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, anæmic; 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”) But “life requires us to apprehend things in the relation they have to our needs.” ("Laughter”) 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) 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 antennæ 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”) 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”)

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”)

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”) “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”; “Matter and Memory”, “Creative Evolution”)

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”)

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”)

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”)

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”)

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”)

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”)

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” 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 rôle 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”)

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.)

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”) 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”)

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”) “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”)

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”)

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”) 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”) 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.