Henri Bergson. Both the form and the substance of his works attract
universal attention. His ideas are pleasing and bold, and at least in
form wonderfully original; he is persuasive without argument and
mystical without conventionality; he moves in the atmosphere of
science and free thought, yet seems to transcend them and to be
secretly religious. An undercurrent of zeal and even of prophecy seems
to animate his subtle analyses and his surprising fancies. He is
eloquent, and to a public rather sick of the half-education it has
received and eager for some inspiriting novelty he seems more eloquent
than he is. He uses the French language (and little else is French
about him) in the manner of the more recent artists in words,
retaining the precision of phrase and the measured judgments which are
traditional in French literature, yet managing to envelop everything
in a penumbra of emotional suggestion. Each expression of an idea is
complete in itself; yet these expressions are often varied and
constantly metaphorical, so that we are led to feel that much in that
idea has remained unexpressed and is indeed inexpressible.
Studied and insinuating as M. Bergson is in his style, he is no less
elaborate in his learning. In the history of philosophy, in
mathematics and physics, and especially in natural history he has
taken great pains to survey the ground and to assimilate the views and
spirit of the most recent scholars. He might be called outright an
expert in all these subjects, were it not for a certain externality
and want of radical sympathy in his way of conceiving them. A genuine
historian of philosophy, for instance, would love to rehearse the
views of great thinkers, would feel their eternal plausibility, and in
interpreting them would think of himself as little as they ever
thought of him. But M. Bergson evidently regards Plato or Kant as
persons who did or did not prepare the way for some Bergsonian
insight. The theory of evolution, taken enthusiastically, is apt to
exercise an evil influence on the moral estimation of things. First
the evolutionist asserts that later things grow out of earlier, which
is true of things in their causes and basis, but not in their values;
as modern Greece proceeds out of ancient Greece materially but does
not exactly crown it. The evolutionist, however, proceeds to assume
that later things are necessarily better than what they have grown out
of: and this is false altogether. This fallacy reinforces very
unfortunately that inevitable esteem which people have for their own
opinions, and which must always vitiate the history of philosophy when
it is a philosopher that writes it. A false subordination comes to be
established among systems, as if they moved in single file and all had
the last, the author's system, for their secret goal. In Hegel, for
instance, this conceit is conspicuous, in spite of his mastery in the
dramatic presentation of points of view, for his way of
reconstructing history was, on the surface, very sympathetic. He too,
like M. Bergson, proceeded from learning to intuition, and feigned at
every turn to identify himself with what he was describing, especially
if this was a philosophical attitude or temper. Yet in reality his
historical judgments were forced and brutal: Greece was but a
stepping-stone to Prussia, Plato and Spinoza found their higher
synthesis in himself, and (though he may not say so frankly) Jesus
Christ and St. Francis realised their better selves in Luther. Actual
spiritual life, the thoughts, affections, and pleasures of
individuals, passed with Hegel for so much moonshine; the true spirit
was "objective," it was simply the movement of those circumstances in
which actual spirit arose. He was accordingly contemptuous of
everything intrinsically good, and his idealism consisted in forcing
the natural world into a formula of evolution and then worshipping it
as the embodiment of the living God. But under the guise of optimism
and belief in a cosmic reason this is mere idolatry of success--a
malign superstition, by which all moral independence is crushed out
and conscience enslaved to chronology; and it is no marvel if,
somewhat to relieve this subjection, history in turn was expurgated,
marshalled, and distorted, that it might pass muster for the work of
the Holy Ghost.
In truth the value of spiritual life is intrinsic and centred at every
point. It is never wholly recoverable. To recover it at all, an
historian must have a certain detachment and ingenuousness; knowing
the dignity and simplicity of his own mind, he must courteously
attribute the same dignity and simplicity to others, unless their
avowed attitude prevents; this is to be an intelligent critic and to
write history like a gentleman. The truth, which all philosophers
alike are seeking, is eternal. It lies as near to one age as to
another; the means of discovery alone change, and not always for the
better. The course of evolution is no test of what is true or good;
else nothing could be good intrinsically nor true simply and
ultimately; on the contrary, it is the approach to truth and
excellence anywhere, like the approach of tree tops to the sky, that
tests the value of evolution, and determines whether it is moving
upward or downward or in a circle.
M. Bergson accordingly misses fire when, for instance, in order
utterly to damn a view which he has been criticising, and which may be
open to objection on other grounds, he cries that those who hold it
"_retardent sur Kant;_" as if a clock were the compass of the mind,
and he who was one minute late was one point off the course. Kant was
a hard honest thinker, more sinned against than sinning, from whom a
great many people in the nineteenth century have taken their point of
departure, departing as far as they chose; but if a straight line of
progress could be traced at all through the labyrinth of philosophy,
Kant would not lie in that line. His thought is essentially excentric
and sophisticated, being largely based on two inherited blunders,
which a truly progressive philosophy would have to begin by avoiding,
thus leaving Kant on one side, and weathering his philosophy, as one
might Scylla or Charybdis. The one blunder was that of the English
malicious psychology which had maintained since the time of Locke that
the ideas in the mind are the only objects of knowledge, instead of
being the knowledge of objects. The other blunder was that of
Protestantism that, in groping after that moral freedom which is so
ineradicable a need of a pure spirit, thought to find it in a revision
of revelation, tradition, and prejudice, so as to be able to cling to
these a little longer. How should a system so local, so accidental,
and so unstable as Kant's be prescribed as a sort of catechism for all
humanity? The tree of knowledge has many branches, and all its fruits
are not condemned to hang for ever from that one gnarled and contorted
bough. M. Bergson himself "lags behind" Kant on those points on which
his better insight requires it, as, for instance, on the reality of
time; but with regard to his own philosophy I am afraid he thinks that
all previous systems empty into it, which is hardly true, and that all
future systems must flow out of it, which is hardly necessary.
The embarrassment that qualifies M. Bergson's attainments in
mathematics and physics has another and more personal source. He
understands, but he trembles. Non-human immensities frighten him, as
they did Pascal. He suffers from cosmic agoraphobia. We
might think empty space an innocent harmless thing, a mere opportunity
to move, which ought to be highly prized by all devotees of motion.
But M. Bergson is instinctively a mystic, and his philosophy
deliberately discredits the existence of anything except in immediacy,
that is, as an experience of the heart. What he dreads in space is
that the heart should be possessed by it, and transformed into it. He
dreads that the imagination should be fascinated by the homogeneous
and static, hypnotised by geometry, and actually lost in
_Auseinandersein_. This would be a real death and petrifaction of
consciousness, frozen into contemplation of a monotonous infinite
void. What is warm and desirable is rather the sense of variety and
succession, as if all visions radiated from the occupied focus or
hearth of the self. The more concentration at this habitable point,
with the more mental perspectives opening backwards and forwards
through time, in a word, the more personal and historical the
apparition, the better it would be. Things must be reduced again to
what they seem; it is vain and terrible to take them for what we find
they are. M. Bergson is at bottom an apologist for very old human
prejudices, an apologist for animal illusion. His whole labour is a
plea for some vague but comfortable faith which he dreads to have
stolen from him by the progress of art and knowledge. There is a
certain trepidation, a certain suppressed instinct to snap at and
sting the hated oppressor, as if some desperate small being were at
bay before a horrible monster. M. Bergson is afraid of space, of
mathematics, of necessity, and of eternity; he is afraid of the
intellect and the possible discoveries of science; he is afraid of
nothingness and death. These fears may prevent him from being a
philosopher in the old and noble sense of the word; but they sharpen
his sense for many a psychological problem, and make him the spokesman
of many an inarticulate soul. Animal timidity and animal illusion are
deep in the heart of all of us. Practice may compel us to bow to the
conventions of the intellect, as to those of polite society; but
secretly, in our moments of immersion in ourselves, we may find them
a great nuisance, even a vain nightmare. Could we only listen
undisturbed to the beat of protoplasm in our hearts, would not that
oracle solve all the riddles of the universe, or at least avoid them?
To protect this inner conviction, however, it is necessary for the
mystic to sally forth and attack the enemy on his own ground. If he
refuted physics and mathematics simply out of his own faith, he might
be accused of ignorance of the subject. He will therefore study it
conscientiously, yet with a certain irritation and haste to be done
with it, somewhat as a Jesuit might study Protestant theology. Such a
student, however, is apt to lose his pains; for in retracing a free
inquiry in his servile spirit, he remains deeply ignorant, not indeed
of its form, but of its nature and value. Why, for instance, has M.
Bergson such a horror of mechanical physics? He seems to think it a
black art, dealing in unholy abstractions, and rather dangerous to
salvation, and he keeps his metaphysical exorcisms and antidotes
always at hand, to render it innocuous, at least to his own soul. But
physical science never solicited of anybody that he should be wholly
absorbed in the contemplation of atoms, and worship them; that we must
worship and lose ourselves in reality, whatever reality may be, is a
mystic aberration, which physical science does nothing to foster. Nor
does any critical physicist suppose that what he describes is the
whole of the object; he merely notes the occasions on which its
sensible qualities appear, and calculates events. Because the
calculable side of nature is his province, he does not deny that
events have other aspects--the psychic and the moral, for
instance--no less real in their way, in terms of which calculation
would indeed be impossible. If he chances to call the calculable
elements of nature her substance, as it is proper to do, that name is
given without passion; he may perfectly well proclaim with Goethe that
it is in the accidents, in the _farbiger Abglanz_, that we have our
life. And if it be for his freedom that the mystic trembles, I imagine
any man of science would be content with M. Bergson's assertion that
true freedom is the sense of freedom, and that in any intelligible
statement of the situation, even the most indeterministic, this
freedom disappears; for it is an immediate experience, not any scheme
of relation between events.
The horror of mechanical physics arises, then, from attributing to
that science pretensions and extensions which it does not have; it
arises from the habits of theology and metaphysics being imported
inopportunely into science. Similarly when M. Bergson mentions
mathematics, he seems to be thinking of the supposed authority it
exercises--one of Kant's confusions--over the empirical world, and
trying to limit and subordinate that authority, lest movement should
somehow be removed from nature, and vagueness from human thought. But
nature and human thought are what they are; they have enough affinity
to mathematics, as it happens, to suggest that study to our minds, and
to give those who go deep into it a great, though partial, mastery
over things. Nevertheless a true mathematician is satisfied with the
hypothetical and ideal cogency of his science, and puts its dignity in
that. Moreover, M. Bergson has the too pragmatic notion that the use
of mathematics is to keep our accounts straight in this business
world; whereas its inherent use is emancipating and Platonic, in that
it shows us the possibility of other worlds, less contingent and
perturbed than this one. If he allows himself any excursus from his
beloved immediacy, it is only in the interests of practice; he little
knows the pleasures of a liberal mind, ranging over the congenial
realm of internal accuracy and ideal truth, where it can possess
itself of what treasures it likes in perfect security and freedom. An
artist in his workmanship, M. Bergson is not an artist in his
allegiance; he has no respect for what is merely ideal.
For this very reason, perhaps, he is more at home in natural history
than in the exact sciences. He has the gift of observation, and can
suggest vividly the actual appearance of natural processes, in
contrast to the verbal paraphrase of these processes which is
sometimes taken to explain them. He is content to stop at habit
without formulating laws; he refuses to assume that the large obvious
cycles of change in things can be reduced to mechanism, that is, to
minute included cycles repeated _ad libitum_. He may sometimes defend
this refusal by sophistical arguments, as when he says that mechanism
would require the last stage of the universe to be simultaneous with
the first, forgetting that the unit of mechanism is not a mathematical
equation but some observed typical event. The refusal itself, however,
would be honest scepticism enough were it made with no _arrière
pensée_, but simply in view of the immense complexity of the facts and
the extreme simplicity of the mechanical hypothesis. In such a
situation, to halt at appearances might seem the mark of a true
naturalist and a true empiricist not misled by speculative haste and
the human passion for system and simplification. At the first reading,
M. Bergson's _Evolution Créatrice_ may well dazzle the professional
naturalist and seem to him an illuminating confession of the nature
and limits of his science; yet a second reading, I have good authority
for saying, may as easily reverse that impression. M. Bergson never
reviews his facts in order to understand them, but only if possible to
discredit others who may have fancied they understood. He raises
difficulties, he marks the problems that confront the naturalist, and
the inadequacy of explanations that may have been suggested. Such
criticism would be a valuable beginning if it were followed by the
suggestion of some new solution; but the suggestion only is that no
solution is possible, that the phenomena of life are simply
miraculous, and that it is in the tendency or vocation of the animal,
not in its body or its past, that we must see the ground of what goes
on before us.
With such a philosophy of science, it is evident that all progress in
the understanding of nature would cease, as it ceased after Aristotle.
The attempt would again be abandoned to reduce gross and obvious
cycles of change, such as generation, growth, and death, to minute
latent cycles, so that natural history should offer a picturesque
approach to universal physics. If for the magic power of types,
invoked by Aristotle, we substituted with M. Bergson the magic power
of the _élan vital_, that is, of evolution in general, we should be
referring events not to finer, more familiar, more pervasive
processes, but to one all-embracing process, unique and always
incomplete. Our understanding would end in something far vaguer and
looser than what our observation began with. Aristotle at least could
refer particulars to their specific types, as medicine and social
science are still glad enough to do, to help them in guessing and in
making a learned show before the public. But if divination and
eloquence--for science is out of the question--were to invoke nothing
but a fluid tendency to grow, we should be left with a flat history of
phenomena and no means of prediction or even classification. All
knowledge would be reduced to gossip, infinitely diffuse, perhaps
enlisting our dramatic feelings, but yielding no intellectual mastery
of experience, no practical competence, and no moral lesson. The world
would be a serial novel, to be continued for ever, and all men mere
novel-readers.
Nothing is more familiar to philosophers nowadays than that criticism
of knowledge by which we are thrown back upon the appearances from
which science starts, upon what is known to children and savages,
whilst all that which long experience and reason may infer from those
appearances is set down as so much hypothesis; and indeed it is
through hypothesis that latent being, if such there be, comes before
the mind at all. Now such criticism of knowledge might have been
straightforward and ingenuous. It might have simply disclosed the
fact, very salutary to meditate upon, that the whole frame of nature,
with the minds that animate it, is disclosed to us by intelligence;
that if we were not intelligent our sensations would exist for us
without meaning anything, as they exist for idiots. The criticism of
knowledge, however, has usually been taken maliciously, in the sense
that it is the idiots only that are not deceived; for any
interpretation of sensation is a mental figment, and while experience
may have any extent it will it cannot possibly, they say, have
expressive value; it cannot reveal anything going on beneath.
Intelligence and science are accordingly declared to have no
penetration, no power to disclose what is latent, for nothing latent
exists; they can at best furnish symbols for past or future sensations
and the order in which they arise; they can be seven-league boots for
striding over the surface of sentience.
This negative dogmatism as to knowledge was rendered harmless and
futile by the English philosophers, in that they maintained at the
same time that everything happens exactly _as if_ the intellect were a
true instrument of discovery, and _as if_ a material world underlay
our experience and furnished all its occasions. Hume, Mill, and Huxley
were scientific at heart, and full of the intelligence they dissected;
they seemed to cry to nature: Though thou dost not exist, yet will I
trust in thee. Their idealism was a theoretical scruple rather than a
passionate superstition. Not so M. Bergson; he is not so simple as to
invoke the malicious criticism of knowledge in order to go on thinking
rationalistically. Reason and science make him deeply uncomfortable.
His point accordingly is not merely that mechanism is a hypothesis,
but that it is a wrong hypothesis. Events do not come as if mechanism
brought them about; they come, at least in the organic world, as if a
magic destiny, and inscrutable ungovernable effort, were driving them
on.
Thus M. Bergson introduces metaphysics into natural history; he
invokes, in what is supposed to be science, the agency of a power,
called the _élan vital,_ on a level with the "Will" of Schopenhauer or
the "Unknowable Force" of Herbert Spencer. But there is a scientific
vitalism also, which it is well to distinguish from the metaphysical
sort. The point at issue between vitalism and mechanism in biology is
whether the living processes in nature can be resolved into a
combination of the material. The material processes will always remain
vital, if we take this word in a descriptive and poetic sense; for
they will contain a movement having a certain idiosyncrasy and taking
a certain time, like the fall of an apple. The movement of nature is
never dialectical; the first part of any event does not logically
imply the last part of it. Physics is descriptive, historical,
reporting after the fact what are found to be the habits of matter.
But if these habits are constant and calculable we call the vitality
of them mechanical. Thus the larger processes of nature, no matter how
vital they may be and whatever consciousness may accompany them, will
always be mechanical if they can be calculated and predicted, being a
combination of the more minute and widespread processes which they
contain. The only question therefore is: Do processes such as
nutrition and reproduction arise by a combination of such events as
the fall of apples? Or are they irreducible events, and units of
mechanism by themselves? That is the dilemma as it appears in science.
Both possibilities will always remain open, because however far
mechanical analysis may go, many phenomena, as human apprehension
presents them, will always remain irreducible to any common
denominator with the rest; and on the other hand, wherever the actual
reduction of the habits of animals to those of matter may have
stopped, we can never know that a further reduction is impossible.
The balance of reasonable presumption, however, is not even. The most
inclusive movements known to us in nature, the astronomical, are
calculable, and so are the most minute and pervasive processes, the
chemical. These are also, if evolution is to be accepted, the earliest
processes upon which all others have supervened and out of which, as
it were, they have grown. Apart from miraculous intervention,
therefore, the assumption seems to be inevitable that the intermediate
processes are calculable too, and compounded out of the others. The
appearance to the contrary presented in animal and social life is
easily explicable on psychological grounds. We read inevitably in
terms of our passions those things which affect them or are analogous
to what involves passion in ourselves; and when the mechanism of them
is hidden from us, as is that of our bodies, we suppose that these
passions which we find on the surface in ourselves, or read into other
creatures, are the substantial and only forces that carry on our part
of the world. Penetrating this illusion, dispassionate observers in
all ages have received the general impression that nature is one and
mechanical. This was, and still remains, a general impression only;
but I suspect no one who walks the earth with his eyes open would be
concerned to resist it, were it not for certain fond human conceits
which such a view would rebuke and, if accepted, would tend to
obliterate. The psychological illusion that our ideas and purposes are
original facts and forces (instead of expressions in consciousness of
facts and forces which are material) and the practical and optical
illusion that everything wheels about us in this world--these are the
primitive persuasions which the enemies of naturalism have always been
concerned to protect.