is comfortable, and all our habits of speech support it. Yet it is not
for idle or fantastical reasons that the notion of the substantial
soul, so freely used by common men and the more popular philosophies,
has fallen upon such evil days, and has no prestige in the eyes of
critical thinkers. It only shares the fate of other unrepresentable
substances and principles. They are without exception all so barren
that to sincere inquirers they appear as little more than names
masquerading--Wo die begriffe fehlen da stellt ein wort zur rechten
zeit sich ein. You see no deeper into the fact that a hundred
sensations get compounded or known together by thinking that a 'soul'
does the compounding than you see into a man's living eighty years by
thinking of him as an octogenarian, or into our having five fingers by
calling us pentadactyls. Souls have worn out both themselves and
their welcome, that is the plain truth. Philosophy ought to get the
manifolds of experience unified on principles less empty. Like the
word 'cause,' the word 'soul' is but a theoretic stop-gap--it marks a
place and claims it for a future explanation to occupy.
This being our post-humian and post-kantian state of mind, I will ask
your permission to leave the soul wholly out of the present discussion
and to consider only the residual dilemma. Some day, indeed, souls may
get their innings again in philosophy--I am quite ready to admit that
possibility--they form a category of thought too natural to the human
mind to expire without prolonged resistance. But if the belief in the
soul ever does come to life after the many funeral-discourses which
humian and kantian criticism have preached over it, I am sure it will
be only when some one has found in the term a pragmatic significance
that has hitherto eluded observation. When that champion speaks, as
he well may speak some day, it will be time to consider souls more
seriously.
Let us leave out the soul, then, and confront what I just called
the residual dilemma. Can we, on the one hand, give up the logic
of identity?--can we, on the other, believe human experience to be
fundamentally irrational? Neither is easy, yet it would seem that we
must do one or the other.
Few philosophers have had the frankness fairly to admit the necessity
of choosing between the 'horns' offered. Reality must be rational,
they have said, and since the ordinary intellectualist logic is
the only usual test of rationality, reality and logic must agree
'somehow.' Hegel was the first non-mystical writer to face the
dilemma squarely and throw away the ordinary logic, saving a
pseudo-rationality for the universe by inventing the higher logic of
the 'dialectic process.' Bradley holds to the intellectualist logic,
and by dint of it convicts the human universe of being irrationality
incarnate. But what must be and can be, is, he says; there must and
can be relief from _that_ irrationality; and the absolute must already
have got the relief in secret ways of its own, impossible for us to
guess at. _We_ of course get no relief, so Bradley's is a rather
ascetic doctrine. Royce and Taylor accept similar solutions, only they
emphasize the irrationality of our finite universe less than Bradley
does; and Royce in particular, being unusually 'thick' for an
idealist, tries to bring the absolute's secret forms of relief more
sympathetically home to our imagination.
Well, what must we do in this tragic predicament? For my own part, I
have finally found myself compelled to _give up the logic_, fairly,
squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life,
but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the
essential nature of reality--just what it is I can perhaps suggest
to you a little later. Reality, life, experience, concreteness,
immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and
surrounds it. If you like to employ words eulogistically, as most
men do, and so encourage confusion, you may say that reality obeys a
higher logic, or enjoys a higher rationality. But I think that
even eulogistic words should be used rather to distinguish than
to commingle meanings, so I prefer bluntly to call reality if not
irrational then at least non-rational in its constitution,--and by
reality here I mean reality where things _happen_, all temporal
reality without exception. I myself find no good warrant for even
suspecting the existence of any reality of a higher denomination than
that distributed and strung-along and flowing sort of reality which we
finite beings swim in. That is the sort of reality given us, and that
is the sort with which logic is so incommensurable. If there be any
higher sort of reality--the 'absolute,' for example--that sort, by
the confession of those who believe in it, is still less amenable
to ordinary logic; it transcends logic and is therefore still less
rational in the intellectualist sense, so it cannot help us to save
our logic as an adequate definer and confiner of existence.
These sayings will sound queer and dark, probably they will sound
quite wild or childish in the absence of explanatory comment. Only the
persuasion that I soon can explain them, if not satisfactorily to all
of you, at least intelligibly, emboldens me to state them thus baldly
as a sort of programme. Please take them as a thesis, therefore, to be
defended by later pleading.
I told you that I had long and sincerely wrestled with the dilemma. I
have now to confess (and this will probably re-animate your interest)
that I should not now be emancipated, not now subordinate logic with
so very light a heart, or throw it out of the deeper regions of
philosophy to take its rightful and respectable place in the world of
simple human practice, if I had not been influenced by a comparatively
young and very original french writer, Professor Henri Bergson.
Reading his works is what has made me bold. If I had not read
Bergson, I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper
privately, in the hope of making ends meet that were never meant to
meet, and trying to discover some mode of conceiving the behavior of
reality which should leave no discrepancy between it and the accepted
laws of the logic of identity. It is certain, at any rate, that
without the confidence which being able to lean on Bergson's authority
gives me I should never have ventured to urge these particular views
of mine upon this ultra-critical audience.
I must therefore, in order to make my own views more intelligible,
give some preliminary account of the bergsonian philosophy. But here,
as in Fechner's case, I must confine myself only to the features
that are essential to the present purpose, and not entangle you in
collateral details, however interesting otherwise. For our present
purpose, then, the essential contribution of Bergson to philosophy
is his criticism of intellectualism. In my opinion he has killed
intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery. I don't
see how it can ever revive again in its ancient platonizing rôle of
claiming to be the most authentic, intimate, and exhaustive definer
of the nature of reality. Others, as Kant for example, have denied
intellectualism's pretensions to define reality _an sich_ or in its
absolute capacity; but Kant still leaves it laying down laws--and laws
from which there is no appeal--to all our human experience; while what
Bergson denies is that its methods give any adequate account of this
human experience in its very finiteness. Just how Bergson accomplishes
all this I must try to tell in my imperfect way in the next lecture;
but since I have already used the words 'logic,' 'logic of identity,
intellectualistic logic,' and 'intellectualism' so often, and
sometimes used them as if they required no particular explanation, it
will be wise at this point to say at greater length than heretofore in
what sense I take these terms when I claim that Bergson has refuted
their pretension to decide what reality can or cannot be. Just what I
mean by intellectualism is therefore what I shall try to give a fuller
idea of during the remainder of this present hour.
In recent controversies some participants have shown resentment
at being classed as intellectualists. I mean to use the word
disparagingly, but shall be sorry if it works offence. Intellectualism
has its source in the faculty which gives us our chief superiority to
the brutes, our power, namely, of translating the crude flux of our
merely feeling-experience into a conceptual order. An immediate
experience, as yet unnamed or classed, is a mere _that_ that we
undergo, a thing that asks, '_What_ am I?' When we name and class it,
we say for the first time what it is, and all these whats are abstract
names or concepts. Each concept means a particular _kind_ of thing,
and as things seem once for all to have been created in kinds, a far
more efficient handling of a given bit of experience begins as soon as
we have classed the various parts of it. Once classed, a thing can be
treated by the law of its class, and the advantages are endless. Both
theoretically and practically this power of framing abstract concepts
is one of the sublimest of our human prerogatives. We come back
into the concrete from our journey into these abstractions, with an
increase both of vision and of power. It is no wonder that earlier
thinkers, forgetting that concepts are only man-made extracts from the
temporal flux, should have ended by treating them as a superior type
of being, bright, changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed in
nature to the turbid, restless lower world. The latter then appears as
but their corruption and falsification.
Intellectualism in the vicious sense began when Socrates and Plato
taught that what a thing really is, is told us by its _definition_.
Ever since Socrates we have been taught that reality consists of
essences, not of appearances, and that the essences of things are
known whenever we know their definitions. So first we identify
the thing with a concept and then we identify the concept with a
definition, and only then, inasmuch as the thing _is_ whatever the
definition expresses, are we sure of apprehending the real essence of
it or the full truth about it.
So far no harm is done. The misuse of concepts begins with the habit
of employing them privatively as well as positively, using them not
merely to assign properties to things, but to deny the very properties
with which the things sensibly present themselves. Logic can extract
all its possible consequences from any definition, and the logician
who is _unerbittlich consequent_ is often tempted, when he cannot
extract a certain property from a definition, to deny that the
concrete object to which the definition applies can possibly possess
that property. The definition that fails to yield it must exclude or
negate it. This is Hegel's regular method of establishing his system.
It is but the old story, of a useful practice first becoming a method,
then a habit, and finally a tyranny that defeats the end it was used
for. Concepts, first employed to make things intelligible, are clung
to even when they make them unintelligible. Thus it comes that when
once you have conceived things as 'independent,' you must proceed to
deny the possibility of any connexion whatever among them, because
the notion of connexion is not contained in the definition of
independence. For a like reason you must deny any possible forms or
modes of unity among things which you have begun by defining as a
'many.' We have cast a glance at Hegel's and Bradley's use of this
sort of reasoning, and you will remember Sigwart's epigram that
according to it a horseman can never in his life go on foot, or a
photographer ever do anything but photograph.
The classic extreme in this direction is the denial of the possibility
of change, and the consequent branding of the world of change as
unreal, by certain philosophers. The definition of A is changeless,
so is the definition of B. The one definition cannot change into
the other, so the notion that a concrete thing A should change into
another concrete thing B is made Out to be contrary to reason. In Mr.
Bradley's difficulty in seeing how sugar can be sweet intellectualism
outstrips itself and becomes openly a sort of verbalism. Sugar is just
sugar and sweet is just sweet; neither is the other; nor can the
word 'is' ever be understood to join any subject to its predicate
rationally. Nothing 'between' things can connect them, for 'between'
is just that third thing, 'between,' and would need itself to be
connected to the first and second things by two still finer betweens,
and so on ad infinitum.
The particular intellectualistic difficulty that had held my own
thought so long in a vise was, as we have seen at such tedious length,
the impossibility of understanding how 'your' experience and 'mine,'
which 'as such' are defined as not conscious of each other, can
nevertheless at the same time be members of a world-experience defined
expressly as having all its parts co-conscious, or known together. The
definitions are contradictory, so the things defined can in no way be
united. You see how unintelligible intellectualism here seems to make
the world of our most accomplished philosophers. Neither as they
use it nor as we use it does it do anything but make nature look
irrational and seem impossible.
In my next lecture, using Bergson as my principal topic, I shall enter
into more concrete details and try, by giving up intellectualism
frankly, to make, if not the world, at least my own general thesis,
less unintelligible.
LECTURE VI
BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF INTELLECTUALISM
I gave you a very stiff lecture last time, and I fear that this one
can be little less so. The best way of entering into it will be to
begin immediately with Bergson's philosophy, since I told you that
that was what had led me personally to renounce the intellectualistic
method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of
what can or cannot be.
Professor Henri Bergson is a young man, comparatively, as influential
philosophers go, having been born at Paris in 1859. His career has
been the perfectly routine one of a successful french professor.
Entering the école normale supérieure at the age of twenty-two, he
spent the next seventeen years teaching at _lycées_, provincial or
parisian, until his fortieth year, when he was made professor at the
said école normale. Since 1900 he has been professor at the College de
France, and member of the Institute since 1900. So far as the outward
facts go, Bergson's career has then been commonplace to the utmost.
Neither one of Taine's famous principles of explanation of great
men, _the race, the environment, or the moment_, no, nor all three
together, will explain that peculiar way of looking at things that
constitutes his mental individuality. Originality in men dates from
nothing previous, other things date from it, rather. I have to confess
that Bergson's originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle
me entirely. I doubt whether any one understands him all over, so to
speak; and I am sure that he would himself be the first to see that
this must be, and to confess that things which he himself has not yet
thought out clearly, had yet to be mentioned and have a tentative
place assigned them in his philosophy. Many of us are profusely
original, in that no man can understand us--violently peculiar ways
of looking at things are no great rarity. The rarity is when great
peculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual
command of all the classic expository apparatus. Bergson's resources
in the way of erudition are remarkable, and in the way of expression
they are simply phenomenal. This is why in France, where _l'art de
bien dire_ counts for so much and is so sure of appreciation, he has
immediately taken so eminent a place in public esteem. Old-fashioned
professors, whom his ideas quite fail to satisfy, nevertheless speak
of his talent almost with bated breath, while the youngsters flock to
him as to a master.
If anything can make hard things easy to follow, it is a style like
Bergson's. A 'straightforward' style, an american reviewer lately
called it; failing to see that such straightforwardness means a
flexibility of verbal resource that follows the thought without a
crease or wrinkle, as elastic silk underclothing follows the movements
of one's body. The lucidity of Bergson's way of putting things is what
all readers are first struck by. It seduces you and bribes you in
advance to become his disciple. It is a miracle, and he a real
magician.
M. Bergson, if I am rightly informed, came into philosophy through the
gateway of mathematics. The old antinomies of the infinite were,
I imagine, the irritant that first woke his faculties from their
dogmatic slumber. You all remember Zeno's famous paradox, or sophism,
as many of our logic books still call it, of Achilles and the
tortoise. Give that reptile ever so small an advance and the swift
runner Achilles can never overtake him, much less get ahead of him;
for if space and time are infinitely divisible (as our intellects
tell us they must be), by the time Achilles reaches the tortoise's
starting-point, the tortoise has already got ahead of _that_
starting-point, and so on _ad infinitum_, the interval between the
pursuer and the pursued growing endlessly minuter, but never becoming
wholly obliterated. The common way of showing up the sophism here is
by pointing out the ambiguity of the expression 'never can overtake.'
What the word 'never' falsely suggests, it is said, is an infinite
duration of time; what it really means is the inexhaustible number of
the steps of which the overtaking must consist. But if these steps are
infinitely short, a finite time will suffice for them; and in point of
fact they do rapidly converge, whatever be the original interval
or the contrasted speeds, toward infinitesimal shortness. This
proportionality of the shortness of the times to that of the spaces
required frees us, it is claimed, from the sophism which the word
'never' suggests.
But this criticism misses Zeno's point entirely. Zeno would have been
perfectly willing to grant that if the tortoise can be overtaken at
all, he can be overtaken in (say) twenty seconds, but he would still
have insisted that he can't be overtaken at all. Leave Achilles and
the tortoise out of the account altogether, he would have said--they
complicate the case unnecessarily. Take any single process of change
whatever, take the twenty seconds themselves elapsing. If time be
infinitely divisible, and it must be so on intellectualist principles,
they simply cannot elapse, their end cannot be reached; for no matter
how much of them has already elapsed, before the remainder, however
minute, can have wholly elapsed, the earlier half of it must first
have elapsed. And this ever re-arising need of making the earlier half
elapse _first_ leaves time with always something to do _before_ the
last thing is done, so that the last thing never gets done. Expressed
in bare numbers, it is like the convergent series 1/2 plus 1/4 plus
1/8..., of which the limit is one. But this limit, simply because it
is a limit, stands outside the series, the value of which approaches
it indefinitely but never touches it. If in the natural world there
were no other way of getting things save by such successive addition
of their logically involved fractions, no complete units or whole
things would ever come into being, for the fractions' sum would always
leave a remainder. But in point of fact nature doesn't make eggs by
making first half an egg, then a quarter, then an eighth, etc., and
adding them together. She either makes a whole egg at once or none
at all, and so of all her other units. It is only in the sphere of
change, then, where one phase of a thing must needs come into being
before another phase can come that Zeno's paradox gives trouble.
And it gives trouble then only if the succession of steps of change
be infinitely divisible. If a bottle had to be emptied by an infinite
number of successive decrements, it is mathematically impossible that
the emptying should ever positively terminate. In point of fact,
however, bottles and coffee-pots empty themselves by a finite number
of decrements, each of definite amount. Either a whole drop emerges or
nothing emerges from the spout. If all change went thus drop-wise,
so to speak, if real time sprouted or grew by units of duration of
determinate amount, just as our perceptions of it grow by pulses,
there would be no zenonian paradoxes or kantian antinomies to trouble
us. All our sensible experiences, as we get them immediately, do thus
change by discrete pulses of perception, each of which keeps us saying
'more, more, more,' or 'less, less, less,' as the definite increments
or diminutions make themselves felt. The discreteness is still more
obvious when, instead of old things changing, they cease, or when
altogether new things come. Fechner's term of the 'threshold,' which
has played such a part in the psychology of perception, is only one
way of naming the quantitative discreteness in the change of all our
sensible experiences. They come to us in drops. Time itself comes in
drops.
Our ideal decomposition of the drops which are all that we feel into
still finer fractions is but an incident in that great transformation
of the perceptual order into a conceptual order of which I spoke in
my last lecture. It is made in the interest of our rationalizing
intellect solely. The times directly _felt_ in the experiences of
living subjects have originally no common measure. Let a lump of sugar
melt in a glass, to use one of M. Bergson's instances. We feel the
time to be long while waiting for the process to end, but who knows
how long or how short it feels to the sugar? All _felt_ times coexist
and overlap or compenetrate each other thus vaguely, but the artifice
of plotting them on a common scale helps us to reduce their aboriginal
confusion, and it helps us still more to plot, against the same scale,
the successive possible steps into which nature's various changes may
be resolved, either sensibly or conceivably. We thus straighten out
the aboriginal privacy and vagueness, and can date things publicly, as
it were, and by each other. The notion of one objective and 'evenly
flowing' time, cut into numbered instants, applies itself as a common
measure to all the steps and phases, no matter how many, into which we
cut the processes of nature. They are now definitely contemporary,
or later or earlier one than another, and we can handle them
mathematically, as we say, and far better, practically as well as
theoretically, for having thus correlated them one to one with each
other on the common schematic or conceptual time-scale.