Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/132

116 characteristic is the interest in the living, moving, pulsating element of existence. Reality for the latter-day opponent of rationalism, no less than for his earlier brother, is not a dead, static thing, not a mere skeleton of bone and sinew, but flesh and blood, full of life and movement and never-ending change. This view of reality helps to intensify the distrust of the intellect already aroused by its failure to satisfy the longings of the will. Our estimate of the competence of the understanding to do justice to reality will, in a measure, depend upon what we believe reality to be; our theory of knowledge will rest upon our metaphysics. If we identify the world with what we experience objectively or subjectively, if we believe that we come face to face with the real in inner or outer perception or in both, and intelligence appears to give us a different report, we will repudiate intelligence. That is what some of the older Romanticists proceeded to do: the intellect was deposed because it did not tell the truth.

Not all our contemporary anti-intellectualists are, however, prepared to go so far. Bergson admits that science and logic cannot grasp the core of reality; science breaks it up, arrests it and schematizes it in its rigid forms. We cannot draw off the flowing vital process in static logical concepts. Le mot est brutal; just because it is universal, every definition robs the immediate of its individual character. Where there is life and movement, conceptual thinking finds its occupation gone. But this does not mean that intelligence is without its raison d'être, and that the methods and results of natural science are to be abandoned as false trails. The work of the intellect is not without purpose; it owes its origin to practical needs; it is, as pragmatists have insisted, an instrument in the service of the will to live. And yet it is not merely such a tool for Bergson. Conceptual thought is well-adapted for employment in a dead world, and such a world confronts it in inert matter: here mechanism reigns and here the discursive understanding has cognitive value. Where there is no individuality, no inwardness, nothing but dead surface, science and logic have practical and theoretical worth. In its own peculiar field intelligence is