Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/133

No. 2.] king. But the trouble comes when the logical mind extends its operations to the world in which everything is moving, growing, becoming, living. Baffled by the infinite variety and change of forms, and taking the whirling flux for illusion, the intellect proceeds to construct a bony skeleton, a rigid frame- work, and substitutes this, as the true reality, for the disturbing and unpleasant temporal succession. It keeps forever reading static elements, eternal causes and substances, into the flux, and dropping out as mere appearance what does not fit into the logical scheme. Life and consciousness cannot be treated mathematically, scientifically, logically; the scientist who studies and analyzes them in the ordinary mathematical-physical ways, cuts them up, destroys them, and misses their meaning. The metaphysician cannot give us scientific knowledge of them; philosophy is and remains a direct vision of reality, a Weltanschauung in the literal sense of the term, intuition. Intuition is life, real and immediate life envisaging itself. There is something in the universe analogous to the creative spirit of the poet, a living pushing force, which eludes the mathematical intelligence and which can be appreciated only by a kind of divining sympathy, a feeling which often gets nearer to the essence of things than reason. A normal philosophy must do justice to both intelligence and intuition, for only by a union of these two faculties will the philosopher succeed in approximating the truth. The Critique of Pure Reason would be right and metaphysics would be impossible if mathematical-physical knowledge were the only form of truth, but for Bergson, as for Fichte, Schelling, and, indeed, for Kant himself, there are other sources of knowledge, upon which a satisfactory world-view may be based.

Bergson sharply distinguishes between intelligence and intuition, science and philosophy, and is led to do so by the cleavage his metaphysics makes between the world of matter and the world of life and mind. Like his fellow-countryman Descartes, he abandons the corporeal realm to mechanism; whatever of life and movement there is in nature is due to the élan vital that pushes itself through obstructing matter and flows in channels fashioned by itself. Matter itself is dead, life and consciousness