which the native shape is perhaps best preserved in the phenomenon of
vertigo. In vertigo we feel that movement _is_, and is more or less
violent or rapid, more or less in this direction or that, more or less
alarming or sickening. But a man subject to vertigo may gradually
learn to co-ordinate his felt motion with his real position and that
of other things, and intellectualize it enough to succeed at last in
walking without staggering. The mathematical mind similarly organizes
motion in its way, putting it into a logical definition: motion is now
conceived as 'the occupancy of serially successive points of space
at serially successive instants of time.' With such a definition we
escape wholly from the turbid privacy of sense. But do we not also
escape from sense-reality altogether? Whatever motion really may be,
it surely is not static; but the definition we have gained is of the
absolutely static. It gives a set of one-to-one relations between
space-points and time-points, which relations themselves are as fixed
as the points are. It gives _positions_ assignable ad infinitum, but
how the body gets from one position to another it omits to mention.
The body gets there by moving, of course; but the conceived positions,
however numerously multiplied, contain no element of movement, so
Zeno, using nothing but them in his discussion, has no alternative
but to say that our intellect repudiates motion as a non-reality.
Intellectualism here does what I said it does--it makes experience
less instead of more intelligible.
We of course need a stable scheme of concepts, stably related with
one another, to lay hold of our experiences and to co-ordinate them
withal. When an experience comes with sufficient saliency to stand
out, we keep the thought of it for future use, and store it in our
conceptual system. What does not of itself stand out, we learn to
_cut_ out; so the system grows completer, and new reality, as it
comes, gets named after and conceptually strung upon this or that
element of it which we have already established. The immutability
of such an abstract system is its great practical merit; the same
identical terms and relations in it can always be recovered and
referred to--change itself is just such an unalterable concept. But
all these abstract concepts are but as flowers gathered, they are only
moments dipped out from the stream of time, snap-shots taken, as by
a kinetoscopic camera, at a life that in its original coming is
continuous. Useful as they are as samples of the garden, or to
re-enter the stream with, or to insert in our revolving lantern, they
have no value but these practical values. You cannot explain by them
what makes any single phenomenon be or go--you merely dot out the path
of appearances which it traverses. For you cannot make continuous
being out of discontinuities, and your concepts are discontinuous. The
stages into which you analyze a change are _states_, the change itself
goes on between them. It lies along their intervals, inhabits what
your definition fails to gather up, and thus eludes conceptual
explanation altogether.
'When the mathematician,' Bergson writes, 'calculates the state of
a system at the end of a time _t_, nothing need prevent him from
supposing that betweenwhiles the universe vanishes, in order suddenly
to appear again at the due moment in the new configuration. It is
only the _t_-th moment that counts--that which flows throughout the
intervals, namely real time, plays no part in his calculation.... In
short, the world on which the mathematician operates is a world which
dies and is born anew at every instant, like the world which Descartes
thought of when he spoke of a continued creation.' To know adequately
what really _happens_ we ought, Bergson insists, to see into the
intervals, but the mathematician sees only their extremities. He
fixes only a few results, he dots a curve and then interpolates, he
substitutes a tracing for a reality.
This being so undeniably the case, the history of the way in which
philosophy has dealt with it is curious. The ruling tradition in
philosophy has always been the platonic and aristotelian belief that
fixity is a nobler and worthier thing than change. Reality must be one
and unalterable. Concepts, being themselves fixities, agree best with
this fixed nature of truth, so that for any knowledge of ours to be
quite true it must be knowledge by universal concepts rather than
by particular experiences, for these notoriously are mutable and
corruptible. This is the tradition known as rationalism in philosophy,
and what I have called intellectualism is only the extreme application
of it. In spite of sceptics and empiricists, in spite of Protagoras,
Hume, and James Mill, rationalism has never been seriously questioned,
for its sharpest critics have always had a tender place in their
hearts for it, and have obeyed some of its mandates. They have not
been consistent; they have played fast and loose with the enemy; and
Bergson alone has been radical.
To show what I mean by this, let me contrast his procedure with that
of some of the transcendentalist philosophers whom I have lately
mentioned. Coming after Kant, these pique themselves on being
'critical,' on building in fact upon Kant's 'critique' of pure reason.
What that critique professed to establish was this, that concepts do
not apprehend reality, but only such appearances as our senses
feed out to them. They give immutable intellectual forms to these
appearances, it is true, but the reality _an sich_ from which in
ultimate resort the sense-appearances have to come remains forever
unintelligible to our intellect. Take motion, for example. Sensibly,
motion comes in drops, waves, or pulses; either some actual amount of
it, or none, being apprehended. This amount is the datum or _gabe_
which reality feeds out to our intellectual faculty; but our intellect
makes of it a task or _aufgabe_--this pun is one of the most memorable
of Kant's formulas--and insists that in every pulse of it an infinite
number of successive minor pulses shall be ascertainable. These minor
pulses _we_ can indeed _go on_ to ascertain or to compute indefinitely
if we have patience; but it would contradict the definition of an
infinite number to suppose the endless series of them to have actually
counted _themselves_ out piecemeal. Zeno made this manifest; so the
infinity which our intellect requires of the sense-datum is thus
a future and potential rather than a past and actual infinity of
structure. The datum after it has made itself must be decompos_able_
ad infinitum by our conception, but of the steps by which that
structure actually got composed we know nothing. Our intellect casts,
in short, no ray of light on the processes by which experiences _get
made_.
Kant's monistic successors have in general found the data of immediate
experience even more self-contradictory, when intellectually treated,
than Kant did. Not only the character of infinity involved in the
relation of various empirical data to their 'conditions,' but the very
notion that empirical things should be related to one another at all,
has seemed to them, when the intellectualistic fit was upon them, full
of paradox and contradiction. We saw in a former lecture numerous
instances of this from Hegel, Bradley, Royce, and others. We saw also
where the solution of such an intolerable state of things was sought
for by these authors. Whereas Kant had placed it outside of and
_before_ our experience, in the _dinge an sich_ which are the causes
of the latter, his monistic successors all look for it either _after_
experience, as its absolute completion, or else consider it to be even
now implicit within experience as its ideal signification. Kant and
his successors look, in short, in diametrically opposite directions.
Do not be misled by Kant's admission of theism into his system.
His God is the ordinary dualistic God of Christianity, to whom his
philosophy simply opens the door; he has nothing whatsoever in common
with the 'absolute spirit' set up by his successors. So far as this
absolute spirit is logically derived from Kant, it is not from his
God, but from entirely different elements of his philosophy. First
from his notion that an unconditioned totality of the conditions of
any experience must be assignable; and then from his other notion that
the presence of some witness, or ego of apperception, is the most
universal of all the conditions in question. The post-kantians make
of the witness-condition what is called a concrete universal, an
individualized all-witness or world-self, which shall imply in its
rational constitution each and all of the other conditions put
together, and therefore necessitate each and all of the conditioned
experiences.
Abridgments like this of other men's opinions are very unsatisfactory,
they always work injustice; but in this case those of you who are
familiar with the literature will see immediately what I have in mind;
and to the others, if there be any here, it will suffice to say that
what I am trying so pedantically to point out is only the fact that
monistic idealists after Kant have invariably sought relief from the
supposed contradictions of our world of sense by looking forward
toward an _ens rationis_ conceived as its integration or logical
completion, while he looked backward toward non-rational _dinge an
sich_ conceived as its cause. Pluralistic empiricists, on the other
hand, have remained in the world of sense, either naïvely and because
they overlooked the intellectualistic contradictions, or because, not
able to ignore them, they thought they could refute them by a superior
use of the same intellectualistic logic. Thus it is that John Mill
pretends to refute the Achilles-tortoise fallacy.
The important point to notice here is the intellectualist logic. Both
sides treat it as authoritative, but they do so capriciously: the
absolutists smashing the world of sense by its means, the empiricists
smashing the absolute--for the absolute, they say, is the quintessence
of all logical contradictions. Neither side attains consistency.
The Hegelians have to invoke a higher logic to supersede the purely
destructive efforts of their first logic. The empiricists use their
logic against the absolute, but refuse to use it against finite
experience. Each party uses it or drops it to suit the vision it has
faith in, but neither impugns in principle its general theoretic
authority.
Bergson alone challenges its theoretic authority in principle. He
alone denies that mere conceptual logic can tell us what is impossible
or possible in the world of being or fact; and he does so for reasons
which at the same time that they rule logic out from lordship over the
whole of life, establish a vast and definite sphere of influence where
its sovereignty is indisputable. Bergson's own text, felicitous as
it is, is too intricate for quotation, so I must use my own inferior
words in explaining what I mean by saying this.
In the first place, logic, giving primarily the relations between
concepts as such, and the relations between natural facts only
secondarily or so far as the facts have been already identified with
concepts and defined by them, must of course stand or fall with the
conceptual method. But the conceptual method is a transformation which
the flux of life undergoes at our hands in the interests of practice
essentially and only subordinately in the interests of theory. We
live forward, we understand backward, said a danish writer; and to
understand life by concepts is to arrest its movement, cutting it up
into bits as if with scissors, and immobilizing these in our logical
herbarium where, comparing them as dried specimens, we can ascertain
which of them statically includes or excludes which other. This
treatment supposes life to have already accomplished itself, for the
concepts, being so many views taken after the fact, are retrospective
and post mortem. Nevertheless we can draw conclusions from them and
project them into the future. We cannot learn from them how life made
itself go, or how it will make itself go; but, on the supposition that
its ways of making itself go are unchanging, we can calculate what
positions of imagined arrest it will exhibit hereafter under given
conditions. We can compute, for instance, at what point Achilles
will be, and where the tortoise will be, at the end of the twentieth
minute. Achilles may then be at a point far ahead; but the full detail
of how he will have managed practically to get there our logic never
gives us--we have seen, indeed, that it finds that its results
contradict the facts of nature. The computations which the other
sciences make differ in no respect from those of mathematics. The
concepts used are all of them dots through which, by interpolation or
extrapolation, curves are drawn, while along the curves other dots are
found as consequences. The latest refinements of logic dispense
with the curves altogether, and deal solely with the dots and their
correspondences each to each in various series. The authors of these
recent improvements tell us expressly that their aim is to abolish the
last vestiges of intuition, _videlicet_ of concrete reality, from the
field of reasoning, which then will operate literally on mental dots
or bare abstract units of discourse, and on the ways in which they may
be strung in naked series.
This is all very esoteric, and my own understanding of it is most
likely misunderstanding. So I speak here only by way of brief reminder
to those who know. For the rest of us it is enough to recognize this
fact, that altho by means of concepts cut out from the sensible flux
of the past, we can re-descend upon the future flux and, making
another cut, say what particular thing is likely to be found there;
and that altho in this sense concepts give us knowledge, and may be
said to have some theoretic value (especially when the particular
thing foretold is one in which we take no present practical interest);
yet in the deeper sense of giving _insight_ they have no theoretic
value, for they quite fail to connect us with the inner life of the
flux, or with the causes that govern its direction. Instead of being
interpreters of reality, concepts negate the inwardness of reality
altogether. They make the whole notion of a causal influence between
finite things incomprehensible. No real activities and indeed no real
connexions of any kind can obtain if we follow the conceptual logic;
for to be distinguishable, according to what I call intellectualism,
is to be incapable of connexion. The work begun by Zeno, and continued
by Hume, Kant, Herbart, Hegel, and Bradley, does not stop till
sensible reality lies entirely disintegrated at the feet of 'reason.'
Of the 'absolute' reality which reason proposes to substitute for
sensible reality I shall have more to say presently. Meanwhile you see
what Professor Bergson means by insisting that the function of the
intellect is practical rather than theoretical. Sensible reality is
too concrete to be entirely manageable--look at the narrow range of it
which is all that any animal, living in it exclusively as he does, is
able to compass. To get from one point in it to another we have to
plough or wade through the whole intolerable interval. No detail is
spared us; it is as bad as the barbed-wire complications at Port
Arthur, and we grow old and die in the process. But with our faculty
of abstracting and fixing concepts we are there in a second, almost as
if we controlled a fourth dimension, skipping the intermediaries as
by a divine winged power, and getting at the exact point we require
without entanglement with any context. What we do in fact is to
_harness up_ reality in our conceptual systems in order to drive it
the better. This process is practical because all the termini to which
we drive are _particular_ termini, even when they are facts of the
mental order. But the sciences in which the conceptual method chiefly
celebrates its triumphs are those of space and matter, where the
transformations of external things are dealt with. To deal with moral
facts conceptually, we have first to transform them, substitute
brain-diagrams or physical metaphors, treat ideas as atoms, interests
as mechanical forces, our conscious 'selves' as 'streams,' and the
like. Paradoxical effect! as Bergson well remarks, if our intellectual
life were not practical but destined to reveal the inner natures.
One would then suppose that it would find itself most at home in the
domain of its own intellectual realities. But it is precisely there
that it finds itself at the end of its tether. We know the inner
movements of our spirit only perceptually. We feel them live in us,
but can give no distinct account of their elements, nor definitely
predict their future; while things that lie along the world of space,
things of the sort that we literally _handle_, are what our intellects
cope with most successfully. Does not this confirm us in the view that
the original and still surviving function of our intellectual life
is to guide us in the practical adaptation of our expectancies and
activities?
One can easily get into a verbal mess at this point, and my own
experience with pragmatism' makes me shrink from the dangers that lie
in the word 'practical,' and far rather than stand out against you for
that word, I am quite willing to part company with Professor Bergson,
and to ascribe a primarily theoretical function to our intellect,
provided you on your part then agree to discriminate 'theoretic' or
scientific knowledge from the deeper 'speculative' knowledge aspired
to by most philosophers, and concede that theoretic knowledge,
which is knowledge _about_ things, as distinguished from living or
sympathetic acquaintance with them, touches only the outer surface of
reality. The surface which theoretic knowledge taken in this sense
covers may indeed be enormous in extent; it may dot the whole diameter
of space and time with its conceptual creations; but it does not
penetrate a millimeter into the solid dimension. That inner dimension
of reality is occupied by the _activities_ that keep it going, but the
intellect, speaking through Hume, Kant & Co., finds itself obliged to
deny, and persists in denying, that activities have any intelligible
existence. What exists for _thought_, we are told, is at most the
results that we illusorily ascribe to such activities, strung along
the surfaces of space and time by _regeln der verknüpfung_, laws of
nature which state only coexistences and successions.[1]
Thought deals thus solely with surfaces. It can name the thickness
of reality, but it cannot fathom it, and its insufficiency here is
essential and permanent, not temporary.
The only way in which to apprehend reality's thickness is either to
experience it directly by being a part of reality one's self, or to
evoke it in imagination by sympathetically divining some one else's
inner life. But what we thus immediately experience or concretely
divine is very limited in duration, whereas abstractly we are able to
conceive eternities. Could we feel a million years concretely as we
now feel a passing minute, we should have very little employment for
our conceptual faculty. We should know the whole period fully at every
moment of its passage, whereas we must now construct it laboriously by
means of concepts which we project. Direct acquaintance and conceptual
knowledge are thus complementary of each other; each remedies the
other's defects. If what we care most about be the synoptic treatment
of phenomena, the vision of the far and the gathering of the scattered
like, we must follow the conceptual method. But if, as metaphysicians,
we are more curious about the inner nature of reality or about what
really makes it go, we must turn our backs upon our winged concepts
altogether, and bury ourselves in the thickness of those passing
moments over the surface of which they fly, and on particular points
of which they occasionally rest and perch.
Professor Bergson thus inverts the traditional platonic doctrine
absolutely. Instead of intellectual knowledge being the profounder,
he calls it the more superficial. Instead of being the only adequate
knowledge, it is grossly inadequate, and its only superiority is the
practical one of enabling us to make short cuts through experience
and thereby to save time. The one thing it cannot do is to reveal the
nature of things--which last remark, if not clear already, will become
clearer as I proceed. Dive back into the flux itself, then, Bergson
tells us, if you wish to _know_ reality, that flux which Platonism, in
its strange belief that only the immutable is excellent, has always
spurned; turn your face toward sensation, that flesh-bound thing which
rationalism has always loaded with abuse.--This, you see, is exactly
the opposite remedy from that of looking forward into the absolute,
which our idealistic contemporaries prescribe. It violates our mental
habits, being a kind of passive and receptive listening quite contrary
to that effort to react noisily and verbally on everything, which is
our usual intellectual pose.
What, then, are the peculiar features in the perceptual flux which the
conceptual translation so fatally leaves out?
The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our
concepts are all discontinuous and fixed, and the only mode of making
them coincide with life is by arbitrarily supposing positions of
arrest therein. With such arrests our concepts may be made congruent.
But these concepts are not _parts_ of reality, not real positions
taken by it, but _suppositions_ rather, notes taken by ourselves, and
you can no more dip up the substance of reality with them than you can
dip up water with a net, however finely meshed.
When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and exclude everything
but what we have fixed. A concept means a _that-and-no-other_.
Conceptually, time excludes space; motion and rest exclude each other;
approach excludes contact; presence excludes absence; unity excludes
plurality; independence excludes relativity; 'mine' excludes 'yours';
this connexion excludes that connexion--and so on indefinitely;
whereas in the real concrete sensible flux of life experiences
compenetrate each other so that it is not easy to know just what is
excluded and what not. Past and future, for example, conceptually
separated by the cut to which we give the name of present, and defined
as being the opposite sides of that cut, are to some extent, however
brief, co-present with each other throughout experience. The literally
present moment is a purely verbal supposition, not a position; the
only present ever realized concretely being the 'passing moment' in
which the dying rearward of time and its dawning future forever mix
their lights. Say 'now' and it _was_ even while you say it.
It is just intellectualism's attempt to substitute static cuts
for units of experienced duration that makes real motion so
unintelligible. The conception of the first half of the interval
between Achilles and the tortoise excludes that of the last half, and
the mathematical necessity of traversing it separately before the last
half is traversed stands permanently in the way of the last half ever
being traversed. Meanwhile the living Achilles (who, for the purposes
of this discussion, is only the abstract name of one phenomenon of
impetus, just as the tortoise is of another) asks no leave of logic.
The velocity of his acts is an indivisible nature in them like the
expansive tension in a spring compressed. We define it conceptually as
[_s/t_], but the _s_ and _t_ are only artificial cuts made after the
fact, and indeed most artificial when we treat them in both runners
as the same tracts of 'objective' space and time, for the experienced
spaces and times in which the tortoise inwardly lives are probably
as different as his velocity from the same things in Achilles. The
impetus of Achilles is one concrete fact, and carries space, time, and
conquest over the inferior creature's motion indivisibly in it. He
perceives nothing, while running, of the mathematician's homogeneous
time and space, of the infinitely numerous succession of cuts in both,
or of their order. End and beginning come for him in the one onrush,
and all that he actually experiences is that, in the midst of a
certain intense effort of his own, the rival is in point of fact
outstripped.
We are so inveterately wedded to the conceptual decomposition of life
that I know that this will seem to you like putting muddiest confusion
in place of clearest thought, and relapsing into a molluscoid state
of mind. Yet I ask you whether the absolute superiority of our higher
thought is so very clear, if all that it can find is impossibility in
tasks which sense-experience so easily performs.