I am trying again to read Bergson's "Creative Evolution," with poor
success. When I recall how I was taken with the work ten or more years
ago, and carried it with me whenever I went from home, I am wondering
if my mind has become too old and feeble to take it in. But I do not
have such difficulty with any other of my favorite authors. Bergson's
work now seems to me a mixture of two things that won't
mix--metaphysics and natural science. It is full of word-splitting and
conjuring with terms, and abounds in natural history facts. The style
is wonderful, but the logic is not strong. He enlarges upon the
inability of the intellect to understand or grasp Life. The reason is
baffled, but sympathy and the emotional nature and the intuitions
grasp the mystery.
This may be true, the heart often knows what the head does not; but is
it not the intellect that tells us so? The intellect understands the
grounds of our inability. We can and do reason about the limitations
of reason. We do not know how matter and spirit blend, but we know
they do blend. The animals live by instinct, and we live largely in
our emotions, but it is reason that has placed man at the head of the
animal kingdom.
Bergson himself by no means dispenses with the logical faculty. Note
his close and convincing reasoning on the development of the
vertebrate eye, and how inadequate the Darwinian idea of the
accumulation of insensible variations is to account for it. A closer
and more convincing piece of reasoning would be hard to find.
Bergson's conception of two currents--an upward current of spirit and
a downward current of matter--meeting and uniting at a definite time
and place and producing life, is extremely fanciful. Where had they
both been during all the geologic ages? I do not suppose they had been
any _where_. How life arose is, of course, one of the great mysteries.
But do we not know enough to see that it did not originate in this
sudden spectacular way?--that it began very slowly, in unicellular
germs?
At first I was so captivated by the wonderful style of M. Bergson, and
the richness of his page in natural history, that I could see no flaws
in his subject-matter, but now that my enthusiasm has cooled off a
little I return to him and am looking closer into the text.
Is not Bergson guilty of false or careless reasoning when he says
that the relation of the soul to the brain is like that of a coat to
the nail upon which it hangs? I call this spurious or pinchbeck
analogy. If we know anything about it, do we not know that the
relation of the two is not a mechanical or fortuitous one? and that it
cannot be defined in this loose way?
"To a large extent," Bergson says, "thought is independent of the
brain." "The brain is, strictly speaking, neither an organ of thought,
nor of feeling, nor of consciousness." He speaks of consciousness as
if it were a disembodied something floating around in the air
overhead, like wireless messages. If I do not think with my brain,
with what do I think? Certainly not with my legs, or my abdomen, or my
chest. I think with my head, or the gray matter of my brain. I look
down at the rest of my body and I say, this is part of me, but it is
not the real me. With both legs and both arms gone, I should still be
I. But cut off my head and where am I?
Has not the intelligence of the animal kingdom increased during the
geologic ages with the increase in the size of the brain?