Page:EB1922 - Volume 32.djvu/112

94 which make up their physical surroundings. Hence the crowning achievement of the intellect is the creation of the science of geometry, which therefore furnishes the ideal model to which human science in general is everywhere striving to approximate. The aim of all sciences is to become exact sciences, i.e. sciences of number and measure. But the only magnitudes which we can measure directly are straight lines. Consequently all measure- ment of other magnitudes has to be effected by artifices which enable us to substitute lengths for the various " intensive " mag- nitudes (lapses of duration, degrees of temperature, electric charges, and the like), which meet us in the " real world " of actual life. In particular, the measurement of time only be- comes possible by the artifice of representing the real duration through which we live by the image of a line on which we can measure off different lengths. This device, though indispensable to science, inevitably falsifies the facts of living experience. For it gives rise to the belief in a " Newtonian " time, which is homo- geneous, like the straight line, and " flows equably," whereas the " real duration " of experience, which is the very stuff of which our inner life of feeling and conation is made, is non-homogeneous and " flows " with very varying rapidity according as we are well or ill, interested or bored, pleased or pained, and the like. From the initial substitution of the unreal " uniform " time of science for the infinitely varying " real duration," out of which the processes of life and consciousness are made, further arise all the illusions characteristic of a mechanical theory of the universe. It is our tendency to envisage time under the form of a line, which leads to the belief in permanent " substances " or things, as the bearers or supports of change, and further conducts us to the notion of a rigid determinism by producing the illusion that what happens in the various moments of time is all completely " given " at once, as all the points on a straight line are given " simultaneously." This again leads to a radically false con- ception of " evolution." It creates the belief that nothing radically new is ever produced in the evolutionary process; whatever emerges in the course of the process, on a determinist theory, must be already completely contained in its antecedent conditions, and adequate knowledge of those conditions must enable you to say beforehand exactly what will emerge from them. Hence for science, which to be true to its geometrical ideal must be strictly mechanical, the whole process of evolution can be nothing but the rearrangement, according to mechanical law, of selfsame and permanent units. Real life, as we know it at first hand in the act of living it, is of a wholly different kind. It is a single continuous process of becoming, in which there is no permanent substratum; it presents us at every moment with the emergence of the qualitatively new, fresh qualities, fresh adapta- tions to environment, which could never have been anticipated from any knowledge of what had gone before, until they had actually emerged. You cannot expect to know the direction this flan vital, as Bergson names the impulse which Schopenhauer had called the " will to live," will take until it has been actually taken; life is thus essentially contingent. (It follows, of course, that determinism is false as regards that special manifestation of the flan vital which we call will or choice. To speak of our decisions as necessitated or determined by our pasts is virtually to think of them as already made for us before we make them.) Instinctive or impulsive activity is thus but a manifestation of the forward-going flan vital, the tendency of the process which is life to exhibit itself in ever newer forms. Science is the in- evitably unsuccessful attempt of the intellect to reconstruct the process in " geometrical " form by reversing its sense. It looks back at a process which has culminated in the appearance of something new (e.g. a new modification of an animal species), notes what the earlier stages of the process have been, and then assumes that it could have predicted from a knowledge of ante- cedent conditions the new manifestation of the flan vital with which it had, in fact, to be already acquainted before it could think of the antecedent events as conditions of this result. Hence, if philosophy is to understand life, its method must be the reverse of that of the scientific intellect. It must renounce the intellect and its logic, which latter is indeed merely the ab-

stract schematism of the " geometrical " procedure, and surrender itself without reserve to the intuitions and presages which attend on complete immersion in the stream of the flan vital.

It may perhaps be suggested that the real test of Bergson's ability to construct an irrational philosophy on this basis must be sought in the success with which it can be applied to the in- terpretation of the spiritual life of humanity, a task with which Bergson has not as yet fully grappled. Meanwhile, there appear to be some reasons for doubting whether the foundations of his thought are themselves securely laid. The condemnation of the intellect is based upon the assumption that because it is a " prod- uct of evolution " it can have no function but that of enabling us to find our way about among things; this is why geometry, which deals with the " surfaces of solid things," is declared to be its highest achievement, and why it is denied all value for the interpretation of life. But it might reasonably be contended that from the dawn of time men have had to occupy themselves at least as much with reaching a common understanding of one another as with learning their way about among " solid bodies," and that we should therefore expect an intellect which is a " product of evolution " to be competent to deal with life as well as with the surfaces of solid bodies. Again, it is plain that the alleged necessity for science of a spatial schematism, which inevitably misrepresents the facts of " real duration," depends entirely on the results of the one chapter (Donntes Immediates de la Conscience, ch. i) which expounds the author's peculiar theory of measurable magnitudes. Now this chapter bears evident marks of hasty construction. The author seems to have forgotten that even in geometry straight lines are not the only measurable magnitudes. It is indispensable that we should be able to measure angles, a consideration which of itself should have given the author pause. In fact, the whole treatment of the distinction between " extensive " and " intensive " magnitudes, upon which so much depends for Bergson's develop- ment of his theory, is, as it stands, at least perfunctory. Again, the very language employed to distinguish " real duration " from the unreal time of science, viz. that the portions of real duration flow with varying rapidity, seems to imply that these varying rapidities are comparable with one another, and con- sequently that " Newtonian " time has, after all, the significance for real life which Bergson refuses to allow.

There has been much discussion in philosophical quarters of Bergson's place in the classification of philosophers. William James, in his latest works, claimed him as a pragmatist, and it has been maintained on the continent of Europe that his doctrine is not only a form, but the one really coherent form, of pragmatism. There is, of course, a real affinity between Bergson and the pragmatists, which rests on their common distrust of the intellect. On the other hand, whereas pragmatism, at least in its inception, made it a fundamental point to insist on a pluralistic theory of the world, Bergson's doctrine of the elan vital is definitely singularist. Thus he touches Bradley on one side of his doctrine as closely as he touches James on the other. In fact, the complaints which pragmatists used to make a few years ago of the miraculous feats ascribed by " idealists " to the Absolute might easily be urged totidem verbis against the elan vital. According to another view, Bergson is most correctly described as a " mystic," though he can hardly be called so if the word is used with any precision. Mysticism is primarily not a peculiar way of thinking but a peculiar way of being. What the great mystics of the past have aimed at is first and foremost a transformation of human character by which it becomes re- sponsive to stimuli from a " transcendental " world, inaccessible to ordinary perception. Since no such transcendental world is recognized in the Bergsonian scheme, it seems merely misleading to speak of his philosophy as mysticism.

A second feature of the philosophical movement in the earlier days of the decade was, in Great Britain and America, the rise of the so-called " New Realism." This also may be regarded as a conscious reaction against the idealistic doctrines of the last generation which go back for their inspiration to Fichte and Hegel, but it was a reaction which was in many ways the direct antith-