is said to "plant himself in the very heart of the subject." The
general tenor of M. Bergson's philosophy warrants us in taking this
quite literally to mean that the field from which inspiration draws
its materials is not the man's present memory nor even his past
experience, but the subject itself which that experience and this
memory regard: in other words, what we write about and our latent
knowledge are the same thing. When Shakespeare was composing his
_Antony and Cleopatra,_ for instance, he planted himself in the very
heart of Rome and of Egypt, and in the very heart of the Queen of
Egypt herself; what he had gathered from Plutarch and from elsewhere
was, according to M. Bergson's view, a sort of glimpse of the remote
reality itself, as if by telepathy he had been made to witness some
part of it; or rather as if the scope of his consciousness had been
suddenly extended in one direction, so as to embrace and contain
bodily a bit of that outlying experience. Thus when the poet sifts his
facts and sets his imagination to work at unifying and completing
them, what he does is to pierce to Egypt, Rome, and the inner
consciousness of Cleopatra, to fetch _thence_ the profound momentum
which is to guide him in composition; and it is there, not in the
adventitious later parts of his own mind, that he should find the
thousand other details which he may add to the picture.
Here again, in an exaggerated form, we have a transcript of the
immediate, a piece of really wonderful introspection, spoiled by being
projected into a theory of nature, which it spoils in its turn.
Doubtless Shakespeare, in the heat of dramatic vision, lived his
characters, transported himself to their environment, and felt the
passion of each, as we do in a dream, dictating their unpremeditated
words. But all this is in imagination; it is true only within the
framework of our dream. In reality, of course, Shakespeare never
pierced to Rome nor to Egypt; his elaborations of his data are drawn
from his own feelings and circumstances, not from those of Cleopatra.
This transporting oneself into the heart of a subject is a loose
metaphor: the best one can do is to transplant the subject into one's
own heart and draw _from oneself_ impulses as profound as possible
with which to vivify tradition and make it over in one's own image.
Yet I fear that to speak so is rationalism, and would be found to
involve, to the horror of our philosopher, that life is cognitive and
spiritual, but dependent, discontinuous, and unsubstantial. What he
conceives instead is that consciousness is a stuff out of which things
are made, and has all the attributes, even the most material, of its
several objects; and that there is no possibility of knowing, save by
becoming what one is trying to know. So perception, for him, lies
where its object does, and is some part of it; memory is the past
experience itself, somehow shining through into the present; and
Shakespeare's Cleopatra, I should infer, would have to be some part of
Cleopatra herself--in those moments when she spoke English.
It is hard to be a just critic of mysticism because mysticism can
never do itself justice in words. To conceive of an external actual
Cleopatra and an external actual mind of Shakespeare is to betray the
cause of pure immediacy; and I suspect that if M. Bergson heard of
such criticisms as I am making, he would brush them aside as utterly
blind and scholastic. As the mystics have always said that God was not
far from them, but dwelt in their hearts, meaning this pretty
literally: so this mystical philosophy of the immediate, which talks
sometimes so scientifically of things and with such intimacy of
knowledge, feels that these things are not far from it, but dwell
literally in its heart. The revelation and the sentiment of them, if
it be thorough, is just what the things are. The total aspects to be
discerned in a body _are_ that body; and the movement of those
aspects, when you enact it, _is_ the spirit of that body, and at the
same time a part of your own spirit. To suppose that a man's
consciousness (either one's own or other people's) is a separate fact
over and above the shuffling of the things he feels, or that these
things are anything over and above the feeling of them which exists
more or less everywhere in diffusion--that, for the mystic, is to be
once for all hopelessly intellectual, dualistic, and diabolical. If
you cannot shed the husk of those dead categories--space, matter,
mind, truth, person--life is shut out of your heart. And the mystic,
who always speaks out of experience, is certainly right in this, that
a certain sort of life is shut out by reason, the sort that reason
calls dreaming or madness; but he forgets that reason too is a kind of
life, and that of all the kinds--mystical, passionate, practical,
æsthetic, intellectual--with their various degrees of light and heat,
the life of reason is that which some people may prefer. I confess I
am one of these, and I am not inclined, even if I were able, to
reproduce M. Bergson's sentiments as he feels them. He is his own
perfect expositor. All a critic can aim at is to understand these
sentiments as existing facts, and to give them the place that belongs
to them in the moral world. To understand, in most cases, is intimacy
enough.
Herbert Spencer says somewhere that the yolk of an egg is homogeneous,
the highly heterogeneous bird being differentiated in it by the law of
evolution. I cannot think what assured Spencer of this homogeneity in
the egg, except the fact that perhaps it all tasted alike, which might
seem good proof to a pure empiricist. Leibnitz, on the contrary,
maintained that the organisation of nature was infinitely deep, every
part consisting of an endless number of discrete elements. Here we
may observe the difference between good philosophy and bad. The idea
of Leibnitz is speculative and far outruns the evidence, but it is
speculative in a well-advised, penetrating, humble, and noble fashion;
while the idea of Spencer is foolishly dogmatic, it is a piece of
ignorant self-sufficiency, like that insular empiricism that would
deny that Chinamen were real until it had actually seen them. Nature
is richer than experience and wider than divination; and it is far
rasher and more arrogant to declare that any part of nature is simple
than to suggest the sort of complexity that perhaps it might have. M.
Bergson, however, is on the side of Spencer. After studiously
examining the egg on every side--for he would do more than taste
it--and considering the source and destiny of it, he would summon his
intuition to penetrate to the very heart of it, to its spirit, and
then he would declare that this spirit was a vital momentum without
parts and without ideas, and was simplicity itself. He would add that
it was the free and original creator of the bird, because it is of the
essence of spirit to bestow more than it possesses and to build better
than it knows. Undoubtedly actual spirit is simple and does not know
how it builds; but for that very reason actual spirit does not really
create or build anything, but merely watches, now with sympathetic,
now with shocked attention, what is being created and built for it.
Doubtless new things are always arising, new islands, new persons, new
philosophies; but that the real cause of them should be simpler than
they, that their Creator, if I may use this language, should be
ignorant and give more than he has, who can stomach that?
Let us grant, however, since the thing is not abstractly
inconceivable, that eggs really have no structure. To what, then,
shall we attribute the formation of birds? Will it follow that
evolution, or differentiation, or the law of the passage from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous, or the dialectic of the concept of
pure being, or the impulse towards life, or the vocation of spirit is
what actually hatches them? Alas, these words are but pedantic and
rhetorical cloaks for our ignorance, and to project them behind the
facts and regard them as presiding from thence over the course of
nature is a piece of the most deplorable scholasticism. If eggs are
really without structure, the true causes of the formation of birds
are the last conditions, whatever they may be, that introduce that
phenomenon and determine its character--the type of the parents, the
act of fertilisation, the temperature, or whatever else observation
might find regularly to precede and qualify that new birth in nature.
These facts, if they were the ultimate and deepest facts in the case,
would be the ultimate and only possible terms in which to explain it.
They would constitute the mechanism of reproduction; and if nature
were no finer than that in its structure, science could not go deeper
than that in its discoveries. And although it is frivolous to suppose
that nature ends in this way at the limits of our casual apprehension,
and has no hidden roots, yet philosophically that would be as good a
stopping place as any other. Ultimately we should have to be satisfied
with some factual conjunction and method in events. If atoms and their
collisions, by any chance, were the ultimate and inmost facts
discoverable, they would supply the explanation of everything, in the
only sense in which anything existent can be explained at all. If
somebody then came to us enthusiastically and added that the Will of
the atoms so to be and move was the true cause, or the Will of God
that they should move so, he would not be reputed, I suppose, to have
thrown a bright light on the subject.
Yet this is what M. Bergson does in his whole defence of metaphysical
vitalism, and especially in the instance of the evolution of eyes by
two different methods, which is his palmary argument. Since in some
molluscs and in vertebrates organs that coincide in being organs of
vision are reached by distinct paths, it cannot have been the
propulsion of mechanism in each case, he says, that guided the
developments, which, being divergent, would never have led to
coincident results, but the double development must have been guided
by a common _tendency towards vision_. Suppose (what some young man in
a laboratory may by this time have shown to be false) that M.
Bergson's observations have sounded the facts to the bottom; it would
then be of the ultimate nature of things that, given light and the
other conditions, the two methods of development will end in eyes;
just as, for a peasant, it is of the ultimate nature of things that
puddles can be formed in two quite opposite ways, by rain falling from
heaven and by springs issuing from the earth; but as the peasant would
not have reached a profound insight into nature if he had proclaimed
the presence in her of a _tendency to puddles_, to be formed in
inexplicably different ways; so the philosopher attains to no profound
insight when he proclaims in her a _tendency to vision._ If those
words express more than ignorance, they express the love of it. Even
if the vitalists were right in despairing of further scientific
discoveries, they would be wrong in offering their verbiage as a
substitute. Nature may possibly have only a very loose hazy
constitution, to be watched and understood as sailors watch and
understand the weather; but Neptune and Æolus are not thereby proved
to be the authors of storms. Yet M. Bergson thinks if life could only
be safely shown to arise unaccountably, that would prove the invisible
efficacy of a mighty tendency to life. But would the ultimate
contexture and miracle of things be made less arbitrary, and less a
matter of brute fact, by the presence behind them of an actual and
arbitrary effort that such should be their nature? If this word
"effort" is not a mere figure of rhetoric, a name for a movement in
things of which the end happens to interest us more than the
beginning, if it is meant to be an effort actually and consciously
existing, then we must proceed to ask: Why did this effort exist? Why
did it choose that particular end to strive for? How did it reach the
conception of that end, which had never been realised before, and
which no existent nature demanded for its fulfilment? How did the
effort, once made specific, select the particular matter it was to
transform? Why did this matter respond to the disembodied effort that
it should change its habits? Not one of these questions is easier to
answer than the question why nature is living or animals have eyes.
Yet without seeking to solve the only real problem, namely, how nature
is actually constituted, this introduction of metaphysical powers
raises all the others, artificially and without occasion. This side
of M. Bergson's philosophy illustrates the worst and most familiar
vices of metaphysics. It marvels at some appearance, not to
investigate it, but to give it an unctuous name. Then it turns this
name into a power, that by its operation creates the appearance. This
is simply verbal mythology or the hypostasis of words, and there would
be some excuse for a rude person who should call it rubbish.
The metaphysical abuse of psychology is as extraordinary in modern
Europe as that of fancy ever was in India or of rhetoric in Greece. We
find, for instance, Mr. Bradley murmuring, as a matter almost too
obvious to mention, that the existence of anything not sentience is
unmeaning to him; or, if I may put this evident principle in other
words, that nothing is able to exist unless something else is able to
discover it. Yet even if discovered the poor candidate for existence
would be foiled, for it would turn out to be nothing but a
modification of the mind falsely said to discover it. Existence and
discovery are conceptions which the malicious criticism of knowledge
(which is the psychology of knowledge abused) pretends to have
discarded and outgrown altogether; the conception of immediacy has
taken their place. This malicious criticism of knowledge is based on
the silent assumption that knowledge is impossible. Whenever you
mention anything, it baffles you by talking instead about your idea of
what you mention; and if ever you describe the origin of anything it
substitutes, as a counter-theory, its theory of the origin of your
description. This, however, would not be a counter-theory at all if
the criticism of knowledge had not been corrupted into a negative
dogma, maintaining that ideas of things are the only things possible
and that therefore only ideas and not things can have an origin.
Nothing could better illustrate how deep this cognitive impotence has
got into people's bones than the manner in which, in the latest
schools of philosophy, it is being disavowed; for unblushing idealism
is distinctly out of fashion. M. Bergson tells us he has solved a
difficulty that seemed hopeless by avoiding a fallacy common to
idealism and realism. The difficulty was that if you started with
self-existent matter you could never arrive at mind, and if you
started with self-existent mind you could never arrive at matter. The
fallacy was that both schools innocently supposed there was an
existing world to discover, and each thought it possible that its view
should describe that world as it really was. What now is M. Bergson's
solution? That no articulated world, either material or psychical,
exists at all, but only a tendency or enduring effort to evolve images
of both sorts; or rather to evolve images which in their finer texture
and vibration are images of matter, but which grouped and
foreshortened in various ways are images of minds. The idea of nature
and the idea of consciousness are two apperceptions or syntheses of
the same stuff of experience. The two worlds thus become substantially
identical, continuous, and superposable; each can merge insensibly
into the other. "To perceive all the influences of all the points of
all bodies would be to sink to the condition of a material object."[4]
To perceive some of these influences, by having created organs that
shut out the others, is to be a mind.
[Footnote 4: _Matière et Mémoire_, p. 38.]
This solution is obtained by substituting, as usual, the ideas of
things for the things themselves and cheating the honest man who was
talking about objects by answering him as if he were talking about
himself. Certainly, if we could limit ourselves to feeling life flow
and the whole world vibrate, we should not raise the question debated
between realists and idealists; but not to raise a question is one
thing and to have solved it is another. What has really been done is
to offer us a history, _on the assumption of idealism,_ of the idea of
mind and the idea of matter. This history may be correct enough
psychologically, and such as a student of the life of reason might
possibly come to; but it is a mere evasion of the original question
concerning the relation of this mental evolution to the world it
occurs in. In truth, an enveloping world is assumed by these
hereditary idealists not to exist; they rule it out _a priori,_ and
the life of reason is supposed by them to constitute the whole
universe. To be sure, they say they transcend idealism no less than
realism, because they mark the point where, by contrast or selection
from other objects, the mind has come to be distinguished: but the
subterfuge is vain, because by "mind" they mean simply the idea of
mind, and they give no name, except perhaps experience, to the mind
that forms that idea. Matter and mind, for these transcendentalists
posing as realists, merge and flow so easily together only because
both are images or groups of images in an original mind presupposed
but never honestly posited. It is in this forgotten mind, also, as
the professed idealists urge, that the relations of proximity and
simultaneity between various lives can alone subsist, if to subsist is
to be experienced.
There is, however, one point of real difference, at least initially,
between the idealism of M. Bergson and that of his predecessors. The
universal mind, for M. Bergson, is in process of actual
transformation. It is not an omniscient God but a cosmic sensibility.
In this sensibility matter, with all its vibrations felt in detail,
forms one moving panorama together with all minds, which are patterns
visible at will from various points of view in that same woof of
matter; and so the great experiment crawls and shoots on, the dream of
a giant without a body, mindful of the past, uncertain of the future,
shuffling his images, and threading his painful way through a
labyrinth of cross-purposes.
Such at least is the notion which the reader gathers from the
prevailing character of M. Bergson's words; but I am not sure that it
would be his ultimate conclusion. Perhaps it is to be out of sympathy
with his spirit to speak of an ultimate conclusion at all; nothing
comes to a conclusion and nothing is ultimate. Many dilemmas, however,
are inevitable, and if the master does not make a choice himself, his
pupils will divide and trace the alternative consequences for
themselves in each direction. If they care most for a real fluidity,
as William James did, they will stick to something like what I have
just described; but if they care most for immediacy, as we may suspect
that M. Bergson does, they will transform that view into something far
more orthodox. For a real fluidity and an absolute immediacy are not
compatible. To believe in real change you must put some trust in
representation, and if you posit a real past and a real future you
posit independent objects. In absolute immediacy, on the contrary,
instead of change taken realistically, you can have only a feeling of
change. The flux becomes an idea in the absolute, like the image of a
moving spiral, always flowing outwards or inwards, but with its centre
and its circumference always immovable. Duration, we must remember, is
simply the sense of lasting; no time is real that is not lived
through. Therefore various lives cannot be dated in a common time, but
have no temporal relations to one another. Thus, if we insist on
immediacy, the vaunted novelty of the future and the inestimable
freedom of life threaten to become (like all else) the given _feeling_
of novelty or freedom, in passing from a given image of the past to a
given image of the future--all these terms being contained in the
present; and we have reverted to the familiar conception of absolute
immutability in absolute life. M. Bergson has studied Plotinus and
Spinoza; I suspect he has not studied them in vain.
Nor is this the only point at which this philosophy, when we live a
while with it, suddenly drops its mask of novelty and shows us a
familiar face. It would seem, for instance, that beneath the drama of
creative evolution there was a deeper nature of things. For apparently
creative evolution (apart from the obstacle of matter, which may be
explained away idealistically) has to submit to the following
conditions: first, to create in sequence, not all at once; second, to
create some particular sequence only, not all possible sequences side
by side; and third, to continue the one sequence chosen, since if the
additions of every new moment were irrelevant to the past, no
sequence, no vital persistence or progress would be secured, and all
effort would be wasted. These are compulsions; but it may also, I
suppose, be thought a _duty_ on the part of the vital impulse to be
true to its initial direction and not to halt, as it well might, like
the self-reversing Will of Schopenhauer, on perceiving the result of
its spontaneous efforts. Necessity would thus appear behind liberty
and duty before it. This summons to life to go on, and these
conditions imposed upon it, might then very plausibly be attributed to
a Deity existing beyond the world, as is done in religious tradition;
and such a doctrine, if M. Bergson should happen to be holding it in
reserve, would perhaps help to explain some obscurities in his system,
such, for instance, as the power of potentiality to actualise itself,
of equipoise to become suddenly emphasis on one particular part, and
of spirit to pursue an end chosen before it is conceived, and when
there is no nature to predetermine it.
It has been said that M. Bergson's system precludes ethics: I cannot
think that observation just. Apart from the moral inspiration which
appears throughout his philosophy, which is indeed a passionate
attempt to exalt (or debase) values into powers, it offers, I should
say, two starting-points for ethics. In the first place, the _élan
vital_ ought not to falter, although it can do so: therefore to
persevere, labour, experiment, propagate, must be duties, and the
opposite must be sins. In the second place, freedom, in adding
uncaused increments to life, ought to do so in continuation of the
whole past, though it might do so frivolously: therefore it is a duty
to be studious, consecutive, loyal; you may move in any direction but
you must carry the whole past with you. I will not say this suggests a
sound system of ethics, because it would be extracted from dogmas
which are physical and incidentally incredible; nor would it represent
a mature and disillusioned morality, because it would look to the
future and not to the eternal; nevertheless it would be deeply
ethical, expressing the feelings that have always inspired Hebraic
morality.
A good way of testing the calibre of a philosophy is to ask what it
thinks of death. Philosophy, said Plato, is a meditation on death, or
rather, if we would do justice to his thought, an aspiration to live
disembodied; and Schopenhauer said that the spectacle of death was the
first provocation to philosophy. M. Bergson has not yet treated of
this subject; but we may perhaps perceive for ourselves the place that
it might occupy in his system.[5] Life, according to him, is the
original and absolute force. In the beginning, however, it was only a
potentiality or tendency. To become specific lives, life had to
emphasise and bring exclusively to consciousness, here and there,
special possibilities of living; and where these special lives have
their chosen boundary (if this way of putting it is not too Fichtean)
they posit or create a material environment. Matter is the view each
life takes of what for it are rejected or abandoned possibilities of
living. This might show how the absolute will to live, if it was to be
carried out, would have to begin by evoking a sense of dead or
material things about it; it would not show how death could ever
overtake the will itself. If matter were merely the periphery which
life has to draw round itself, in order to be a definite life, matter
could never abolish any life; as the ring of a circus or the sand of
the arena can never abolish the show for which they have been
prepared. Life would then be fed and defined by matter, as an artist
is served by the matter he needs to carry on his art.