Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/145

No. 2.] The true reality, we are told, is unanalysable, alive, full of qualities, many and yet one. It must be directly experienced, lived, or intuited. But merely living it is not intuiting it, as that process is described by Bergson. Intuition already includes reflection, and this implies a number of mental operations such as recognition, memory, comparison, analysis and synthesis, the same operations that are employed in knowing the outer world. Only a philosopher can intuit, see the one in the many, and only a genius among philosophers, it seems. Bergson himself tells us that, compared with what memory adds, the original stock of the intuition would be quite small. Moreover, it must be remembered that the philosopher does not merely experience, envisage, gaze, lose himself in mystical contemplation and remain lost there: he writes books, describes what he discovers, tells us his story, and constructs a system. How that can be done without the critical and logical employment of intelligence, it is hard to see. It is not done; the discredited discursive understanding performs its functions in the accustomed ways, trying to render the situation intelligible. It assumes that the inner experience is the true reality; it assumes that it is the same in others as in ourselves; it assumes that what is found in man lies at the very core of things; it assumes that the principle is a creative principle, that it creates new qualities, that it makes progress, that it subdivides matter, that inorganic existence is mind come to rest, congealed mind, that souls are ceaselessly created by the rolling of the great current of life through matter and the forming of brooklets, as it were. All this is thinking, the same kind of thinking that is employed in the effort to understand the world of dead things.

If, however, it is insisted that the intellect reveals to us only an external world, physical objects in causal-mechanical relation, then it is true that it does not tell us the whole story. And if the intellect paralyzes everything it lays its eyes on, stops motion, kills life, butchers reality, then, indeed, scientific thinking is inadequate and there is need of a special method or the abandonment of philosophy. The Romanticists are right in throwing logic and concepts overboard, or at least in limiting their