if they were dissolved in one another, a lot of differents which
conception breaks life's flow by keeping apart. But _are_ not
differents actually dissolved in one another? Hasn't every bit of
experience its quality, its duration, its extension, its intensity,
its urgency, its clearness, and many aspects besides, no one of which
can exist in the isolation in which our verbalized logic keeps it?
They exist only _durcheinander_. Reality always is, in M. Bergson's
phrase, an endosmosis or conflux of the same with the different: they
compenetrate and telescope. For conceptual logic, the same is nothing
but the same, and all sames with a third thing are the same with each
other. Not so in concrete experience. Two spots on our skin, each of
which feels the same as a third spot when touched along with it, are
felt as different from each other. Two tones, neither distinguishable
from a third tone, are perfectly distinct from each other. The whole
process of life is due to life's violation of our logical axioms.
Take its continuity as an example. Terms like A and C appear to be
connected by intermediaries, by B for example. Intellectualism calls
this absurd, for 'B-connected-with-A' is, 'as such,' a different term
from 'B-connected-with-C.' But real life laughs at logic's veto.
Imagine a heavy log which takes two men to carry it. First A and B
take it. Then C takes hold and A drops off; then D takes hold and B
drops off, so that C and D now bear it; and so on. The log meanwhile
never drops, and keeps its sameness throughout the journey. Even so
it is with all our experiences. Their changes are not complete
annihilations followed by complete creations of something absolutely
novel. There is partial decay and partial growth, and all the while a
nucleus of relative constancy from which what decays drops off, and
which takes into itself whatever is grafted on, until at length
something wholly different has taken its place. In such a process we
are as sure, in spite of intellectualist logic with its 'as suches,'
that it _is_ the same nucleus which is able now to make connexion with
what goes and again with what comes, as we are sure that the same
point can lie on diverse lines that intersect there. Without being one
throughout, such a universe is continuous. Its members interdigitate
with their next neighbors in manifold directions, and there are no
clean cuts between them anywhere.
The great clash of intellectualist logic with sensible experience is
where the experience is that of influence exerted. Intellectualism
denies (as we saw in lecture ii) that finite things can act on one
another, for all things, once translated into concepts, remain shut up
to themselves. To act on anything means to get into it somehow; but
that would mean to get out of one's self and be one's other, which is
self-contradictory, etc. Meanwhile each of us actually _is_ his own
other to that extent, livingly knowing how to perform the trick which
logic tells us can't be done. My thoughts animate and actuate this
very body which you see and hear, and thereby influence your thoughts.
The dynamic current somehow does get from me to you, however numerous
the intermediary conductors may have to be. Distinctions may be
insulators in logic as much as they like, but in life distinct things
can and do commune together every moment.
The conflict of the two ways of knowing is best summed up in the
intellectualist doctrine that 'the same cannot exist in many
relations.' This follows of course from the concepts of the two
relations being so distinct that 'what-is-in-the-one' means 'as such'
something distinct from what 'what-is-in-the-other' means. It is like
Mill's ironical saying, that we should not think of Newton as both an
Englishman and a mathematician, because an Englishman as such is not
a mathematician and a mathematician as such is not an Englishman. But
the real Newton was somehow both things at once; and throughout the
whole finite universe each real thing proves to be many differents
without undergoing the necessity of breaking into disconnected
editions of itself.
These few indications will perhaps suffice to put you at the
bergsonian point of view. The immediate experience of life solves the
problems which so baffle our conceptual intelligence: How can what is
manifold be one? how can things get out of themselves? how be their
own others? how be both distinct and connected? how can they act on
one another? how be for others and yet for themselves? how be absent
and present at once? The intellect asks these questions much as we
might ask how anything can both separate and unite things, or how
sounds can grow more alike by continuing to grow more different. If
you already know space sensibly, you can answer the former question by
pointing to any interval in it, long or short; if you know the musical
scale, you can answer the latter by sounding an octave; but then you
must first have the sensible knowledge of these realities. Similarly
Bergson answers the intellectualist conundrums by pointing back to our
various finite sensational experiences and saying, 'Lo, even thus;
even so are these other problems solved livingly.'
When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can
reconstruct it in its wholeness. Out of no amount of discreteness
can you manufacture the concrete. But place yourself at a bound, or
_d'emblée_, as M. Bergson says, inside of the living, moving, active
thickness of the real, and all the abstractions and distinctions
are given into your hand: you can now make the intellectualist
substitutions to your heart's content. Install yourself in phenomenal
movement, for example, and velocity, succession, dates, positions, and
innumerable other things are given you in the bargain. But with only
an abstract succession of dates and positions you can never patch up
movement itself. It slips through their intervals and is lost.
So it is with every concrete thing, however complicated. Our
intellectual handling of it is a retrospective patchwork, a
post-mortem dissection, and can follow any order we find most
expedient. We can make the thing seem self-contradictory whenever
we wish to. But place yourself at the point of view of the thing's
interior _doing_, and all these back-looking and conflicting
conceptions lie harmoniously in your hand. Get at the expanding centre
of a human character, the _élan vital_ of a man, as Bergson calls it,
by living sympathy, and at a stroke you see how it makes those who see
it from without interpret it in such diverse ways. It is something
that breaks into both honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice,
stupidity and insight, at the touch of varying circumstances, and you
feel exactly why and how it does this, and never seek to identify
it stably with any of these single abstractions. Only your
intellectualist does that,--and you now also feel why _he_ must do it
to the end.
Place yourself similarly at the centre of a man's philosophic vision
and you understand at once all the different things it makes him write
or say. But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to build
the philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one and then
another and seeking to make them fit, and of course you fail. You
crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling
into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but
inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists. I hope
that some of the philosophers in this audience may occasionally have
had something different from this intellectualist type of criticism
applied to their own works!
What really _exists_ is not things made but things in the making. Once
made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual
decompositions can be used in defining them. But put yourself _in the
making_ by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and, the
whole range of possible decompositions coming at once into your
possession, you are no longer troubled with the question which of
them is the more absolutely true. Reality _falls_ in passing into
conceptual analysis; it _mounts_ in living its own undivided life--it
buds and bourgeons, changes and creates. Once adopt the movement of
this life in any given instance and you know what Bergson calls the
_devenir réel_ by which the thing evolves and grows. Philosophy should
seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality,
not follow science in vainly patching together fragments of its dead
results.
Thus much of M. Bergson's philosophy is sufficient for my purpose in
these lectures, so here I will stop, leaving unnoticed all its other
constituent features, original and interesting tho they be. You may
say, and doubtless some of you now are saying inwardly, that his
remanding us to sensation in this wise is only a regress, a return to
that ultra-crude empiricism which your own idealists since Green
have buried ten times over. I confess that it is indeed a return to
empiricism, but I think that the return in such accomplished shape
only proves the latter's immortal truth. What won't stay buried must
have some genuine life. _Am anfang war die tat_; fact is a _first_; to
which all our conceptual handling comes as an inadequate second,
never its full equivalent. When I read recent transcendentalist
literature--I must partly except my colleague Royce!--I get nothing
but a sort of marking of time, champing of jaws, pawing of the ground,
and resettling into the same attitude, like a weary horse in a stall
with an empty manger. It is but turning over the same few threadbare
categories, bringing the same objections, and urging the same answers
and solutions, with never a new fact or a new horizon coming into
sight. But open Bergson, and new horizons loom on every page you read.
It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds. It tells
of reality itself, instead of merely reiterating what dusty-minded
professors have written about what other previous professors have
thought. Nothing in Bergson is shop-worn or at second hand.
That he gives us no closed-in system will of course be fatal to him in
intellectualist eyes. He only evokes and invites; but he first annuls
the intellectualist veto, so that we now join step with reality with
a philosophical conscience never quite set free before. As a french
disciple of his well expresses it: 'Bergson claims of us first of all
a certain inner catastrophe, and not every one is capable of such a
logical revolution. But those who have once found themselves flexible
enough for the execution of such a psychological change of front,
discover somehow that they can never return again to their ancient
attitude of mind. They are now Bergsonians ... and possess the
principal thoughts of the master all at once. They have understood in
the fashion in which one loves, they have caught the whole melody and
can thereafter admire at their leisure the originality, the fecundity,
and the imaginative genius with which its author develops, transposes,
and varies in a thousand ways by the orchestration of his style and
dialectic, the original theme.'[2]
This, scant as it is, is all I have to say about Bergson on this
occasion--I hope it may send some of you to his original text. I must
now turn back to the point where I found it advisable to appeal to his
ideas. You remember my own intellectualist difficulties in the last
lecture, about how a lot of separate consciousnesses can at the same
time be one collective thing. How, I asked, can one and the same
identical content of experience, of which on idealist principles the
_esse_ is to be felt, be felt so diversely if itself be the only
feeler? The usual way of escape by 'quatenus' or 'as such' won't
help us here if we are radical intellectualists, I said, for
appearance-together is as such _not_ appearance-apart, the world _quâ_
many is not the world _quâ_ one, as absolutism claims. If we hold to
Hume's maxim, which later intellectualism uses so well, that whatever
things are distinguished are as separate as if there were no manner of
connexion between them, there seemed no way out of the difficulty save
by stepping outside of experience altogether and invoking different
spiritual agents, selves or souls, to realize the diversity required.
But this rescue by 'scholastic entities' I was unwilling to accept any
more than pantheistic idealists accept it.
Yet, to quote Fechner's phrase again, 'nichts wirkliches kann
unmöglich sein,' the actual cannot be impossible, and what _is_ actual
at every moment of our lives is the sort of thing which I now
proceed to remind you of. You can hear the vibration of an electric
contact-maker, smell the ozone, see the sparks, and feel the thrill,
co-consciously as it were or in one field of experience. But you can
also isolate any one of these sensations by shutting out the rest. If
you close your eyes, hold your nose, and remove your hand, you can get
the sensation of sound alone, but it seems still the same sensation
that it was; and if you restore the action of the other organs, the
sound coalesces with the feeling, the sight, and the smell sensations
again. Now the natural way of talking of all this[3] is to say that
certain sensations are experienced, now singly, and now together
with other sensations, in a common conscious field. Fluctuations of
attention give analogous results. We let a sensation in or keep it out
by changing our attention; and similarly we let an item of memory in
or drop it out. [Please don't raise the question here of how these
changes _come to pass_. The immediate condition is probably cerebral
in every instance, but it would be irrelevant now to consider it, for
now we are thinking only of results, and I repeat that the natural way
of thinking of them is that which intellectualist criticism finds so
absurd.]
The absurdity charged is that the self-same should function so
differently, now with and now without something else. But this it
sensibly seems to do. This very desk which I strike with my hand
strikes in turn your eyes. It functions at once as a physical object
in the outer world and as a mental object in our sundry mental worlds.
The very body of mine that _my_ thought actuates is the body whose
gestures are _your_ visual object and to which you give my name. The
very log which John helped to carry is the log now borne by James. The
very girl you love is simultaneously entangled elsewhere. The very
place behind me is in front of you. Look where you will, you gather
only examples of the same amid the different, and of different
relations existing as it were in solution in the same thing. _Quâ_
this an experience is not the same as it is _quâ_ that, truly enough;
but the _quâs_ are conceptual shots of ours at its post-mortem
remains, and in its sensational immediacy everything is all at once
whatever different things it is at once at all. It is before C and
after A, far from you and near to me, without this associate and with
that one, active and passive, physical and mental, a whole of
parts and part of a higher whole, all simultaneously and without
interference or need of doubling-up its being, so long as we keep to
what I call the 'immediate' point of view, the point of view in which
we follow our sensational life's continuity, and to which all living
language conforms. It is only when you try--to continue using the
hegelian vocabulary--to 'mediate' the immediate, or to substitute
concepts for sensational life, that intellectualism celebrates
its triumph and the immanent-self-contradictoriness of all this
smooth-running finite experience gets proved.
Of the oddity of inventing as a remedy for the inconveniences
resulting from this situation a supernumerary conceptual object
called an absolute, into which you pack the self-same contradictions
unreduced, I will say something in the next lecture. The absolute is
said to perform its feats by taking up its other into itself. But
that is exactly what is done when every individual morsel of the
sensational stream takes up the adjacent morsels by coalescing with
them. This is just what we mean by the stream's sensible continuity.
No element _there_ cuts itself off from any other element, as concepts
cut themselves from concepts. No part _there_ is so small as not to be
a place of conflux. No part there is not really _next_ its neighbors;
which means that there is literally nothing between; which means
again that no part goes exactly so far and no farther; that no part
absolutely excludes another, but that they compenetrate and are
cohesive; that if you tear out one, its roots bring out more with
them; that whatever is real is telescoped and diffused into other
reals; that, in short, every minutest thing is already its hegelian
'own other,' in the fullest sense of the term.
Of course this _sounds_ self-contradictory, but as the immediate facts
don't sound at all, but simply _are_, until we conceptualize and name
them vocally, the contradiction results only from the conceptual
or discursive form being substituted for the real form. But if, as
Bergson shows, that form is superimposed for practical ends only, in
order to let us jump about over life instead of wading through it;
and if it cannot even pretend to reveal anything of what life's inner
nature is or ought to be; why then we can turn a deaf ear to its
accusations. The resolve to turn the deaf ear is the inner crisis or
'catastrophe' of which M. Bergson's disciple whom I lately quoted
spoke. We are so subject to the philosophic tradition which treats
_logos_ or discursive thought generally as the sole avenue to truth,
that to fall back on raw unverbalized life as more of a revealer, and
to think of concepts as the merely practical things which Bergson
calls them, comes very hard. It is putting off our proud maturity of
mind and becoming again as foolish little children in the eyes of
reason. But difficult as such a revolution is, there is no other way,
I believe, to the possession of reality, and I permit myself to hope
that some of you may share my opinion after you have heard my next
lecture.
LECTURE VII
THE CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE
I fear that few of you will have been able to obey Bergson's call upon
you to look towards the sensational life for the fuller knowledge of
reality, or to sympathize with his attempt to limit the divine right
of concepts to rule our mind absolutely. It is too much like looking
downward and not up. Philosophy, you will say, doesn't lie flat on its
belly in the middle of experience, in the very thick of its sand and
gravel, as this Bergsonism does, never getting a peep at anything from
above. Philosophy is essentially the vision of things from above.
It doesn't simply feel the detail of things, it comprehends their
intelligible plan, sees their forms and principles, their categories
and rules, their order and necessity. It takes the superior point of
view of the architect. Is it conceivable that it should ever forsake
that point of view and abandon itself to a slovenly life of immediate
feeling? To say nothing of your traditional Oxford devotion to
Aristotle and Plato, the leaven of T.H. Green probably works still
too strongly here for his anti-sensationalism to be outgrown quickly.
Green more than any one realized that knowledge _about_ things was
knowledge of their relations; but nothing could persuade him that our
sensational life could contain any relational element. He followed
the strict intellectualist method with sensations. What they were not
expressly defined as including, they must exclude. Sensations are not
defined as relations, so in the end Green thought that they could
get related together only by the action on them from above of a
'self-distinguishing' absolute and eternal mind, present to that which
is related, but not related itself. 'A relation,' he said, 'is not
contingent with the contingency of feeling. It is permanent with
the permanence of the combining and comparing thought which alone
constitutes it.'[1] In other words, relations are purely conceptual
objects, and the sensational life as such cannot relate itself
together. Sensation in itself, Green wrote, is fleeting, momentary,
unnameable (because, while we name it, it has become another), and for
the same reason unknowable, the very negation of knowability. Were
there no permanent objects of conception for our sensations to be
'referred to,' there would be no significant names, but only noises,
and a consistent sensationalism must be speechless.[2] Green's
intellectualism was so earnest that it produced a natural and an
inevitable effect. But the atomistic and unrelated sensations which he
had in mind were purely fictitious products of his rationalist fancy.
The psychology of our own day disavows them utterly,[3] and Green's
laborious belaboring of poor old Locke for not having first seen that
his ideas of sensation were just that impracticable sort of thing, and
then fled to transcendental idealism as a remedy,--his belaboring of
poor old Locke for this, I say, is pathetic. Every examiner of the
sensible life _in concreto_ must see that relations of every sort, of
time, space, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause, or what not,
are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are, and
that conjunctive relations are just as true members of the flux as
disjunctive relations are.[4] This is what in some recent writings of
mine I have called the 'radically empiricist' doctrine (in distinction
from the doctrine of mental atoms which the name empiricism so
often suggests). Intellectualistic critics of sensation insist that
sensations are _disjoined_ only. Radical empiricism insists
that conjunctions between them are just as immediately given as
disjunctions are, and that relations, whether disjunctive or
conjunctive, are in their original sensible givenness just as fleeting
and momentary (in Green's words), and just as 'particular,' as terms
are. Later, both terms and relations get universalized by being
conceptualized and named.[5] But all the thickness, concreteness, and
individuality of experience exists in the immediate and relatively
unnamed stages of it, to the richness of which, and to the standing
inadequacy of our conceptions to match it, Professor Bergson so
emphatically calls our attention. And now I am happy to say that we
can begin to gather together some of the separate threads of our
argument, and see a little better the general kind of conclusion
toward which we are tending. Pray go back with me to the lecture
before the last, and recall what I said about the difficulty of seeing
how states of consciousness can compound themselves. The difficulty
seemed to be the same, you remember, whether we took it in psychology
as the composition of finite states of mind out of simpler finite
states, or in metaphysics as the composition of the absolute mind out
of finite minds in general. It is the general conceptualist difficulty
of any one thing being the same with many things, either at once or
in succession, for the abstract concepts of oneness and manyness must
needs exclude each other. In the particular instance that we have
dwelt on so long, the one thing is the all-form of experience, the
many things are the each-forms of experience in you and me. To call
them the same we must treat them as if each were simultaneously
its own other, a feat on conceptualist principles impossible of
performance.