, p. 175; italics mine). Of course it is evident from his books that Bergson does not take much account of such difficult facts and topics as the mistakes of instinct, etc. And I have just spoken of his optimistic avoidance of some of the deeper problems of the moral and spiritual life of man.

[431] “This amounts to saying that the _theory of knowledge_ and _theory of life_ seem to us inseparable [_Creative Evolution_, p. xiii.; italics Bergson’s]. A theory of life that is not accompanied by a criticism of knowledge is obliged to accept, as they stand, the concepts which the understanding puts at its disposal: it can but enclose the facts, willing or not, in pre-existing frames which it regards as ultimate. It thus obtains a symbolism which is convenient, perhaps even necessary to positive science, but not a direct vision of its object.”

[432] I more than agree with Bergson that our whole modern philosophy since Descartes has been unduly influenced by physics and mathematics. And I deplore the fact that the “New Realism” which has come upon us by way of a reaction (see p. 53) from the subjectivism of Pragmatism, should be travelling apparently in this backward direction--away, to say the very least, from some of the things clearly seen even by biologists and psychologists. See p. 144.

[433] As I have indicated in my Preface, I am certainly the last person in the world to affect to disparage the importance of the thin end of the wedge of Critical Idealism introduced into the English-speaking world by Green and the Cairds, and their first followers (like the writers in the old Seth-Haldane, _Essays on Philosophical Criticism_). Their theory of knowledge, or “epistemology,” was simply everything to the impoverished condition of our philosophy at the time, but, as Bergson points out, it still left many of us [the fault perhaps was our own, to some extent] in the position of “taking” the scientific reading of the world _as so far true_, and of thinking that we had done well in philosophy when we simply partly “transformed” it. The really important thing was to see _with this epistemology_ that the scientific reading of the world is not in any sense initial “fact” for philosophy.

INDEX

Absolutism, 13, chap. viii.

Action, 91 _n._, 105, chap. iv.

Activity-Experience, 105, 109

Alexander, S., 163

Anti-Intellectualism, 73, 239

Appearance and Reality, 84

Arcesilaus, 155

Aristotle, 155

Armstrong (Prof.), 49 _n._

Attention, 119

Augustine, 107

Avenarius, 41

Bain, 120

Baldwin, J. M., 156, 110 _n._

Bawden (Prof.), 17, 85

Belief, 64, 65, 229 _n._, 251

Bergson, 72, 104, 126

Berthelot, 117

Blondel, 32, 34

Bosanquet, B., 110, 185, chap. viii.

Bourdeau, 26, 133 _n._, 193

Boyce-Gibson (Prof.), 154

Bradley, F. H., 74, 75, 91

Browning, R., 117

Brunschvig, 30

Bryce, James, 193

Butler, 119

Caird, E., 112

Carlyle, 125

Chesterton, W. K., 117, 156

Cohen, 48 _n._

Common-sense Beliefs, 7

Common-sense Philosophy, 117

Comte, 120

Contemplation, 96

Cornford, 184

Curtis (Prof. M. M.), 22

Dawes-Hicks (Prof.), 163

De Maistre, 170

Descartes, 66, 121

Desjardins, P., 37

Dewey, J., 16, 17, 37, 62, 147, 173, 175

Du Bois Reymond, 110

Duncan (Prof.), 122

Duns Scotus, 119

Eleutheropulos, 43

Elliot, H. S. R., 66

Epicureanism, 118

Eucken, 39, 154

Ewald (Dr.), 44, 48

Flournoy, 180

Fouillée, 37 _n._

Fraser, A. C., 112

Futurism, 26

Geddes, P., 123

Goethe, 195, 215

Gordon, A., 152–3

Green, T. H., 199

Gregory (Prof.), 24

Inge (Dean), 29, 31

Invention, 192

James, W., 3, 4, 24, 35, 39, 45, 50, 65, 135, 182, 192 _n._

Jerusalem, W., 43

Joachim, 56

Jones, Sir H., 56

Joseph, 57

Kant, 119, 121, 247

Kant and Hegel, 183

Knox (Capt.), 15

Lalande, A., 29, 33, 164

Lankester (Sir R.), 167

Lecky, 70

Leighton (Prof.), 133

Le Roy, 31

Locke, 61, 119

Lovejoy (Prof.), 49

MacEachran (Prof.), 49 _n._

Mach, 40

Mackenzie, J. S., 112

Maeterlinck, 90

Mallarmé, 214

Marett, 160

Mastermann, G. F. G., 118

M’Dougall, 104

McTaggart, J. M. E., 92

Meaning, 21, 51, 149

Mellone, 57

Merz, 157

Münsterberg, 46

Natorp, 48

Needham (Prof.), 101, 260

New Realism, 53

Nietzsche, 118, 139, 151

Ostwald, 40, 41

Pace (Prof.), 187

Paleyism, 247

Papini, 24, 135

Pascal, 119

Pater, W., 124

Peirce, 3, 22

Perry (Prof.), 53, 185

Perry, Bliss, 171, 179

Plato, 57, 61, 121, 150, 151

Pluralism, 87

Poincaré, 30

Pradines, 36 _n._

Pragmatism, and American philosophy, 49, chap. vii.;
and British thought, 54;
and French thought, 28;
and German thought, 38;
and Italian thought, 23;
a democratic doctrine, 105;
its ethics, 136;
its pluralism, 162;
its sociological character, 164, 262;
its theory of knowledge, 131;
its theory of truth, 127;
its theory of reality, 135

Pratt (Prof.), 51, 127

Radical Empiricism, 85

Renan, 110

Renouvier, 29

Rey, 31

Riley, W., 26 _n._

Ritzsche, 45

Royce, J., 54

Russell, B., 61, 66 _n._, 169

Santayana, 171, 181, 190

Schellwien, 44

Schiller, F. C. S., 12, 14, 16, 132, 133

Schinz, 192 _n._

Schopenhauer, 28, 119, 151, 260

Seth, James, 14 _n._

Seth-Haldane, 260

Shaw, Bernard, 124

Sidgwick, H., 56, 118, 119 _n._, 140

Sigwart, 42

Simmel, 44

Spencer, 41 _n._

Starbuck, 28

Stoicism, 118

Stout, G. F., 55

Subjective Idealism, 259

Taylor, A. E., 57, 77, 78, 199 _n._, 219

Teleology, 88, 198

Tertullian, 119

Theism, 215 _n._

Themistius, 155

Thompson, J. H., 144

Titchener, 157

Truth, 59, 81, 163

Tufts, 147

Tyndall, 110

Vaihinger, 39

Walker, L. J., 31

Ward, James, 30, 55, 143, 162

Wells, H. G., 123

Westermarck, 145

Windelband, 46, 150

Wollaston, 224

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.

Transcriber’s Notes

Inconsistent punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.