Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/134

118 are everything but that, for to live is to create and invent. The dualism becomes especially marked in the case of the self with its free will. We cannot strap the ego, which is both a unity and a plurality, upon the conceptual frame-work used for the external world. The intellect looks at reality from the outside and can understand only such existences as have nothing but an outside; in the presence of the true realities it is condemned to relativity and symbolism; it operates with pictures, rigid concepts, substitutes and symbols of the absolute; it cannot break itself of its habit of cutting things into strips and measuring and counting them. With qualities and movements, with life and consciousness, with the 'growing personality, all of which have to be caught on the wing, as it were, only intuition can deal; intelligence can at best give us nothing but snap-shots of life, while intuition seizes its movement.

The sharp distinction which Bergson makes between matter and mind is not always consistently adhered to in his works and perhaps does not represent the final form of his philosophy; but as it stands, it reminds us somewhat of the dualistic metaphysics of Descartes. Unlike his predecessor, however, he does not advance upon the spiritual citadel of reality by way of logical arguments, but takes it by storm, seizes it by direct inner vision like the German Romanticists. We cannot think ourselves into life and mind, but must grasp them without the intervention of intellectual reflection, which would at once begin to block them out. James, too, discredits the intellect; for him also philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than of logic. We must go behind the conceptual function altogether; in this he is agreed with Bergson, but his sympathies seem to lie with Hume and Mill rather than with Schelling in looking to the more primitive flux of the sensational life for reality's true shape. The French philosopher looks inward for reality's true shape, the American outward. It is not true, as Hegel held, that whatever is real is rational and whatever is rational is real; whatever is experienced is real. But English empiricism is no more satisfactory than German rationalism, James tells us, simply because it is not empirical, not radical enough, because it does violence to the