A NEW PHILOSOPHY: HENRI BERGSON

by Edouard le Roy

Translated from the French by Vincent Benson

Preface

This little book is due to two articles published under the same titlein the "Revue des Deux Mondes", 1st and 15th February 1912. 

Their object was to present Mr Bergson's philosophy to the public atlarge, giving as short a sketch as possible, and describing, without toominute details, the general trend of his movement. These articles Ihave here reprinted intact. But I have added, in the form of continuousnotes, some additional explanations on points which did not come withinthe scope of investigation in the original sketch. 

I need hardly add that my work, though thus far complete, does not inany way claim to be a profound critical study. Indeed, such a study, dealing with a thinker who has not yet said his last word, would todaybe premature. I have simply aimed at writing an introduction which willmake it easier to read and understand Mr Bergson's works, and serve as apreliminary guide to those who desire initiation in the new philosophy. 

I have therefore firmly waived all the paraphernalia of technicaldiscussions, and have made no comparisons, learned or otherwise, betweenMr Bergson's teaching and that of older philosophies. 

I can conceive no better method of misunderstanding the point atissue, I mean the simple unity of productive intuition, than that ofpigeon-holing names of systems, collecting instances of resemblance, making up analogies, and specifying ingredients. An original philosophyis not meant to be studied as a mosaic which takes to pieces, a compoundwhich analyses, or a body which dissects. On the contrary, it is byconsidering it as a living act, not as a rather clever discourse, byexamining the peculiar excellence of its soul rather than the formationof its body, that the inquirer will succeed in understanding it. Properly speaking, I have only applied to Mr Bergson the method whichhe himself justifiably prescribes in a recent article ("Revue deMetaphysique et de Morale", November 1911), the only method, in fact, which is in all senses of the word fully "exact. " I shall none the lessbe glad if these brief pages can be of any interest to professionalphilosophers, and have endeavoured, as far as possible, to allow themto trace, under the concise formulae employed, the scheme which I haverefused to develop. 

It has become evident to me that even today the interpretation of MrBergson's position is in many cases full of faults, which it wouldundoubtedly be worth while to assist in removing. I may or may not havesucceeded in my attempt, but such, at any rate, is the precise end I hadin view. 

In conclusion, I may say that I have not had the honour of being MrBergson's pupil; and, at the time when I became acquainted with hisoutlook, my own direct reflection on science and life had alreadyproduced in me similar trains of thought. I found in his workthe striking realisation of a presentiment and a desire. This"correspondence, " which I have not exaggerated, proved at once a helpand a hindrance to me in entering into the exact comprehension of soprofoundly original a doctrine. The reader will thus understand that Ithink it in place to quote my authority to him in the following lineswhich Mr Bergson kindly wrote me after the publication of the articlesreproduced in this volume: "Underneath and beyond the method you havecaught the intention and the spirit. .. Your study could not be moreconscientious or true to the original. As it advances, condensationincreases in a marked degree: the reader becomes aware that theexplanation is undergoing a progressive involution similar to theinvolution by which we determine the reality of Time. To produce thisfeeling, much more has been necessary than a close study of my works: ithas required deep sympathy of thought, the power, in fact, of rethinkingthe subject in a personal and original manner. Nowhere is this sympathymore in evidence than in your concluding pages, where in a few words youpoint out the possibilities of further developments of the doctrine. Inthis direction I should myself say exactly what you have said. "

Paris, 28th March 1912. 

CONTENTS

Preface

GENERAL VIEW

I. Method. 

Scope of Henri Bergson's Philosophy. Material and Authorities. Investigation of Common-sense. Value of Science. Perception Discussed. Practical Life and Reality. Concepts and Symbolism. Intuition andAnalysis. Use of Metaphor. The Philosopher's Task. 

II. Teaching. 

The Ego. Space and Number. Parallelism. Henri Bergson's View of Mindand Matter. Qualitative Continuity. Memory. Real Duration Heterogeneous. Liberty and Determinism. Meaning of Reality. Evolution and Automatism. Triumph of Man. The Vital Impulse. Objections Refuted. Place of Religionin the New Philosophy. 

ADDITIONAL EXPLANATIONS

I. Henri Bergson's Work and the General Directions of ContemporaryThought. 

Mathematics and Philosophy. The Inert and the Living. Realism andPositivism. Henri Bergson and the Intuition of Duration. 

II. Immediacy. 

Necessity of Criticism. Utilitarianism of Common-sense. Perception ofImmediacy. 

III. Theory of Perception. 

Pure and Ordinary Perception. Kant's Position. Relation of Perception toMatter. Complete Experience. 

IV. Critique of Language. 

Dynamic Schemes. Dangers of Language. The Eleatic Dialectic. ScientificThought and the Task of Intuition. Discussion of Change. 

V. The Problem of Consciousness: Duration and Liberty. 

States as Phases in Duration. The Scientific View of Time. Durationand Freedom. Liberty and Determinism in the Light of Henri Bergson'sPhilosophy. 

VI. The Problem of Evolution: Life and Matter. 

Evolution and Creation. Laws of Conservation and Degradation. Quantityand Quality. Secondary Value of Matter. 

VII. The Problem of Knowledge: Analysis and Intuition. 

Difficulties of Kant's Position. Insufficiency of Intelligence. HenriBergson and the Problem of Reason. Geometric and Vital Types of Order. 

VIII. Conclusion. 

Moral and Religious Problems. Henri Bergson's Position. 

A NEW PHILOSOPHY

GENERAL VIEW

I. Method. 

There is a thinker whose name is today on everybody's lips, who isdeemed by acknowledged philosophers worthy of comparison with thegreatest, and who, with his pen as well as his brain, has overleapt alltechnical obstacles, and won himself a reading both outside and insidethe schools. Beyond any doubt, and by common consent, Mr Henri Bergson'swork will appear to future eyes among the most characteristic, fertile, and glorious of our era. It marks a never-to-be-forgotten date inhistory; it opens up a phase of metaphysical thought; it lays down aprinciple of development the limits of which are indeterminable; and itis after cool consideration, with full consciousness of the exact valueof words, that we are able to pronounce the revolution which it effectsequal in importance to that effected by Kant, or even by Socrates. 

Everybody, indeed, has become aware of this more or less clearly. Elsehow are we to explain, except through such recognition, the suddenstriking spread of this new philosophy which, by its learned rigorism, precluded the likelihood of so rapid a triumph?

Twenty years have sufficed to make its results felt far beyondtraditional limits: and now its influence is alive and working from onepole of thought to the other; and the active leaven contained in it canbe seen already extending to the most varied and distant spheres:in social and political spheres, where from opposite points, and notwithout certain abuses, an attempt is already being made to wrench itin contrary directions; in the sphere of religious speculation, whereit has been more legitimately summoned to a distinguished, illuminative, and beneficent career; in the sphere of pure science, where, despite oldseparatist prejudices, the ideas sown are pushing up here and there;and lastly, in the sphere of art, where there are indications that itis likely to help certain presentiments, which have till now remainedobscure, to become conscious of themselves. The moment is favourable toa study of Mr Bergson's philosophy; but in the face of so many attemptedmethods of employment, some of them a trifle premature, the point ofparamount importance, applying Mr Bergson's own method to himself, isto study his philosophy in itself, for itself, in its profound trend andits authenticated action, without claiming to enlist it in the ranks ofany cause whatsoever. 

I. 

Mr Bergson's readers will undergo at almost every page they read anintense and singular experience. The curtain drawn between ourselvesand reality, enveloping everything including ourselves in its illusivefolds, seems of a sudden to fall, dissipated by enchantment, and displayto the mind depths of light till then undreamt, in which reality itself, contemplated face to face for the first time, stands fully revealed. Therevelation is overpowering, and once vouchsafed will never afterwards beforgotten. 

Nothing can convey to the reader the effects of this direct and intimatemental vision. Everything which he thought he knew already finds newbirth and vigour in the clear light of morning: on all hands, in theglow of dawn, new intuitions spring up and open out; we feel them bigwith infinite consequences, heavy and saturated with life. Each of themis no sooner blown than it appears fertile for ever. And yet there isnothing paradoxical or disturbing in the novelty. It is a reply to ourexpectation, an answer to some dim hope. So vivid is the impression oftruth, that afterwards we are even ready to believe we recognise therevelation as if we had always darkly anticipated it in some mysterioustwilight at the back of consciousness. 

Afterwards, no doubt, in certain cases, incertitude reappears, sometimeseven decided objections. The reader, who at first was under a magicspell, corrects his thought, or at least hesitates. What he has seenis still at bottom so new, so unexpected, so far removed from familiarconceptions. For this surging wave of thought our mind contains none ofthose ready-cut channels which render comprehension easy. But whether, in the long run, we each of us give or refuse complete or partialadhesion, all of us, at least, have received a regenerating shock, aninternal upheaval not readily silenced: the network of our intellectualhabits is broken; henceforth a new leaven works and ferments in us; weshall no longer think as we used to think; and be we pupils or critics, we cannot mistake the fact that we have here a principle of integralrenewal for ancient philosophy and its old and timeworn problems. 

It is obviously impossible to sketch in brief all the aspects and allthe wealth of so original a work. Still less shall I be able to answerhere the many questions which arise. I must decide to pass rapidlyover the technical detail of clear, closely-argued, and penetratingdiscussions; over the scope and exactness of the evidence borrowed fromthe most diverse positive sciences; over the marvellous dexterity of thepsychological analysis; over the magic of a style which can call upwhat words cannot express. The solidity of the construction will not beevidenced in these pages, nor its austere and subtle beauty. But whatI do at all costs wish to bring out, in shorter form, in this newphilosophy, is its directing idea and general movement. 

In such an undertaking, where the end is to understand rather than tojudge, criticism ought to take second place. It is more profitable toattempt to feel oneself into the heart of the teaching, to relive itsgenesis, to perceive the principle of organic unity, to come at themainspring. Let our reading be a course of meditation which we live. The only true homage we can render to the masters of thought consists inourselves thinking, as far as we can do so, in their train, under theirinspiration, and along the paths which they have opened up. 

In the case before us this road is landmarked by several books which itwill be sufficient to study one after the other, and take successivelyas the text of our reflections. 

In 1889 Mr Bergson made his appearance with an "Essay on the ImmediateData of Consciousness". 

This was his doctor's thesis. Taking up his position inside the humanpersonality, in its inmost mind, he endeavoured to lay hold of thedepths of life and free action in their commonly overlooked and fugitiveoriginality. 

Some years later, in 1896, passing this time to the externals ofconsciousness, the contact surface between things and the ego, hepublished "Matter and Memory", a masterly study of perception andrecollection, which he himself put forward as an inquiry into therelation between body and mind. In 1907 he followed with "CreativeEvolution", in which the new metaphysic was outlined in its fullbreadth, and developed with a wealth of suggestion and perspectiveopening upon the distances of infinity; universal evolution, the meaningof life, the nature of mind and matter, of intelligence and instinct, were the great problems here treated, ending in a general critique ofknowledge and a completely original definition of philosophy. 

These will be our guides which we shall carefully follow, step by step. It is not, I must confess, without some apprehension that I undertakethe task of summing up so much research, and of condensing into a fewpages so many and such new conclusions. 

Mr Bergson excels, even on points of least significance, in producingthe feeling of unfathomed depths and infinite levels. Never has anyonebetter understood how to fulfil the philosopher's first task, inpointing out the hidden mystery in everything. With him we see all atonce the concrete thickness and inexhaustible extension of the mostfamiliar reality, which has always been before our eyes, where before wewere aware only of the external film. 

Do not imagine that this is simply a poetical delusion. We must begrateful if the philosopher uses exquisite language and writes in astyle which abounds in living images. These are rare qualities. Butlet us avoid being duped by a show of printed matter: these unannotatedpages are supported by positive science submitted to the most minuteinspection. One day, in 1901, at the French Philosophical Society, MrBergson related the genesis of "Matter and Memory". 

"Twelve years or so before its appearance, I had set myself thefollowing problem: 'What would be the teaching of the physiology andpathology of today upon the ancient question of the connection betweenphysical and moral to an unprejudiced mind, determined to forget allspeculation in which it has indulged on this point, determined also toneglect, in the enunciations of philosophers, all that is not pure andsimple statement of fact?' I set myself to solve the problem, and Ivery soon perceived that the question was susceptible of a provisionalsolution, and even of precise formulation, only if restricted to theproblem of memory. In memory itself I was forced to determine boundswhich I had afterwards to narrow considerably. After confining myself tothe recollection of words I saw that the problem, as stated, wasstill too broad, and that, to put the question in its most precise andinteresting form, I should have to substitute the recollection of thesound of words. The literature on aphasia is enormous. I took fiveyears to sift it. And I arrived at this conclusion, that between thepsychological fact and its corresponding basis in the brain there mustbe a relation which answers to none of the ready-made concepts furnishedus by philosophy. "

Certain characteristics of Mr Bergson's manner will be remarkedthroughout: his provisional effort of forgetfulness to recreate anew and untrammelled mind; his mixture of positive inquiry and boldinvention; his stupendous reading; his vast pioneer work carried on withindefatigable patience; his constant correction by criticism, informedof the minutest details and swift to follow up each of them at everyturn. With a problem which would at first have seemed secondary andincomplete, but which reappears as the subject deepens and is therebymetamorphosed, he connects his entire philosophy; and so well does heblend the whole and breathe upon it the breath of life that the finalstatement leaves the reader with an impression of sovereign ease. 

Examples will be necessary to enable us, even to a feeble extent, tounderstand this proceeding better. But before we come to examples, apreliminary question requires examination. In the preface to hisfirst "Essay" Mr Bergson defined the principle of a method which wasafterwards to reappear in its identity throughout his various works; andwe must recall the terms he employed. 

"We are forced to express ourselves in words, and we think, most often, in space. To put it another way, language compels us to establishbetween our ideas the same clear and precise distinctions, and the samebreak in continuity, as between material objects. This assimilationis useful in practical life and necessary in most sciences. But weare right in asking whether the insuperable difficulties of certainphilosophical problems do not arise from the fact that we persist inplacing non-spatial phenomena next one another in space, and whether, if we did away with the vulgar illustrations round which we dispute, weshould not sometimes put an end to the dispute. "

That is to say, it is stated to be the philosopher's duty from theoutset to renounce the usual forms of analytic and synthetic thought, and to achieve a direct intuitional effort which shall put him inimmediate contact with reality. Without doubt it is this question ofmethod which demands our first attention. It is the leading question. Mr Bergson himself presents his works as "essays" which do not aim at"solving the greatest problems all at once, " but seek merely "to definethe method and disclose the possibility of applying it on some essentialpoints. " (Preface to "Creative Evolution". ) It is also a delicatequestion, for it dominates all the rest, and decides whether we shallfully understand what is to follow. 

We must therefore pause here a moment. To direct us in this preliminarystudy we have an admirable "Introduction to Metaphysis", which appearedas an article in the "Metaphysical and Moral Review" (January 1903): ashort but marvellously suggestive memoire, constituting the best prefaceto the reading of the books themselves. We may say in passing, that weshould be grateful to Mr Bergson if he would have it bound in volumeform, along with some other articles which are scarcely to be had at alltoday. 

II. 

Every philosophy, prior to taking shape in a group of co-ordinatedtheses, presents itself, in its initial stage, as an attitude, a frameof mind, a method. Nothing can be more important than to study thisstarting-point, this elementary act of direction and movement, ifwe wish afterwards to arrive at the precise shade of meaning of thesubsequent teaching. Here is really the fountain-head of thought; itis here that the form of the future system is determined, and here thatcontact with reality takes effect. 

The last point, particularly, is vital. To return to the direct view ofthings beyond all figurative symbols, to descend into the inmost depthsof being, to watch the throbbing life in its pure state, and listen tothe secret rhythm of its inmost breath, to measure it, at least so faras measurement is possible, has always been the philosopher's ambition;and the new philosophy has not departed from this ideal. But in whatlight does it regard its task? That is the first point to clear up. Forthe problem is complex, and the goal distant. 

"We are made as much, and more, for action than for thought, " says MrBergson; "or rather, when we follow our natural impulse, it is to actthat we think. " ("L'Evolution Creatrice", page 321. ) And again, "Whatwe ordinarily call a fact is not reality such as it would appear to animmediate intuition, but an adaptation of reality to practical interestsand the demands of social life. " ("Matiere et Memoire", page 201. ) Hencethe question which takes precedence of all others is: to distinguish inour common representation of the world, the fact in its true sensefrom the combinations which we have introduced in view of action andlanguage. 

Now, to rediscover nature in her fresh springs of reality, it is notsufficient to abandon the images and conceptions invented by humaninitiative; still less is it sufficient to fling ourselves into thetorrent of brute sensations. By so doing we are in danger of dissolvingour thought in dream or quenching it in night. 

Above all, we are in danger of committal to a path which it isimpossible to follow. The philosopher is not free to begin the work ofknowledge again upon other planes, with a mind which would be adequateto the new and virgin issue of a simple writ of oblivion. 

At the time when critical reflection begins, we have already been longengaged in action and science, by the training of individual life, asby hereditary and racial experience, our faculties of perception andconception, our senses and our understanding, have contracted habits, which are by this time unconscious and instinctive; we are haunted byall kinds of ideas and principles, so familiar today that they even passunobserved. But what is it all worth?

Does it, in its present state, help us to know the nature of adisinterested intuition?

Nothing but a methodical examination of consciousness can tell us that;and it will take more than a renunciation of explicit knowledge torecreate in us a new mind, capable of grasping the bare fact exactlyas it is: what we require is perhaps a penetrating reform, a kind ofconversion. 

The rational and perceptive function we term our intelligence emergesfrom darkness through a slowly lifting dawn. During this twilight periodit has lived, worked, acted, fashioned and informed itself. On thethreshold of philosophical speculation it is full of more or lessconcealed beliefs, which are literally prejudices, and branded with asecret mark influencing its every movement. Here is an actual situation. Exemption from it is beyond anyone's province. Whether we will or no, we are from the beginning of our inquiry immersed in a doctrine whichdisguises nature to us, and already at bottom constitutes a completemetaphysic. This we term common-sense, and positive science is itselfonly an extension and refinement of it. What is the value of this workperformed without clear consciousness or critical attention? Doesit bring us into true relation with things, into relation with pureconsciousness?

This is our first and inevitable doubt, which requires solution. 

But it would be a quixotic proceeding first to make a void in our mind, and afterwards to admit into it, one by one, after investigation, suchand such a concept, or such and such a principle. The illusion ofthe clean sweep and total reconstruction can never be too vigorouslycondemned. 

Is it from the void that we set out to think? Do we think in void, andwith nothing? Common ideas of necessity form the groundwork for thebroidery of our advanced thought. Further, even if we succeeded in ourimpossible task, should we, in so doing, have corrected the causesof error which are today graven upon the very structure of ourintelligence, such as our past life has made it? These errors would notcease to act imperceptibly upon the work of revision intended to applythe remedy. 

It is from within, by an effort of immanent purgation, that thenecessary reform must be brought about. And philosophy's first task isto institute critical reflection upon the obscure beginnings of thought, with a view to shedding light upon its spontaneous virgin condition, but without any vain claim to lift it out of the current in which it isactually plunged. 

One conclusion is already plain: the groundwork of common-sense is sure, but the form is suspicious. 

In common-sense is contained, at any rate virtually and in embryo, allthat can ever be attained of reality, for reality is verification, notconstruction. 

Everything has its starting-point in construction and verification. Thusphilosophical research can only be a conscious and deliberate return tothe facts of primal intuition. But common-sense, being prepossessed in apractical direction, has doubtless subjected these facts to a process ofinterested alteration, which is artificial in proportion to the labourbestowed. Such is Mr Bergson's fundamental hypothesis, and it isfar-reaching. "Many metaphysical difficulties probably arise from ourhabit of confounding speculation and practice; or of pushing an ideain the direction of utility, when we think we fathom it in theory;or, lastly, of employing in thought the forms of action. " (Preface to"Matter and Memory". First edition. )

The work of reform will consist therefore in freeing our intelligencefrom its utilitarian habits, by endeavouring at the outset to becomeclearly conscious of them. 

Notice how far presumption is in favour of our hypothesis. Whether weregard organic life in the genesis and preservation of the individual, or in the evolution of species, we see its natural direction to betowards utility: but the effort of thought comes after the effort oflife; it is not added from outside, it is the continuance and the flowerof the former effort. Must we not expect from this that it will preserveits former habits? And what do we actually observe? The first gleamof human intelligence in prehistoric times is revealed to us by anindustry; the cut flint of the primitive caves marks the first stageof the road which was one day to end in the most sublime philosophies. Again, every science has begun by practical arts. Indeed, our science oftoday, however disinterested it may have become, remains none the lessin close relation with the demands of our action; it permits us to speakof and to handle things rather than to see them in their intimate andprofound nature. Analysis, when applied to our operations of knowledge, shows us that our understanding parcels out, arrests, and quantifies, whereas reality, as it appears to immediate intuition, is a movingseries, a flux of blended qualities. 

That is to say, our understanding solidifies all that it touches. Havewe not here exactly the essential postulates of action and speech? Tospeak, as to act, we must have separable elements, terms and objectswhich remain inert while the operation goes on, maintaining betweenthemselves the constant relations which find their most perfect andideal presentment in mathematics. 

Everything tends, then, to incline us towards the hypothesis inquestion. Let us regard it henceforward as expressing a fact. 

The forms of knowledge elaborated by common-sense were not originallyintended to allow us to see reality as it is. 

Their task was rather, and remains so, to enable us to grasp itspractical aspect. It is for that they are made, not for philosophicalspeculation. 

Now these forms nevertheless have existed in us as inveterate habits, soon becoming unconscious, even when we have reached the point ofdesiring knowledge for its own sake. 

But in this new stage they preserve the bias of their originalutilitarian function, and carry this mark with them everywhere, leavingit upon the fresh tasks which we are fain to make them accomplish. 

An inner reform is therefore imperative today, if we are to succeed inunearthing and sifting, in our perception of nature, under the veinstoneof practical symbolism, the true intuitional content. 

This attempt at return to the standpoint of pure contemplation anddisinterested experience is a task very different from the task ofscience. It is one thing to regard more and more or less and lessclosely with the eyes made for us by utilitarian evolution: it isanother to labour at remaking for ourselves eyes capable of seeing, inorder to see, and not in order to live. 

Philosophy understood in this manner--and we shall see more andmore clearly as we go on that there is no other legitimate method ofunderstanding it--demands from us an almost violent act of reform andconversion. 

The mind must turn round upon itself, invert the habitual direction ofits thought, climb the hill down which its instinct towards action hascarried it, and go to seek experience at its source, "above the criticalbend where it inclines towards our practical use and becomes, properlyspeaking, human experience. " ("Matter and Memory", page 203. ) In short, by a twin effort of criticism and expansion, it must pass outsidecommon-sense and synthetic understanding to return to pure intuition. 

Philosophy consists in reliving the immediate over again, and ininterpreting our rational science and everyday perception by its light. That, at least, is the first stage. We shall find afterwards that thatis not all. 

Here is a genuinely new conception of philosophy. Here, for the firsttime, philosophy is made specifically distinct from science, yet remainsno less positive. 

What science really does is to preserve the general attitude ofcommon-sense, with its apparatus of forms and principles. 

It is true that science develops and perfects it, refines and extendsit, and even now and again corrects it. But science does not changeeither the direction or the essential steps. 

In this philosophy, on the contrary, what is at first suspected andfinally modified, is the setting of the points before the journeybegins. 

Not that, in saying so, we mean to condemn science; but we mustrecognise its just limits. The methods of science proper are in theirplace and appropriate, and lead to a knowledge which is true (thoughstill symbolical), so long as the object studied is the world ofpractical action, or, to put it briefly, the world of inert matter. 

But soul, life, and activity escape it, and yet these are the spring andultimate basis of everything: and it is the appreciation of thisfact, with what it entails, that is new. And yet, new as Mr Bergson'sconception of philosophy may deservedly appear, it does not any theless, from another point of view, deserve to be styled classic andtraditional. 

What it really defines is not so much a particular philosophy asphilosophy itself, in its original function. 

Everywhere in history we find its secret current at its task. 

All great philosophers have had glimpses of it, and employed it inmoments of discovery. Only as a general rule they have not clearlyrecognised what they were doing, and so have soon turned aside. 

But on this point I cannot insist without going into lengthy detail, and am obliged to refer the reader to the fourth chapter of "CreativeEvolution", where he will find the whole question dealt with. 

One remark, however, has still to be made. Philosophy, according toMr Bergson's conception, implies and demands time; it does not aim atcompletion all at once, for the mental reform in question is of the kindwhich requires gradual fulfilment. The truth which it involves doesnot set out to be a non-temporal essence, which a sufficiently powerfulgenius would be able, under pressure, to perceive in its entirety at oneview; and that again seems to be very new. 

I do not, of course, wish to abuse systems of philosophy. Each of themis an experience of thought, a moment in the life of thought, a methodof exploring reality, a reagent which reveals an aspect. Truth undergoesanalysis into systems as does light into colours. 

But the mere name system calls up the static idea of a finishedbuilding. Here there is nothing of the kind. The new philosophy desiresto be a proceeding as much as, and even more than, to be a system. It insists on being lived as well as thought. It demands that thoughtshould work at living its true life, an inner life related to itself, effective, active, and creative, but not on that account directedtowards external action. "And, " says Mr Bergson, "it can only beconstructed by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, and of many observers, completing, correcting, and righting oneanother. " (Preface to "Creative Evolution". )

Let us see how it begins, and what is its generating act. 

III. 

How are we to attain the immediate? How are we to realise thisperception of pure fact which we stated to be the philosopher's firststep?

Unless we can clear up this doubt, the end proposed will remain to ourgaze an abstract and lifeless ideal. This is, then, the point whichrequires instant explanation. For there is a serious difficulty in whichthe very employment of the word "immediate" might lead us astray. 

The immediate, in the sense which concerns us, is not at all, or atleast is no longer for us the passive experience, the indefinablesomething which we should inevitably receive, provided we opened oureyes and abstained from reflection. 

As a matter of fact, we cannot abstain from reflection: reflection istoday part of our very vision; it comes into play as soon as we openour eyes. So that, to come on the trail of the immediate, there must beeffort and work. How are we to guide this effort? In what will this workconsist? By what sign shall we be able to recognise that the result hasbeen obtained?

These are the questions to be cleared up. Mr Bergson speaks of themchiefly in connection with the realities of consciousness, or, more generally speaking, of life. And it is here, in fact, that theconsequences are most weighty and far-reaching. We shall need to referto them again in detail. But to simplify my explanation, I will herechoose another example: that of inert matter, of the perception on whichthe physical is based. It is in this case that the divergence betweencommon perception and pure perception, however real it may be, assumesleast proportions. 

Therefore it appears most in place in the sketch I desire to trace of anexceedingly complex work, where I can only hope, evidently, to indicatethe main lines and general direction. 

We readily believe that when we cast our eyes upon surrounding objects, we enter into them unresistingly and apprehend them all at once in theirintrinsic nature. Perception would thus be nothing but simple passiveregistration. But nothing could be more untrue, if we are speaking ofthe perception which we employ without profound criticism in thecourse of our daily life. What we here take to be pure fact is, onthe contrary, the last term in a highly complicated series of mentaloperations. And this term contains as much of us as of things. 

In fact, all concrete perception comes up for analysis as anindissoluble mixture of construction and fact, in which the fact is onlyrevealed through the construction, and takes on its complexion. We allknow by experience how incapable the uneducated person is of explainingthe simple appearance of the least fact, without embodying a crowd offalse interpretations. We know to a less extent, but it is also true, that the most enlightened and adroit person proceeds in just the samemanner: his interpretation is better, but it is still interpretation. 

That is why accurate observation is so difficult; we see or we do notsee, we notice such and such an aspect, we read this or that, accordingto our state of consciousness at the time, according to the direction ofthe investigation on which we are engaged. 

Who was it defined art as nature seen through a mind? Perception, too, is an art. 

This art has its processes, its conventions, and its tools. Go into alaboratory and study one of those complex instruments which make oursenses finer or more powerful; each of them is literally a sheaf ofmaterialised theories, and by means of it all acquired science isbrought to bear on each new observation of the student. In exactly thesame way our organs of sense are actual instruments constructed by theunconscious work of the mind in the course of biological evolution;they too sum up and give concrete form and expression to a systemof enlightening theories. But that is not all. The most elementarypsychology shows us the amount of thought, in the correct sense of theterm, recollection, or inference, which enters into what we should betempted to call pure perception. 

Establishment of fact is not the simple reception of the faithfulimprint of that fact; it is invariably interpreted, systematised, andplaced in pre-existing forms which constitute veritable theoreticalframes. That is why the child has to learn to perceive. There is aneducation of the senses which he acquires by long training. One day, which aid of habit, he will almost cease to see things: a few lines, afew glimpses, a few simple signs noted in a brief passing glance, willenable him to recognise them; and he will hardly retain any more ofreality than its schemes and symbols. 

"Perception, " says Mr Bergson on this subject, "becomes in the end onlyan opportunity of recollection. " ("Matter and Memory", page 59. )

All concrete perception, it is true, is directed less upon thepresent than the past. The part of pure perception in it is small, andimmediately covered and almost buried by the contribution of memory. 

This infinitesimal part acts as a bait. It is a summons to recollection, challenging us to extract from our previous experience, and constructwith our acquired wealth a system of images which permits us to read theexperience of the moment. 

With our scheme of interpretation thus constituted we encounter the fewfugitive traits which we have actually perceived. If the theory we haveelaborated adapts itself, and succeeds in accounting for, connecting, and making sense of these traits, we shall finally have a perceptionproperly so called. 

Perception then, in the usual sense of the word, is the resolution of aproblem, the verification of a theory. 

Thus are explained "errors of the senses, " which are in reality errorsof interpretation. Thus too, and in the same manner, we have theexplanation of dreams. 

Let us take a simple example. When you read a book, do you spell eachsyllable, one by one, to group the syllables afterwards into words, andthe words into phrases, thus travelling from print to meaning? Not atall: you grasp a few letters accurately, a few downstrokes in theirgraphical outline; then you guess the remainder, travelling in thereverse direction, from a probable meaning to the print which youare interpreting. This is what causes mistakes in reading, and thewell-known difficulty in seeing printing errors. 

This observation is confirmed by curious experiments. Write someeveryday phrase or other on a blackboard; let there be a few intentionalmistakes here and there, a letter or two altered, or left out. Place thewords in a dark room in front of a person who, of course, does notknow what has been written. Then turn on the light without allowing theobserver sufficient time to spell the writing. 

In spite of this, he will in most cases read the entire phrase, withouthesitation or difficulty. 

He has restored what was missing, or corrected what was at fault. 

Now, ask him what letters he is certain he saw, and you will find hewill tell you an omitted or altered letter as well as a letter actuallywritten. 

The observer then thinks he sees in broad light a letter which is notthere, if that letter, in virtue of the general sense, ought to appearin the phrase. But you can go further, and vary the experiment. 

Suppose we write the word "tumult" correctly. After doing so, to directthe memory of the observer into a certain trend of recollection, callout in his ear, during the short time the light is turned on, anotherword of different meaning, for example, the word "railway. "

The observer will read "tunnel"; that is to say, a word, the graphicaloutline of which is like that of the written word, but connected insense with the order of recollection called up. 

In this mistake in reading, as in the spontaneous correction of theprevious experiment, we see very clearly that perception is always thefulfilment of guesswork. 

It is the direction of this work that we are concerned to determine. 

According to the popular idea, perception has a completely speculativeinterest: it is pure knowledge. Therein lies the fundamental mistake. 

Notice first of all how much more probable it is, a priori, that thework of perception, just as any other natural and spontaneous work, should have a utilitarian signification. 

"Life, " says Mr Bergson with justice, "is the acceptance from objects ofnothing but the useful impression, with the response of the appropriatereactions. " ("Laughter", page 154. )

And this view receives striking objective confirmation if, with theauthor of "Matter and Memory", we follow the progress of the perceptivefunctions along the animal series from the protoplasm to the highervertebrates; or if, with him, we analyse the task of the body, anddiscover that the nervous system is manifested in its very structure as, before all, an instrument of action. Have we not already besides proofof this in the fact that each of us always appears in his own eyes tooccupy the centre of the world he perceives?

The "Riquet" of Anatole France voices Mr Bergson's view: "I am always inthe centre of everything, and men and beasts and things, for or againstme, range themselves around. "

But direct analysis leads us still more plainly to the same conclusion. 

Let us take the perception of bodies. It is easy to show--and I regretthat I cannot here reproduce Mr Bergson's masterly demonstration--thatthe division of matter into distinct objects with sharp outlines isproduced by a selection of images which is completely relative to ourpractical needs. 

"The distinct outlines which we assign to an object, and which bestowupon it its individuality, are nothing but the graph of a certain kindof influence which we should be able to employ at a certain point inspace: it is the plan of our future actions which is submitted to oureyes, as in a mirror, when we perceive the surfaces and edges of things. Remove this action, and in consequence the high roads which it makesfor itself in advance by perception, in the web of reality, andthe individuality of the body will be reabsorbed in the universalinteraction which is without doubt reality itself. " Which is tantamountto saying that "rough bodies are cut in the material of nature by aperception of which the scissors follow, in some sort, the dotted linealong which the action would pass. " ("Creative Evolution", page 12. )

Bodies independent of common experience do not then appear, to anattentive criticism, as veritable realities which would have anexistence in themselves. They are only centres of co-ordination for ouractions. Or, if you prefer it, "our needs are so many shafts of lightwhich, when played upon the continuity of perceptible qualities, producein them the outline of distinct bodies. " ("Matter and Memory", page220. ) Does not science too, after its own fashion, resolve the atom intoa centre of intersecting relations, which finally extend by degrees tothe entire universe in an indissoluble interpenetration?

A qualitative continuity, imperceptibly shaded off, over which passquivers that here and there converge, is the image by which we areforced to recognise a superior degree of reality. 

But is this perceptible material, this qualitative continuity, the purefact in matter? Not yet. Perception, we said just now, is always inreality complicated by memory. There is more truth in this than we hadseen. Reality is not a motionless spectrum, extending to our viewits infinite shades; it might rather be termed a leaping flame in thespectrum. All is in passage, in process of becoming. 

On this flux consciousness concentrates at long intervals, each timecondensing into one "quality" an immense period of the inner history ofthings. "In just this way the thousand successive positions of a runnercontract into one single symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everybody the representationof a man running. " ("Matter and Memory", page 233. )

In the same way again, a red light, continuing one second, embodies sucha large number of elementary pulsations that it would take 25, 000years of our time to see its distinct passage. From here springs thesubjectivity of our perception. The different qualities correspond, roughly speaking, to the different rhythms of contraction ordilution, to the different degrees of inner tension in the perceivingconsciousness. 

Pushing the case to its limits, and imagining a complete expansion, matter would resolve into colourless disturbances, and become the "purematter" of the natural philosopher. 

Let us now unite in one single continuity the different periods of thepreceding dialectic. Vibration, qualities, and bodies are none of themreality by themselves; but all the same they are part of reality. Andabsolute reality would be the whole of these degrees and moments, andmany others as well, no doubt. Or rather, to secure absolute intuitionof matter, we should have on the one hand to get rid of all that ourpractical needs have constructed, restore on the other all the effectivetendencies they have extinguished, follow the complete scale ofqualitative concentrations and dilutions, and pass, by a kind ofsympathy, into the incessantly moving play of all the possibleinnumerable contractions or resolutions; with the result that in theend we should succeed, by a simultaneous view as it were, in grasping, according to their infinitely various modes, the phases of this matterwhich, though at present latent, admit of "perception. "

Thus, in the case before us, absolute knowledge is found to be theresult of integral experience; and though we cannot attain the term, wesee at any rate in what direction we should have to work to reach it. 

Now it must be stated that our realisable knowledge is at every momentpartial and limited rather than exterior and relative, for our effectiveperception is related to matter in itself as the part to the whole. Ourleast perceptions are actually based on pure perception, and "we areaware of the elementary disturbances which constitute matter, in theperceptible quality in which they suffer contraction, as we are aware ofthe beating of our heart in the general feeling that we have of living. "("The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods", 7thJuly 1910. )

But the preoccupation of practical action, coming between reality andourselves, produces the fragmentary world of common-sense, much as anabsorbing medium resolves into separate rays the continuous spectrumof a luminous body; whilst the rhythm of duration, and the degree oftension peculiar to our consciousness, limit us to the apprehension ofcertain qualities only. 

What then have we to do to progress towards absolute knowledge? Not toquit experience: quite the contrary; but to extend it and diversify itby science, while, at the same time, by criticism, we correct in it thedisturbing effects of action, and finally quicken all the results thusobtained by an effort of sympathy which will make us familiar with theobject until we feel its profound throbbing and its inner wealth. 

In connection with this last vital point, which is decisive, call tomind a celebrated page of Sainte-Beuve where he defines his method:"Enter into your author, make yourself at home in him, produce him underhis different aspects, make him live, move, and speak as he must havedone; follow him to his fireside and in his domestic habits, as closelyas you can. .. 

"Study him, turn him round and round, ask him questions at your leisure;place him before you. .. Every feature will appear in its turn, and takethe place of the man himself in this expression. .. 

"An individual reality will gradually blend with and become incarnate inthe vague, abstract, and general type. .. There is our man. .. " Yes, thatis exactly what we want: it could not be better put. Transpose this pagefrom the literary to the metaphysical order, and you have intuition, asdefined by Mr Bergson. You have the return to immediacy. 

But a new problem then arises: Is not our intuition of immediacy indanger of remaining inexpressible? For our language has been formed inview of practical life, not of pure knowledge. 

IV. 

The immediate perception of reality is not all; we have still totranslate this perception into intelligible language, into a connectedchain of concepts; failing which, it would seem, we should not haveknowledge in the strict sense of the word, we should not have truth. 

Without language, intuition, supposing it came to birth, would remainintransmissible and incommunicable, and would perish in a solitary cry. By language alone are we enabled to submit it to a positive test: theletter is the ballast of the mind, the body which allows it to act, andin acting to scatter the unreal delusions of dream. 

The act of pure intuition demands so great an inner tension from thoughtthat it can only be very rare and very fugitive: a few rapid gleams hereand there; and these dawning glimpses must be sustained, and afterwardsunited, and that again is the work of language. 

But while language is thus necessary, no less necessary is a criticismof ordinary language, and of the methods familiar to the understanding. These forms of reflected knowledge, these processes of analysis reallyconvey secretly all the postulates of practical action. But it isimperative that language should translate, not betray; that the body offormulae should not stifle the soul of intuition. We shall see in whatthe work of reform and conversion imposed on the philosopher preciselyconsists. 

The attitude of the ordinary proceedings of common thought can be statedin a few words. Place the object studied before yourself as an exterior"thing. " Then place yourself outside it, in perspective, at points ofvantage on a circumference, whence you can only see the object of yourinvestigation at a distance, with such interval as would be sufficientfor the contemplation of a picture; in short, move round the objectinstead of entering boldly into it. But these proceedings lead to what Ishall term analysis by concepts; that is to say, the attempt to resolveall reality into general ideas. 

What are concepts and abstract ideas really, but distant and simplifiedviews, species of model drawings, giving only a few summary features oftheir object, which vary according to direction and angle? By means ofthem we claim to determine the object from outside, as if, in order toknow it, it were sufficient to enclose it in a system of logical sidesand angles. 

And perhaps in this way we do really grasp it, perhaps we do establishits precise description, but we do not penetrate it. 

Concepts translate relations resulting from comparisons by which eachobject is finally expressed as a function of what it is not. Theydismember it, divide it up piece by piece, and mount it in variousframes. They lay hold of it only by ends and corners, by resemblancesand differences. Is not that obviously what is done by the convertingtheories which explain the soul by the body, life by matter, qualityby movements, space itself by pure number? Is not that what is donegenerally by all criticisms, all doctrines which connect one idea toanother, or to a group of other ideas?

In this way we reach only the surface of things, the reciprocalcontacts, mutual intersections, and parts common, but not the organicunity nor the inner essence. 

In vain we multiply our points of view, our perspectives and planeprojections: no accumulation of this kind will reconstruct the concretesolid. We can pass from an object directly perceived to the pictureswhich represent it, the prints which represent the pictures, the schemerepresenting the prints, because each stage contains less than the onebefore, and is obtained from it by simple diminution. 

But, inversely, you may take all the schemes, prints, pictures youlike--supposing that it is not absurd to conceive as given what is bynature interminable and inexhaustible, lending itself to indefiniteenumeration and endless development and multiplicity--but you will neverrecompose the profound and original unity of the source. 

How, by forcing yourself to seek the object outside itself, where itcertainly is not, except in echo and reflection, would you ever findits intimate and specific reality? You are but condemning yourself tosymbolism, for one "thing" can only be in another symbolically. 

To go further still, your knowledge of things will remain irremediablyrelative, relative to the symbols selected and the points of viewadopted. Everything will happen as in a movement of which the appearanceand formula vary with the spot from which you regard it, with the marksto which you relate it. 

Absolute revelation is only given to the man who passes into the object, flings himself upon its stream, and lives within its rhythm. Thethesis which maintains the inevitable relativity of all human knowledgeoriginates mainly from the metaphors employed to describe the act ofknowledge. The subject occupies this point, the object that; how are weto span the distance? Our perceptory organs fill the interval; how arewe to grasp anything but what reaches us in the receiver at the end ofthe wire?

The mind itself is a projecting lantern playing a shaft of light onnature; how should it do otherwise than tint nature its own colour?

But these difficulties all arise out of the spatial metaphors employed;and these metaphors in their turn do little but illustrate andtranslate the common method of analysis by concepts: and this method isessentially regulated by the practical needs of action and language. 

The philosopher must adopt an attitude entirely inverse; not keep at adistance from things, but listen in a manner to their inward breathing, and, above all, supply the effort of sympathy by which he establisheshimself in the object, becomes on intimate terms with it, tunes himselfto its rhythm, and, in a word, lives it. There is really nothingmysterious or strange in this. 

Consider your daily judgments in matters of art, profession, or sport. 

Between knowledge by theory and knowledge by experience, betweenunderstanding by external analogy and perception by profound intuition, what difference and divergence there is!

Who has absolute knowledge of a machine, the student who analyses it inmechanical theorems, or the engineer who has lived in comradeship withit, even to sharing the physical sensation of its laboured or easyworking, who feels the play of its inner muscles, its likes anddislikes, who notes its movements and the task before it, as the machineitself would do were it conscious, for whom it has become an extensionof his own body, a new sensori-motor organ, a group of prearrangedgestures and automatic habits?

The student's knowledge is more useful to the builder, and I do not wishto claim that we should ever neglect it; but the only true knowledgeis that of the engineer. And what I have just said does not concernmaterial objects only. Who has absolute knowledge of religion, he whoanalyses it in psychology, sociology, history, and metaphysics, or hewho, from within, by a living experience, participates in its essenceand holds communion with its duration?

But the external nature of the knowledge obtained by conceptual analysisis only its least fault. There are others still more serious. 

If concepts actually express what is common, general, unspecific, whatshould make us feel the need of recasting them when we apply them to anew object?

Does not their ground, their utility, and their interest exactly consistin sparing us this labour?

We regard them as elaborated once for all. They are building-material, ready-hewn blocks, which we have only to bring together. They are atoms, simple elements--a mathematician would say prime factors--capable ofassociating with infinity, but without undergoing any inner modificationin contact with it. They admit linkage; they can be attached externally, but they leave the aggregate as they went into it. 

Juxtaposition and arrangement are the geometrical operations whichtypify the work of knowledge in such a case; or else we must fall backon metaphors from some mental chemistry, such as proportioning andcombination. 

In all cases, the method is still that of alignment and blending ofpre-existent concepts. 

Now the mere fact of proceeding thus is equivalent to setting up theconcept as a symbol of an abstract class. That being done, explanationof a thing is no more than showing it in the intersection of severalclasses, partaking of each of them in definite proportions: which isthe same as considering it sufficiently expressed by a list of generalframes into which it will go. The unknown is then, on principle, andin virtue of this theory, referred to the already known; and it therebybecomes impossible ever to grasp any true novelty or any irreducibleoriginality. 

On principle, once more, we claim to reconstruct nature with puresymbols; and it thereby becomes impossible ever to reach its concretereality, "the invisible and present soul. "

This intuitional coinage in fixed standard concepts, this creation ofan easily handled intellectual cash, is no doubt of evident practicalutility. For knowledge in the usual sense of the word is not adisinterested operation; it consists in finding out what profit we candraw from an object, how we are to conduct ourselves towards it, whatlabel we can suitably attach to it, under what already known classit comes, to what degree it is deserving of this or that title whichdetermines an attitude we must take up, or a step we must perform. Ourend is to place the object in its approximate class, having regard toadvantageous employment or to everyday language. Then, and only then, we find our pigeon-holes all ready-made; and the same parcel of reagentsmeets all cases. A universal catechism is here in existence to meetevery research; its different clauses define so many unshifting pointsof view, from which we regard each object, and our study is subsequentlylimited to applying a kind of nomenclature to the preconstructed frames. 

Once again the philosopher has to proceed in exactly the oppositedirection. He has not to confine himself to ready-made businessconcepts, of the ordinary kind, suits cut to an average model, which fitnobody because they almost fit everybody; but he has to work to measure, incessantly renew his plant, continually recreate his mind, and meeteach new problem with a fresh adaptive effort. He must not go fromconcepts to things, as if each of them were only the cutting-pointof several concurrent generalities, an ideal centre of intersectingabstractions; on the contrary, he must go from things to concepts, incessantly creating new thoughts, and incessantly recasting the old. 

There could be no solution of the problem in a more or less ingeniousmosaic or tessellation of rigid concepts, pre-existing to be employed. We need plastic fluid, supple and living concepts, capable of beingcontinually modelled on reality, of delicately following its infinitecurves. The philosopher's task is then to create concepts much more thanto combine them. And each of the concepts he creates must remain openand adjustable, ready for the necessary renewal and adaptation, likea method or a programme: it must be the arrow pointing to a path whichdescends from intuition to language, not a boundary marking a terminus. In this way only does philosophy remain what it ought to be: theexamination into the consciousness of the human mind, the effort towardsenlargement and depth which it attempts unremittingly, in order toadvance beyond its present intellectual condition. 

Do you want an example? I will take that of human personality. Theego is one; the ego is many: no one contests this double formula. Buteverything admits of it; and what is its lesson to us? Observe what isbound to happen to the two concepts of unity and multiplicity, bythe mere fact that we take them for general frames independent of thereality contained, for detached language admitting empty and blankdefinition, always representable by the same word, no matter whatthe circumstances: they are no longer living and coloured ideas, butabstract, motionless, and neutral forms, without shades or gradations, without distinction of case, characterising two points of view fromwhich you can observe anything and everything. This being so, howcould the application of these forms help us to grasp the original andpeculiar nature of the unity and multiplicity of the ego? Still further, how could we, between two such entities, statically defined bytheir opposition, ever imagine a synthesis? Correctly speaking, theinteresting question is not whether there is unity, multiplicity, combination, one with the other, but to see what sort of unity, multiplicity, or combination realises the case in point; above all, to understand how the living person is at once multiple unity andone multiplicity, how these two poles of conceptual dissociation areconnected, how these two diverging branches of abstraction join atthe roots. The interesting point, in a word, is not the two symbolicalcolourless marks indicating the two ends of the spectrum; it is thecontinuity between, with its changing wealth of colouring, and thedouble progress of shades which resolve it into red and violet. 

But it is impossible to arrive at this concrete transition unless webegin from direct intuition and descend to the analysing concepts. 

Again, the same duty of reversing our familiar attitude, of invertingour customary proceeding, becomes ours for another reason. Theconceptual atomism of common thought leads it to place movement in alower order than rest, fact in a lower order than becoming. Accordingto common thought, movement is added to the atom, as a supplementaryaccident to a body previously at rest; and, by becoming, thepre-existent terms are strung together like pearls on a necklace. It delights in rest, and endeavours to bring to rest all that moves. Immobility appears to it to be the base of existence. It decomposesand pulverises every change and every phenomenon, until it findsthe invariable element in them. It is immobility which it esteemsas primary, fundamental, intelligible of itself; and motion, on thecontrary, which it seeks to explain as a function of immobility. Andso it tends, out of progresses and transitions, to make things. To seedistinctly, it appears to need a dead halt. What indeed are concepts butlogical look-out stations along the path of becoming? what are theybut motionless external views, taken at intervals, of an uninterruptedstream of movement?

Each of them isolates and fixes an aspect, "as the instantaneouslightning flashes on a storm-scene in the darkness. " ("Matter andMemory", page 209. )

Placed together, they make a net laid in advance, a strong meshwork inwhich the human intelligence posts itself securely to spy the flux ofreality, and seize it as it passes. Such a proceeding is made for thepractical world, and is out of place in the speculative. Everywhere weare trying to find constants, identities, non-variants, states; and weimagine ideal science as an open eye which gazes for ever upon objectsthat do not move. The constant is the concrete support demanded by ouraction: the matter upon which we operate must not escape our grasp andslip through our hands, if we are to be able to work it. The constant, again, is the element of language, in which the word represents itsinert permanence, in which it constitutes the solid fulcrum, thefoundation and landmark of dialectic progress, being that which can bediscarded by the mind, whose attention is thus free for other tasks. Inthis respect analysis by concepts is the natural method of common-sense. It consists in asking from time to time what point the object studiedhas reached, what it has become, in order to see what one could derivefrom it, or what it is fitting to say of it. 

But this method has only a practical reach. Reality, which in itsessence is becoming, passes through our concepts without ever lettingitself be caught, as a moving body passes fixed points. When we filterit, we retain only its deposit, the result of the becoming drifted downto us. 

Do the dams, canals, and buoys make the current of the river? Do thefestoons of dead seaweed ranged along the sand make the rising tide? Letus beware of confounding the stream of becoming with the sharp outlineof its result. Analysis by concepts is a cinematograph method, and itis plain that the inner organisation of the movement is not seen in themoving pictures. Every moment we have fixed views of moving objects. With such conceptual sections taken in the stream of continuity, howevermany we accumulate, should we ever reconstruct the movement itself, thedynamic connection, the march of the images, the transition from oneview to another? This capacity for movement must be contained in thepicture apparatus, and must therefore be given in addition to the viewsthemselves; and nothing can better prove how, after all, movement isnever explicable except by itself, never grasped except in itself. 

But if we take movement as our principle, it is, on the contrary, possible, and even easy, to slacken speed by imperceptible degrees, andstop dead. 

From a dead stop we shall never get our movement again; but rest canvery well be conceived as the limit of movement, as its arrest orextinction; for rest is less than movement. 

In this way the true philosophical method, which is the inverse of thecommon method, consists in taking up a position from the very outsetin the bosom of becoming, in adopting its changing curves and variabletension, in sympathising with the rhythm of its genesis, in perceivingall existence from within, as a growth, in following it in its innergeneration; in short, in promoting movement to fundamental reality, and, inversely, in degrading fixed states to the rank of secondary andderived reality. 

And thus, to come back to the example of the human personality, thephilosopher must seek in the ego not so much a ready-made unity ormultiplicity as, if I may venture the expression, two antagonistic andcorrelative movements of unification and plurification. 

There is then a radical difference between philosophic intuition andconceptual analysis. The latter delights in the play of dialectic, infountains of knowledge, where it is interested only in the immovablebasins; the former goes back to the source of the concepts, and seeksto possess it where it gushes out. Analysis cuts the channels; intuitionsupplies the water. Intuition acquires and analysis expends. 

It is not a question of banning analysis; science could not do withoutit, and philosophy could not do without science. But we must reserve forit its normal place and its just task. 

Concepts are the deposited sediment of intuition: intuition produces theconcepts, not the concepts intuition. From the heart of intuition youwill have no difficulty in seeing how it splits up and analyses intoconcepts, concepts of such and such a kind or such and such a shade. Butby successive analyses you will never reconstruct the least intuition, just as, no matter how you distribute water, you will never reconstructthe reservoir in its original condition. 

Begin from intuition: it is a summit from which we can descend byinfinite slopes; it is a picture which we can place in an infinitenumber of frames. But all the frames together will not recompose thepicture, and the lower ends of all the slopes will not explain howthey meet at the summit. Intuition is a necessary beginning; it is theimpulse which sets the analysis in motion, and gives it direction; it isthe sounding which brings it to solid bottom; the soul which assures itsunity. "I shall never understand how black and white interpenetrate, if I have not seen grey, but I understand without trouble, after onceseeing grey, how we can regard it from the double point of view of blackand white. " ("Introduction to Metaphysics. ")

Here are some letters which you can arrange in chains in a thousandways: the indivisible sense running along the chain, and making onephrase of it, is the original cause of the writing, not its consequence. Thus it is with intuition in relation to analysis. But beginnings andgenerative activities are the proper object of the philosopher. Thusthe conversion and reform incumbent on him consist essentially in atransition from the analytic to the intuitive point of view. 

The result is that the chosen instrument of philosophic thought ismetaphor; and of metaphor we know Mr Bergson to be an incomparablemaster. What we have to do, he says himself, is "to elicit a certainactive force which in most men is liable to be trammelled by mentalhabits more useful to life, " to awaken in them the feeling of theimmediate, original, and concrete. But "many different images, borrowedfrom very different orders of things, can, by their convergent action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certainintuition to be seized. By choosing images as unlike as possible, weprevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it isintended to call up, since it would in that case be immediately routedby its rivals. In making them all, despite their different aspects, demand of our mind the same kind of attention, and in some way the samedegree of tension, we accustom our consciousness little by little to aquite peculiar and well-determined disposition, precisely the one whichit ought to adopt to appear to itself unmasked. " ("Introduction toMetaphysics". )

Strictly speaking, the intuition of immediacy is inexpressible. But itcan be suggested and called up. How? By ringing it round with concurrentmetaphors. Our aim is to modify the habits of imagination in ourselveswhich are opposed to a simple and direct view, to break through themechanical imagery in which we have allowed ourselves to be caught; andit is by awakening other imagery and other habits that we can succeed inso doing. 

But then, you will say, where is the difference between philosophy andart, between metaphysical and aesthetic intuition? Art also tends toreveal nature to us, to suggest to us a direct vision of it, to lift theveil of illusion which hides us from ourselves; and aesthetic intuitionis, in its own way, perception of immediacy. We revive the feeling ofreality obliterated by habit, we summon the deep and penetrating soul ofthings: the object is the same in both cases; and the means are also thesame; images and metaphors. Is Mr Bergson only a poet, and does his workamount to nothing but the introduction of impressionism in metaphysics?

It is an old objection. If the truth be told, Mr Bergson's immensescientific knowledge should be sufficient refutation. 

Only those who have not read the mass of carefully proved and positivediscussions could give way thus to the impressions of art awakened bywhat is truly a magic style. But we can go further and put it better. 

That there are analogies between philosophy and art, betweenmetaphysical and aesthetic intuition, is unquestionable and uncontested. 

At the same time, the analogies must not be allowed to hide thedifferences. 

Art is, to a certain extent, philosophy previous to analysis, previousto criticism and science; the aesthetic intuition is metaphysicalintuition in process of birth, bounded by dream, not proceeding to thetest of positive verification. Reciprocally, philosophy is the art whichfollows upon science, and takes account of it, the art which uses theresults of analysis as its material, and submits itself to the demandsof stern criticism; metaphysical intuition is the aesthetic intuitionverified, systematised, ballasted by the language of reason. 

Philosophy then differs from art in two essential points: first of all, it rests upon, envelops, and supposes science; secondly, it implies atest of verification in its strict meaning. Instead of stopping at theacts of common-sense, it completes them with all the contributions ofanalysis and scientific investigation. 

We said just now of common-sense that, in its inmost depths, itpossesses reality: that is only quite exact when we mean common-sensedeveloped in positive science; and that is why philosophy takes theresults of science as its basis, for each of these results, likethe facts and data of common perception, opens a way for criticalpenetration towards the immediate. Just now I was comparing the twokinds of knowledge which the theorist and the engineer can have of amachine, and I allowed the advantage of absolute knowledge topractical experience, whilst theory seemed to me mainly relative to theconstructive industry. That is true, and I do not go back upon it. Butthe most experienced engineer, who did not know the mechanism of hismachine, who possessed only unanalysed feelings about it, would haveonly an artist's, not a philosopher's knowledge. For absolute intuition, in the full sense of the word, we must have integral experience; that isto say, a living application of rational theory no less than of workingtechnique. 

To journey towards living intuition, starting from complete science andcomplete sensation, is the philosopher's task; and this task is governedby standards unknown to art. 

Metaphysical intuition offers a victorious resistance to the test ofthorough and continued experiment, to the test of calculation as to thatof working, to the complete experiment which brings into play all thevarious deoxidising agents of criticism; it shows itself capable ofwithstanding analysis without dissolving or succumbing; it abounds inconcepts which satisfy the understanding, and exalt it; in a word, itcreates light and truth on all mental planes; and these characteristicsare sufficient to distinguish it in a profound degree from aestheticintuition. 

The latter is only the prophetic type of the former, a dream orpresentiment, a veiled and still uncertain dawn, a twilight mythpreceding and proclaiming, in the half-darkness, the full day ofpositive revelation. .. 

Every philosophy has two faces, and must be studied in twomovements--method and teaching. 

These are its two moments, its two aspects, no doubt co-ordinate andmutually dependent, but none the less distinct. 

We have just examined the method of the new philosophy inaugurated byMr Bergson. To what teaching has this method led us, and to what can weforesee that it will lead us?

This is what we have still to find. 

II. Teaching. 

The sciences properly so called, those that are by agreement termedpositive, present themselves as so many external and circumferentialpoints from which we view reality. They leave us on the outside ofthings, and confine themselves to investigating from a distance. 

The views they give us resemble the brief perspectives of a town whichwe obtain in looking at it from different angles on the surroundinghills. 

Less even than that: for very soon, by increasing abstraction, the coloured views give place to regular lines, and even to simpleconventional notes, which are more practical in use and waste lesstime. And so the sciences remain prisoners of the symbol, and all theinevitable relativity involved in its use. But philosophy claims topierce within reality, establish itself in the object, follow itsthousand turns and folds, obtain from it a direct and immediate feeling, and penetrate right into the concrete depths of its heart; it is notcontent with an analysis, but demands an intuition. 

Now there is one existence which, at the outset, we know better and moresurely than any other; there is a privileged case in which the effortof sympathetic revelation is natural and almost easy to us; there is onereality at least which we grasp from within, which we perceive in itsdeep and internal content. This reality is ourselves. It is typical ofall reality, and our study may fitly begin here. Psychology puts usin direct contact with it, and metaphysics attempt to generalise thiscontact. But such a generalisation can only be attempted if, to beginwith, we are familiar with reality at the point where we have immediateaccess to it. 

The path of thought which the philosopher must take is from the inner tothe outer being. 

I. 

"Know thyself": the old maxim has remained the motto of philosophysince Socrates, the motto at least which marks its initial moment, when, inclining towards the depth of the subject, it commences its true workof penetration, whilst science continues to extend on the surface. Eachphilosophy in turn has commented upon and applied this old motto. But MrBergson, more than anyone else, has given it, as he does everythingelse he takes up, a new and profound meaning. What was the currentinterpretation before him? Speaking only of the last century, we maysay that, under the influence of Kant, criticism had till now beenprincipally engaged in unravelling the contribution of the subjectin the act of consciousness, in establishing our perception of thingsthrough certain representative forms borrowed from our own constitution. Such was, even yesterday, the authenticated way of regarding theproblem. And it is precisely this attitude which Mr Bergson, by avolte-face which will remain familiar to him in the course of hisresearches, reverses from the outset. 

"It has appeared to me, " says he, ("Essay on the Immediate Data ofConsciousness", Conclusion. ) "that there was ground for setting oneselfthe inverse problem, and asking whether the most apparent states of theego itself, which we think we grasp directly, are not most of the timeperceived through certain forms borrowed from the outer world, which inthis way gives us back what we have lent it. A priori, it seems fairlyprobable that this is what goes on. For supposing that the forms ofwhich we are speaking, to which we adapt matter, come entirely from themind, it seems difficult to apply them constantly to objects withoutsoon producing the colouring of the objects in the forms; thereforein using these forms for the knowledge of our own personality, werisk taking a reflection of the frame in which we place them--that is, actually, the external world--for the very colouring of the ego. Butwe can go further, and state that forms applicable to things cannot beentirely our own work; that they must result from a compromise betweenmatter and mind; that if we give much to this matter, we doubtlessreceive something from it; and that, in this way, when we try to possessourselves again after an excursion into the outer world, we no longerhave our hands free. "

To avoid such a consequence, there is, we must admit, a conceivableloophole. It consists in maintaining on principle an absolute analogy, an exact similitude between internal reality and external objects. Theforms which suit the one would then also suit the other. 

But it must be observed that such a principle constitutes in the highestdegree a metaphysical thesis which it would be on all hands illegal toassert previously as a postulate of method. Secondly, and above all, itmust be observed that on this head experience is decisive, and manifestsmore plainly every day the failure of the theories which try toassimilate the world of consciousness to that of matter, to copypsychology from physics. We have here two different "orders. " Theapparatus of the first does not admit of being employed in the second. Hence the necessity of the attitude adopted by Mr Bergson. We havean effort to make, a work of reform to undertake, to lift the veil ofsymbols which envelops our usual representation of the ego, and thusconceals us from our own view, in order to find out what we are inreality, immediately, in our inmost selves. This effort and this workare necessary, because, "in order to contemplate the ego in its originalpurity, psychology must eliminate or correct certain forms which bearthe visible mark of the outer world. " ("Essay on the Immediate Dataof Consciousness", Conclusion. ) What are these forms? Let us confineourselves to the most important. Things appear to us as numerableunits, placed side by side in space. They compose numerical and spatialmultiplicity, a dust of terms between which geometrical ties areestablished. 

But space and number are the two forms of immobility, the two schemes ofanalysis, by which we must not let ourselves be obsessed. I do not saythat there is no place to give them, even in the internal world. But themore deeply we enter into the heart of psychological life, the less theyare in place. 

The fact is, there are several planes of consciousness, situated atdifferent depths, marking all the intervening degrees between purethought and bodily action, and each mental phenomenon interests allthese planes simultaneously, and is thus repeated in a thousand highertones, like the harmonies of one and the same note. 

Or, if you prefer it, the life of the spirit is not the uniformtransparent surface of a mere; rather it is a gushing spring which, at first pent in, spreads upwards and outwards, like a sheaf of corn, passing through many different states, from the dark and concentratedwelling of the source to the gleam of the scattered tumbling spray; andeach of its moods presents in its turn a similar character, being itselfonly a thread within the whole. Such without doubt is the central andactivating idea of the admirable book entitled "Matter and Memory". Icannot possibly condense its substance here, or convey its astonishingsynthetic power, which succeeds in contracting a complete metaphysic, and in gripping it so firmly that the examination ends by passing tothe discussion of a few humble facts relative to the philosophy of thebrain! But its technical severity and its very conciseness, combinedwith the wealth it contains, render it irresumable; and I can only in afew words indicate its conclusions. 

First of all, however little we pride ourselves on positive method, wemust admit the existence of an internal world, of a spiritual activitydistinct from matter and its mechanism. No chemistry of the brain, nodance of atoms, is equivalent to the least thought, or indeed to theleast sensation. 

Some, it is true, have brought forward a thesis of parallelism, according to which each mental phenomenon corresponds point by pointto a phenomenon in the brain, without adding anything to it, withoutinfluencing its course, merely translating it into another tongue, so that a glance sufficiently penetrating to follow the molecularrevolutions and the fluxes of nervous production in their leastepisodes would immediately read the inmost secrets of the associatedconsciousness. 

But no one will deny that a thesis of this kind is only in reality ahypothesis, that it goes enormously beyond the certain data of currentbiology, and that it can only be formulated by anticipating futurediscoveries in a preconceived direction. Let us be candid: it is notreally a thesis of positive science, but a metaphysical thesis in theunpleasant meaning of the term. Taking it at its best, its worth todaycould only be one of intelligibleness. And intelligible it is not. 

How are we to understand a consciousness destitute of activity andconsequently without connection with reality, a kind of phosphorescencewhich emphasises the lines of vibration in the brain, and renders inmiraculous duplicate, by its mysterious and useless light, certainphenomena already complete without it?

One day Mr Bergson came down into the arena of dialectic, and, talking to his opponents in their own language, pulled their"psycho-physiological paralogism" to pieces before their eyes; itis only by confounding in one and the same argument two systems ofincompatible notations, idealism and realism, that we succeed inenunciating the parallelist thesis. This reasoning went home, allthe more as it was adapted to the usual form of discussions betweenphilosophers. But a more positive and more categorical proof is tobe found all through "Matter and Memory". From the precise example ofrecollection analysed to its lowest depths, Mr Bergson completely graspsand measures the divergence between soul and body, between mind andmatter. Then, putting into practice what he said elsewhere about thecreation of new concepts, he arrives at the conclusion--these are hisown expressions--that between the psychological fact and its counterpartin the brain there must be a relation sui generis, which is neitherthe determination of the one by the other, nor their reciprocalindependence, nor the production of the latter by the former, nor of theformer by the latter, nor their simple parallel concomitance; in short, a relation which answers to none of the ready-made concepts whichabstraction puts at our service, but which may be approximatelyformulated in these terms: ("Report of the French PhilosophicalSociety", meeting, 2nd May 1901. )

"Given a psychological state, that part of the state which admits ofplay, the part which would be translated by an attitude of the bodyor by bodily actions, is represented in the brain; the remainder isindependent of it, and has no equivalent in the brain. So that toone and the same state of the brain there may be many differentpsychological states which correspond, though not all kinds of states. They are psychological states which all have in common the same motorscheme. Into one and the same frame many pictures may go, but not allpictures. Let us take a lofty abstract philosophical thought. We donot conceive it without adding to it an image representing it, which weplace beneath. 

"We do not represent the image to ourselves, again, without supportingit by a design which resumes its leading features. We do not imaginethis design itself without imagining and, in so doing, sketching certainmovements which would reproduce it. It is this sketch, and this sketchonly, which is represented in the brain. Frame the sketch, there is amargin for the image. Frame the image again, there remains a margin, anda still larger margin, for the thought. The thought is thus relativelyfree and indeterminate in relation to the activity which conditions itin the brain, for this activity expresses only the motive articulationof the idea, and the articulation may be the same for ideasabsolutely different. And yet it is not complete liberty nor absoluteindetermination, since any kind of idea, taken at hazard, would notpresent the articulation desired. 

"In short, none of the simple concepts furnished us by philosophy couldexpress the relation we seek, but this relation appears with tolerableclearness to result from experiment. "

The same analysis of facts tells us how the planes of consciousness, of which I spoke just now, are arranged, the law by which they aredistributed, and the meaning which attaches to their disposition. Let usneglect the intervening multiples, and look only at the extreme poles ofthe series. 

We are inclined to imagine too abrupt a severance between gesture anddream, between action and thought, between body and mind. There are nottwo plane surfaces, without thickness or transition, placed one abovethe other on different levels; it is by an imperceptible degradation ofincreasing depth, and decreasing materiality, that we pass from one termto the other. 

And the characteristics are continually changing in the course of thetransition. Thus our initial problem confronts us again, more acutelythan ever: are the forms of number and space equally suitable on allplanes of consciousness?

Let us consider the most external of these planes of life, and one whichis in contact with the outer world, the one which receives directly theimpressions of external reality. We live as a rule on the surface ofourselves, in the numerical and spatial dispersion of language andgesture. Our deeper ego is covered as it were with a tough crust, hardened in action: it is a skein of motionless and numerable habits, side by side, and of distinct and solid things, with sharp outlines andmechanical relations. And it is for the representation of the phenomenawhich occur within this dead rind that space and number are valid. 

For we have to live, I mean live our common daily life, with our body, with our customary mechanism rather than with our true depths. Ourattention is therefore most often directed by a natural inclination tothe practical worth and useful function of our internal states, to thepublic object of which they are the sign, to the effect they produceexternally, to the gestures by which we express them in space. Asocial average of individual modalities interests us more than theincommunicable originality of our deeper life. The words of languagebesides offer us so many symbolic centres round which crystallise groupsof motor mechanisms set up by habit, the only usual elements of ourinternal determinations. Now, contact with society has rendered thesemotor mechanisms practically identical in all men. Hence, whether it bea question of sensation, feeling, or ideas, we have these neutraldry and colourless residua, which spread lifeless over the surface ofourselves, "like dead leaves on the water of a pond. " ("Essay on theImmediate Data, " page 102. )

Thus the progress we have lived falls into the rank of a thing that canbe handled. Space and number lay hold of it. And soon all that remainsof what was movement and life is combinations formed and annulled, andforces mechanically composed in a whole of juxtaposed atoms, and torepresent this whole a collection of petrified concepts, manipulated indialectic like counters. 

Quite different appears the true inner reality, and quite differentare its profound characteristics. To begin with, it contains nothingquantitative; the intensity of a psychological state is not amagnitude, nor can it be measured. The "Essay on the Immediate Data ofConsciousness" begins with the proof of this leading statement. If itis a question of a simple state, such as a sensation of light or weight, the intensity is measured by a certain quality of shade which indicatesto us approximately, by an association of ideas and thanks to ouracquired experience, the magnitude of the objective cause from which itproceeds. If, on the contrary, it is a question of a complex state, such as those impressions of profound joy or sorrow which lay hold ofus entirely, invading and overwhelming us, what we call their intensityexpresses only the confused feeling of a qualitative progress, andincreasing wealth. "Take, for example, an obscure desire, which hasgradually become a profound passion. You will see that the feebleintensity of this desire consisted first of all in the fact that itseemed to you isolated and in a way foreign to all the rest of yourinner life. But little by little it penetrated a larger number ofpsychic elements, dyeing them, so to speak, its own colour; and nowyou find your point of view on things as a whole appears to you to havechanged. Is it not true that you become aware of a profound passion, once it has taken root, by the fact that the same objects no longerproduce the same impression upon you? All your sensations, all yourideas, appear to you refreshed by it; it is like a new childhood. " (Loc. Cit. , page 6. )

There is here none of the homogeneity which is the property ofmagnitude, and the necessary condition of measurement, giving a view ofthe less in the bosom of the more. The element of number has vanished, and with it numerical multiplicity extended in space. Our inner statesform a qualitative continuity; they are prolonged and blended into oneanother; they are grouped in harmonies, each note of which contains anecho of the whole; they are encircled by an innumerable degradation ofhalos, which gradually colour the total content of consciousness; theylive each in the bosom of his fellow. 

"I am the scent of roses, " were the words Condillac put in the mouth ofhis statue; and these words translate the immediate truth exactly, assoon as observation becomes naive and simple enough to attain pure fact. In a passing breath I breathe my childhood; in the rustle of leaves, ina ray of moonlight, I find an infinite series of reflections and dreams. A thought, a feeling, an act, may reveal a complete soul. My ideas, my sensations, are like me. How would such facts be possible, if themultiple unity of the ego did not present the essential characteristicof vibrating in its entirety in the depths of each of the parts descriedor rather determined in it by analysis? All physical determinationsenvelop and imply each other reciprocally. And the fact that the soulis thus present in its entirety in each of its acts, its feelings, for example, or its ideas in its sensations, its recollections in itspercepts, its inclinations in its obvious states, is the justifyingprinciple of metaphors, the source of all poetry, the truth whichmodern philosophy proclaims with more force every day under the name ofimmanence of thought, the fact which explains our moral responsibilitywith regard to our affections and our beliefs themselves; and finally, it is the best of us, since it is this which ensures our being ableto surrender ourselves, genuinely and unreservedly, and this whichconstitutes the real unity of our person. 

Let us push still further into the hidden retreat of the soul. Here weare in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego takes shape, where the spring within us gushes up, in the warm secrecy of thedarkness which ushers our trembling being into birth. Distinctions failus. Words are useless now. We hear the wells of consciousness at theirmysterious task like an invisible shiver of running water through themossy shadow of the caves. I dissolve in the joy of becoming. I abandonmyself to the delight of being a pulsing reality. I no longer knowwhether I see scents, breathe sounds, or smell colours. Do I love? Do Ithink? The question has no longer a meaning for me. I am, in my completeself, each of my attitudes, each of my changes. It is not my sight whichis indistinct or my attention which is idle. It is I who have resumedcontact with pure reality, whose essential movement admits no form ofnumber. He who thus makes the really "deep" and "inner" effort necessaryto becoming--were it only for an elusive moment--discovers, under thesimplest appearance, inexhaustible sources of unsuspected wealth; therhythm of his duration becomes amplified and refined; his acts becomemore conscious; and in what seemed to him at first sudden severance orinstantaneous pulsation he discovers complex transitions imperceptiblyshaded off, musical transitions full of unexpected repetitions andthreaded movements. 

Thus, the deeper we go in consciousness, the less suitable become theseschemes of separation and fixity existing in spatial and numericalforms. The inner world is that of pure quality. There is no measurablehomogeneity, no collection of atomically constructed elements. Thephenomena distinguished in it by analysis are not composing units, butphases. And it is only when they reach the surface, when they come incontact with the external world, when they are incarnated in languageor gesture, that the categories of matter become adapted to them. Inits true nature, reality appears as an uninterrupted flow, an impalpableshiver of fluid changing tones, a perpetual flux of waves which ebb andbreak and dissolve into one another without shock or jar. Everything isceaseless change; and the state which appears the most stable is alreadychange, since it continues and grows old. Constant quantities arerepresented only by the materialisation of habit or by means ofpractical symbols. And it is on this point that Mr Bergson rightlyinsists. ("Creative Evolution", page 3. )

"The apparent discontinuity of psychological life is due, then, tothe fact that our attention is concentrated on it in a series ofdiscontinuous acts; where there is only a gentle slope, we think wesee, when we follow the broken line of our attention, the steps of astaircase. It is true that our psychological life is full of surprises. A thousand incidents arise which seem to contrast with what precedesthem, and not to be connected with what follows. But the gap in theirappearances stands out against the continuous background on which theyare represented, and to which they owe the very intervals that separatethem; they are the drumbeats which break into the symphony at intervals. Our attention is fixed upon them because they interest it more, buteach of them proceeds from the fluid mass of our entire psychologicalexistence. Each of them is only the brightest point in a moving zonewhich understands all that we feel, think, wish; in fact, all that weare at a given moment. It is this zone which really constitutes ourstate. But we may observe that states defined in this way are notdistinct elements. They are an endless stream of mutual continuity. "

And do not think that perhaps such a description represents only orprincipally our life of feeling. Reason and thought share the samecharacteristic, as soon as we penetrate their living depth, whether itbe a question of creative invention or of those primordial judgmentswhich direct our activity. If they evidence greater stability, it is inpermanence of direction, because our past remains present to us. 

For we are endowed with memory, and that perhaps is, on the whole, ourmost profound characteristic. It is by memory we enlarge ourselves anddraw continually upon the wealth of our treasuries. Hence comes thecompletely original nature of the change which constitutes us. But itis here that we must shake off familiar representations! Common-sensecannot think in terms of movement. It forges a static conception of it, and destroys it by arresting it under pretext of seeing it better. Todefine movement as a series of positions, with a generating law, with atime-table or correspondence sheet between places and times, is surelya ready-made presentation. Are we not confusing the trajectory and itsperformance, the points traversed and the traversing of the points, theresult of the genesis of the result; in short, the quantitative distanceover which the flight extends, and the qualitative flight which putsthis distance behind it? In this way the very mobility which is theessence of movement vanishes. There is the same common mistake abouttime. Analytic and synthetic thought can see in time only a string ofcoincidences, each of them instantaneous, a logical series of relations. It imagines the whole of it to be a graduated slide-rule, in which theluminous point called the present is the geometrical index. 

Thus it gives form to time in space, "a kind of fourth dimension, "("Essay on the Immediate Data". ) or at least it reduces it to nothingmore than an abstract scheme of succession, "a stream without bottomor sides, flowing without determinable strength, in an indefinabledirection. " ("Introduction to Metaphysics". ) It requires time to behomogeneous, and every homogeneous medium is space, "for as homogeneityconsists here in the absence of any quality, it is not clear how twoforms of homogeneity could be distinguished one from the other. " ("Essayon the Immediate Data", page 74. )

Quite different appears real duration, the duration which is lived. It is pure heterogeneity. It contains a thousand different degrees oftension or relaxation, and its rhythm varies without end. The magicsilence of calm nights or the wild disorder of a tempest, the still joyof ecstasy or the tumult of passion unchained, a steep climb towardsa difficult truth or a gentle descent from a luminous principle toconsequences which easily follow, a moral crisis or a shooting pain, call up intuitions admitting no comparison with one another. We havehere no series of moments, but prolonged and interpenetrating phases;their sequence is not a substitution of one point for another, butrather resembles a musical resolution of harmony into harmony. Andof this ever-new melody which constitutes our inner life every momentcontains a resonance or an echo of past moments. "What are we really, what is our character, except the condensation of the history which wehave lived since our birth, even before our birth, since we bring withus our prenatal dispositions? Without doubt we think only with a smallpart of our past; but it is with our complete past, including ouroriginal bias of soul, that we desire, wish, and act. " ("CreativeEvolution", pages 5-6. ) This is what makes our duration irreversible, and its novelty perpetual, for each of the states through which itpasses envelops the recollection of all past states. And thus we see, in the end, how, for a being endowed with memory, "existence consistsin change, change in ripening, ripening in endless self-creation. "("Creative Evolution", page 8. )

With this formula we face the capital problem in which psychology andmetaphysics meet, that of liberty. The solution given by Mr Bergsonmarks one of the culminating points of his philosophy. It is from thissummit that he finds light thrown on the riddle of inner being. And itis the centre where all the lines of his research converge. 

What is liberty? What must we understand by this word? Beware of theanswer you are going to give. Every definition, in the strict sense ofthe term, will imply the determinist thesis in advance, since, underpain of going round in a circle, it will be bound to express libertyas a function of what it is not. Either psychological liberty isan illusive appearance, or, if it is real, we can only grasp it byintuition, not by analysis, in the light of an immediate feeling. For areality is verified, not constructed; and we are now or never in oneof those situations where the philosopher's task is to create some newconcept, instead of abiding by a combination of previous elements. 

Man is free, says common-sense, in so far as his action depends only onhimself. "We are free, " says Mr Bergson, ("Essay on the Immediate Dataof Consciousness", page 131. ) "when our acts proceed from our entirepersonality, when they express it, when they exhibit that indefinableresemblance to it which we find occasionally between the artist and hiswork. " That is all we need seek; two conceptions which are equivalentto each other, two concordant formulae. It is true that this amounts todetermining the free act by its very originality, in the etymologicalsense of the word: which is at bottom only another way of declaring itincommensurable with every concept, and reluctant to be confined by anydefinition. But, after all, is not that the only true immediate fact?

That our spiritual life is genuine action, capable of independence, initiative, and irreducible novelty, not mere result produced fromoutside, not simple extension of external mechanism, that it is so muchours as to constitute every moment, for him who can see, an essentiallyincomparable and new invention, is exactly what represents for us thename of liberty. Understood thus, and decidedly it is like this thatwe must understand it, liberty is a profound thing: we seek it only inthose moments of high and solemn choice which come into our life, notin the petty familiar actions which their very insignificance submits toall surrounding influences, to every wandering breeze. Liberty is rare;many live and die and have never known it. Liberty is a thing whichcontains an infinite number of degrees and shades; it is measured byour capacity for the inner life. Liberty is a thing which goes on in usunceasingly: our liberty is potential rather than actual. And lastly, itis a thing of duration, not of space and number, not the work of momentsor decrees. The free act is the act which has been long in preparing, the act which is heavy with our whole history, and falls like a ripefruit from our past life. 

But how are we to establish positive verification of these views? Howare we to do away with the danger of illusion? The proof will in thiscase result from a criticism of adverse theories, along with directobservation of psychological reality freed from the deceptive formswhich warp the common perception of it. And it will here be an easy taskto resume Mr Bergson's reasoning in a few words. 

The first obstacle which confronts affirmation of our liberty comesfrom physical determinism. Positive science, we are told, presents theuniverse to us as an immense homogeneous transformation, maintainingan exact equivalence between departure and arrival. How can we possiblyhave after that the genuine creation which we require in the act we callfree?

The answer is that the universality of the mechanism is at bottom onlya hypothesis which is still awaiting demonstration. On the one hand itincludes the parallelist conception which we have recognised as effete. And on the other it is plain that it is not self-sufficient. At least itrequires that somewhere or other there should be a principle of positiongiving once for all what will afterwards be maintained. In actualfact, the course of phenomena displays three tendencies: a tendency toconservation, beyond question; but also a tendency to collapse, as inthe diminution of energy; and a tendency to progress, as in biologicalevolution. To make conservation the sole law of matter implies anarbitrary decree, denoting only those aspects of reality which willcount for anything. By what right do we thus exclude, with vital effort, even the feeling of liberty which in us is so vigorous?

We might say, it is true, that our spiritual life, if it is not a simpleextension of external mechanism, yet proceeds according to an internalmechanism equally severe, but of a different order. This would bringus to the hypothesis of a kind of psychological mechanism; and in manyrespects this seems to be the common-sense hypothesis. I need notdwell upon it, after the numerous criticisms already made. Innerreality--which does not admit number--is not a sequence of distinctterms, allowing a disconnected waste of absolute causality. 

And the mechanism of which we dream has no true sense--for, after all, it has a sense--except in relation to the superficial phenomena whichtake place in our dead rind, in relation to the automaton which we arein daily life. I am ready to admit that it explains our common actions, but here it is our profound consciousness which is in question, not theplay of our materialised habits. 

Without insisting, then, too strongly on this mongrel conception, letus pass to the direct examination of inner psychological reality. Everything is ready for the conclusion. Our duration, which iscontinually accumulating itself, and always introducing some irreduciblenew factor, prevents any kind of state, even if superficially identical, from repeating itself in depth. "We shall never again have the soul wehad this evening. " Each of our moments remains essentially unique. It issomething new added to the surviving past; not only new, but unable tobe foreseen. 

For how can we speak of foresight which is not simple conjecture, howcan we conceive an absolute extrinsic determination, when the act inbirth only makes one with the finished sum of its conditions, when theseconditions are complete only on the threshold of the action beginning, including the fresh and irreducible contribution added by its very datein our history? We can only explain afterwards, we can only foresee whenit is too late, in retrospect, when the accomplished action has falleninto the plan of matter. 

Thus our inner life is a work of enduring creation: of phases whichmature slowly, and conclude at long intervals the decisive moments ofemancipating discovery. Undoubtedly matter is there, under the forms ofhabit, threatening us with automatism, seeking at every moment to devourus, stealing a march on us whenever we forget. But matter represents inus only the waste of existence, the mortal fall of weakened reality, theswoon of the creative action falling back inert; while the depths of ourbeing still pulse with the liberty which, in its true function, employsmechanism itself only as a means of action. 

Now, does not this conception make a singular exception of us innature, an empire within an empire? That is the question we have yet toinvestigate. 

II. 

We have just attempted to grasp what being is in ourselves; and we havefound that it is becoming, progress, and growth, that it is a creativeprocess which never ceases to labour incessantly; in a word, that itis duration. Must we come to the same conclusion about external being, about existence in general?

Let us consider that external reality which is nearest us, our body. Itis known to us both externally by our perceptions and internally by ouraffections. It is then a privileged case for our inquiry. In addition, and by analogy, we shall at the same time study the other living bodieswhich everyday induction shows us to be more or less like our own. Whatare the distinctive characteristics of these new realities? Each of thempossesses a genuine individuality to a far greater degree than inorganicobjects; whilst the latter are hardly limited at all except inrelation to the needs of the former, and so do not constitute beings inthemselves, the former evidence a powerful internal unity which is onlyfurther emphasised by their prodigious complication, and form wholeswith are naturally complete. These wholes are not collections ofjuxtaposed parts: they are organisms; that is to say, systems ofconnected functions, in which each detail implies the whole, and wherethe various elements interpenetrate. These organisms change and modifycontinually; we say of them not only that they are, but that they live;and their life is mutability itself, a flight, a perpetual flux. Thisuninterrupted flight cannot in any way be compared to a geometricalmovement; it is a rhythmic succession of phases, each of which containsthe resonance of all those which come before; each state lives on inthe state following; the life of the body is memory; the living beingaccumulates its past, makes a snowball of itself, serves as an openregister for time, ripens, and grows old. Despite all resemblances, theliving body always remains, in some measure, an absolutely original andunique invention, for there are not two specimens exactly alike; and, among inert objects, it appears as the reservoir of indetermination, the centre of spontaneity, contingence, and genuine action, as if in thecourse of phenomena nothing really new could be produced except by itsagency. 

Such are the characteristic tendencies of life, such the aspectswhich it presents to immediate observation. Whether spiritual activityunconsciously presides over biological evolution, or whether it simplyprolongs it, we always find here and there the essential features ofduration. 

But I spoke just now of "individuality. " Is it really one of thedistinctive marks of life? We know how difficult it is to define itaccurately. Nowhere, not even in man, is it fully realised; and thereare beings in existence in which it seems a complete illusion, thoughevery part of them reproduces their complete unity. 

True, but we are now dealing with biology, in which geometricalprecision is inadmissible, where reality is defined not so much by thepossession of certain characteristics as by its tendency to accentuatethem. It is as a tendency that individuality is more particularlymanifested; and if we look at it in this light, no one can deny thatit does constitute one of the fundamental tendencies of life. Onlythe truth is that the tendency to individuality remains always andeverywhere counterbalanced, and therefore limited, by an opposingtendency, the tendency to association, and above all to reproduction. This necessitates a correction in our analysis. Nature, in manyrespects, seems to take no interest in individuals. "Life appears tobe a current passing from one germ to another through the medium of adeveloped organism. " ("Creative Evolution", page 29. )

It seems as if the organism played the part of a thoroughfare. What isimportant is rather the continuity of progress of which the individualsare only transitory phases. Between these phases again there are nosharp severances; each phase resolves and melts imperceptibly into thatwhich follows. Is not the real problem of heredity to know how, and upto what point, a new individual breaks away from the individuals whichproduced it? Is not the real mystery of heredity the difference, not theresemblance, occurring between one term and another?

Whatever be its solution, all the individual phases mutually extend andinterpenetrate one another. There is a racial memory by which the pastis continually accumulated and preserved. Life's history is embodiedin its present. And that is really the ultimate reason of the perpetualnovelty which surprised us just now. The characteristics of biologicalevolution are thus the same as those of human progress. Once again wefind the very stuff of reality in duration. "We must not then speak anylonger of life in general as an abstraction, or a mere heading underwhich we write down all living beings. " ("Creative Evolution", page 28. )On the contrary, to it belongs the primordial function of reality. Itis a very real current transmitted from generation to generation, organising and passing through bodies, without failing or becomingexhausted in any one of them. 

We may, already, then, draw one conclusion: Reality, at bottom, isbecoming. But such a thesis runs counter to all our familiar ideas. It is imperative that we should submit it to the test of criticalexamination and positive verification. 

One system of metaphysics, I said some time ago, underlies common-sense, animating and informing it. According to this system, which is theinverse of that which we have just intimated, reality in its very depthsis fixity and permanence. This is the completely static conception whichsees in being exactly the opposite of becoming: we cannot become, itseems to say, except in so far as we are not. It does not, however, meanto deny movement. But it represents it as fluctuation round invariabletypes, as a whirling but captive eddy. Every phenomenon appears to it asa transformation which ends where it began, and the result is that theworld takes the form of an eternal equilibrium in which "nothing iscreated, nothing destroyed. " The idea does not need much forcing to endin the old supposition of a cyclic return which restores everything toits original conditions. Everything is thus conceived in astronomicalperiods. All that is left of the universe henceforward is a whirl ofatoms in which nothing counts but certain fixed quantities translated byour systems of equations; the rest has vanished "in algebraical smoke. "There is therefore nothing more or less in the effect than in the groupof causes; and the causal relation moves towards identity as towards itsasymptote. 

Such a view of nature is open to many objections, even if it were onlya question of inorganised matter. Simple physics already betoken theinsufficiency of a purely mechanic conception. The stream of phenomenaflows in an irreversible direction and obeys a determined rhythm. "If Iwish to prepare myself a glass of sugar and water, I may do what I like, but I must wait for my sugar to melt. " ("Creative Evolution", page10. ) Here are facts which pure mechanism does not take into account, regarding as it does only statically conceived relations, and makingtime into a measure only, something like a common denominator ofconcrete successions, a certain number of coincidences from which alltrue duration remains absent, which would remain unchanged even if theworld's history, instead of opening out in consecutive phases, were tobe unfolded before our eyes all at once like a fan. Do we not indeedspeak today of aging and atomic separation. If the quantity of energyis preserved, at least its quality is continually deteriorating. Bythe side of something which remains constant, the world also containssomething which is being used up, dissipated, exhausted, decomposed. 

Further still, a specimen of metal, in its molecular structure, preserves an indelible trace of the treatment it has undergone; naturalphilosophers tell us that there is a "memory of solids. " These are allvery positive facts which pure mechanism passes over. In addition, must we not first of all postulate what will afterwards be preserved ordeteriorated? Whence we get another aspect of things: that of genesisand creation; and in reality we register the ascending effort of life asa reality no less startling than mechanic inertia. 

Finally, we have a double movement of ascent and descent: such is whatlife and matter appear to immediate observation. These two currentsmeet each other, and grapple. It is the drama of evolution, of whichMr Bergson once gave a masterly explanation, in stating the high placewhich man fills in nature:

"I cannot regard the general evolution and progress of life in the wholeof the organised world, the co-ordination and subordination of vitalfunctions to one another in the same living being, the relations whichpsychology and physiology combined seem bound to establish between brainactivity and thought in man, without arriving at this conclusion, thatlife is an immense effort attempted by thought to obtain of mattersomething which matter does not wish to give it. Matter is inert; it isthe seat of necessity; it proceeds mechanically. It seems as if thoughtseeks to profit by this mechanical inclination in matter to utilise itfor actions, and thus to convert all the creative energy it contains, atleast all that this energy possesses which admits of play and externalextraction, into contingent movements in space and events in time whichcannot be foreseen. With laborious research it piles up complicationsto make liberty out of necessity, to compose for itself a matter sosubtile, and so mobile, that liberty, by a veritable physical paradox, and thanks to an effort which cannot last long, succeeds in maintainingits equilibrium on this very mobility. 

"But it is caught in the snare. The eddy on which it was poised seizesand drags it down. It becomes prisoner of the mechanism it has set up. Automatism lays hold of it, and life, inevitably forgetting the endwhich it had determined, which was only to be a means in view of asuperior end, is entirely used up in an effort to preserve itself byitself. From the humblest of organised beings to the higher vertebrateswhich come immediately before man, we witness an attempt which is alwaysfoiled and always resumed with more and more art. Man has triumphed;with difficulty, it is true, and so incompletely that a moment's lapseand inattention on his part surrender him to automatism again. Buthe has triumphed. .. " ("Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901. )

And Mr Bergson adds in another place: ("Creative Evolution", pages286-287. ) "With man consciousness breaks the chain. In man and in manonly it obtains its freedom. The whole history of life, till man, hadbeen the history of an effort of consciousness to lift matter, and ofthe more or less complete crushing of consciousness by matter fallingupon it again. The enterprise was paradoxical; if indeed we can speakhere, except paradoxically, of enterprise and effort. The task was totake matter, which is necessity itself, and create an instrument ofliberty, construct a mechanical system to triumph over mechanism, toemploy the determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the netit had spread. But everywhere, except in man, consciousness let itselfbe caught in the net of which it sought to traverse the meshes. Itremained taken in the mechanisms it had set up. The automatism which itclaimed to be drawing towards liberty enfolds it and drags it down. Ithas not the strength to get away, because the energy with which it hadsupplied itself for action is almost entirely employed in maintainingthe exceedingly subtile and essentially unstable equilibrium into whichit has brought matter. But man does not merely keep his machine going, he succeeds in using it as it pleases him. 

"He owes it without doubt to the superiority of his brain, which allowshim to construct an unlimited number of motor mechanisms, to oppose newhabits to old time after time, and to master automatism by dividingit against itself. He owes it to his language, which furnishesconsciousness with an immaterial body in which to become incarnate, thusdispensing it from depending exclusively upon material bodies, the fluxof which would drag it down and soon engulf it. He owes it to sociallife, which stores and preserves efforts as language stores thought, thereby fixing a mean level to which individuals will rise withease, and which, by means of this initial impulse, prevents averageindividuals from going to sleep and urges better people to rise higher. But our brain, our society, and our language are only the varied outersigns of one and the same internal superiority. Each after its fashion, they tell us the unique and exceptional success which life has won at agiven moment of its evolution. They translate the difference in nature, and not in degree only, which separates man from the rest of the animalworld. They let us see that if, at the end of the broad springboard fromwhich life took off, all others came down, finding the cord stretchedtoo high, man alone has leapt the obstacle. "

But man is not on that account isolated in nature: "As the smallestgrain of dust forms part of our entire solar system, and is involvedalong with it in this undivided downward movement which is materialityitself, so all organised beings from the humblest to the highest, fromthe first origins of life to the times in which we live, and in allplaces as at all times, do but demonstrate to our eyes a unique impulsecontrary to the movement of matter, and, in itself, indivisible. Allliving beings are connected, and all yield to the same formidablethrust. The animal is supported by the plant, man rides the animal, andthe whole of humanity in space and time is an immense army galloping bythe side of each of us, before and behind us, in a spirited charge whichcan upset all resistance, and leap many obstacles, perhaps even death. "("Creative Evolution", pages 293-294. )

We see with what broad and far-reaching conclusions the new philosophycloses. In the forcible poetry of the pages just quoted its originalaccent rings deep and pure. Some of its leading theses, moreover, arenoted here. But now we must discover the solid foundation of underlyingfact. 

Let us take first the fact of biological evolution. Why has it beenselected as the basis of the system? Is it really a fact, or is it onlya more or less conjectural and plausible theory?

Notice in the first instance that the argument from evolution appears atleast as a weapon of co-ordination and research admitted in our day byall philosophers, rejected only on the inspiration of preconceived ideaswhich are completely unscientific; and that it succeeds in the taskallotted to it is doubtless already the proof that it responds tosome part of reality. And besides, we can go further. "The idea oftransformism is already contained in germ in the natural classificationof organised beings. The naturalist brings resembling organismstogether, divides the group into sub-groups, within which theresemblance is still greater, and so on; throughout the operation, thecharacteristics of the group appear as general themes upon which each ofthe sub-groups executes its particular variations. 

"Now this is precisely the relation we find in the animal world and inthe vegetable world between that which produces and what is produced; onthe canvas bequeathed by the ancestor to his posterity, and possessedin common by them, each broiders his original pattern. " ("CreativeEvolution", pages 24-25. )

We may, it is true, ask ourselves whether the genealogical methodpermits results so far divergent as those presented to us by varietyof species. But embryology answers by showing us the highest and mostcomplex forms of life attained every day from very elementary forms; andpalaeontology, as it develops, allows us to witness the same spectaclein the universal history of life, as if the succession of phases throughwhich the embryo passes were only a recollection and an epitome of thecomplete past whence it has come. In addition, the phenomena of suddenchanges, recently observed, help us to understand more easily theconception which obtrudes itself under so many heads, by diminishing theimportance of the apparent lacunae in genealogical continuity. Thus thetrend of all our experience is the same. 

Now there are some certainties which are only centres of concurrentprobabilities; there are some truths determined only by succession offacts, but yet, by their intersection and convergence, sufficientlydetermined. 

"That is how we measure the distance from an inaccessible point, byregarding it time after time from the points to which we have access. "("Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901. )

Is not that the case here? The affirmative seems all the more inevitableinasmuch as the language of transformism is the only language known tothe biology of today. Evolution can, it is true, be transposed, but notsuppressed, since in any actual state there would always remain thisstriking fact that the living forms met with as remains in geologicallayers are ranged by the natural affinity of their characteristics in anorder of succession parallel to the succession of the ages. We are notreally then inventing a hypothesis in beginning with the affirmation ofevolution. But what we have to do is to appreciate its object. 

Evolution! We meet the word everywhere today. But how rare is the trueidea! Let us ask the astronomers who originate cosmogonical hypotheses, and invent a primitive nebula, the natural philosophers who dream thatby the deterioration of energy and the dissipation of movement thematerial world will obtain final rest in the inertia of a homogeneousequilibrium, let us ask the biologists and psychologists who are enemiesof fixed species and inquisitive about ancestral history. What theyare anxious to discern in evolution is the persistent influence of aninitial cause once given, the attraction of a fixed end, a collectionof laws before the eternity of which change becomes negligible likean appearance. Now he who thinks of the universe as a construction ofunchangeable relations denies by his method the evolution of which hespeaks, since he transforms it into a calculable effect necessarilyproduced by a regulated play of generating conditions, since heimplicitly admits the illusive character of a becoming which addsnothing to what is given. 

Finality itself, if he keeps the name, does not save him from his error, for finality in his eyes is nothing but an efficient cause projectedinto the future. So we see him fixing stages, marking periods, insertingmeans, putting in milestones, continually destroying movement by haltingit before his gaze. And we all do the same by instinctive inclination. Our concept of law, in its classical form, is not general: it representsonly the law of co-existence and of mechanism, the static relationbetween two numerically disconnected terms; and in order to graspevolution we shall doubtless have to invent a new type of law: law induration, dynamic relation. For we can, and we must, conceive that thereis an evolution of natural laws; that these laws never define anythingbut a momentary state of things; that they are in reality like streaksdetermined in the flux of becoming by the meeting of contrary currents. "Laws, " says Monsieur Boutroux, "are the bed down which passes thetorrent of facts; they have dug it, though they follow it. " Yet wesee the common theories of evolution appealing to the concepts of thepresent to describe the past, forcing them back to prehistoric times, and beyond the reasoning of today, placing at the beginning what isonly conceivable in the mind of the contemporary thinker; in a word, imagining the same laws as always existing and always observed. Thisis the method which Mr Bergson so justly criticises in Spencer: that ofreconstructing evolution with fragments of its product. 

If we wish thoroughly to grasp the reality of things, we must thinkotherwise. Neither of these ready-made concepts, mechanism and finality, is in place, because both of them imply the same postulate, viz. That"everything is given, " either at the beginning or at the end, whilstevolution is nothing if it is not, on the contrary, "that which gives. "Let us take care not to confound evolution and development. There isthe stumbling-block of the usual transformist theories, and Mr Bergsondevotes to it a closely argued and singularly penetrating criticism, byan example which he analyses in detail. ("Creative Evolution", chapteri. ) These theories either do not explain the birth of variation, andlimit themselves to an attempt to make us understand how, once born, it becomes fixed, or else through need of adaptation they look for aconception of its birth. But in both cases they fail. 

"The truth is that adaptation explains the windings of the movement ofevolution, but not the general directions of the movement, still lessthe movement itself. The road which leads to the town is certainlyobliged to climb the hills and go down the slopes; it adapts itself tothe accidents of the ground; but the accidents of the ground are notthe cause of the road, any more than they have imparted its direction. "("Creative Evolution", pages 111-112. )

At the bottom of all these errors there are only prejudices of practicalaction. That is of course why every work appears to be an outsideconstruction beginning with previous elements; a phase of anticipationfollowed by a phase of execution, calculation, and art, an effectiveprojecting cause, and a concerted goal, a mechanism which hurls toa finality which aims. But the genuine explanation must be soughtelsewhere. And Mr Bergson makes this plain by two admirable analyses inwhich he takes to pieces the common ideas of disorder and nothingness inorder to explain their meaning relative to our proceedings in industryor language. 

Let us come back to facts, to immediate experience, and try to translateits pure data simply. What are the characteristics of vital evolution?First of all it is a dynamic continuity, a continuity of qualitativeprogress; next, it is essentially a duration, an irreversible rhythm, awork of inner maturation. By the memory inherent in it, the whole of itspast lives on and accumulates, the whole of its past remains for everpresent to it; which is tantamount to saying that it is experience. 

It is also an effort of perpetual invention, a generation of continualnovelty, indeducible and capable of defying all anticipation, as itdefies all repetition. We see it at its task of research in the gropingattempts exhibited by the long-sought genesis of species; we see ittriumphant in the originality of the least state of consciousness, ofthe least body, of the tiniest cell, of which the infinity of times andspaces does not offer two identical specimens. 

But the reef which lies in its way, and on which too often it founders, is habit; habit would be a better and more powerful means of action ifit remained free, but in so far as it congeals and becomes materialised, is a hindrance and an obstacle. First of all we have the average typesround which fluctuates an action which is decreasing and becomingreduced in breadth. Then we have the residual organs, the proofs of deadlife, the encrustations from which the stream of consciousness graduallyebbs; and finally we have the inert gear from which all real life hasdisappeared, the masses of shipwrecked "things" rearing their spectraloutlines where once rolled the open sea of mind. The concept ofmechanism suits the phenomena which occur within the zone of wreckage, on this shore of fixities and corpses. But life itself is ratherfinality, if not in the anthropomorphic sense of premeditated design, plan, or programme, at least in this sense, that it is a continuallyrenewed effort of growth and liberation. And it is from here we get MrBergson's formulae: vital impetus and creative evolution. 

In this conception of being consciousness is everywhere, as original andfundamental reality, always present in a myriad degrees of tension orsleep, and under infinitely various rhythms. 

The vital impulse consists in a "demand for creation"; life in itshumblest stage already constitutes a spiritual activity; and its effortsends out a current of ascending realisation which again determines thecounter-current of matter. Thus all reality is contained in a doublemovement of ascent and descent. The first only, which translates aninner work of creative maturation, is essentially durable; the secondmight, in strictness, be almost instantaneous, like that of an escapingspring; but the one imposes its rhythm on the other. From this point ofview mind and matter appear not as two things opposed to each other, asstatic terms in fixed antithesis, but rather as two inverse directionsof movement; and, in certain respects, we must therefore speak not somuch of matter or mind as of spiritualisation and materialisation, thelatter resulting automatically from a simple interruption of the former. "Consciousness or superconsciousness is the rocket, the extinguishedremains of which fall into matter. " ("Creative Evolution", page 283. )

What image of universal evolution is then suggested? Not a cascade ofdeduction, nor a system of stationary pulsations, but a fountain whichspreads like a sheaf of corn and is partially arrested, or at leasthindered and delayed, by the falling spray. The fountain itself, thereality which is created, is vital activity, of which spiritual activityrepresents the highest form; and the spray which falls is the creativeact which falls, it is reality which is undone, it is matter andinertia. In a word, the supreme law of genesis and fall, the double playof which constitutes the universe, comprises a psychological formula. 

Everything begins in the manner of an invention, as the fruit ofduration and creative genius, by liberty, by pure mind; then comeshabit, a kind of body, as the body is already a group of habits; andhabit, taking root, being a work of consciousness which escapes it andturns against it, is little by little degraded into mechanism in whichthe soul is buried. 

III. 

The main lines and general perspective of Mr Bergson's philosophy nowperhaps begin to appear. Certainly I am the first to feel how powerlessa slender resume really is to translate all its wealth and all itsstrength. 

At least I wish I could have contributed to making its movement, andwhat I may call its rhythm, clearer to perception. It is from the booksof the master himself that a more complete revelation must be sought. And the few words which I am still going to add as conclusion are onlyintended to sketch the principal consequences of the doctrine, and allowits distant reach to be seen. 

The evolution of life would be a very simple and easy thing tounderstand if it were fulfilled along one single trajectory and followeda straight path. "But we are here dealing with a shell which hasimmediately burst into fragments, which, being themselves species ofshells, have again burst into fragments destined to burst again, and soon for a very long time. " ("Creative Evolution", page 107. ) It is, infact, the property of a tendency to develop itself in the expansionwhich analyses it. As for the causes of this dispersion into kingdoms, then into species, and finally into individuals, we can distinguish twoseries: the resistance which matter opposes to the current of life sentthrough it, and the explosive force--due to an unstable equilibrium oftendencies--carried by the vital impulse within itself. Both unitein making the thrust of life divide in more and more diverging butcomplementary directions, each emphasising some distinct aspect of itsoriginal wealth. Mr Bergson confines himself to the branches of thefirst order--plant, animal, and man. And in the course of a minute andsearching discussion he shows us the characteristics of these lines inthe moods or qualities signified by the three words--torpor, instinct, and intelligence: the vegetable kingdom constructing and storingexplosives which the animal expends, and man creating a nervous systemfor himself which permits him to convert the expense into analysis. Letus leave aside, as we must, the many suggestive views scattered lavishlyabout, the many flashes of light which fall on all faces of the problem, and let us confine ourselves to seeing how we get a theory of knowledgefrom this doctrine. There we have yet another proof of the striking andfertile originality of the new philosophy. 

More than one objection has been brought against Mr Bergson on thishead. That is quite natural: how could such a novelty be exactlyunderstood at once? It is also very desirable; it is the demands forenlightenment which lead a doctrine to full consciousness of itself, to precision and perfection. But we must be afraid of false objections, those which arise from an obstinate translation of the new philosophyinto an old language steeped in a different metaphysic. With what hasMr Bergson been reproached? With misunderstanding reason, with ruiningpositive science, with being caught in the illusion of getting knowledgeotherwise than by intelligence, or of thinking otherwise thanby thought; in short, of falling into a vicious circle by makingintellectualism turn round upon itself. Not one of these reproaches hasany foundation. 

Let us begin by a few preliminary remarks to clear the ground. First ofall, there is one ridiculous objection which I quote only to record. I mean that which suspects at the bottom of the theories which we aregoing to discuss some dark background, some prepossession of irrationalmysticism. On the contrary, the truth is, we have here perhaps betterthan anywhere, the spectacle of pure thought face to face with things. But it is a complete thought, not thought reduced to some partialfunctions, but sufficiently sure of its critical power to sacrifice noneof its resources. Here, we may say, really is the genuine positivism, which reinstates all spiritual reality. It does not in any way lead to amisunderstanding or depreciation of science. Even where contingency andrelativity are most visible in it, in the domain of inert matter, MrBergson goes so far as to say that physical science touches an absolute. It is true that it touches this absolute rather than sees it. More particularly it perceives all its reactions on a system ofrepresentative forms which it presents to it, and observes the effecton the veil of theory with which it envelops it. At certain moments, all the same, the veil becomes almost transparent. And in any case thescholar's thought guesses and grazes reality in the curve drawn by thesuccession of its increasing syntheses. But there are two orders ofscience. Formerly it was from the mathematician that we borrowed theideal of evidence. Hence came the inclination always to seek the mostcertain knowledge from the most abstract side. The temptation was tomake a kind of less severe and rigorous mathematics of biology itself. Now if such a method suits the study of inert matter because in a mannergeometrical, so much so that our knowledge of it thus acquired is moreincomplete than inexact, this is not at all the case for the things oflife. Here, if we were to conduct scientific research always in thesame grooves and according to the same formulae, we should immediatelyencounter symbolism and relativity. For life is progress, whilst thegeometrical method is commensurable only with things. Mr Bergsonis aware of this; and his rare merit has been to disengage specificoriginality from biology, while elevating it to a typical and standardscience. 

But let us come to the heart of the problem. What was Kant's point ofdeparture in the theory of knowledge? In seeking to define the structureof the mind according to the traces of itself which it must have left inits works, and in proceeding by a reflective analysis ascending froma fact to its conditions, he could only regard intelligence as a thingmade, a fixed system of categories and principles. 

Mr Bergson adopts an inverse attitude. Intelligence is a product ofevolution: we see it slowly and uninterruptedly constructed along a linewhich rises through the vertebrates to man. Such a point of view is theonly one which conforms to the real nature of things, and the actualconditions of reality; the more we think of it, the more we perceivethat the theory of knowledge and the theory of life are bound up withone another. Now what do we conclude from this point of view? Life, considered in the direction of "knowledge, " evolves on two diverginglines which at first are confused, then gradually separate, and finallyend in two opposed forms of organisation, intelligence and instinct. Several contrary potentialities interpenetrated at their common source, but of this source each of these kinds of activity preserves or ratheraccentuates only one tendency; and it will be easy to mark its dualcharacter. 

Instinct is sympathy; it has no clear consciousness of itself; it doesnot know how to reflect; it is hardly capable of varying its steps; butit operates with incomparable certainty because it remains lodged inthings, in communion with their rhythm and with inner feeling of them. The history of animals in this respect supplies many remarkable exampleswhich Mr Bergson analyses and discusses in detail. As much might besaid of the work which produces a living body, and of the effort whichpresides over its growth, maintenance, and functions. Take a naturalphilosopher who has long breathed the atmosphere of the laboratory, whohas by long practice acquired what we call "experience"; he has akind of intimate feeling for his instruments, their resources, theirmovements, their working tendencies; he perceives them as extensionsof himself; he possesses them as groups of habitual actions, thusdiscoursing by manipulations as easily and spontaneously as othersdiscourse in calculation. Doubtless that is only an image; but transposeit and generalise it, and it will help you to understand the kind ofaction which divines instinct. But intelligence is something quitedifferent. We are talking, of course, of the analytic and syntheticintelligence which we use in our acts of current thought, which worksthroughout our daily action and forms the fundamental thread of ourscientific operations. I need not here go back to the criticism of itsordinary proceedings. But I must now note the service which suits them, the domain in which they apply and are valid, and what they teach usthereby about the meaning, reach, and natural task of intelligence. 

Whilst instinct vibrates in sympathetic harmony with life, it is aboutinert matter that intelligence is granted; it is a rider to our facultyof action; it triumphs in geometry; it feels at home among the objectsin which our industry finds its supports and its tools. In a word, "our logic is primarily the logic of solids. " (Preface to "CreativeEvolution". ) But if we enter the vital order its incompetence ismanifestly apparent. 

It is very important that deduction should be so impotent in biology. Still more impotent is it perhaps in matters of art or religion; whilst, on the contrary, it works marvels so long as it has only to foreseemovements or transformations in bodies. What does this mean, if notthat intelligence and materiality go together, that language with itsanalytic steps is regulated by the movements of matter? Philosophyonce again then must leave it behind, for the duty of philosophy is toconsider everything in its relation to life. 

Do not conclude, however, that the philosopher's duty is to renounceintelligence, place it under tutelage, or abandon it to the blindsuggestions of feeling and will. It has not even the right to do so. Instinct, with us who have evolved along the grooves of intelligence, has remained too weak to be sufficient for us. Besides, intelligenceis the only path by which light could dawn in the bosom of primitivedarkness. But let us look at present reality in all its complexity, allits wealth. Round intelligence itself exists a halo of instinct. Thishalo represents the remains of the first nebulous vapour at the expenseof which intelligence was constituted like a brilliantly condensednucleus; and it is still today the atmosphere which gives it life, thefringe of touch, and delicate probing, inspiring contact and diviningsympathy, which we see in play in the phenomena of discovery, as also inthe acts of that "attention to life, " and that "sense of reality" whichis the soul of good sense, so widely distinct from common-sense. Andthe peculiar task of the philosopher is to reabsorb intelligence ininstinct, or rather to reinstate instinct in intelligence; or betterstill, to win back to the heart of intelligence all the initialresources which it must have sacrificed. This is what is meant by returnto the primitive, and the immediate, to reality and life. This is themeaning of intuition. 

Certainly the task is difficult. We at once suspect a vicious circle. How can we go beyond intelligence except by intelligence itself? We areapparently inside our thought, as incapable of coming out of it as is aballoon of rising above the atmosphere. True, but on this reasoning wecould just as well prove that it is impossible for us to acquire anynew habit whatsoever, impossible for life to grow and go beyond itselfcontinually. 

We must avoid drawing false conclusions from the simile of the balloon. The question here is to know what are the real limits of the atmosphere. It is certain that the synthetic and critical intelligence, left toits own strength, remains imprisoned in a circle from which there is noescape. 

But action removes the barrier. If intelligence accepts the risk oftaking the leap into the phosphorescent fluid which bathes it, and towhich it is not altogether foreign, since it has broken off from it andin it dwell the complementary powers of the understanding, intelligencewill soon become adapted and so will only be lost for a moment toreappear greater, stronger, and of fuller content. It is action againunder the name of experience which removes the danger of illusion orgiddiness, it is action which verifies; by a practical demonstration, by an effort of enduring maturation which tests the idea in intimatecontact with reality and judges it by its fruits. 

It always falls therefore to intelligence to pronounce the grand verdictin the sense that only that can be called true which will finallysatisfy it; but we mean an intelligence duly enlarged and transformedby the very effect of the action it has lived. Thus the objection of"irrationalism" directed against the new philosophy falls to the ground. 

The objection of "non-morality" fares no better. But is has been made, and people have thought fit to accuse Mr Bergson's work of being the toocalm production of an intelligence too indifferent, too coldly lucid, too exclusively curious to see and understand, untroubled and unthrilledby the universal drama of life, by the tragic reality of evil. On theother hand, not without contradiction, the new philosophy has beencalled "romantic, " and people have tried to find in it the essentialtraits of romanticism: its predilection for feeling and imagination, itsunique anxiety for vital intensity, its recognised right to all whichis to be, whence its radical inability to establish a hierarchy of moralqualifications. Strange reproach! The system in question is not yetpresented to us as a finished system. Its author manifests a plaindesire to classify his problems. And he is certainly right in proceedingso: there is a time for everything, and on occasion we must learn to bejust an eye focussed upon being. But that does not at all exclude thepossibility of future works, treating in due order of the problem ofhuman destiny, and perhaps even in the work so far completed we maydescry some attempts to bring this future within ken. 

But universal evolution, though creative, is not for all that quixoticor anarchist. It forms a sequence. It is a becoming with direction, undoubtedly due, not to the attraction of a clearly preconceived goal, or the guidance of an outer law, but to the actual tendency of theoriginal thrust. In spite of the stationary eddies or momentarybackwashes we observe here and there, its stream moves in a definitedirection, ever swelling and broadening. For the spectator who regardsthe general sweep of the current, evolution is growth. On the otherhand, he who thinks this growth now ended is under a simple delusion:"The gates of the future stand wide open. " ("Creative Evolution", page114. ) In the stage at present attained man is leading; he marks theculminating point at which creation continues; in him, life has alreadysucceeded, at least up to a certain point; from him onwards it advanceswith consciousness capable of reflection; is it not for that very reasonresponsible for the result? Life, according to the new philosophy, isa continual creation of what is new: new--be it well understood--in thesense of growth and progress in relation to what has gone before. Life, in a word, is mental travel, ascent in a path of growingspiritualisation. Such at least is the intense desire, and such thefirst tendency which launched and still inspires it. But it may faint, halt, or travel down the hill. This is an undeniable fact; and oncerecognised does it not awake in us the presentiment of a directing lawimmanent in vital effort, a law doubtless not to be found in any code, nor yet binding through the stern behest of mechanical necessity, buta law which finds definition at every moment, and at every moment alsomarks a direction of progress, being as it were the shifting tangent tothe curve of becoming?

Let us did that according to the new philosophy the whole of our pastsurvives for ever in us, and by means of us results in action. It isthen literally true that our acts do to a certain extent involvethe whole universe, and its whole history: the act which we make itaccomplish will exist henceforward for ever, and will for ever tingeuniversal duration with its indelible shade. Does not that imply animperious, urgent, solemn, and tragic problem of action? Nay, more;memory makes a persistent reality of evil, as of good. Where are we tofind the means to abolish and reabsorb the evil? What in the individualis called memory becomes tradition and joint responsibility in the race. 

On the other hand, a directing law is immanent in life, but in theshape of an appeal to endless transcendence. In dealing with this futuretranscendent to our daily life, with this further shore of presentexperience, where are we to seek the inspiring strength? And is therenot ground for asking ourselves whether intuitions have not arisen hereand there in the course of history, lighting up the dark road of thefuture for us with a prophetic ray of dawn? It is at this point that thenew philosophy would find place for the problem of religion. 

But this word "religion, " which has not come once so far from MrBergson's pen, coming now from mine, warns me that it is time to end. Noman today would be justified in foreseeing the conclusions to which thedoctrine of creative evolution will one day undoubtedly lead on thispoint. More than any other, I must forget here what I myself may haveelsewhere tried to do in this order of ideas. But it was impossiblenot to feel the approach of the temptation. Mr Bergson's work isextraordinarily suggestive. His books, so measured in tone, so tranquilin harmony, awaken in us a mystery of presentiment and imagination; theyreach the hidden retreats where the springs of consciousness well up. Long after we have closed them we are shaken within; strangely moved, we listen to the deepening echo, passing on and on. However valuablealready their explicit contents may be, they reach still further thanthey aimed. It is impossible to tell what latent germs they foster. Itis impossible to guess what lies behind the boundless distance of thehorizons they expose. But this at least is sure: these books have verilybegun a new work in the history of human thought. 

ADDITIONAL EXPLANATIONS

I. Mr Bergson's Work and the General Directions of Contemporary Thought. 

A broad survey of the new philosophy was bound to be somewhat rapidand summary; and now that this is completed it will doubtless not besuperfluous to come back, on the same plan as before, to some moreimportant or more difficult individual points, and to examine bythemselves the most prominent centres on which we should focus the lightof our attention. Not that I intend to probe in minute detail the foldsand turns of a doctrine which admits of infinite development: how can Iclaim to exhaust a work of such profound thought that the least passingexample employed takes its place as a particular study? Still less doI wish to undertake a kind of analytic resume; no undertaking could beless profitable than that of arranging paragraph headings to repeat toobriefly, and therefore obscurely, what a thinker has said without anyextravagance of language, yet with every requisite explanation. 

The critic's true task, as I understand it, in no way consists indrawing up a table of contents strewn with qualifying notes. His taskis to read and enable others to read between the lines, between thechapters, and between the successive works, what constitutes the dynamictie between them, all that the linear form of writing and language hasnot allowed the author himself to elucidate. 

His task is, as far as possible, to master the accompaniment ofunderlying thought which produced the resonant atmosphere of theinquirer's intuition, the rhythm and toning of the image, resulting inthe shade of light which falls upon his vision. His task, in a word, is to help understanding, and therefore to point out and anticipate themisunderstandings to be feared. Now it seems to me that there are a fewpoints round which the errors of interpretation more naturally gather, producing some astounding misconceptions of Mr Bergson's philosophy. Itis these points only that I propose to clear up. But at the same time Ishall use the opportunity to supply information about authorities, whichI have hitherto deliberately omitted, to avoid riddling with referencespages which were primarily intended to impart a general impression. 

Let us begin by glancing at the milieu of thought in which Mr Bergson'sphilosophy must have had birth. For the last thirty years new currentsare traceable. In what direction do they go? And what distance have theyalready gone? What, in short, are the intellectual characteristics ofour time? We must endeavour to distinguish the deeper tendencies, thosewhich herald and prepare and near future. 

One of the essential and frequently cited features of the generationin which Taine and Renan were the most prominent leaders was thepassionate, enthusiastic, somewhat exclusive and intolerant cult ofpositive science. This science, in its days of pride, was consideredunique, displayed on a plane by itself, always uniformly competent, capable of gripping any object whatever with the same strength, and ofinserting it in the thread of one and the same unbroken connection. The dream of that time, despite all verbal palliations, was a universalscience of mathematics: mathematics, of course, with their bare andbrutal rigour softened and shaded off, where feasible; if possible, supple and sensitive; in ideal, delicate, buoyant, and judicious; butmathematics governed from end to end by an equal necessity. Conceived asthe sole mistress of truth, this science was expected in days to cometo fulfil all the needs of man, and unreservedly to take the place ofancient spiritual discipline. Genuine philosophy had had its day:all metaphysics seemed deception and fantasy, a simple play of emptyformulae or puerile dreams, a mythical procession of abstraction andphantom; religion itself paled before science, as poetry of the greymorning before the splendour of the rising sun. 

However, after all this pride came the turn of humility, and humility ofthe very lowest. This deified science, borne down in its hour of triumphby too heavy a weight, had necessarily been recognised as powerless togo beyond the order of relations, and radically incapable of tellingus the origin, end, and basis of things. It analysed the conditions ofphenomena, but was ill-suited ever to grasp any real cause, or any deepessence. Further, it became the Unknowable, before which the human mindcould only halt in despair. And in this way destitution arose out ofambition itself, since thought, after trusting too exclusively to itsgeometrical strength, was compelled at the end of its effort to confessitself beaten when confronted with the only questions to which no manmay 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 seenow nothing but idolatry. The haughty affirmation of yesterday appearstoday, not as expressing a positive fact or a result duly established, but as bringing forward a thesis of perilous and unconsciousmetaphysics. Let us go even further. If true intelligence is mentalexpansion and aptitude for understanding widely different things, eachin its originality, to the same degree, we must say that the claim toreduce reality to one only of its modes, to know it in one only of itsforms, is an unintelligent claim. That is, in brief formula, theverdict of the present generation. Not, of course, that it in anyway misconceives or disdains the true value of science, whether as aninstrument of action for the conquest of nature, or as intelligiblelanguage, allowing us to know our whereabouts in things and "talk" them. 

It is aware that in all circumstances positive methods have theirevidence to produce, and that, where they pronounce within the limits oftheir power, nothing can stand against their verdict. But it considersfirst of all that science was conceived of late under much too stiff andnarrow a form, under the obsession of too abstract a mathematicalideal which corresponds to one aspect of reality only, and thatthe shallowest. And it considers afterwards that science, even whenbroadened and made flexible, being concerned only with what is, withfact and datum, remains radically powerless to solve the problem ofhuman 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 withthis delicate scalpel. Speaking in more general terms, we adopt spatialrelation as the perfect example of intelligible relation. I do not wishto deny the use of such a method now and again, the services it mayrender, or the beauty of construction peculiar to the systems itinspires. But we must see what price we pay for these advantages. Dowe choose geometry for an informing and regulating science? The morewe advance towards the concrete and the living, the more we feel thenecessity of altering the pure mathematical type. The sciences, as theyget further from inert matter, unless they agree to reform, pale andweaken; they become vague, impotent, anaemic; they touch little butthe trite surface of their object, the body, not the soul; in themsymbolism, artifice, and relativity become increasingly evident; atlength, arbitrary and conventional elements crop up and devour them. Ina word, the claim to treat the living as inert matter conduces to themisconception in life of life itself, and the retention of nothing butthe material waste. 

This experience furnishes us with a lesson. There is not so much onescience 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 verysharp line of demarcation between the inert and the living. Two ordersof knowledge will thereby become separate, one in which the frames ofgeometrical understanding are in place, the other where new means and anew attitude are required. The essential task of the present hour willnow appear to us in a precise light; it will henceforward consist, without any disregard of a glorious past, in an effort to found asspecifically distinct methods of instruction those sciences which takefor 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, thelike of what ancient philosophy had attempted, setting out from geometryand mechanics. By so doing we shall succeed in throwing knowledge opento receive all the wealth of reality, while at the same time we shallreinstate the sense of mystery and the thrill of higher anxieties. A further result will be that the phantom of the Unknowable will beexorcised, since it no longer represents anything but the relative andmomentary limit of each method, the portion of being which escapes itspartial grip. 

This is one of the first controlling ideas of the contemporarygeneration. Others result from it. More particularly, it is for the samebody of motives, in the same sense, and with the same restrictions, thatwe distrust intellectualism; I mean the tendency to live uniquely byintelligence, 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 rightsof intellectuality in judgment. But around critical reason there is aquickening atmosphere in which dwell the powers of intuition, there is ahalf-light of gradual tones in which insertion into reality is effected. If by rationalism we mean the attitude which consists in cabiningourselves within the zone of geometrical light in which languageevolves, we must admit that rationalism supposes something other thanitself, that it hangs suspended by a generating act which escapes it. 

The method therefore which we seek to employ everywhere today isexperience; but complete experience, anxious to neglect no aspect ofbeing nor any resource of mind; shaded experience, not extending on thesurface only, in a homogeneous and uniform manner; on the contrary, an experience distributed in depth over multiple planes, adopting athousand different forms to adapt itself to the different kinds ofproblems; in short, a creative and informing experience, a veritablegenesis, a genuine action of thought, a work and movement of life bywhich the guiding principles, forms of intelligibility, and criteria ofverification obtain birth and stability in habits. And here again itis by borrowing Mr Bergson's own formula from him that we shall mostaccurately describe the new spirit. 

That the attitude and fundamental procedure of this new spirit are inno way a return to scepticism or a reaction against thought cannotbe better demonstrated than by this resurrection of metaphysics, thisrenaissance of idealism, which is certainly one of the most distinctivefeatures of our epoch. Undoubtedly philosophy in France has never knownso prosperous and so pregnant a moment. Notwithstanding, it is nota return to the old dreams of dialectic construction. Everything isregarded from the point of view of life, and there is a tendency moreand more to recognise the primacy of spiritual activity. But we wish tounderstand 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 thewhole of thought, and go to the truth with the whole of our soul; andthe reason of which we recognise the sovereign weight is reason ladenwith its complete past history. 

And what is that, really, but realism? By realism I mean the gift ofourselves to reality, the work of concrete realisation, the effort toconvert every idea into action, to regulate the idea by the action asmuch as the action by the idea, to live what we think and think what welive. But that is positivism, you will say; certainly it is positivism. But how changed! Far from considering as positive only that which canbe an object of sensation or calculation, we begin by greeting the greatspiritual realities with this title. The deep and living aspiration ofour day is in everything to seek the soul, the soul which specifies andquickens, seek it by an effort towards the revealing sympathy whichis genuine intelligence, seek it in the concrete, without dissolvingthought in dreams or language, without losing contact with the body orcritical control, seek it, in fine, as the most real and genuine part ofbeing. 

Hence its return to questions which were lately declared out of dateand closed; hence its taste for problems of aesthetics and morality, its close siege of social and religious problems, its homesickness for afaith harmonising the powers of action and the powers of thought; henceits restless desire to hark back to tradition and discipline. 

A new philosophy was required to answer this new way of looking atthings. Already, in 1867, Ravaisson in his celebrated "Report" wrotethese prophetic lines: "Many signs permit us to foresee in the nearfuture a philosophical epoch of which the general character will be thepredominance of what may be called spiritualist realism or positivism, having as generating principle the consciousness which the mind has initself of an existence recognised as being the source and support ofevery other existence, being none other than its action. "

This prophetic view was further commented on in a work where Mr Bergsonspeaks with just praise of this shrewd and penetrating sense of what wascoming: "What could be bolder or more novel than to come and predictto the physicists that the inert will be explained by the living, tobiologists that life will only be understood by thought, to philosophersthat generalities are not philosophic?" ("Notice on the Life and Worksof M. Felix Ravaisson-Molien", in the Reports of the Academy of Moraland Political Sciences, 1904. )

But let us give each his due. What Ravaisson had only anticipated MrBergson himself accomplishes, with a precision which gives body to theimpalpable and floating breath of first inspiration, with a depth whichrenews both proof and theses alike, with a creative originality whichprevents the critic who is anxious for justice and precision frominsisting on any researches establishing connection of thought. 

One reason for the popularity today enjoyed by this new philosophy isdoubtless to be found in the very tendencies of the milieu in whichit is produced and in the aspirations which work it. But, after onceremarking these desires, we must further not forget that Mr Bergson hascontributed more than anyone else to awaken them, determine them, and make them become conscious of themselves. Let us therefore try tounderstand in itself and by itself the work of genius of which just nowwe were seeking the dawning gleams. What synthetic formula will be bestable to tell us the essential direction of its movement? I will borrowit from the author himself: "It seems to me, " he writes, ("PhilosophicIntuition" in the "Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", November 1911. )"that metaphysics are trying at this moment to simplify themselves, tocome nearer to life. " Every philosophy tends to become incarnate in asystem which constitutes for it a kind of body of analysis. 

Regarded literally, it appears to be an infinite complication, a complexconstruction with a thousand alcoves of high architecture, "in whichmeasures have been taken to provide ample lodging for all problems. "(Ibid. ) Do not let us be deceived by this appearance: it signifies onlythat language is incommensurable with thought, that speech admits ofendless multiplication in approximations incapable of exhausting theirobject. But before constructing such a body for itself, all philosophyis a soul, a mind, and begins with the simple unity of a generatingintuition. Here is the fitting point at which to see its essence; thisis what determines it much better than its conceptual expression, whichis always contingent and incomplete. "A philosophy worthy of the namehas never said but one thing; and that thing it has rather attempted tosay than actually said. And it has only said one thing, because it hasonly seen one point: and that was not so much vision as contact; thiscontact supplied an impulse, this impulse a movement, and if thismovement, which is a kind of vortex of a certain particular form, isonly visible to our eyes by what it has picked up on its path, it is noless true that other dust might equally well have been raised, and thatit would still have been the same vortex. " ("Philosophic Intuition" inthe "Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", November 1911. )

Hence comes the fact that a philosophy is at bottom much moreindependent of its natal environment than one might at first suppose;hence also the fact that ancient philosophies, though apparentlyrelative to a science which is out of date, remain always living andworthy of study. 

What, then, is the original intuition of Mr Bergson's philosophy, thecreative intuition whence it comes forth? We cannot hesitate long: itis the intuition of duration. That is the perspective centre to which wemust indefatigably return; that is the principle which we must labourto expose in its full light; and that is, finally, the source of lightwhich will illumine us. Now a philosophy is not only an expressedintuition; it is further and above all an acting intuition, graduallydetermined and realised, and tested by its explanatory works; and it isby its fruits that we can understand and judge it. Hence the review uponwhich we are entering. 

II. Immediacy. 

The philosopher's first duty is in clear language to declare hisstarting-point, with what a mathematician would call the "tangent tothe origin" of the path along which he is travelling, as afterwardsthe critic's first duty is to describe this initial attitude. I havetherefore first of all to indicate the directing idea of the newphilosophy. But it is not a question of extracting a quintessence, or offencing the soul of doctrine within a few summary formulae. A systemis not to be resumed in a phrase, for every proposition isolated isa proposition falsified. I wish merely to elucidate the methodicalprinciple which inspires the beginning of Mr Bergson's philosophy. 

To philosophy itself falls the task and belongs the right to defineitself gradually as it becomes constituted. On this point, ananticipation of experience seems hardly possible; here, as elsewhere, the finding of a synthetic formula is a final rather than preliminaryquestion. However, we are obliged from the outset of the work todetermine 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, theanalogy ceases. For in any science properly speaking the determinationof beginning consists in the indication of an object, and a matter, andbeyond that, to each new object a new science reciprocally corresponds, the existence of the one involving the legitimacy of the other. But ifthe various sciences--I mean the positive sciences--divide differentobjects thus between them, philosophy cannot, in its turn, come forwardas a particular science, having a distinct object, the designation ofwhich would be sufficient to characterise and circumscribe it. Such wasalways the traditional conception: such will ours continue to be. For, as a matter of fact, every object has a philosophy and all matter canbe regarded philosophically. In short, philosophy is chiefly a way ofperceiving and thinking, an attitude and a proceeding: the peculiar andspecific in it is more an intuition than a content, a spirit rather thana domain. 

What, then, is the characteristic function of philosophy, at least itsinitial function, that which marks its opening?

To criticise the works of knowledge spontaneously effected; that is tosay, to scrutinise their direction, reach, and conditions: that is todaythe unanimous answer of philosophers when questioned about the goal oftheir labours. In other terms, what they study is not so much suchand such a particular "thing" as the relation of mind to each of therealities to be studied. Their object, if we must employ the word, isknowledge itself, it is the act of knowing regarded from the point ofview of its meaning and value. Philosophy thus appears as a new "order"of knowledge, co-extensive with what is knowable, as a kind of knowledgeof the second degree, in which it is less a question of learning thanof understanding, in which we aim at progressing in depth rather than inextent; not effort to extend the quantity of knowledge, but reflectionon the quality of this knowledge. Spontaneous thought--vulgar orscientific--is a direct, simple, and practical thought turned towardsthings and partial to useful results; seeking what is formulable ratherthan 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 truthin them; a thought which, moreover, sets out from more or less unguardedpostulates, 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 retracingits life and work, knowledge labouring to know itself, fact whichaspires to fact about itself, mental effort to become free, to becomeentirely transparent and luminous in its own eyes, and, if need be, toeffect self-reform by dissipating its natural illusions. What we havebefore our eyes then are the initial postulates themselves, thefirst spontaneous thoughts, the obscure origins of reason; and we areproceeding towards a point of departure rather than arrival. 

The new philosophy does not refuse to carry out this first criticaltask; but it carries it out in its own way after determining moreprecisely the real conditions of the problem. At the hour whenmethodical 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 thoughtcannot be inspected and judged from outside. It constitutes, whether wewish it or no, the sole concrete and positive point of departure. Let usadd that common-sense constitutes also our sole point of insertion intoreality. It can only then be a question of purifying it, not in any wayof replacing it. But we must distinguish in it what is pure fact, andwhat is ulterior arrangement, in order to see what are the problemswhich really are presented, and what are, on the contrary, the falseproblems, the illusory problems, those which relate only to ourartifices of language. 

The search for facts is then the first necessary moment of allphilosophy. 

But common thought comes before us at the outset as a piece of verycomposite alluvial ground. It is a beginning of positive science, andalso a residue of all philosophical opinions which have had somevogue. That, however, is not its primary basis. Primum vivere, deindephilosophari, says the proverb. In certain respects, "speculation is aluxury, whilst action is a necessity. " ("Creative Evolution", page 47. )But "life requires us to apprehend things in the relation they haveto our needs. " ("Laughter", page 154. ) Hence comes the fundamentalutilitarianism of common-sense. Therefore if we wish to define it initself and for itself, and no longer as a first approximation ofsuch and such a system of metaphysics, it appears to us no longer asrudimentary science and philosophy, but as an organisation of thought inview of practical life. Thus it is that outside all speculative opinionit is effectively lived by all. Its proper language, we may say, is thelanguage of customary perception and mechanical fabrication, thereforea language relative to action, made to express action, modelled uponaction, translating things by the relations they maintain to our action;I mean our corporal and synthetic action, which very evidently impliesthought, since it is a question of the action of a reasonable being, butwhich thus contains a thought which is itself eminently practical. 

However, we are here regarding common-sense considered as a source offact. Its utilitarianism then becomes a kind of spontaneous metaphysicsfrom which we must detach ourselves. But is it not the very task ofpositive science to execute this work of purification? Nothing of thekind, despite appearances and despite intentions. Let us examine moreclosely. The general categories of common thought, according to MrBergson, ("Philosophic Intuition" in the "Metaphysical and MoralReview", November 1911, page 825. ) remain those of science; the mainroads traced by our senses through the continuity of reality are stillthose along which science will pass; perception is an infant scienceand science an adult perception; so much so that customary knowledge andscientific knowledge, both of them destined to prepare our action uponthings, are of necessity two visions of the same kind, though of unequalprecision and reach. It does not follow that science does not practisea certain disinterestedness as far as immediate mechanical utility isconcerned; it does not follow that it has no value as knowledge. But itdoes not set itself genuinely free from the habits contracted in commonexperience, and to inform its research it preserves the postulates ofcommon-sense; so that it always grasps things by their "actable" side, by their point of contact with our faculty for action, under the formsby which we handle them conceptually or practically, and all it attainsof reality is that by which nature is a possible object of language orindustry. 

Let us turn now towards another aspect of natural thought, todiscover 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 thebeginning of what we shall later on call philosophic intuition. (Cf. Anaddress on "Good Sense and Classical Studies", delivered by Mr Bergsonat the Concours general prize distribution, 30th July 1895. ) It is asense of what is real, concrete, original, living, an art of equilibriumand precision, a fine touch for complexities, continually feeling likethe antennae of some insects. It contains a certain distrust of thelogical faculty in respect of itself; it wages incessant war uponintellectual 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 theprecise point where too brutal an application would offend the delicacyof reality; at every moment it collects the whole of our experience andorganises it in view of the present. It is, in a word, thought whichkeeps its freedom, activity which remains awake, suppleness ofattitude, attention to life, an ever-renewed adjustment to suit ever-newsituations. 

Its revealing virtue is derived from this moving contact with fact, andthis living effort of sympathy. This is what we must tend to transposefrom the practical to the speculative order. 

What, then, will be for us the beginning of philosophy? After takingcognisance of common utilitarianism, and to emerge from the relativityin which it buries us, we seek a departure-point, a criterion, somethingwhich decides the raising of inquiry. Where are we to find such aprinciple, except in the very action of thought; I mean, this time, itsaction of profound life independent of all practical aim? We shall thusonly be imitating the example of Descartes when solving the problemof temporary doubt. What we shall term return to the immediate, the primitive, the pure fact, will be the taking of each perceptionconsidered as an act lived, a coloured moment of the Cogito, and thiswill be for us a criterion and departure-point. 

Let us specify this point. Immediate data or primitive data or pure dataare apprehended by us under forms of disinterested action; I mean thatthey are first of all lived rather than conceived, that before becomingmaterial for science, they appear as moments of life; in brief, thatperception of them precedes their use. 

It is at this stage previous to language that we are by these pure datain intimate communion with reality itself, and the whole of our criticaltask is to return to them through a regressive analysis, the goalof which is gradually to make our clear intelligence equal to ourprimordial intuition. The latter already constitutes a thought, apreconceptual thought which is the intrinsic light of action, which isaction itself so far as it is luminous. Thus there is no question hereof restricting in any degree the part played by thought, but only ofdistinguishing 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 flashof conscious existence "in which the act of knowledge coincides withthe generating act of reality"? ("Report of the French PhilosophicalSociety", philosophical vocabulary, article "Immediate". )

Let us forget all philosophical controversies about realism andidealism; let us try to reconstruct for ourselves a simplicity, avirginal and candid glance, freeing us from the habits contracted inthe course of practical life. These then are our "images": not thingspresented externally, nor states felt internally, not portraits ofexterior beings nor projections of internal moods, but appearances, inthe etymological sense of the word, appearances lived simply, withoutour being distinguished from them, as yet neither subjective norobjective, marking a moment of consciousness previous to the work ofreflection, from which proceeds the duality of subject and object. Andsuch also, in every order, appear the "immediate feelings"; as action inbirth, previous to language. (Cf. "Matter and Memory", Foreword to the7th edition. )

Why depart from the immediate thus conceived as action and life? Becauseit is quite impossible to do otherwise, for every initial fact canbe only such a pulsation of consciousness in its lived act, and thefundamental and primitive direction of the least word, were it in anenunciation of a problem or a doubt, can only be such a direction oflife and action. And we must certainly accord to this immediacy a valueof absolute knowledge, since it realises the coincidence of being andknowledge. 

But let us not think that the perception of immediacy is simple passiveperception, that it is sufficient to open our eyes to obtain it, todaywhen our utilitarian education is completed and has passed into thestate of habit. There is a difference between common experience andthe initial action of life; the first is a practical limitation ofthe second. Hence it follows that a previous criticism is necessary toreturn from one to the other, a criticism always in activity, alwaysopen as a way of progressive investigation, always ready for thereiteration and the renewal of effort. 

In this task of purification there is doubtless always to be feared anillusion of remaining in the primitive stage. By what criteria, by whatsigns can we recognise that we have touched the goal? Pure fact isshown to be such on the one hand because it remains independent of alltheoretical symbolism, because the critique of language allows it toexist thus as an indissoluble residue, because we are unable not to"live" it, even when we free ourselves from the anxiety of utility; onthe other hand, because it dominates all systems, and imposes itselfequally upon them all as the common source from which they derive bydiverging analyses, and in which they become reconciled. Assuredly, to attain it, to extricate it, we must appeal to the revelations ofscience, to the exercise of deliberate thought. But this employment ofanalysis against analysis does not in any way constitute a circle, forit tends only to destroy prejudices which have become unconscious: it isa simple artifice destined to break off habits and to scatter illusionsby changing the points of view. Once set free, once again become capableof direct and simple view, what we accept as fact is what bears no traceof synthetic elaboration. It is true that here a last objection presentsitself: how shall we think this limit, purely given, to any degree atall 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 certainquality of progression. 

Now, it is the second sense only which suits the case before us. Immediacy contains no matter statically defined, and no thing. Thenotion of fact is quite relative. What is fact in one case may becomeconstruction in another. For example, the percepts of common experienceare facts for the physicist, and constructions for the philosopher; thesame applies to a table of numerical results, for the scholar who istrying to establish a theory, or for the observer and the psychologist. We may then conceive a series in which each term is fact in relationto those which follow it, and constructed in relation to those whichprecede it. The expression "primitive fact" then determines not somuch a final object as a direction of thought, a movement of criticalretrogression, a journey from the most to the least elaborate, andthe "contact with pure immediacy" is only the effort, more and moreprolonged, to convert the elements of experience into real and profoundaction. 

III. Theory of Perception. 

Of what the work of return to immediacy consists, and how the intuitionwhich it calls up reveals absolute fact, we shall see by an example, ifwe study more closely a capital point of Mr Bergson's philosophy, thetheory of external perception. 

If the act of perceiving realises the lived communion of the subjectand object in the image, we must admit that here we have the perfectknowledge which we wish to obtain always: we resign ourselves toconception only for want of perception, and our ideal is to convert allconception into perception. Doubtless we might define philosophy by thissame ideal, as an effort to expand our perceptive power until we renderit capable of grasping all the wealth and all the depth of reality at asingle glance. Too true it is that such an ideal remains inaccessible tous. Something, however, is given us already in aesthetic intuition. MrBergson has pointed it out in some admirable pages, ("Laughter", pages 153-161. ) and has explained to us also how philosophy pursues ananalogous end. (First lecture on "The Perception of Change", deliveredat Oxford, 26th May 1911. )

But philosophy must be conceived as an art implying science andcriticism, all experience and all reason. It is when we look atmetaphysics in this way that they become a positive order of veritableknowledge. Kant has conclusively established that what lies beyondlanguage can only be attained by direct vision, not by dialecticprogress. His mistake was that he afterwards believed such a vision forever impossible; and whence did this mistake arise, if not from the factthat, for his new vision, he exacted intuitive faculties quite differentfrom those at man's disposal. Here again the artist will be ourexample and model. He appeals to no transcendent sense, but detachescommon-sense from its utilitarian prejudices. Let us do the same: weshall obtain a similar result without lying ourselves open to Kant'sobjections. This work is everywhere possible, and it is, par excellence, the work of philosophy: let us try then to sketch it in relation to theperception of matter. 

We must distinguish two senses of the word "perception. " This word meansfirst 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 concreteexperience never presents unmixed, a direction of research rather thanthe possession of a thing. 

However that may be, the first sense is the fundamental sense, and whatit designates must be at the root of all ordinary perception; I mean, ofevery mental operation which results in the construction of a percept:a term formed by analogy with concept, representing the result of acomplex work of analysis and synthesis, with judgment from externals. We live the images in an act of pure perception, whilst the objects ofordinary perception are, for example, the bodies of which we speak incommon language. 

With regard to the relation of the two senses which we have justdistinguished, common opinion seems very precise. It might be thusresumed: at the point of departure we have simple sensations, similar toqualitative atoms (this is the part of pure perception), and afterwardstheir arrangement into connected systems, which are percepts. 

But criticism does not authorise this manner of looking at it. Nowheredoes knowledge begin by separate elements. Such elements are always aproduct of analysis. So there is a problem to solve to regain thebasis of pure perception which is hidden and obscured by our familiarpercepts. 

Do not suppose that the solution of this problem is easy. One methodonly is of any use: to plunge into reality, to become immersed in it, ina long-pursued effort to assimilate all the records of common-sense andpositive science. "For we do not obtain an intuition of reality, that isto say, an intellectual sympathy with its inmost content, unless wehave gained its confidence by long companionship with its superficialmanifestations. And it is not a question merely of assimilating theleading facts; we must accumulate and melt them down into such anenormous mass that we are sure, in this fusion, of neutralising in oneanother all the preconceived and premature ideas which observers mayhave unconsciously allowed to form the sediment of their observations. Thus, and only thus, is crude materiality to be disengaged from knownfacts. " ("Introduction to Metaphysics" in the "Metaphysical and MoralReview", January 1903. For the correct interpretation of this passage("intellectual sympathy") it must not be forgotten that before "CreativeEvolution", Mr Bergson employed the word "intelligence" in a wideracceptation, more akin to that commonly received. )

A directing principle controls this work and reintroduces order andconvergence, after dispensing with them at the outset; viz. That, contrary to common opinion, perception as practised in the course ofdaily life, "natural" perception does not aim at a goal of disinterestedknowledge, 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 inthe most positive manner that such is really the meaning of ordinaryperception, the underlying reason which causes it to take the place ofpure perception? We perceive by habit only what is useful to us, whatinterests us practically; very often, too, we think we are perceivingwhen we are merely inferring, as for example when we seem to see adistance in depth, a succession of planes, of which in reality we judgeby differences of colouring or relief. 

Our senses supplement one another. A slow education has gradually taughtus to co-ordinate their impressions, especially those of touch to thoseof vision. (H. Bergson, "Note on the Psychological Origins of Our Beliefin the Law of Causality". Vol. I. Of the "Library of the InternationalPhilosophical Congress", 1900. )

Theoretical forms come between nature and us: a veil of symbols envelopsreality; thus, finally, we no longer see things themselves, we arecontent to read the labels on them. 

Moreover, our perception appears to analysis completely saturated withmemories, and that in view of our practical insertion in the present. Iwill not come back to this point which has been so lucidly explainedby Mr Bergson in a lecture on "Dream" ("Report of the InternationalPsychological Institute", May 1901. ) and an article on "IntellectualEffort", ("Philosophical Review", January 1902. ) the reading of whichcannot be too strongly recommended as an introduction to the firstchapter of "Matter and Memory", in which further arguments are to befound. I will only add one remark, following Mr Bergson, as always:perception is not simply contemplation, but consciousness of an originalvisual emotion combined with a complete group of actions in embryo, gestures in outline, and the graze of movement within, by which weprepare to grasp the object, describe its lines, test its functions, sound it, move it, and handle it in a thousand ways. (This is attestedby the facts of apraxia or psychic blindness. Cf. "Matter and Memory", chapter ii. )

From the preceding observations springs the utilitarian and practicalnature of common perception. Let us attempt now to see of what theelaboration which it makes reality undergo consists. This time I amsumming up the fourth chapter of "Matter and Memory". First of all, wechoose between the images, emphasising the strong, extinguishingthe weak, although both have, a priori, the same interest for pureknowledge; we make this choice above all by according preference toimpressions of touch, which are the most useful from the practical pointof view. This selection determines the parcelling up of matter intoindependent bodies, and the artificial character of our proceeding isthus made plain. Does not science, indeed, conclude in the same way, showing us--as soon as she frees herself even to a small extent fromcommon-sense--full continuity re-established by "moving strata, " and allbodies resolved into stationary waves and knots of intersecting fluxes?Already, then, we shall be nearer pure perception if we cease toconsider anything but the perceptible stuff in which numericallydistinct percepts are cut. Even there, however, a utilitarian divisioncontinues. Our senses are instruments of abstraction, each of themdiscerning a possible path of action. We may say that corporal lifefunctions in the manner of an absorbing milieu, which determines thedisconnected scale of simple qualities by extinguishing most of theperceptible radiations. In short, the scale of sensations, with itsnumerical aspect, is nothing but the spectrum of our practical activity. Commonly we perceive only averages and wholes, which we contract intodistinct "qualities". Let us disengage from this rhythm what is peculiarto ourselves. 

Above all, let us strive to disengage ourselves from homogeneous space, this substratum of fixity, this arbitrary scheme of measurement anddivision, which, to our greater advantage, subtends the natural, qualitative, and undivided extension of images. (We usually representhomogeneous space as previous to the heterogeneous extension of images:as a kind of empty room which we furnish with percepts. We must reversethis order, and conceive, on the contrary, that extension precedesspace. ) And we shall finally have pure perception in so far as it isaccessible to us. 

There is no disputing the absolute value of this pure perception. Theimpotence of speculative reason, as demonstrated by Kant, is perhaps, at bottom, only the impotence of an intelligence in bondage to certainnecessities of the corporal life, and exercised upon a matter which ithas had to disorganise for the satisfaction of our needs. Our knowledgeof things is then no longer relative to the fundamental structure of ourmind, but only to its superficial and acquired habits, to the contingentform which it takes on from our corporal functions and our lower needs. 

The relativity of knowledge is therefore not final. In unmaking what ourneeds have made we re-establish intuition in its original purity, andresume contact with reality. ("Matter and Memory", page 203. )

That is how things are really presented. Here we are confronted by themoving continuity of images. Pure perception is complete perception. From it we pass to ordinary perception by diminution, throwing shadowshere and there: the reality perceived by common-sense is nothingelse actually than universal interaction rendered visible by its veryinterruption at certain points. 

Whence we have this double conclusion already formulated higher up: therelation of perception to matter is that of the part to the whole, andour consciousness is rather limited than relative. It must be statedthat primarily we perceive things in themselves, not in us; thesubjectivity of our current perception comes from our work of outliningit in the bosom of reality, but the root of pure perception plunges intofull objectivity. If, at each point of matter, we were to succeed inpossessing the stream of total interaction of which it marks a wave, andif we were to succeed in seeing the multiplicity of these points as aqualitative heterogeneous flux without number or severance, we shouldcoincide with reality itself. It is true that such an ideal, whileinaccessible on the one hand, would not succeed on the other withoutrisk to knowledge; in fact, says Mr Bergson, ("Matter and Memory", page38. ) "to perceive all the influences of all the points of all bodieswould be to descend to the state of material object. "

But a solution of this double difficulty remains possible, a dynamicand approximate solution, which consists in looking for the absoluteintuition of matter in such a mobilisation of our perspective facultiesthat we become capable of following, according to the circumstances, all the paths of virtual perception of which the common anxiety for thepractical has made us choose one only, and capable of realising all theinfinitely different modes of qualification and discernment. 

But we have still to see how this "complete experience" can bepractically 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, andthereby also tested and verified. 

There is one means only of doing that; viz. To analyse it intomanageable and portable concepts. By language I mean the product of thisconceptualisation. Thus language is necessary; for we must always speak, were it only to utter the impotence of words. Not less necessary is acritique of spontaneous language, of the laws which govern it, of thepostulates which it embraces, of the methods which convey its implicitdoctrines. Synthetic forms are actually theories already; they effectan adaptation of reality to the demands of practical use. If it isimpossible to escape them, it is at least fitting not to employ themexcept with due knowledge, and when properly warned against the illusionof 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 readilysay, analysis and synthesis. 

Nothing can be known except in contrast, correlation, or negationof another thing; and the act of knowledge, considered in itself, is unification. Thus number appears as a fundamental category, as anabsolute condition of intelligibility; some go so far as to regardatomism as a necessary method. But that is inexact. No doubt the useof number and the resulting atomism are imposed by definition, we mightsay, on the thought which proceeds by conceptual analysis, and then byunifying construction; that is to say, on synthetic thought. But, ingreater depth, thought is dynamic continuity and duration. Its essentialwork does not consist in discerning and afterwards in assemblingready-made elements. Let us see in it rather a kind of creativematuration, and let us attempt to grasp the nature of this causalactivity. (H. Bergson, "Intellectual Effort" in the "PhilosophicalReview", 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 isto say, it is movement. But there are several planes of thought, fromintuition to language, and we must distinguish between the thought whichmoves on the surface among terms displayed on a single plane, and thethought 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 adynamic scheme? It is motive rather than representative, inexpressiblein itself, but a source of language containing not so much the imagesor concepts in which it will develop as the indication of the path to befollowed in order to obtain them. It is not so much system as movement, progress, genesis; it does not mark the gaze directed upon the variouspoints of one plane of deliberate contemplation so much as an effort topass through successive planes of thought in a direction leading fromintuition to analysis. We might define it by its function of calling upimages and concepts, representations which, for one and the samescheme, are neither strictly determined nor anything in particular inthemselves, concurrent representations which have in common one and thesame logical power. 

The representations called up form a body to the scheme, and therelation of the scheme to the concepts and images which it calls upresembles, mutatis mutandis, the relation pointed out by Mr Bergsonbetween an idea and its basis in the brain. In short, it is the very actof creative thought which the dynamic scheme interprets, the act not yetfixed in "results. "

Nothing is easier than to illustrate the existence of this scheme. Let us merely remark a few facts of current observation. Recall, forexample, the suggestive anxiety we experience when we seek to remembera name; the precise syllables of the name still escape us, but we feelthem approaching, and already we possess something of them, since weimmediately reject those which do not answer to a certain direction ofexpectancy; and by endeavouring to secure a more intimate feeling ofthis direction we suddenly arouse the desired recollection. 

In the same way, what does it mean to have the sense of a complexsituation in active life, if not that we perceive it, not as a staticgroup of explicit details, but as a meeting of powers allied or hostile, convergent or divergent, directed towards this or that, of which theaggregate whole tends of itself to awaken in us the initial reactionswhich analyse it?

In the same way again, how do we learn, how can we assimilate avast system of conceits or images? Our task is not to concentrate anenumerative attention on each individual factor; we should never getaway 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 realityour only "knowledge" is through such a scheme, which contains in thestate of potential implication an inexhaustible multiplicity ready to bedeveloped in actual representations. 

How, finally, is any discovery made? Finding is solving a problem; andto solve a problem we must always begin by supposing it solved. But ofwhat does such a hypothesis consist?

It is not an anticipated view of the solution, for then all would beat an end; nor is it a simple formula putting in the present indicativewhat the enunciation expressed in the future or the imperative, for thennothing would be begun. It is exactly a dynamic scheme; that is to say, a method in the state of directed tension; and often, the discoveryonce realised as theory or system, capable of unending developmentsand resurrections, remains by the best of itself a method and a dynamicscheme. 

But one last example will perhaps reveal the truth still more. "Anyonewho has attempted literary composition knows well that when the subjecthas been long studied, all the documents collected, all the notes taken, we need, to embark on the actual work of composition, something more, aneffort, often very painful, to place oneself suddenly in the very heartof the subject, and to seek as deep down as possible an impulse to whichafterwards we shall only have to let ourselves go. This impulse, once received, projects the mind on a road where it finds both theinformation which it had collected and a thousand other details as well;it develops and analyses itself in terms, the enumeration of which wouldhave no end; the further we advance, the more we discover; we shallnever succeed in saying everything; and yet, if we turn sharply roundtowards the impulse we feel behind ourselves, to grasp it, it escapes;for it was not a thing but a direction of movement, and thoughindefinitely extensible, it is simplicity itself. " (H. Bergson, "Metaphysical and Moral Review", January 1903. The whole critique oflanguage is implicitly contained in this "Introduction to Metaphysics". )

The thought, then, which proceeds from one representation to another inone and the same plane is one kind; that which follows one and the sameconceptual direction through descending planes is another. Creative andfertile thought is the thought which adopts the second kind of work. Theideal is a continual oscillation from one plane to the other, a restlessalternative of intuitive concentration and conceptual expansion. Butour idleness takes exception to this, for the feeling of effort appearsprecisely in the traject from the dynamic scheme to the images andconcepts, in the passing from one plane of thought to another. 

Thus the natural tendency is to remain in the last of these planes, thatof language. We know what dangers threaten us there. 

Suppose we have some idea or other and the word representing it. Do notsuppose that to this word there is one corresponding sense only, noreven a finished group of various distinct and rigorously separablesenses. On the contrary, there is a whole scale corresponding, acomplete continuous spectrum of unstable meanings which tend unceasinglyto resolve into one another. Dictionaries attempt to illuminate them. The task is impossible. They co-ordinate a few guiding marks; but whoshall say what infinite transitions underlie them?

A word designates rather a current of thought than one or several haltson a logical path. Here again a dynamic continuity exists previousto the parcelling out of the acceptations. What, then, should be theattitude of the mind?

A supple moving attitude more attentive to the curve of change than tothe possible halting-points along the road. But this is not the case atall; the effort would be too great, and what happens, on the contrary, is this. For the spectrum a chromatic scale of uniform tints is veryquickly substituted. This is in itself an undesirable simplification, for it is impossible to reconstitute the infinity of real shades bycombinations of fundamental colours each representing the homogeneousshore, which each region of the spectrum finally becomes. 

However cleverly we proportion these averages, we get, at most, somevulgar counterfeit: orange, for example, is not a mixture of yellowand red, although this mixture may recall to those who have known itelsewhere the simple and original sensation of orange. Again, a secondsimplification, still more undesirable, succeeds the first. 

There are no longer any colours at all; black lines serve asguide-marks. We are therefore with pure concepts decidedly in fullsymbolism. And it is with symbols that we shall henceforward be tryingto reconstruct reality. 

I need not go back to the general characteristics or the inconveniencesof this method. Concepts resemble photographic views; concrete thicknessescapes them. However exact, varied, or numerous we suppose them, theycan certainly recall their object, but not reveal it to any one who hadnot had any direct intuition of it. Nothing is easier than to trace theplan of a body in four dimensions; all the same, this drawing does notadmit "visualisation in space" as is the case with ordinary bodies, for want of a previous intuition which it would awaken: thus it is withconcepts in relation to reality. Like photographs and like plans, theyare extracted from reality, but we are not able to say that they werecontained in it; and many of them besides are not so much as extracts;they are simple systematised notes, in fact, notes made upon notes. Inother terms, concepts do not represent pieces, parts, or elements ofreality. Literally they are nothing but simple symbolic notations. Towish to make integral factors of them would be as strange an illusion asthat of seeing in the co-ordinates of a geometric point the constitutiveessence of that point. 

We do not make things with symbols, any more than we should reconstructa picture with the qualifications which classify it. 

Whence, then, comes the natural inclination of thought towards theconcept? From the fact that thought delights in artifices whichfacilitate analysis and language. 

The first of these artifices is that from which results the possibilityof decomposition or recomposition according to arbitrary laws. Forthat we need a previous substitution of symbols for things. Nothingdemonstrates this better than the celebrated arguments which we owe toZeno of Elea. Mr Bergson returns to the discussion of them over and overagain. ("Essay on the Immediate Data", pages 85-86; "Matter and Memory", pages 211-213, "Creative Evolution", pages 333-337. )

The nerve of the reasoning there consists in the evident absurditythere would be in conceiving an inexhaustible exhausted, an unachievableachieved; in short, a total actually completed, and yet obtained by thesuccessive addition of an infinite number of terms. 

But the question is to know whether a movement can be considered as anumerical multiplicity. Virtual divisibility there is, no doubt, but notactual division; divisibility is indefinite, whereas an actual division, if it respects the inner articulations of reality, is bound to halt at alimited number of phases. 

What we divide and measure is the track of the movement onceaccomplished, not the movement itself: it is the trajectory, not thetraject. In the trajectory we can count endless positions; that is tosay, possible halts. Let us not suppose that the moving body meets theseelements all ready-marked. Hence what the Eleatic dialectic illustratesis a case of incommensurability; the radical inability of analysisto end a certain task; our powerlessness to explain the fact ofthe transit, if we apply to it such and such modes of numericaldecomposition or recomposition, which are valid only for space; theimpossibility of conceiving becoming as susceptible of being cut up intoarbitrary segments, and afterwards reconstructed by summing of termsaccording 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 considerationof easy language; hence its tendency to an arithmetic and geometry ofconcepts, in spite of the disastrous consequences; and thus the Eleaticparadox is no less instructive in its specious character than in thesolution which it embodies. 

At bottom, natural thought, I mean thought which abandons itself toits double inclination of synthetic idleness and useful industry, isa thought haunted by anxieties of the operating manual, anxieties offabrication. 

What does it care about the fluxes of reality and dynamic depths? It isonly interested in the outcrops scattered here and there over the firmsoil of the practical, and it solidifies "terms" like stakes plunged ina moving ground. Hence comes the configuration of its spontaneous logicto a geometry of solids, and hence come concepts, the instantaneousmoments taken in transitions. 

Scientific thought, again, preserves the same habits and the samepreferences. It seeks only what repeats, what can be counted. Everywhere, when it theorises, it tends to establish static relationsbetween composing unities which form a homogeneous and disconnectedmultiplicity. 

Its very instruments bias it in that direction. The apparatus of thelaboratory really grasps nothing but arrangement and coincidence; in aword, states not transitions. Even in cases of contrary appearance, forexample, when we determine a weight by observing the oscillation of abalance and not its rest, we are interested in regular recurrence, ina symmetry, in something therefore which is of the nature of anequilibrium 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 inactual fact at obtaining finished and workable results. 

Let us imagine reality under the figure of a curve, a rhythmicsuccession of phases of which our concepts mark so many tangents. Thereis contact at one point, but at one point only. Thus our logic is validas infinitesimal analysis, just as the geometry of the straight lineallows us to define each state of curve. It is thus, for example, that vitality maintains a relation of momentary tangency to thephysico-chemical structure. If we study this relation and analogousrelations, this fact remains indisputably legitimate. Let us not think, however, that such a study, even when repeated in as many points as wewish, can ever suffice. 

We must afterwards by genuine integration attain moving continuity. Thatis exactly the task represented by the return to intuition, with itsproper instrument, the dynamic scheme. From this tangential point ofview we try to grasp the genesis of the curve as envelope, or rather, and better still, the birth of successive tangents as instantaneousdirections. Speaking non-metaphorically, we cling to genetic methodsof conceptualisation and proceed from the generating principle to itsconceptual derivatives. 

But our thought finds it very difficult to sustain such an effort long. It is partial to rectilineal deduction, actual becoming horrifies it. Itdesires immediately to find "things" sharply determined and veryclear. That is why immediately a tangent is constructed, it followsits movement in a straight line to infinity. Thus are producedlimit-concepts, the ultimate terms, the atoms of language. As a rulethey 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 relativeweight which is attributed to them, we get the antinomies between whicha philosophy of analysis must for ever remain oscillating and torn insunder. Hence comes the parcelling up of metaphysics into systems, andits appearance of regulated play "between antagonistic schools which getup 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; notdialectic combination of pre-existing concepts, but, setting out from adirect and really lived intuition, a descent to ever new concepts alongdynamic schemes which remain open. From the same intuition spring manyconcepts: "As the wind which rushes into the crossroads divides intodiverging currents of air, which are all only one and the same gust. "("Creative Evolution", page 55. )

The antinomies are resolved genetically, whilst in the plane of languagethey remain irreducible. With a heterogeneity of shades, when we mix thetints and neutralise them by one another, we easily create homogeneity;but take the result of this work, that is to say, the average finalcolour, and it will be impossible to reconstitute the wealth of theoriginal. 

Do you desire a precise example of the work we must accomplish? Takethat of change; (Cf. Two lectures delivered by Mr Bergson at Oxford on"The Perception of Change", 26th and 27th May 1911. ) no other is moresignificant or clearer. It shows us two necessary movements in thereform of our habits of imagination or conception. 

Let us try first of all to familiarise ourselves with the images whichshow us the fixity deriving from becoming. 

Two colliding waves, two rollers meeting, typify rest by extinction andinterference. With the movement of a stone, and the fluidity of runningwater, we form the instantaneous position of a ricochet. The verymovement of the stone, seen in the successive positions of the tangentto the trajectory, is stationary to our view. 

What is dynamic stability, except non-variation arising from variationitself? Equilibrium is produced from speed. A man running solidifiesthe moving ground. In short, two moving bodies regulated by each otherbecome fixed in relation to each other. 

After this, let us try to perceive change in itself, and then representit 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 asa numerical series of states, but a rhythm of phases, each of whichconstitutes an indivisible act, in such a way that each change has itsnatural inner articulations, forbidding us to break it up according toarbitrary laws, like a homogeneous length. 

(2) Change is self-sufficient; it has no need of a support, a movingbody, a "thing" in motion. There is no vehicle, no substance, no spatialreceptacle, resembling a theatre-scene, no material dummy successivelydraped in coloured stuffs; on the contrary, it is the body or the atomwhich should be subordinately defined as symbols of completed becoming. 

Of movement thus conceived, indivisible and substantial, what betterimage can we have than a musical evolution, a phrase in melody? Thatis how we must work to conceive reality. If such a conception at firstappears obscure, let us credit experience, for ideas are graduallyilluminated by the very use we make of them, "the clarity of a conceptbeing hardly anything, at bottom, but the assurance once obtainedthat we can handle it profitably. " (H. Bergson, "Introduction toMetaphysics". )

If we require to reach a conception of this kind with regard to change, the Eleatic dialectic is there to establish it beyond dispute, andpositive science comes to the same conclusion, since it shows useverywhere nothing but movements placed upon movements, never fixed"things, " except as temporary symbols of what we leave at a given momentoutside the field of study. 

In any case, the difficulty of such a conception need not stop us; it islittle more than a difficulty of the imaginative order. And as for theconception itself, or rather the corresponding intuition, it will sharethe fate of all its predecessors: to our contemporaries it will be ascandal, a century later a stroke of genius, after some centuries commonevidence, 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 ofall toward the problem of the ego: taking up his position in the centreof mind, he has attempted to establish its independent reality byexamining its profound nature. 

The first chapter of the "Essay on the Immediate Data" contains adecisive criticism of the conceptions which claim to introduce numberand measure into the domain of the facts of consciousness. 

Not that it is our business to reject as false the notion ofpsychological intensity; but this notion demands interpretation, and theleast that we can say against the attempt to turn it into a notion ofsize is that in doing so we are misunderstanding the specific characterof the object studied. The same reproach must be levelled againstassociation of ideas, the system of mechanical psychology of which thetype is presented us by Taine and Stuart Mill. Already in chapters ii. And iii. Of the "Essay", and again all through "Matter and Memory", thesystem is riddled with objections, each of which would be sufficient toshow its radical flaw. All the aspects, all the phenomena of mental lifecome up for successive review. In respect of each of them we havean illustration of the insufficiency of the atomism which seeks torecompose the soul with fixed elements, by a massing of units exteriorto one another, everywhere and always the same: this is a grammaticalphilosophy which believes reality to be composed of parts which admitof number just as language is made of words placed side by side; it is amaterialist philosophy which improperly transfers the proceedings of thephysical sciences to the sciences of the inner life. 

On the contrary, we must represent the state of consciousness toourselves 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 longerthe same thing. "The more the ego becomes itself again, the more alsodo its states of consciousness, instead of being in juxtaposition, penetrate one another, blend with one another, and tinge one anotherwith the colouring of all the rest. Thus each of us has his manner ofloving or hating, and this love or hate reflect our entire personality. "("Essay on the Immediate Data", pages 125-126. )

At bottom Mr Bergson is bringing forward the necessity, in the casebefore us, of substituting a new notion of continuous qualitativeheterogeneity for the old notion of numerical and spatial continuity. Above all, he is emphasising the still more imperious necessity ofregarding each state as a phase in duration; and we are here touching onhis principal and leading intuition, the intuition of real duration. 

Historically this was Mr Bergson's starting-point and the origin ofhis thought: a criticism of time under the form in which common-senseimagines it, in which science employs it. He was the first to noticethe fact that scientific time has no "duration. " Our equations reallyexpress only static relations between simultaneous phenomena; even thedifferential quotients they may contain in reality mark nothing butpresent tendencies; no change would take place in our calculations ifthe time were given in advance, instantaneously fulfilled, like a linearwhole of points in numerical order, with no more genuine duration thanthat contained in the numerical succession. Even in astronomy thereis less anticipation than judgment of constancy and stability, thephenomena being almost strictly periodic, while the hazard of predictionbears only upon the minute divergence between the actual phenomenon andthe exact period attributed to it. Notice under what figure common-senseimagines time: as an inert receptacle, a homogeneous milieu, neutral andindifferent; in fact, a kind of space. 

The scholar makes use of a like image; for he defines time by itsmeasurement, and all measurement implies interpretation in space. For the scholar the hour is not an interval, but a coincidence, aninstantaneous 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, whenit is only a question of matter, the mechanism of which, strictlyconsidered, contains nothing "durable. " But in biology and psychologyquite different characteristics become essential; age and memory, heterogeneity of musical phases, irreversible rhythm "which cannot belengthened or shortened at will. " ("Creative Evolution", page 10. )

Then it is that the return of time becomes necessary to duration. How are we to describe this duration? It is a melodious evolution ofmoments, each of which contains the resonance of those preceding andannounces the one which is going to follow; it is a process of enrichingwhich never ceases, and a perpetual appearance of novelty; it is anindivisible, qualitative, and organic becoming, foreign to space, refractory to number. 

Summon the image of a stream of consciousness passing through thecontinuity of the spectrum, and becoming tinged successively with eachof 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 Bergsonproves by a thousand examples, and by a marvellous employment of theintrospective method which he has helped to make so popular. We cannotquote these admirable analyses here. A single one will serve as model, specially selected as referring to one of the most ordinary moments ofour life, to show plainly that the perception of real duration alwaysaccompanies us in secret. 

"At the moment when I write these lines a clock near me is striking thehour; but my distracted ear is only aware of it after several strokeshave already sounded; that is, I have not counted them. And yet aneffort of introspective attention enables me to total the four strokesalready struck and add them to those which I hear. If I then withdrawinto myself and carefully question myself about what has just happened, I become aware that the first four sounds had struck my ear and evenmoved my consciousness, but that the sensations produced by each ofthem, instead of following in juxtaposition, had blended into oneanother in such a way as to endow the whole with a peculiar aspect andmake of it a kind of musical phrase. In order to estimate in retrospectthe number of strokes which have sounded, I attempted to reconstitutethis 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 ofits own, but quite otherwise than by addition, and without bringing inthe image of a juxtaposition of distinct terms. In fact, the number ofstrokes struck was perceived as quality, not as quantity: duration isthus presented to immediate consciousness, and preserves this form solong as it does not give place to a symbolical representation drawn fromspace. " ("Essay on the Immediate Data", pages 95-96. )

And now are we to believe that return to the feeling of real durationconsists in letting ourselves go, and allowing ourselves an idlerelaxation in dream or dissolution in sensation, "as a shepherddozing watches the water flow"? Or are we even to believe, as has beenmaintained, that the intuition of duration reduces "to the spasm ofdelight of the mollusc basking in the sun"? This is a complete mistake!We should fall back into the misconceptions which I was pointing out inconnection with immediacy in general; we should be forgetting thatthere are several rhythms of duration, as there are several kinds ofconsciousness; and finally, we should be misunderstanding the characterof a creative invention perpetually renewed, which is that of our innerlife. 

For it is in duration that we are free, not in spatialised time, as alldeterminist conceptions suppose in contradiction. 

I shall not go back to the proofs of this thesis; they were condensedsome way back after the third chapter of the "Essay on the ImmediateData". But I will borrow from Mr Bergson himself a few complementaryexplanations, in order, as far as possible, to forestall anymisunderstanding. "The word liberty, " he says, "has for me a senseintermediate between those which we assign as a rule to the two termsliberty and free-will. On one hand, I believe that liberty consistsin being entirely oneself, in acting in conformity with oneself; itis then, to a certain degree, the 'moral liberty' of philosophers, theindependence of the person with regard to everything other thanitself. But that is not quite this liberty, since the independence Iam describing has not always a moral character. Further, it does notconsist in depending on oneself as an effect depends on the cause whichof 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 equalpossibility of two contraries, and on my theory we cannot formulate, oreven conceive in this case the thesis of the equal possibility of thetwo contraries, without falling into grave error about the nature oftime. I might say then, that the object of my thesis, on this particularpoint, has been precisely to find a position intermediate between 'moralliberty' and 'free-will. ' Liberty, such as I understand it, is situatedbetween these two terms, but not at equal distances from both. If I wereobliged 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 homogeneoustime; that is to say, when we substitute for the real and profound egoits image refracted through space, the act necessarily appears eitheras the resultant of a mechanical composition of elements, or as anincomprehensible creation ex nihilo. 

"We have supposed that there is a third course to pursue; that is, toplace ourselves back in pure duration. .. Then we seemed to see actionarise from its antecedents by an evolution sui generis, in such a waythat we discover in this action the antecedents which explain it, whileat the same time it adds something absolutely new to them, being anadvance upon them as the fruit upon the flower. Liberty is in no wayreduced thereby, as has been said, to obvious spontaneity. At most thiswould be the case in the animal world, where the psychological life isprincipally that of the affections. But in the case of man, a thinkingbeing, the free act can be called a synthesis of feelings and ideas, andthe evolution which leads to it a reasonable evolution. " ("Matter andMemory", page 205. )

Finally, in a most important letter, ("Report of the FrenchPhilosophical Society", meeting, 26th February 1903. ) Mr Bergsonbecomes a little more precise still. We must certainly not confuse theaffirmation of liberty with the negation of physical determinism; "forthere is more in this affirmation than in this negation. " All the same, liberty supposes a certain contingence. It is "psychological causalityitself, " which must not be represented after the model of physicalcausality. 

In opposition to the latter, it implies that between two moments of aconscious being there is not an equivalence admitting of deduction, thatin 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 havebecome determining; that is, at the moment when the act was virtuallyaccomplished, and the creation of which I speak is entirely contained inthe progress by which these reasons have become determining. " It is truethat all this implies a certain independence of mental life in relationto the mechanism of matter; and that is why Mr Bergson was obliged toset 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 isthere peremptorily refuted. 

The method which Mr Bergson has followed to do so will be found set outby himself in a communication to the French Philosophical Society, whichit is important to study as introduction. ("Report" of meeting, 2ndMay 1901. ) The paralogism included in the very enunciation of theparallelist thesis is explained in a memoire presented to the GenevaInternational Philosophical Congress in 1904. ("Revue de Metaphysique etde Morale", November 1904. ) But the actual proof is made by the analysisof the memoire which fills chapters ii. And iii. Of the work citedabove. (An extremely suggestive resume of these theses will be foundin the second lecture on "The Perception of Change". ) It is thereestablished, by the most positive arguments, (Instead of brutallyconnecting the two extremes of matter and mind, one regarded in itshighest action, the other in its most rudimentary mechanism, thusdooming to certain failure any attempt to explain their actual union, MrBergson studies their living contact at the point of intersection markedby the phenomena of perception and memory: he compares the higherpoint of matter--the brain--and the lower point of mind--certainrecollections--and it is between these two neighbouring points that henotes a difference, by a method no longer dialectic but experimental. )that all our past is self-preserved in us, that this preservation onlymakes one with the musical character of duration, with the indivisiblenature of change, but that one part only is conscious of it, the partconcerned with action, to which present conceptions supply a body ofactuality. 

What we call our present must be conceived neither as a mathematicalpoint nor as a segment with precise limits: it is the moment of ourhistory brought out by our attention to life, and nothing, in strictjustice, would prevent it from extending to the whole of thishistory. It is not recollection then, but forgetfulness which demandsexplanation. 

According to a dictum of Ravaisson, of which Mr Bergson makes use, theexplanation must be sought in the body: "it is materiality which causesforgetfulness in us. "

There are, in fact, several planes of memory, from "pure recollection"not yet interpreted in distinct images down to the same recollectionactualised in embryo sensations and movements begun; and we descend fromthe one to the other, from the life of simple "dream" to the life ofpractical "drama, " along "dynamic schemes. " The last of these planes isthe body; a simple instrument of action, a bundle of motive habits, agroup of mechanisms which mind has set up to act. How does it operate inthe work of memory? The task of the brain is every moment to thrust backinto unconsciousness all that part of our past which is not at thetime useful. Minute study of facts shows that the brain is employed inchoosing from the past, in diminishing, simplifying, and extractingfrom it all that can contribute to present experience; but it is notconcerned to preserve it. In short, the brain can only explain absences, not presences. That is why the analysis of memory illustrates thereality of mind, and its independence relative to matter. Thus isdetermined the relation of soul to body, the penetrating point which itinserts and drives into the plane of action. "Mind borrows from matterperceptions from which it derives its nourishment, and gives them backto it in the form of movement, on which it has impressed its liberty. "("Matter and Memory", page 279. )

This, then, is how the cycle of research closes, by returning to theinitial problem, the problem of perception. In the two opposing systemsby which attempts have been made to solve it, Mr Bergson discovers acommon postulate, resulting in a common impotence. From the idealisticpoint of view we do not succeed in explaining how a world is expressedexternally, nor from the realistic point of view how an ego is expressedinternally. And this double failure comes again from the underlyinghypothesis, according to which the duality of the subject and object isconceived as primitive, radical, and static. Our duty is diametricallyopposed. We have to consider this duality as gradually elaborated, andthe problem concerning it must be first stated, and then solved as afunction of time rather than of space. Our representation begins bybeing impersonal, and it is only later that it adopts our body ascentre. We emerge gradually from universal reality, and our realisingroots are always sunk in it. But this reality in itself is alreadyconsciousness, and the first moment of perception always puts us backinto the initial state previous to the separation of the subject andobject. It is by the work of life, and by action, that this separationis effected, created, accentuated, and fixed. And the common mistake ofrealism and idealism is to believe it effected in advance, whereas it isrelatively second to perception. 

Hence comes the absolute value of immediate intuition. For from whatsource could an irreducible relativity be produced in it? It would beabsurd to make it depend on the constitution of our brain, since ourbrain itself, so far as it is a group of images, is only a part of theuniverse, presenting the same characteristics as the whole; and in sofar as it is a group of mechanisms become habits, is only a result ofthe initial action of life, of original perceptive discernment. And, onthe other hand, no less absurd would be the fear that the subjectcan ever be excluded or eliminated from its own knowledge, since, inreality, the subject, like the object, is in perception, not perceptionin the subject--at least not primitively. So that it is by a trick ofspeech that the theses of fundamental relativity take root: they vanishwhen we return to immediacy; that is to say, when we present problems asthey ought to be presented, in terms which do not suppose any conceptualanalysis yet accomplished. 

VI. The Problem of Evolution: Life and Matter. 

After the problem of consciousness Mr Bergson was bound to approach thatof evolution, for psychological liberty is only truly conceivable ifit begins in some measure with the first pulsation of corporal life. "Either sensation has no raison d'etre or it is a beginning of liberty";that is what the "Essay on the Immediate Data" (Page 25. ) already toldus. 

It was easy then to foresee the necessity of a general theoretical framein which our duration might take a position which would render it moreintelligible by removing its appearance of singular exception. 

Thus in 1901, I wrote ("Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", May1901) with regard to the new philosophy considered as a philosophy ofbecoming: "It has been prepared by contemporary evolution, which isinvestigates and perfects, sifting it from its ore of materialism, andturning it into genuine metaphysics. Is not this the philosophy suitedto the century of history? Perhaps it indicates that a period hasarrived in which mathematics, losing its role as the regulating science, is about to give place to biology. " This is the programme carriedout, in what an original manner we are well aware, by the doctrine ofCreative Evolution. 

When we examine ancient knowledge, one characteristic of it is at oncevisible. It studies little but certain privileged moments of changingreality, certain stable forms, certain states of equilibrium. Ancient geometry, for example, is almost always limited to the staticconsideration of figures already traced. Modern science is quitedifferent. Has not the greatest progress which it has realised in themathematical 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 itscontinuity, to place oneself along becoming at any moment whatsoever, orrather, by degrees at all successive moments? This fundamental tendency, coupled with the development of biological research, was bound toincline it towards a doctrine of evolution; and hence the success ofSpencer. 

But time, which is everywhere in modern science the chief variable, isonly a time-length, indefinitely and arbitrarily divisible. There isno genuine duration, nothing really tending to evolution in Spencer'sevolution: no more than there is in the periodic working of a turbine orin the stationary tremble of a diapason. Is not this what is emphasisedby the perpetual employment of mechanical images and vulgar engineeringmetaphors, the least fault of which is to suppose a homogeneous time, and a motionless theatre of change which is at bottom only space? "Insuch a doctrine we still talk of time, we pronounce the word, but wehardly think of the thing; for time is here robbed of all effect. "("Creative Evolution", page 42. )

Whence comes a latent materialism, ready to grasp the chance ofself-expression. Whence the automatic return to the dream of universalarithmetic, which Laplace, Du Bois-Reymond, and Huxley have expressedwith such precision. (Ibid. , page 41. )

In order to escape such consequences we must, with Mr Bergson, reintroduce real duration, that is to say, creative duration intoevolution, we must conceive life according to the mode exhibited withregard to change in general. And it is science itself which calls usto this task. What does science actually tell us when we let it speakinstead of prescribing to it answers which conform to ourpreferences? Vitality, at every point of its becoming, is a tangent tophysico-chemical mechanism. But physico-chemistry does not reveal itssecret any more than the straight line produces the curve. 

Consider the development of an embryo. It summarises the history ofspecies; ontogenesis, we are told, reproduces phylogenesis. And what dowe observe then?

Now that a long sequence of centuries is contracted for us into a shortperiod, and that our view is thus capable of a synthesis which beforewas too difficult, we see appearing the rhythmic organisation, themusical character, which the slowness of the transitions at firstprevented us from seeing. In each state of the embryo there is somethingbesides an instantaneous structure, something besides a conservativeplay of actions and reactions; there is a tendency, a direction, aneffort, a creative activity. The stage traversed is less interestingthan the traversing itself; this again is an act of generating impulse, rather than an effect of mechanical inertia. So must the case be, byanalogy, with general evolution. We have there, as it were, a visionof biological duration in miniature; expansion and relaxation of itstension bring its homogeneity to notice, but at the same time, properlyspeaking, evolution disappears. 

And further, Mr Bergson establishes by direct and positive argumentsthat life is genuine creation. A similar conclusion is presented as theenvelope of his whole doctrine. 

It is imposed first of all by immediate evidence, for we cannot denythat the history of life is revealed to us under the aspect of aprogress and an ascent. And this impulse implies initiative and choice, constituting an effort which we are not authorised by the facts topronounce fatalistic: "A simple glance at the fossil species shows usthat life could have done without evolution, or could have evolved onlywithin very restricted limits, had it chosen the far easier path open toit of becoming cramped in its primitive forms; certain Foraminifera havenot varied since the silurian period; the Lingulae, looking unmoved uponthe innumerable revolutions which have upheaved our planet, are todaywhat they were in the most distant times of the palaeozoic era. "("Creative Evolution", page 111. ) Moreover, if, in us, life isindisputably creation and liberty, how would it not, to some extent, beso in universal nature? "Whatever be the inmost essence of what is andwhat is being made, we are of it: ("Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", November 1911. ) a conclusion by analogy is therefore legitimate. Butabove all, this conclusion is verified by its aptitude for solvingproblems of detail, and for taking account of observed facts, and inthis respect I regret that I can only refer the reader to the whole bodyof admirable discussions and analyses drawn up by Mr Bergson with regardto "the plant and the animal, " or "the development of animal life. ""("Creative Evolution", chapter ii. )

As regards matter, two main laws stand out from the whole of ourscience, relative to its nature and its phenomena: a law of conservationand a law of degradation. On the one hand, we have mechanism, repetition, inertia, constants, and invariants: the play of the materialworld, from the point of view of quantity, offers us the aspect ofan immense transformation without gain or loss, a homogeneoustransformation tending to maintain in itself an exact equivalencebetween the departure and arrival point. On the other hand, from thepoint 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 thenas a loss, a movement of fall and descent. 

In addition, there is only a tendency to conservation, a tendency whichis never realised except imperfectly; while, on the contrary, we noticethat the failure of the vital impulse is most infallibly interpreted bythe appearance of mechanism. Reality falling asleep or breaking upis the figure under which we finally observe matter: matter then issecondary. 

Finally, according to Mr Bergson, matter is defined as a kind ofdescent; this descent as the interruption of an ascent; this ascentitself as growth; and thus a principle of creation is at the base ofthings. 

Such a view seems obscure and disturbing to the mathematicalunderstanding. It cannot accustom itself to the idea of a becoming whichis more than a simple change of distribution, and more than a simpleexpression of latent wealth. When confronted with such an idea, italways harks back to its eternal question: How has something come outof nothing? The question is false; for the idea of nothing is onlya pseudo-idea. Nothing is unthinkable, since to think nothing isnecessarily to think or not to think something; and according to MrBergson's formula, (Cf. The discussion on existence and non-existence inchapter iv. Of "Creative Evolution", pages 298-322. ) "the representationof void is always a full representation. " When I say: "There isnothing, " it is not that I perceive a "nothing. " I never perceiveexcept what is. But I have not perceived what I was seeking, what I wasexpecting, and I express my deception in the language of my desire. Orelse I am speaking a language of construction, implying that I do notyet 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, asphases of gradual maturation, rounded at intervals by crises of creativediscovery. Continuity and discontinuity will thus admit possibility ofreconciliation, the one as an aspect of ascent towards the future, theother as an aspect of retrospection after the event. And we shallsee that the same key will in addition disclose to us the theory ofknowledge. 

VII. The Problem of Knowledge: Analysis and Intuition. 

We know what importance has been attached since Kant to the problem ofreason: it would seem sometimes that all future philosophy is a returnto 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 anact of directing synthesis, unifying the experience and rendering it bythat very fact intelligible. Every movement of thought shows this powerin exercise. To bring it everywhere to the front would be the propertask of philosophy; at least it is in this manner that we understand ittoday. But from what point of view and by what method do we ordinarilyconstruct this theory of knowledge?

The spontaneous works of mind, perception, science, art, and moralityare the departure-point of the inquiry and its initial matter. We do notask ourselves whether but how they are possible, what they imply, andwhat they suppose; a regressive analysis attempts by critical reflectionto discern in them their principles and requisites. The task, in short, is to reascend from production to producing activity, which we regard assufficiently revealed by its natural products. 

Philosophy, in consequence, is no longer anything but the science ofproblems already solved, the science which is confined to saying whyknowledge is knowledge and action action, of such and such a kind, andsuch and such a quality. And in consequence also reason can no longerappear anything but an original datum postulated as a simple fact, asa complete system come down ready-made from heaven, at bottom a kind ofnon-temporal essence, definable without respect to duration, evolution, or history, of which all genesis and all progress are absurd. In vain dowe persist in maintaining that it is originally an act; we always comeround to the fact that the method followed compels us to consider thisact only when once accomplished, and when once expressed in results. Theinevitable consequence is that we imprison ourselves hopelessly in theaffirmation of Kantian relativism. 

Such a system can only be true as a partial and temporary truth: at themost, 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 reasonin general, but of a reason fashioned to the habits and demands ofCartesian mechanism or Newtonian physics. " (H. Bergson, "Report ofFrench Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901. ) Moreover, he plainly studies only adult reason, its present state, a plane ofthought, a sectional view of becoming. For Kant, men progress perhapsin reason, but reason itself has no duration: it is the fixed spot, theatmosphere of dead eternity in which every mental action is displayed. But this could not be the final and complete truth. Is it not a factthat human intelligence has been slowly constituted in the course ofbiological evolution? To know it, we have not so much to separate itstatically 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 isalways in life and by life that we are. 

Life is not a brute force, a blind mechanism, from which one could neverconceive that thought would spring. From its first pulsation, lifeis consciousness, spiritual activity, creative effort tending towardsliberty; that is, discernment already luminous, although the quality isat first faint and diffused. In other terms, life is at bottom of thepsychological nature of a tendency. But "the essence of a tendency isto develop in sheaf-form, creating, by the mere fact of its growth, diverging directions between which its impulse will be divided. "("Creative Evolution", page 108. )

Along these different paths the complementary potentialities areproduced and intensified, separating in the very process, their originalinterpretation being possible only in the state of birth. One of themends in what we call intelligence. This latter therefore has becomegradually detached from a less intense but fuller luminous condition, ofwhich 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 thefaculty of critical reflection and conceptual analysis, represents onlyone form of thought in its entirety, a function, a determination orparticular adaptation, the part organised in view of practical action, the part consolidated as language. What are its characteristics? Itunderstands only what is discontinuous, inert, and fixed, that which hasneither 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 themechanism of matter? But it supposes life; it only remains living itselfby continual loans from a vaster and fuller activity from which itis sprung. And this return to complementary powers is what we callintuition. 

From this point of view it becomes easy to escape Kantian relativity. Weare confronted by an intelligence which is doubtless no longer a facultyuniversally competent, but which, on the contrary, possesses in its owndomain a greater power of penetration. It is arranged for action. Nowaction would not be able to move in irreality. Intelligence, then, makesus acquainted, if not with all reality, at least with some of it, namely that part by which reality is a possible object of mechanical orsynthetic action. 

More profoundly, intuition falls into analysis as life into matter: theyare two aspects of the same movement. That is why, "provided we onlyconsider the general form of physics, we can say that it touches theabsolute. " ("Creative Evolution", page 216. )

In other terms, language and mechanism are regulated by each other. Thisexplains at once the success of mathematical science in the order ofmatter, and its non-success in the order of life. 

For, when confronted with life, intelligence fails. "Being a depositof the evolutive movement along its path, how could it be appliedthroughout the evolutive movement itself? We might as well claim thatthe part equals the whole, that the effect can absorb its cause intoitself, or that the pebble left on the shore outlines the form of thewave which brought it. " (Preface to "Creative Evolution". )

Is not that as good as saying that life is unknowable? Must we concludethat it is impossible to understand it?

"We should be forced to do so, if life had employed all the psychicpotentialities it contains in making pure understandings; that is tosay, in preparing mathematicians. But the line of evolution which endsin man is not the only one. By other divergent ways other formsof consciousness have developed, which have not been able to freethemselves from external constraint, nor regain the victory overthemselves as intelligence has done, but which, none the less forthat, also express something immanent and essential in the movement ofevolution. 

"By bringing them into connection with one another, and making themafterwards amalgamate with intelligence, should we not thus obtain aconsciousness co-extensive with life, and capable, by turning sharplyround upon the vital thrust which it feels behind it, of obtaining acomplete, though doubtless vanishing vision?" ("Creative Evolution", Preface. ) It is precisely in this that the act of philosophic intuitionconsists. "We shall be told that, even so, we do not get beyond ourintelligence, since it is with our intelligence, and through ourintelligence, that we observe all the other forms of consciousness. Andwe should be right in saying so, if we were pure intelligences, ifthere had not remained round our conceptual and logical thought a vaguenebula, made of the very substance at the expense of which the luminousnucleus, which we call intelligence, has been formed. In it residecertain complementary powers of the understanding, of which we have onlya confused feeling when we remain shut up in ourselves, but which willbecome illumined and distinct when they perceive themselves at work, soto speak, in the evolution of nature. They will thus learn what effortthey have to make to become more intense, and to expand in the actualdirection of life. " ("Creative Evolution", Preface. ) Does that meanabandonment to instinct, and descent with it into infra-consciousnessagain? By no means. On the contrary, our task is to bring instinct toenrich intelligence, to become free and illumined in it; and this ascenttowards super-consciousness is possible in the flash of an intuitiveact, as it is sometimes possible for the eye to perceive, as a pale andfugitive gleam, beyond what we properly term light, the ultra-violetrays 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, forlimitation of a sphere is not misappreciation of every legitimateexercise. But intelligence is not the whole of thought, and its naturalproducts do not completely exhaust or manifest our power of light. 

Besides, that intelligence and reason are not things completed, for everarrested in their inner structure, that they evolve and expand, is afact: the place of discovery is precisely the residual fringe of whichwe were speaking above. In this respect, the history of thought wouldfurnish examples in plenty. Intuitions at first obscure, and onlyanticipated, facts originally admitting no comparison, and as it wereirrational, become instructive and luminous by the fruitful use made ofthem, and by the fertility which they manifest. In order to grasp thecomplex content of reality, the mind must do itself violence, mustawaken its sleeping powers of revealing sympathy, must expand till itbecomes adapted to what formerly shocked its habits so much as almostto seem contradictory to it. Such a task, moreover, is possible: we workout its differential every moment, and its complete whole appears in thesequence of centuries. 

At bottom, the new theory of knowledge has nothing new in it exceptthe demand that all the facts shall be taken into account: it renewsduration in the thinking mind, and places itself at the point of view ofcreative invention, not only at that of subsequent demonstration. Henceits conception of experience, which, for it, is not simple information, fitted into pre-existing frames, but elaboration of the framesthemselves. 

Hence the problem of reason changes its aspect. A great mistake has beenmade in thinking that Mr Bergson's doctrine misunderstands it: to denyit 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 facultyof synthesis, and why its essential act is presented as apperceptionof relation. It is unifying activity, not so much by a dialectic ofharmonious construction as by a view of reciprocal implication. Butall 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 anda recollection, an appeal and a promise of profound continuity, ouroriginal anticipation and our final hope, in the bosom of the elementaryatomism which characterises the transitory region of language; andreason thus marks the zone of contact between intelligence and instinct. 

Is thought only possible under the law of number? Does reality onlybecome an object of knowledge as a system of distinct but regulatedfactors and moments? Do ideas exist only by their mutual relations, which first of all oppose them and afterwards force intelligence to moveendlessly from one term to another? If such were the case, reason wouldcertainly be first, as alone making an intelligible continuity out ofdiscontinuous perception and restoring total unity to each temporarypart by a synthetic dialectic. But all this really has meaningonly after analysis has taken place. The demand for rational unityconstitutes in the bosom of atomism something like a murmur of deepunderlying continuity: it expresses in the very language of atomism, atomism's basic irreality. There is no question of misunderstandingreason, but only of putting it in its proper place. In a perspectiveof complete intuition nothing would require to be unified. Reason wouldthen be reabsorbed in perception. That is to say, its present task isto measure and correct in us the limits, gaps, and weaknesses of theperceptive faculty. In this respect not a man of us thinks of denyingit its task. But we try with Mr Bergson to reduce this task to its trueworth and genuine importance. For we are decidedly tired of hearing"Reason" invoked in solemn and moving tones, as if to write thevenerable name with the largest of capital R's were a magic solution ofall problems. 

Mind, in fact, sets out from unity rather than arrives at it; and theorder which it appears to discover subsequently in an experience whichat first is manifold and incoherent is only a refraction of the originalunity through the prism of a spontaneous analysis. Mr Bergson admirablypoints out ("Creative Evolution", pages 240-244 and 252-257. ) that thereare two types of order, geometric and vital, the one a static hierarchyof relations, the other a musical continuity of moments. These two typesare opposed, as space to duration and matter to mind; but the negationof one coincides with the position of the other. It is thereforeimpossible to abolish both at once. The idea of disorder does notcorrespond to any genuine reality. It is essentially relative, andarises only when we do not meet the type of order which we wereexpecting; and then it expresses our deception in the language of ourexpectation, the absence of the expected order being equivalent, fromthe practical point of view, to the absence of all order. Regarded initself, this notion is only a verbal entity, unduly taking form as thecommon basis of two antithetic types. How therefore do we come to speakof a "perceptible diversity" which mind has to regulate and unify?This is only true at most of the disjointed experience employedby common-sense. Reason, accepting this preliminary analysis, and proceeding to language, seeks to organise it according to themathematical type. But it is the vital type which corresponds toabsolute reality, at least when it is a question of the Whole; and onlyintuition 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 mywhole study: Mr Bergson's philosophy is a philosophy of duration. 

Let us regard it from this point of view, as contact with creativeeffort, if we wish to conceive aright the original notions which itproposes to us about liberty, life, and intuition. 

Let us say once more that it appears as the enthronement of positivemetaphysics: positive, that is to say, capable of continuous, regular, and collective progress, no longer forcibly divided into irreducibleschools, "each of which retains its place, chooses its dice, and beginsa 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 operatesin a useful manner to a practical end; metaphysics represent the effortof 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 andmore accuracy the divergence between these two planes of life; hence thepositive character of the new metaphysics. )

Let us next say that until the present moment it constitutes the onlydoctrine which is truly a metaphysic of experience, since no other, atbottom, explains why thought, in its work of discovery and verification, remains in subjection to a law of probation by durable action. Wehave now only to show how it evades certain criticisms which have beenlevelled against its tendencies. 

Some have wanted to see in it a kind of atheist monism. Mr Bergson hasanswered this point himself. What he rejects, and what he is right inrejecting, are the doctrines which confine themselves to personifyingthe unity of nature or the unity of knowledge in God as motionless firstcause. God would really be nothing, since he would do nothing. But headds: "The considerations put forward in my "Essay on the ImmediateData" result in an illustration of the fact of liberty; those of "Matterand Memory" lead us, I hope, to put our finger on mental reality; thoseof "Creative Evolution" present creation as a fact: from all this wederive a clear idea of a free and creating God, producing matter andlife at once, whose creative effort is continued, in a vitaldirection, by the evolution of species and the construction of humanpersonalities. " (Letter to P. De Tonquedec, published in the "Studies"of 20th February 1912, and quoted here as found in the "Annals ofChristian Philosophy", March 1912. ) How can we help finding in thesewords, according to the actual expression of the author, the mostcategorical refutation "of monism and pantheism in general"?

Now to go further and become more precise, Mr Bergson points out that wemust "approach problems of quite a different kind, those of morality. "About these new problems the author of "Creative Evolution" has as yetsaid nothing; and he will say nothing, so long as his method does notlead him, on this point, to results as positive, after their manner, as those of his other works, because he does not consider that meresubjective opinions are in place in philosophy. He therefore deniesnothing; he is waiting and searching, always in the same spirit: whatmore could we ask of him?

One thing only is possible today: to discern in the doctrine alreadyexisting the points of a moral and religious philosophy which presentthemselves in advance for ultimate insertion. 

This is what we are permitted to attempt. But let us fully understandwhat is at issue. The question is only to know whether, as has beenclaimed, there is incompatibility between Mr Bergson's point of view andthe religious or moral point of view; whether the premisses laid downblock the road to all future development in the direction before us; orwhether, on the contrary, such a development is invited by some parts atleast of the previous work. The question is not to find in this workthe necessary and sufficient bases, the already formed and visiblelineaments of what will one day complete it. To imagine that thereligious and moral problem is bound to be regarded by Mr Bergson asarising when it is too late for revision, as admitting proposition andsolution only as functions of a previous theoretical philosophy beyondwhich we should not go; that in his eyes the solution of this problemwill be deduced from principles already laid down without any call forthe introduction of new facts or new points of view, without any need tobegin from a new intuition; that his view precludes all considerationsof strictly spiritual life, of inner and profound action, regardingthings in relation to God and in an eternal perspective: such a viewwould be illegitimate and unreasonable, first of all, because Mr Bergsonhas said nothing of the kind, and secondly, because it is contrary toall his tendencies. 

After the "Essay on the Immediate Data" critics proceeded to confinehim in an irreducible static dualism; after "Matter and Memory" theycondemned him as failing for ever to explain the juxtaposition of thetwo points of view, utility and truth: why should we require that after"Creative Evolution" he should be forbidden to think anything new, ordistinguish, for example, different orders of life?

The problems must be approached one after the other, and, in thesolution of each of them, it is proper to introduce only the necessaryelements. But each result is only "temporarily final. " Let us lose thestrange habit of asking an author continually to do something otherthan he has done, or, in what he has done, to give us the whole of histhought. 

Till now, Mr Bergson has always considered each new problem accordingto its specific and original nature, and, to solve it, he has alwayssupplied a new effort of autonomous adaptation: why should it beotherwise for the future? I seek vainly for the decree forbidding himthe right to study the problem of biological evolution in itself, and for the necessity which compels him to abide now by the premissescontained 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 andreligious question compel Mr Bergson to break with the conclusions ofhis previous studies, and can we not, on the contrary, foresee points ofgeneral agreement?

In the depths of ourselves we find liberty; in the depths of universalbeing we find a demand for creation. Since evolution is creative, each of its moments works for the production of an indeducible andtranscendent future. This future must not be regarded as a simpledevelopment of the present, a simple expression of germs already given. Consequently we have no authority for saying that there is for everonly one order of life, only one plane of action, only one rhythm ofduration, only one perspective of existence. And if disconnections andabrupt leaps are visible in the economy of the past--from matter tolife, from the animal to man--we have no authority again for claimingthat we cannot observe today something analogous in the very essence ofhuman life, that the point of view of the flesh, and the point of viewof the spirit, the point of view of reason, and the point of view ofcharity are a homogeneous extension of it. And apart from that, takinglife in its first tendency, and in the general direction of its current, it is ascent, growth, upward effort, and a work of spiritualising andemancipating creation: by that we might define Good, for Good is a pathrather than a thing. 

But life may fail, halt, or travel downwards. "Life in general ismobility itself; the particular manifestations of life accept thismobility only with regret, and constantly fall behind. While it isalways going forward, they would be glad to mark time. Evolution ingeneral would take place as far as possible in a straight line; specialevolution is a circular advance. Like dust-eddies raised by the passingwind, living bodies are self-pivoted and hung in the full breeze oflife. " ("Creative Evolution", page 139. ) Each species, each individual, each function tends to take itself as its end; mechanism, habit, body, and letter, which are, strictly speaking, pure instruments, actuallybecome principles of death. Thus it comes about that life is exhaustedin efforts towards self-preservation, allows itself to be convertedby matter into captive eddies, sometimes even abandons itself to theinertia of the weight which it ought to raise, and surrenders to thedownward current which constitutes the essence of materiality: it isthus that Evil would be defined, as the direction of travel opposedto Good. Now, with man, thought, reflection, and clear consciousnessappear. At the same time also properly moral qualifications appear: goodbecomes duty, evil becomes sin. At this precise moment, a new problembegins, demanding the soundings of a new intuition, yet connected atclear and visible points with previous problems. 

This is the philosophy which some are pleased to say is closed by natureto all problems of a certain order, problems of reason or problems ofmorality. There is no doctrine, on the contrary, which is more open, andnone 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 conclusionswill be. Let us confine ourselves to taking it in what it has expresslygiven us of itself. From this point of view, which is that of pureknowledge, I must again, as I conclude, emphasise its exceptionalimportance and its infinite reach. It is possible not to understand it. Such is frequently the case: thus it always has been in the past, eachtime that a truly new intuition has arisen among men; thus it will beuntil the inevitable day when disciples more respectful of the letterthan the spirit will turn it, alas, into a new scholastic. What doesit matter! The future is there; despite misconceptions, despiteincomprehensions, there is henceforth the departure-point of allspeculative philosophy; each day increases the number of minds whichrecognise it; and it is better not to dwell upon the proofs of severalof those who are unable or unwilling to see it. 

Index. 

Absolute, the. 

Adaptation, value of. 

Analysis, conceptual, contrasted with intuition. 

Appearances. 

Art, and philosophy. 

Atomism. 

Automatism. 

Automaton, of daily life. 

Being, as becoming. 

Brain, work of. 

Causality, psychological. 

Change. 

Common-sense. 

Concepts, analysis by and functions of, as symbols, creation of, asgeneral frames, practical reach of, inferior to intuition, furtherdiscussed. 

Consciousness. 

Conservation, law of. 

Constants, search for, represented. 

Continuity, qualitative. 

Criticism, of language. 

Deduction, impotence of. 

Degradation, law of. 

Determinism, physical. 

Discontinuity, apparent. 

Disorder. 

Du Bois-Reymond. 

Duration, real, perpetually new, and thought, and time, pure. 

Dynamic connection, schemes. 

Ego, encrustations of the. 

Eleatic dialectic. 

Embryology, evidence of. 

Evil, a reality. 

Evolution, drama of, biological, value and meaning of, notindispensable, distinguished from development, as dynamic continuity, asactivity, further discussed. 

Existence, as change. 

Experience. 

Fact. 

Freedom. 

Free-will. 

Genesis, law of. 

Good, a reality, a path. 

Habit, as obstacle. 

Heredity. 

Heterogeneity. 

Homogeneity, absence of. 

Huxley. 

Images. 

Immediacy. 

Immediate, the. 

Inert, the. 

Instinct, is sympathy, contrasted with intelligence. 

Intellectualism, distrusted. 

Intelligence, product of evolution, and instinct, broad meaning of. 

Intuition, as starting-point, intransmissible without language, aesthetic, triumph of, and duration, and analysis. 

Intuitional effort, content. 

Kant, his point of departure, conclusions of, escape from. 

Knowledge, absolute, utilitarian nature of, new theory of. 

Language, dangers of. 

Laplace. 

Law, concept of. 

Liberty, personal importance of. 

Life, tendencies of, is finality, is progress, further discussed. 

Limit-concepts. 

Materialism. 

Mechanism, psychological, failure of. 

Memory, problem of, perception complicated by, importance of, racial, planes of, memory of solids. 

Metaphor, justification of. 

Method, philosophical. 

Mill, Stuart. 

Motor-schemes, mechanisms. 

Mysticism. 

Non-morality. 

Nothingness. 

Number. 

Ontogenesis. 

Palaeontology, evidence of. 

Parallelism. 

Paralogism. 

Perception, an art, affected by memory, further explained, fulfilmentof guesswork, utilitarian signification, subjectivity of, pureand ordinary, further discussed, relation to matter, perception ofimmediacy. 

Philosophy, duty of, function of. 

Phylogenesis. 

Planes, of consciousness. 

Progress, and reality. 

Quality, and inner world. 

Quantity, and quality. 

Rationalism. 

Ravaisson. 

Realism. 

Reality, contact with, a flux, recognition of, absolute, elusive natureof, personal, essentially qualitative, pure, inner, contrasting viewsabout, further discussed. 

Reason. 

Relation, between mind and matter. 

Religion, its place in philosophy. 

Renan. 

Romanticism. 

Schemes, dynamic. 

Science, prisoner of symbolism, cult of, impotence of. 

Sense, good, and common-sense. 

Space. 

Spencer, criticism of, success and weakness of. 

Spiritualism. 

Symbolism. 

Sympathy. 

Taine. 

Thought, methods of common. 

Time, required by Mr Bergson's philosophy, in space, and common-sense, and duration. 

Torpor. 

Transformism, errors of. 

Utility, as goal of perception. 

Variation. 

Zeno of Elea. 

Zone, of feeling.