Page:Philosophical Review Volume 23.djvu/593

No. 5.] ; his two-fold object is, first, to point out certain general inconsistencies in Bergson's positions, and, secondly, to show his historical relation to the philosophy of nature and of religion developed by the German romanticists. Bergson's theory of time is of fundamental importance. It is not, however, by his confused notion of duration, but by his belief in the difference which time makes in the constitution of reality, that Bergson is a temporalist. His derivation of freedom from the newness of each moment of time involves a confusion of existential uniqueness with qualitative novelty; the former would not be incompatible with repetition of content. Bergson's real argument for freedom depends on the survival of the past in memory, whereby accumulation is substituted for mere succession. The logic of Bergson's procedure, Professor Lovejoy suggests, would lead him directly from this significance of memory—for, in the sense that every event leaves an impression, that the advance of time makes a difference, memory might conceivably pertain to the whole universe—to the theory that new reality is constantly being added to the cumulative experience of the universe. The introduction of "élan vital" into this biological indeterminism raises a difficulty in the treatment of matter, which is regarded as a fiction of intellect and then as a serious obstruction to the life-force which nevertheless produced it. After these criticisms of duration and "élan vital" in relation to creative evolution, Professor Lovejoy shows that evolution, in the middle of the nineteenth century identified with mechanism, was in its earlier development anti-mechanistic. The ultimate reality of motion, the creative efficacy of time, the interpenetration of the moments of pure duration, the life-force, out oneness with it, and the resistance offered by inert matter, are all found in the writings of Jacobi, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. Bergson's philosophy of nature is, therefore, not an innovation, but a revival of the earlier form of evolutionism. The relation of our temporal experience to God implied by romantic evolutionism is the denial of any perfect and eternal reality either as source or goal of our incompleteness. The force of which we are a part, which we may call God, is in the making. Though Bergson inconsistently explicitly declares his belief in a transcendent deity, prior and external to the evolving world, the real tendency of the religious implications of his romantic evolutionism is towards temporalistic pantheism.

This little volume of critical studies is the second work of Fouillee's that has appeared posthumously, bringing the total list of his books up to thirty-four. The three essays that form the main portion of the work, La morale libertaire, La morale humanitaire, and La morale des idées-forces, along with an introductory essay, La sociologie, science theorique et pratique de l'humanité, and an appendix consisting of an address delivered in London in 1911 on Le rapprochement des races au point de vue sociologique, were collected by Madame Fouillée and edited by her grandson Augustin Guyau. In the first essay,