conscientiousness, without sharing those prejudices; and many a
speculative philosopher has been free from them who has been a
vitalist in metaphysics. Schopenhauer, for instance, observed that the
cannon-ball which, if self-conscious, would think it moved freely,
would be quite right in thinking so. The "Will" was as evident to him
in mechanism as in animal life. M. Bergson, in the more hidden reaches
of his thought, seems to be a universal vitalist; apparently an _élan
vital_ must have existed once to deposit in inorganic matter the
energy stored there, and to set mechanism going. But he relies on
biology alone to prove the present existence of an independent effort
to live; this is needed to do what mechanism, as he thinks, could
never do; it is not needed to do, as in Schopenhauer, what mechanism
does. M. Bergson thus introduces his metaphysical force as a peculiar
requirement of biology; he breaks the continuity of nature; he loses
the poetic justification of a metaphysical vitalism; he asks us to
believe that life is not a natural expression of material being, but
an alien and ghostly madness descending into it--I say a ghostly
madness, for why should disembodied life wish that the body should
live? This vitalism is not a kind of biology more prudent and literal
than the mechanical kind (as a scientific vitalism would be), but far
less legitimately speculative. Nor is it a frank and thorough
mythology, such as the total spectacle of the universe might suggest
to an imaginative genius. It is rather a popular animism, insisting on
a sympathetic interpretation of nature where human sympathy is quick
and easy, and turning this sympathy into a revelation of the absolute,
but leaving the rest of nature cold, because to sympathise with its
movement there is harder for anxious, self-centred mortals, and
requires a disinterested mind. M. Bergson would have us believe that
mankind is what nature has set her heart on and the best she can do,
for whose sake she has been long making very special efforts. We are
fortunate that at least her darling is all mankind and not merely
Israel.
In spite, then, of M. Bergson's learning as a naturalist and his eye
for the facts--things Aristotle also possessed--he is like Aristotle
profoundly out of sympathy with nature. Aristotle was alienated from
nature and any penetrating study of it by the fact that he was a
disciple of Socrates, and therefore essentially a moralist and a
logician. M. Bergson is alienated from nature by something quite
different; he is the adept of a very modern, very subtle, and very
arbitrary art, that of literary psychology. In this art the
imagination is invited to conceive things as if they were all centres
of passion and sensation. Literary psychology is not a science; it is
practised by novelists and poets; yet if it is to be brilliantly
executed it demands a minute and extended observation of life. Unless
your psychological novelist had crammed his memory with pictures of
the ways and aspects of men he would have no starting-point for his
psychological fictions; he would not be able to render them
circumstantial and convincing. Just so M. Bergson's achievements in
psychological fiction, to be so brilliantly executed as they are,
required all his learning. The history of philosophy, mathematics, and
physics, and above all natural history, had to supply him first with
suggestions; and if he is not really a master in any of those fields,
that is not to be wondered at. His heart is elsewhere. To write a
universal biological romance, such as he has sketched for us in his
system, he would ideally have required all scientific knowledge, but
only as Homer required the knowledge of seamanship, generalship,
statecraft, augury, and charioteering, in order to turn the aspects of
them into poetry, and not with that technical solidity which Plato
unjustly blames him for not possessing. Just so M. Bergson's proper
achievement begins where his science ends, and his philosophy lies
entirely beyond the horizon of possible discoveries or empirical
probabilities. In essence, it is myth or fable; but in the texture and
degree of its fabulousness it differs notably from the performances of
previous metaphysicians. Primitive poets, even ancient philosophers,
were not psychologists; their fables were compacted out of elements
found in practical life, and they reckoned in the units in which
language and passion reckon--wooing, feasting, fighting, vice, virtue,
happiness, justice. Above all, they talked about persons or about
ideals; this man, this woman, this typical thought or sentiment was
what fixed their attention and seemed to them the ultimate thing. Not
so M. Bergson: he is a microscopic psychologist, and even in man what
he studies by preference is not some integrated passion or idea, but
something far more recondite; the minute texture of sensation, memory,
or impulse. Sharp analysis is required to distinguish or arrest these
elements, yet these are the predestined elements of his fable; and so
his anthropomorphism is far less obvious than that of most poets and
theologians, though no less real.
This peculiarity in the terms of the myth carries with it a notable
extension in its propriety. The social and moral phenomena of human
life cannot be used in interpreting life elsewhere without a certain
conscious humour. This makes the charm of avowed writers of fable;
their playful travesty and dislocation of things human, which would be
puerile if they meant to be naturalists, render them piquant
moralists; for they are not really interpreting animals, but under the
mask of animals maliciously painting men. Such fables are morally
interesting and plausible just because they are psychologically false.
If Æsop could have reported what lions and lambs, ants and donkeys,
really feel and think, his poems would have been perfect riddles to
the public; and they would have had no human value except that of
illustrating, to the truly speculative philosopher, the irresponsible
variety of animal consciousness and its incommensurable types. Now M.
Bergson's psychological fictions, being drawn from what is rudimentary
in man, have a better chance of being literally true beyond man.
Indeed what he asks us to do, and wishes to do himself, is simply to
absorb so completely the aspect and habit of things that the soul of
them may take possession of us: that we may know by intuition the
_élan vital_ which the world expresses, just as Paolo, in Dante, knew
by intuition the _élan vital_ that the smile of Francesca expressed.
The correctness of such an intuition, however, rests on a circumstance
which M. Bergson does not notice, because his psychology is literary
and not scientific. It rests on the possibility of imitation. When the
organism observed and that of the observer have a similar structure
and can imitate one another, the idea produced in the observer by
intent contemplation is like the experience present to the person
contemplated. But where this contagion of attitude, and therefore of
feeling, is impossible, our intuition of our neighbours' souls remains
subjective and has no value as a revelation. Psychological novelists,
when they describe people such as they themselves are or might have
been, may describe them truly; but beyond that limit their personages
are merely plausible, that is, such as might be conceived by an
equally ignorant reader in the presence of the same external
indications. So, for instance, the judgment which a superficial
traveller passes on foreign manners or religions is plausible to him
and to his compatriots just because it represents the feeling that
such manifestations awaken in strangers and does not attempt to convey
the very different feeling really involved for the natives; had the
latter been discovered and expressed the traveller's book would have
found little understanding and no sale in his own country. This
plausibility to the ignorant is present in all spontaneous myth.
Nothing more need be demanded of irresponsible fiction, which makes no
pretensions to be a human document, but is merely a human
entertainment.
Now, a human psychology, even of the finest grain, when it is applied
to the interpretation of the soul of matter, or of the soul of the
whole universe, obviously yields a view of the irresponsible and
subjective sort; for it is not based on any close similarity between
the observed and the observer: man and the ether, man and cosmic
evolution, cannot mimic one another, to discover mutually how they
feel. But just because merely human, such an interpretation may remain
always plausible to man; and it would be an admirable entertainment if
there were no danger that it should be taken seriously. The idea Paul
has of Peter, Spinoza observes, expresses the nature of Peter less
than it betrays that of Paul; and so an idea framed by a man of the
consciousness of things in general reveals the mind of that man rather
than the mind of the universe; but the mind of the man too may be
worth knowing, and the illusive hope of discovering everything may
lead him truly to disclose himself. Such a disclosure of the lower
depths of man by himself is M. Bergson's psychology; and the
psychological romance, purporting to describe the inward nature of the
universe, which he has built out of that introspection, is his
metaphysics.
Many a point in this metaphysics may seem strange, fantastic, and
obscure; and so it really is, when dislocated and projected
metaphysically; but not one will be found to be arbitrary; not one
but is based on attentive introspection and perception of the
immediate. Take, for example, what is M. Bergson's starting-point, his
somewhat dazzling doctrine that to be is to last, or rather to feel
oneself endure. This is a hypostasis of "true" (_i.e._ immediately
felt) duration. In a sensuous day-dream past feelings survive in the
present, images of the long ago are shuffled together with present
sensations, the roving imagination leaves a bright wake behind it like
a comet, and pushes a rising wave before it, like the bow of a ship;
all is fluidity, continuity without identity, novelty without
surprise. Hence, too, the doctrine of freedom: the images that appear
in such a day-dream are often congruous in character with those that
preceded, and mere prolongations of them; but this prolongation itself
modifies them, and what develops is in no way deducible or predictable
out of what exists. This situation is perfectly explicable
scientifically. The movement of consciousness will be self-congruous
and sustained when it rests on continuous processes in the same
tissues, and yet quite unpredictable from within, because the direct
sensuous report of bodily processes (in nausea, for instance, or in
hunger) contains no picture of their actual mechanism. Even wholly new
features, due to little crises in bodily life, may appear in a dream
to flow out of what already exists, yet freely develop it; because in
dreams comparison, the attempt to be consistent, is wholly in
abeyance, and also because the new feature will come imbedded in
others which are not new, but have dramatic relevance in the story. So
immediate consciousness yields the two factors of Bergsonian freedom,
continuity and indetermination.
Again, take the somewhat disconcerting assertion that movement exists
when there is nothing that moves, and no space that it moves through.
In vision, perhaps, it is not easy to imagine a consciousness of
motion without some presentation of a field, and of a distinguishable
something in it; but if we descend to somatic feelings (and the more
we descend, with M. Bergson, the closer we are to reality), in
shooting pains or the sense of intestinal movements, the feeling of a
change and of a motion is certainly given in the absence of all idea
of a _mobile_ or of distinct points (or even of a separate field)
through which it moves; consciousness begins with the sense of change,
and the terms of the felt process are only qualitative limits, bred
out of the felt process itself. Even a more paradoxical tenet of our
philosopher's finds it justification here. He says that the units of
motion are indivisible, that they are acts; so that to solve the
riddle about Achilles and the tortoise we need no mathematics of the
infinitesimal, but only to ask Achilles how he accomplishes the feat.
Achilles would reply that in so many strides he would do it; and we
may be surprised to learn that these strides are indivisible, so that,
apparently, Achilles could not have stumbled in the middle of one, and
taken only half of it. Of course, in nature, in what non-Bergsonians
call reality, he could: but not in his immediate feeling, for if he
had stumbled, the real stride, that which he was aware of taking,
would have been complete at the stumbling-point. It is certain that
consciousness comes in stretches, in breaths: all its data are
æsthetic wholes, like visions or snatches of melody; and we should
never be aware of anything were we not aware of something all at once.
When a man has taught himself--and it is a difficult art--to revert in
this way to rudimentary consciousness and to watch himself live, he
will be able, if he likes, to add a plausible chapter to speculative
psychology. He has unearthed in himself the animal sensibility which
has thickened, budded, and crystallised into his present somewhat
intellectual image of the world. He has touched again the vegetative
stupor, the multiple disconnected landscapes, the "blooming buzzing
confusion" which his reason has partly set in order. May he not have
in all this a key to the consciousness of other creatures? Animal
psychology, and sympathy with the general life of nature, are vitiated
both for naturalists and for poets by the human terms they must use,
terms which presuppose distinctions which non-human beings probably
have not made. These distinctions correct the illusions of immediate
appearance in ways which only a long and special experience has
imposed upon us, and they should not be imported into other souls. We
are old men trying to sing the loves of children; we are wingless
bipeds trying to understand the gods. But the data of the immediate
are hardly human; it is probable that at that level all sentience is
much alike. From that common ground our imagination can perhaps start
safely, and follow such hints as observation furnishes, until we learn
to live and feel as other living things do, or as nature may live and
feel as a whole. Instinct, for instance, need not be, as our human
prejudice suggests, a rudimentary intelligence; it may be a parallel
sort of sensibility, an imageless awareness of the presence and
character of other things, with a superhuman ability to change oneself
so as to meet them. Do we not feel something of this sort ourselves in
love, in art, in religion? M. Bergson is a most delicate and charming
poet on this theme, and a plausible psychologist; his method of
accumulating and varying his metaphors, and leaving our intuition to
itself under that artful stimulus, is the only judicious and
persuasive method he could have employed, and his knack at it is
wonderful. We recover, as we read, the innocence of the mind. It seems
no longer impossible that we might, like the wise men in the
story-books, learn the language of birds; we share for the moment the
siestas of plants; and we catch the quick consciousness of the waves
of light, vibrating at inconceivable rates, each throb forgotten as
the next follows upon it; and we may be tempted to play on Shakespeare
and say:
"Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do _their spirits_ hasten to their end."
Some reader of M. Bergson might say to himself: All this is ingenious
introspection and divination; grant that it is true, and how does that
lead to a new theory of the universe? You have been studying surface
appearances and the texture of primitive consciousness; that is a part
of the internal rumble of this great engine of the world. How should
it loosen or dissolve that engine, as your philosophy evidently
professes that it must? That nature exists we perceive whenever we
resume our intellectual and practical life, interrupted for a moment
by this interesting reversion to the immediate. The consciousness
which in introspection we treat as an object is, in operation, a
cognitive activity: it demonstrates the world. You would never
yourself have conceived the minds of ethereal vibrations, or of birds,
or of ants, or of men suspending their intelligence, if you had known
of no men, ants, birds, or ether. It is the material objects that
suggest to you their souls, and teach you how to conceive them. How
then should the souls be substituted for the bodies, and abolish them?
Poor guileless reader! If philosophers were straightforward men of
science, adding each his mite to the general store of knowledge, they
would all substantially agree, and while they might make interesting
discoveries, they would not herald each his new transformation of the
whole universe. But philosophers are either revolutionists or
apologists, and some of them, like M. Bergson, are revolutionists in the
interests of apologetics. Their art is to create some surprising
inversion of things, some system of the universe contrary to common
apprehension, or to defend some such inverted system, propounded by
poets long ago, and perhaps consecrated by religion. It would not
require a great man to say calmly: Men, birds, even ether-waves, if you
will, feel after this and this fashion. The greatness and the excitement
begin when he says: Your common sense, your practical intellect, your
boasted science have entirely deceived you; see what the real truth is
instead! So M. Bergson is bent on telling us that the immediate, as he
describes it, is the sole reality; all else is unreal, artificial, and a
more or less convenient symbol in discourse--discourse itself being
taken, of course, for a movement in immediate sensibility, which is what
it is existentially, but never for an excursion into an independent
logical realm, which is what it is spiritually and in intent. So we must
revise all our psychological observations, and turn them into
metaphysical dogmas. It would be nothing to say simply: _For immediate
feeling_ the past is contained in the present, movement is prior to that
which moves, spaces are many, disconnected, and incommensurable, events
are indivisible wholes, perception is in its object and identical with
it, the future is unpredictable, the complex is bred out of the simple,
and evolution is creative, its course being obedient to a general
tendency or groping impulse, not to any exact law. No, we must say
instead: _In the universe at large_ the whole past is preserved bodily
in the present; duration is real and space is only imagined; all is
motion, and there is nothing substantial that moves; times are
incommensurable; men, birds, and waves are nothing but the images of
them (our perceptions, like their spirits, being some compendium of
these images); chance intervenes in the flux, but evolution is due to an
absolute Effort which exists _in vacuo_ and is simplicity itself; and
this Effort, without having an idea of what it pursues, nevertheless
produces it out of nothing.
The accuracy or the hollowness of M. Bergson's doctrine, according as
we take it for literary psychology or for natural philosophy, will
appear clearly in the following instance. "Any one," he writes,[3]
"who has ever practised literary composition knows very well that,
after he has devoted long study to the subject, collected all the
documents, and taken all his notes, one thing more is needful before
he can actually embark on the work of composition; namely, an effort,
often a very painful one, to plant himself all at once in the very
heart of the subject, and to fetch from as profound a depth as
possible the momentum by which he need simply let himself be borne
along in the sequel. This momentum, as soon as it is acquired, carries
the mind forward along a path where it recovers all the facts it had
gathered together, and a thousand other details besides. The momentum
develops and breaks up of itself into particulars that might be
retailed _ad infinitum._ The more he advances the more he finds; he
will never have exhausted the subject; and nevertheless if he turns
round suddenly to face the momentum he feels at his back and see what
it is, it eludes him; for it is not a thing but a direction of
movement, and though capable of being extended indefinitely, it is
simplicity itself."
[Footnote 3: "Introduction a la Métaphysique." _Revue de Métaphysique
et de Morale_, Janvier, 1903.]
This is evidently well observed: heighten the tone a little, and you
might have a poem on those joyful pangs of gestation and parturition
which are not denied to a male animal. It is a description of the
_sensation_ of literary composition, of the _immediate experience_ of
a writer as words and images rise into his mind. He cannot summon his
memories explicitly, for he would first have to remember them to do
so; his consciousness of inspiration, of literary creation, is nothing
but a consciousness of pregnancy and of a certain "direction of
movement," as if he were being wafted in a balloon; and just in its
moments of highest tension his mind is filled with mere expectancy and
mere excitement, without images, plans, or motives; and what guides it
is inwardly, as M. Bergson says, simplicity itself. Yet excellent as
such a description is psychologically, it is a literary confession
rather than a piece of science; for scientific psychology is a part of
natural history, and when in nature we come upon such a notable
phenomenon as this, that some men write and write eloquently, we
should at once study the antecedents and the conditions under which
this occurs; we should try, by experiment if possible, to see what
variations in the result follow upon variations in the situation. At
once we should begin to perceive how casual and superficial are those
data of introspection which M. Bergson's account reproduces. Does that
painful effort, for instance, occur always? Is it the moral source, as
he seems to suggest, of the good and miraculous fruits that follow?
Not at all: such an effort is required only when the writer is
overworked, or driven to express himself under pressure; in the
spontaneous talker or singer, in the orator surpassing himself and
overflowing with eloquence, there is no effort at all; only facility,
and joyous undirected abundance. We should further ask whether _all_
the facts previously gathered are recovered, and all correctly, and
what relation the "thousand other details" have to them; and we should
find that everything was controlled and supplied by the sensuous
endowment of the literary man, his moral complexion, and his general
circumstances. And we should perceive at the same time that the
momentum which to introspection was so mysterious was in fact the
discharge of many automatisms long imprinted on the system, a system
(as growth and disease show) that has its internal vegetation and
crises of maturity, to which facility and error in the recovery of the
past, and creation also, are closely attached. Thus we should utterly
refuse to say that this momentum was capable of being extended
indefinitely or was simplicity itself. It may be a good piece of
literary psychology to say that simplicity precedes complexity, for it
precedes complexity in consciousness. Consciousness dwindles and
flares up most irresponsibly, so long as its own flow alone is
regarded, and it continually arises out of nothing, which indeed is
simplicity itself. But it does not arise without real conditions
outside, which cannot be discovered by introspection, nor divined by
that literary psychology which proceeds by imagining what
introspection might yield in others.