cannot think in terms of movement. It forges a static conception of it, and destroys it by arresting it under pretext of seeing it better. To define movement as a series of positions, with a generating law, with a time-table or correspondence sheet between places and times, is surely a ready-made presentation. Are we not confusing the trajectory and its performance, the points traversed and the traversing of the points, the result of the A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson genesis of the result; in short, the quantitative distance over which the flight extends, and the qualitative flight which puts this distance behind it? In this way the very mobility which is the essence of movement vanishes. There is the same common mistake about time. Analytic and synthetic thought can see in time only a string of coincidences, each of them instantaneous, a logical series of relations. It imagines the whole of it to be a graduated slide-rule, in which the luminous point called the present is the geometrical index. Thus it gives form to time in space, "a kind of fourth dimension," ("Essay on the Immediate Data".) or at least it reduces it to nothing more than an abstract scheme of succession, "a stream without bottom or sides, flowing without determinable strength, in an indefinable direction." ("Introduction to Metaphysics".) It requires time to be homogeneous, and every homogeneous medium is space, "for as homogeneity consists here in the absence of any quality, it is not clear how two forms of homogeneity could be distinguished one from the other." ("Essay on the Immediate Data", page 74.) Quite different appears real duration, the duration which is lived. It is pure heterogeneity. It contains a thousand different degrees of tension or relaxation, and its rhythm varies without end. The magic silence of calm nights or the wild disorder of a tempest, the still joy of ecstasy or the tumult of passion unchained, a steep climb towards a difficult truth or a gentle descent from a luminous principle to consequences which easily follow, a moral crisis or a shooting pain, call up intuitions admitting no comparison with one another. We have here no series of moments, but prolonged and interpenetrating phases; their sequence is not a substitution of one point for another, but rather resembles a musical resolution of harmony into harmony. And of this ever-new melody which constitutes our inner life every moment contains a resonance or an echo of past moments. "What are we really, what is our character, except the condensation of the history which we have lived since our birth, even before our birth, since we bring with us our prenatal dispositions? Without doubt we think only with a small part of our past; but it is with our complete past, including our original bias of soul, that we desire, wish, A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson and act." ("Creative Evolution", pages 5-6.) This is what makes our duration irreversible, and its novelty perpetual, for each of the states through which it passes envelops the recollection of all past states. And thus we see, in the end, how, for a being endowed with memory, "existence consists in change, change in ripening, ripening in endless self- creation." ("Creative Evolution", page 8.) With this formula we face the capital problem in which psychology and metaphysics meet, that of liberty. The solution given by Mr Bergson marks one of the culminating points of his philosophy. It is from this summit that he finds light thrown on the riddle of inner being. And it is the centre where all the lines of his research converge. What is liberty? What must we understand by this word? Beware of the answer you are going to give. Every definition, in the strict sense of the term, will imply the determinist thesis in advance, since, under pain of going round in a circle, it will be bound to express liberty as a function of what it is not. Either psychological liberty is an illusive appearance, or, if it is real, we can only grasp it by intuition, not by analysis, in the light of an immediate feeling. For a reality is verified, not constructed; and we are now or never in one of those situations where the philosopher's task is to create some new concept, instead of abiding by a combination of previous elements. Man is free, says common-sense, in so far as his action depends only on himself. "We are free," says Mr Bergson, ("Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness", page 131.) "when our acts proceed from our entire personality, when they express it, when they exhibit that indefinable resemblance to it which we find occasionally between the artist and his work." That is all we need seek; two conceptions which are equivalent to each other, two concordant formulae. It is true that this amounts to determining the free act by its very originality, in the etymological sense of the word: which is at bottom only another way of declaring it incommensurable with every concept, and reluctant to be confined by any definition. But, after all, is not that the only true immediate fact? That our spiritual life is genuine action, capable of independence, initiative, and irreducible novelty, not mere result produced from outside, A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson not simple extension of external mechanism, that it is so much ours as to constitute every moment, for him who can see, an essentially incomparable and new invention, is exactly what represents for us the name of liberty. Understood thus, and decidedly it is like this that we must understand it, liberty is a profound thing: we seek it only in those moments of high and solemn choice which come into our life, not in the petty familiar actions which their very insignificance submits to all surrounding influences, to every wandering breeze. Liberty is rare; many live and die and have never known it. Liberty is a thing which contains an infinite number of degrees and shades; it is measured by our capacity for the inner life. Liberty is a thing which goes on in us unceasingly: our liberty is potential rather than actual. And lastly, it is a thing of duration, not of space and number, not the work of moments or decrees. The free act is the act which has been long in preparing, the act which is heavy with our whole history, and falls like a ripe fruit from our past life. But how are we to establish positive verification of these views? How are we to do away with the danger of illusion? The proof will in this case result from a criticism of adverse theories, along with direct observation of psychological reality freed from the deceptive forms which warp the common perception of it. And it will here be an easy task to resume Mr Bergson's reasoning in a few words. The first obstacle which confronts affirmation of our liberty comes from physical determinism. Positive science, we are told, presents the universe to us as an immense homogeneous transformation, maintaining an exact equivalence between departure and arrival. How can we possibly have after that the genuine creation which we require in the act we call free? The answer is that the universality of the mechanism is at bottom only a hypothesis which is still awaiting demonstration. On the one hand it includes the parallelist conception which we have recognised as effete. And on the other it is plain that it is not self-sufficient. At least it requires that somewhere or other there should be a principle of position giving once for all what will afterwards be maintained. In actual fact, the course of phenomena displays three tendencies: a tendency to A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson conservation, beyond question; but also a tendency to collapse, as in the diminution of energy; and a tendency to progress, as in biological evolution. To make conservation the sole law of matter implies an arbitrary decree, denoting only those aspects of reality which will count for anything. By what right do we thus exclude, with vital effort, even the feeling of liberty which in us is so vigorous? We might say, it is true, that our spiritual life, if it is not a simple extension of external mechanism, yet proceeds according to an internal mechanism equally severe, but of a different order. This would bring us to the hypothesis of a kind of psychological mechanism; and in many respects this seems to be the common-sense hypothesis. I need not dwell upon it, after the numerous criticisms already made. Inner reality--which does not admit number--is not a sequence of distinct terms, allowing a disconnected waste of absolute causality. And the mechanism of which we dream has no true sense--for, after all, it has a sense--except in relation to the superficial phenomena which take place in our dead rind, in relation to the automaton which we are in daily life. I am ready to admit that it explains our common actions, but here it is our profound consciousness which is in question, not the play of our materialised habits. Without insisting, then, too strongly on this mongrel conception, let us pass to the direct examination of inner psychological reality. Everything is ready for the conclusion. Our duration, which is continually accumulating itself, and always introducing some irreducible new factor, prevents any kind of state, even if superficially identical, from repeating itself in depth. "We shall never again have the soul we had this evening." Each of our moments remains essentially unique. It is something new added to the surviving past; not only new, but unable to be foreseen. For how can we speak of foresight which is not simple conjecture, how can we conceive an absolute extrinsic determination, when the act in birth only makes one with the finished sum of its conditions, when these conditions are complete only on the threshold of the action beginning, including the fresh and irreducible contribution added by its very date in our history? We can only explain afterwards, we can only foresee when A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson it is too late, in retrospect, when the accomplished action has fallen into the plan of matter. Thus our inner life is a work of enduring creation: of phases which mature slowly, and conclude at long intervals the decisive moments of emancipating discovery. Undoubtedly matter is there, under the forms of habit, threatening us with automatism, seeking at every moment to devour us, stealing a march on us whenever we forget. But matter represents in us only the waste of existence, the mortal fall of weakened reality, the swoon of the creative action falling back inert; while the depths of our being still pulse with the liberty which, in its true function, employs mechanism itself only as a means of action. Now, does not this conception make a singular exception of us in nature, an empire within an empire? That is the question we have yet to investigate. II. We have just attempted to grasp what being is in ourselves; and we have found that it is becoming, progress, and growth, that it is a creative process which never ceases to labour incessantly; in a word, that it is duration. Must we come to the same conclusion about external being, about existence in general? Let us consider that external reality which is nearest us, our body. It is known to us both externally by our perceptions and internally by our affections. It is then a privileged case for our inquiry. In addition, and by analogy, we shall at the same time study the other living bodies which everyday induction shows us to be more or less like our own. What are the distinctive characteristics of these new realities? Each of them possesses a genuine individuality to a far greater degree than inorganic objects; whilst the latter are hardly limited at all except in relation to the needs of the former, and so do not constitute beings in themselves, the former evidence a powerful internal unity which is only further emphasised by their prodigious complication, and form wholes with are naturally complete. These wholes are not collections of juxtaposed parts: they are organisms; that is to say, systems of connected functions, in A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson which each detail implies the whole, and where the various elements interpenetrate. These organisms change and modify continually; we say of them not only that they are, but that they live; and their life is mutability itself, a flight, a perpetual flux. This uninterrupted flight cannot in any way be compared to a geometrical movement; it is a rhythmic succession of phases, each of which contains the resonance of all those which come before; each state lives on in the state following; the life of the body is memory; the living being accumulates its past, makes a snowball of itself, serves as an open register for time, ripens, and grows old. Despite all resemblances, the living body always remains, in some measure, an absolutely original and unique invention, for there are not two specimens exactly alike; and, among inert objects, it appears as the reservoir of indetermination, the centre of spontaneity, contingence, and genuine action, as if in the course of phenomena nothing really new could be produced except by its agency. Such are the characteristic tendencies of life, such the aspects which it presents to immediate observation. Whether spiritual activity unconsciously presides over biological evolution, or whether it simply prolongs it, we always find here and there the essential features of duration. But I spoke just now of "individuality." Is it really one of the distinctive marks of life? We know how difficult it is to define it accurately. Nowhere, not even in man, is it fully realised; and there are beings in existence in which it seems a complete illusion, though every part of them reproduces their complete unity. True, but we are now dealing with biology, in which geometrical precision is inadmissible, where reality is defined not so much by the possession of certain characteristics as by its tendency to accentuate them. It is as a tendency that individuality is more particularly manifested; and if we look at it in this light, no one can deny that it does constitute one of the fundamental tendencies of life. Only the truth is that the tendency to individuality remains always and everywhere counterbalanced, and therefore limited, by an opposing tendency, the tendency to association, and above all to reproduction. This necessitates a correction in our A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson analysis. Nature, in many respects, seems to take no interest in individuals. "Life appears to be a current passing from one germ to another through the medium of a developed organism." ("Creative Evolution", page 29.) It seems as if the organism played the part of a thoroughfare. What is important is rather the continuity of progress of which the individuals are only transitory phases. Between these phases again there are no sharp severances; each phase resolves and melts imperceptibly into that which follows. Is not the real problem of heredity to know how, and up to what point, a new individual breaks away from the individuals which produced it? Is not the real mystery of heredity the difference, not the resemblance, occurring between one term and another? Whatever be its solution, all the individual phases mutually extend and interpenetrate one another. There is a racial memory by which the past is continually accumulated and preserved. Life's history is embodied in its present. And that is really the ultimate reason of the perpetual novelty which surprised us just now. The characteristics of biological evolution are thus the same as those of human progress. Once again we find the very stuff of reality in duration. "We must not then speak any longer of life in general as an abstraction, or a mere heading under which we write down all living beings." ("Creative Evolution", page 28.) On the contrary, to it belongs the primordial function of reality. It is a very real current transmitted from generation to generation, organising and passing through bodies, without failing or becoming exhausted in any one of them. We may, already, then, draw one conclusion: Reality, at bottom, is becoming. But such a thesis runs counter to all our familiar ideas. It is imperative that we should submit it to the test of critical examination and positive verification. One system of metaphysics, I said some time ago, underlies common- sense, animating and informing it. According to this system, which is the inverse of that which we have just intimated, reality in its very depths is fixity and permanence. This is the completely static conception which sees in being exactly the opposite of becoming: we cannot become, it seems to say, except in so far as we are not. It does not, however, mean A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson to deny movement. But it represents it as fluctuation round invariable types, as a whirling but captive eddy. Every phenomenon appears to it as a transformation which ends where it began, and the result is that the world takes the form of an eternal equilibrium in which "nothing is created, nothing destroyed." The idea does not need much forcing to end in the old supposition of a cyclic return which restores everything to its original conditions. Everything is thus conceived in astronomical periods. All that is left of the universe henceforward is a whirl of atoms in which nothing counts but certain fixed quantities translated by our systems of equations; the rest has vanished "in algebraical smoke." There is therefore nothing more or less in the effect than in the group of causes; and the causal relation moves towards identity as towards its asymptote. Such a view of nature is open to many objections, even if it were only a question of inorganised matter. Simple physics already betoken the insufficiency of a purely mechanic conception. The stream of phenomena flows in an irreversible direction and obeys a determined rhythm. "If I wish to prepare myself a glass of sugar and water, I may do what I like, but I must wait for my sugar to melt." ("Creative Evolution", page 10.) Here are facts which pure mechanism does not take into account, regarding as it does only statically conceived relations, and making time into a measure only, something like a common denominator of concrete successions, a certain number of coincidences from which all true duration remains absent, which would remain unchanged even if the world's history, instead of opening out in consecutive phases, were to be unfolded before our eyes all at once like a fan. Do we not indeed speak today of aging and atomic separation. If the quantity of energy is preserved, at least its quality is continually deteriorating. By the side of something which remains constant, the world also contains something which is being used up, dissipated, exhausted, decomposed. Further still, a specimen of metal, in its molecular structure, preserves an indelible trace of the treatment it has undergone; natural philosophers tell us that there is a "memory of solids." These are all very positive facts which pure mechanism passes over. In addition, must we not first of all postulate what will afterwards be preserved or deteriorated? A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson Whence we get another aspect of things: that of genesis and creation; and in reality we register the ascending effort of life as a reality no less startling than mechanic inertia. Finally, we have a double movement of ascent and descent: such is what life and matter appear to immediate observation. These two currents meet each other, and grapple. It is the drama of evolution, of which Mr Bergson once gave a masterly explanation, in stating the high place which man fills in nature: "I cannot regard the general evolution and progress of life in the whole of the organised world, the co-ordination and subordination of vital functions to one another in the same living being, the relations which psychology and physiology combined seem bound to establish between brain activity and thought in man, without arriving at this conclusion, that life is an immense effort attempted by thought to obtain of matter something which matter does not wish to give it. Matter is inert; it is the seat of necessity; it proceeds mechanically. It seems as if thought seeks to profit by this mechanical inclination in matter to utilise it for actions, and thus to convert all the creative energy it contains, at least all that this energy possesses which admits of play and external extraction, into contingent movements in space and events in time which cannot be foreseen. With laborious research it piles up complications to make liberty out of necessity, to compose for itself a matter so subtile, and so mobile, that liberty, by a veritable physical paradox, and thanks to an effort which cannot last long, succeeds in maintaining its equilibrium on this very mobility. "But it is caught in the snare. The eddy on which it was poised seizes and drags it down. It becomes prisoner of the mechanism it has set up. Automatism lays hold of it, and life, inevitably forgetting the end which it had determined, which was only to be a means in view of a superior end, is entirely used up in an effort to preserve itself by itself. From the humblest of organised beings to the higher vertebrates which come immediately before man, we witness an attempt which is always foiled and always resumed with more and more art. Man has triumphed; with difficulty, it is true, and so incompletely that a moment's lapse and A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson inattention on his part surrender him to automatism again. But he has triumphed..." ("Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.) And Mr Bergson adds in another place: ("Creative Evolution", pages 286- 287.) "With man consciousness breaks the chain. In man and in man only it obtains its freedom. The whole history of life, till man, had been the history of an effort of consciousness to lift matter, and of the more or less complete crushing of consciousness by matter falling upon it again. The enterprise was paradoxical; if indeed we can speak here, except paradoxically, of enterprise and effort. The task was to take matter, which is necessity itself, and create an instrument of liberty, construct a mechanical system to triumph over mechanism, to employ the determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net it had spread. But everywhere, except in man, consciousness let itself be caught in the net of which it sought to traverse the meshes. It remained taken in the mechanisms it had set up. The automatism which it claimed to be drawing towards liberty enfolds it and drags it down. It has not the strength to get away, because the energy with which it had supplied itself for action is almost entirely employed in maintaining the exceedingly subtile and essentially unstable equilibrium into which it has brought matter. But man does not merely keep his machine going, he succeeds in using it as it pleases him. "He owes it without doubt to the superiority of his brain, which allows him to construct an unlimited number of motor mechanisms, to oppose new habits to old time after time, and to master automatism by dividing it against itself. He owes it to his language, which furnishes consciousness with an immaterial body in which to become incarnate, thus dispensing it from depending exclusively upon material bodies, the flux of which would drag it down and soon engulf it. He owes it to social life, which stores and preserves efforts as language stores thought, thereby fixing a mean level to which individuals will rise with ease, and which, by means of this initial impulse, prevents average individuals from going to sleep and urges better people to rise higher. But our brain, our society, and our language are only the varied outer signs of one and the same internal superiority. A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson Each after its fashion, they tell us the unique and exceptional success which life has won at a given moment of its evolution. They translate the difference in nature, and not in degree only, which separates man from the rest of the animal world. They let us see that if, at the end of the broad springboard from which life took off, all others came down, finding the cord stretched too high, man alone has leapt the obstacle." But man is not on that account isolated in nature: "As the smallest grain of dust forms part of our entire solar system, and is involved along with it in this undivided downward movement which is materiality itself, so all organised beings from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the times in which we live, and in all places as at all times, do but demonstrate to our eyes a unique impulse contrary to the movement of matter, and, in itself, indivisible. All living beings are connected, and all yield to the same formidable thrust. The animal is supported by the plant, man rides the animal, and the whole of humanity in space and time is an immense army galloping by the side of each of us, before and behind us, in a spirited charge which can upset all resistance, and leap many obstacles, perhaps even death." ("Creative Evolution", pages 293-294.) We see with what broad and far-reaching conclusions the new philosophy closes. In the forcible poetry of the pages just quoted its original accent rings deep and pure. Some of its leading theses, moreover, are noted here. But now we must discover the solid foundation of underlying fact. Let us take first the fact of biological evolution. Why has it been selected as the basis of the system? Is it really a fact, or is it only a more or less conjectural and plausible theory? Notice in the first instance that the argument from evolution appears at least as a weapon of co-ordination and research admitted in our day by all philosophers, rejected only on the inspiration of preconceived ideas which are completely unscientific; and that it succeeds in the task allotted to it is doubtless already the proof that it responds to some part of reality. And besides, we can go further. "The idea of transformism is already contained in germ in the natural classification of organised beings. The naturalist brings resembling organisms together, divides the group into A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson sub-groups, within which the resemblance is still greater, and so on; throughout the operation, the characteristics of the group appear as general themes upon which each of the sub-groups executes its particular variations. "Now this is precisely the relation we find in the animal world and in the vegetable world between that which produces and what is produced; on the canvas bequeathed by the ancestor to his posterity, and possessed in common by them, each broiders his original pattern." ("Creative Evolution", pages 24-25.) We may, it is true, ask ourselves whether the genealogical method permits results so far divergent as those presented to us by variety of species. But embryology answers by showing us the highest and most complex forms of life attained every day from very elementary forms; and palaeontology, as it develops, allows us to witness the same spectacle in the universal history of life, as if the succession of phases through which the embryo passes were only a recollection and an epitome of the complete past whence it has come. In addition, the phenomena of sudden changes, recently observed, help us to understand more easily the conception which obtrudes itself under so many heads, by diminishing the importance of the apparent lacunae in genealogical continuity. Thus the trend of all our experience is the same. Now there are some certainties which are only centres of concurrent probabilities; there are some truths determined only by succession of facts, but yet, by their intersection and convergence, sufficiently determined. "That is how we measure the distance from an inaccessible point, by regarding it time after time from the points to which we have access." ("Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.) Is not that the case here? The affirmative seems all the more inevitable inasmuch as the language of transformism is the only language known to the biology of today. Evolution can, it is true, be transposed, but not suppressed, since in any actual state there would always remain this striking fact that the living forms met with as remains in geological layers are ranged by the natural affinity of their characteristics in an order of succession parallel to the succession of the ages. We are not really A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson then inventing a hypothesis in beginning with the affirmation of evolution. But what we have to do is to appreciate its object. Evolution! We meet the word everywhere today. But how rare is the true idea! Let us ask the astronomers who originate cosmogonical hypotheses, and invent a primitive nebula, the natural philosophers who dream that by the deterioration of energy and the dissipation of movement the material world will obtain final rest in the inertia of a homogeneous equilibrium, let us ask the biologists and psychologists who are enemies of fixed species and inquisitive about ancestral history. What they are anxious to discern in evolution is the persistent influence of an initial cause once given, the attraction of a fixed end, a collection of laws before the eternity of which change becomes negligible like an appearance. Now he who thinks of the universe as a construction of unchangeable relations denies by his method the evolution of which he speaks, since he transforms it into a calculable effect necessarily produced by a regulated play of generating conditions, since he implicitly admits the illusive character of a becoming which adds nothing to what is given. Finality itself, if he keeps the name, does not save him from his error, for finality in his eyes is nothing but an efficient cause projected into the future. So we see him fixing stages, marking periods, inserting means, putting in milestones, continually destroying movement by halting it before his gaze. And we all do the same by instinctive inclination. Our concept of law, in its classical form, is not general: it represents only the law of co-existence and of mechanism, the static relation between two numerically disconnected terms; and in order to grasp evolution we shall doubtless have to invent a new type of law: law in duration, dynamic relation. For we can, and we must, conceive that there is an evolution of natural laws; that these laws never define anything but a momentary state of things; that they are in reality like streaks determined in the flux of becoming by the meeting of contrary currents. "Laws," says Monsieur Boutroux, "are the bed down which passes the torrent of facts; they have dug it, though they follow it." Yet we see the common theories of evolution appealing to the concepts of the present to describe the past, forcing them back to prehistoric times, and beyond the reasoning of today, A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson placing at the beginning what is only conceivable in the mind of the contemporary thinker; in a word, imagining the same laws as always existing and always observed. This is the method which Mr Bergson so justly criticises in Spencer: that of reconstructing evolution with fragments of its product. If we wish thoroughly to grasp the reality of things, we must think otherwise. Neither of these ready-made concepts, mechanism and finality, is in place, because both of them imply the same postulate, viz. that "everything is given," either at the beginning or at the end, whilst evolution is nothing if it is not, on the contrary, "that which gives." Let us take care not to confound evolution and development. There is the stumbling-block of the usual transformist theories, and Mr Bergson devotes to it a closely argued and singularly penetrating criticism, by an example which he analyses in detail. ("Creative Evolution", chapter i.) These theories either do not explain the birth of variation, and limit themselves to an attempt to make us understand how, once born, it becomes fixed, or else through need of adaptation they look for a conception of its birth. But in both cases they fail. "The truth is that adaptation explains the windings of the movement of evolution, but not the general directions of the movement, still less the movement itself. The road which leads to the town is certainly obliged to climb the hills and go down the slopes; it adapts itself to the accidents of the ground; but the accidents of the ground are not the cause of the road, any more than they have imparted its direction." ("Creative Evolution", pages 111-112.) At the bottom of all these errors there are only prejudices of practical action. That is of course why every work appears to be an outside construction beginning with previous elements; a phase of anticipation followed by a phase of execution, calculation, and art, an effective projecting cause, and a concerted goal, a mechanism which hurls to a finality which aims. But the genuine explanation must be sought elsewhere. And Mr Bergson makes this plain by two admirable analyses in which he takes to pieces the common ideas of disorder and nothingness in order to explain their meaning relative to our proceedings in industry or A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson language. Let us come back to facts, to immediate experience, and try to translate its pure data simply. What are the characteristics of vital evolution? First of all it is a dynamic continuity, a continuity of qualitative progress; next, it is essentially a duration, an irreversible rhythm, a work of inner maturation. By the memory inherent in it, the whole of its past lives on and accumulates, the whole of its past remains for ever present to it; which is tantamount to saying that it is experience. It is also an effort of perpetual invention, a generation of continual novelty, indeducible and capable of defying all anticipation, as it defies all repetition. We see it at its task of research in the groping attempts exhibited by the long-sought genesis of species; we see it triumphant in the originality of the least state of consciousness, of the least body, of the tiniest cell, of which the infinity of times and spaces does not offer two identical specimens. But the reef which lies in its way, and on which too often it founders, is habit; habit would be a better and more powerful means of action if it remained free, but in so far as it congeals and becomes materialised, is a hindrance and an obstacle. First of all we have the average types round which fluctuates an action which is decreasing and becoming reduced in breadth. Then we have the residual organs, the proofs of dead life, the encrustations from which the stream of consciousness gradually ebbs; and finally we have the inert gear from which all real life has disappeared, the masses of shipwrecked "things" rearing their spectral outlines where once rolled the open sea of mind. The concept of mechanism suits the phenomena which occur within the zone of wreckage, on this shore of fixities and corpses. But life itself is rather finality, if not in the anthropomorphic sense of premeditated design, plan, or programme, at least in this sense, that it is a continually renewed effort of growth and liberation. And it is from here we get Mr Bergson's formulae: vital impetus and creative evolution. In this conception of being consciousness is everywhere, as original and fundamental reality, always present in a myriad degrees of tension or sleep, and under infinitely various rhythms. A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson The vital impulse consists in a "demand for creation"; life in its humblest stage already constitutes a spiritual activity; and its effort sends out a current of ascending realisation which again determines the counter- current of matter. Thus all reality is contained in a double movement of ascent and descent. The first only, which translates an inner work of creative maturation, is essentially durable; the second might, in strictness, be almost instantaneous, like that of an escaping spring; but the one imposes its rhythm on the other. From this point of view mind and matter appear not as two things opposed to each other, as static terms in fixed antithesis, but rather as two inverse directions of movement; and, in certain respects, we must therefore speak not so much of matter or mind as of spiritualisation and materialisation, the latter resulting automatically from a simple interruption of the former. "Consciousness or superconsciousness is the rocket, the extinguished remains of which fall into matter." ("Creative Evolution", page 283.) What image of universal evolution is then suggested? Not a cascade of deduction, nor a system of stationary pulsations, but a fountain which spreads like a sheaf of corn and is partially arrested, or at least hindered and delayed, by the falling spray. The fountain itself, the reality which is created, is vital activity, of which spiritual activity represents the highest form; and the spray which falls is the creative act which falls, it is reality which is undone, it is matter and inertia. In a word, the supreme law of genesis and fall, the double play of which constitutes the universe, comprises a psychological formula. Everything begins in the manner of an invention, as the fruit of duration and creative genius, by liberty, by pure mind; then comes habit, a kind of body, as the body is already a group of habits; and habit, taking root, being a work of consciousness which escapes it and turns against it, is little by little degraded into mechanism in which the soul is buried. III. The main lines and general perspective of Mr Bergson's philosophy now perhaps begin to appear. Certainly I am the first to feel how powerless a slender resume really is to translate all its wealth and all its strength. A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson At least I wish I could have contributed to making its movement, and what I may call its rhythm, clearer to perception. It is from the books of the master himself that a more complete revelation must be sought. And the few words which I am still going to add as conclusion are only intended to sketch the principal consequences of the doctrine, and allow its distant reach to be seen. The evolution of life would be a very simple and easy thing to understand if it were fulfilled along one single trajectory and followed a straight path. "But we are here dealing with a shell which has immediately burst into fragments, which, being themselves species of shells, have again burst into fragments destined to burst again, and so on for a very long time." ("Creative Evolution", page 107.) It is, in fact, the property of a tendency to develop itself in the expansion which analyses it. As for the causes of this dispersion into kingdoms, then into species, and finally into individuals, we can distinguish two series: the resistance which matter opposes to the current of life sent through it, and the explosive force--due to an unstable equilibrium of tendencies--carried by the vital impulse within itself. Both unite in making the thrust of life divide in more and more diverging but complementary directions, each emphasising some distinct aspect of its original wealth. Mr Bergson confines himself to the branches of the first order--plant, animal, and man. And in the course of a minute and searching discussion he shows us the characteristics of these lines in the moods or qualities signified by the three words--torpor, instinct, and intelligence: the vegetable kingdom constructing and storing explosives which the animal expends, and man creating a nervous system for himself which permits him to convert the expense into analysis. Let us leave aside, as we must, the many suggestive views scattered lavishly about, the many flashes of light which fall on all faces of the problem, and let us confine ourselves to seeing how we get a theory of knowledge from this doctrine. There we have yet another proof of the striking and fertile originality of the new philosophy. More than one objection has been brought against Mr Bergson on this head. That is quite natural: how could such a novelty be exactly understood at once? It is also very desirable; it is the demands for A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson enlightenment which lead a doctrine to full consciousness of itself, to precision and perfection. But we must be afraid of false objections, those which arise from an obstinate translation of the new philosophy into an old language steeped in a different metaphysic. With what has Mr Bergson been reproached? With misunderstanding reason, with ruining positive science, with being caught in the illusion of getting knowledge otherwise than by intelligence, or of thinking otherwise than by thought; in short, of falling into a vicious circle by making intellectualism turn round upon itself. Not one of these reproaches has any foundation. Let us begin by a few preliminary remarks to clear the ground. First of all, there is one ridiculous objection which I quote only to record. I mean that which suspects at the bottom of the theories which we are going to discuss some dark background, some prepossession of irrational mysticism. On the contrary, the truth is, we have here perhaps better than anywhere, the spectacle of pure thought face to face with things. But it is a complete thought, not thought reduced to some partial functions, but sufficiently sure of its critical power to sacrifice none of its resources. Here, we may say, really is the genuine positivism, which reinstates all spiritual reality. It does not in any way lead to a misunderstanding or depreciation of science. Even where contingency and relativity are most visible in it, in the domain of inert matter, Mr Bergson goes so far as to say that physical science touches an absolute. It is true that it touches this absolute rather than sees it. More particularly it perceives all its reactions on a system of representative forms which it presents to it, and observes the effect on the veil of theory with which it envelops it. At certain moments, all the same, the veil becomes almost transparent. And in any case the scholar's thought guesses and grazes reality in the curve drawn by the succession of its increasing syntheses. But there are two orders of science. Formerly it was from the mathematician that we borrowed the ideal of evidence. Hence came the inclination always to seek the most certain knowledge from the most abstract side. The temptation was to make a kind of less severe and rigorous mathematics of biology itself. Now if such a method suits the study of inert matter because in a manner geometrical, so much so that our knowledge of it thus A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson acquired is more incomplete than inexact, this is not at all the case for the things of life. Here, if we were to conduct scientific research always in the same grooves and according to the same formulae, we should immediately encounter symbolism and relativity. For life is progress, whilst the geometrical method is commensurable only with things. Mr Bergson is aware of this; and his rare merit has been to disengage specific originality from biology, while elevating it to a typical and standard science. But let us come to the heart of the problem. What was Kant's point of departure in the theory of knowledge? In seeking to define the structure of the mind according to the traces of itself which it must have left in its works, and in proceeding by a reflective analysis ascending from a fact to its conditions, he could only regard intelligence as a thing made, a fixed system of categories and principles. Mr Bergson adopts an inverse attitude. Intelligence is a product of evolution: we see it slowly and uninterruptedly constructed along a line which rises through the vertebrates to man. Such a point of view is the only one which conforms to the real nature of things, and the actual conditions of reality; the more we think of it, the more we perceive that the theory of knowledge and the theory of life are bound up with one another. Now what do we conclude from this point of view? Life, considered in the direction of "knowledge," evolves on two diverging lines which at first are confused, then gradually separate, and finally end in two opposed forms of organisation, intelligence and instinct. Several contrary potentialities interpenetrated at their common source, but of this source each of these kinds of activity preserves or rather accentuates only one tendency; and it will be easy to mark its dual character. Instinct is sympathy; it has no clear consciousness of itself; it does not know how to reflect; it is hardly capable of varying its steps; but it operates with incomparable certainty because it remains lodged in things, in communion with their rhythm and with inner feeling of them. The history of animals in this respect supplies many remarkable examples which Mr Bergson analyses and discusses in detail. As much might be said of the work which produces a living body, and of the effort which A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson presides over its growth, maintenance, and functions. Take a natural philosopher who has long breathed the atmosphere of the laboratory, who has by long practice acquired what we call "experience"; he has a kind of intimate feeling for his instruments, their resources, their movements, their working tendencies; he perceives them as extensions of himself; he possesses them as groups of habitual actions, thus discoursing by manipulations as easily and spontaneously as others discourse in calculation. Doubtless that is only an image; but transpose it and generalise it, and it will help you to understand the kind of action which divines instinct. But intelligence is something quite different. We are talking, of course, of the analytic and synthetic intelligence which we use in our acts of current thought, which works throughout our daily action and forms the fundamental thread of our scientific operations. I need not here go back to the criticism of its ordinary proceedings. But I must now note the service which suits them, the domain in which they apply and are valid, and what they teach us thereby about the meaning, reach, and natural task of intelligence. Whilst instinct vibrates in sympathetic harmony with life, it is about inert matter that intelligence is granted; it is a rider to our faculty of action; it triumphs in geometry; it feels at home among the objects in which our industry finds its supports and its tools. In a word, "our logic is primarily the logic of solids." (Preface to "Creative Evolution".) But if we enter the vital order its incompetence is manifestly apparent. It is very important that deduction should be so impotent in biology. Still more impotent is it perhaps in matters of art or religion; whilst, on the contrary, it works marvels so long as it has only to foresee movements or transformations in bodies. What does this mean, if not that intelligence and materiality go together, that language with its analytic steps is regulated by the movements of matter? Philosophy once again then must leave it behind, for the duty of philosophy is to consider everything in its relation to life. Do not conclude, however, that the philosopher's duty is to renounce intelligence, place it under tutelage, or abandon it to the blind suggestions of feeling and will. It has not even the right to do so. Instinct, with us A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson who have evolved along the grooves of intelligence, has remained too weak to be sufficient for us. Besides, intelligence is the only path by which light could dawn in the bosom of primitive darkness. But let us look at present reality in all its complexity, all its wealth. Round intelligence itself exists a halo of instinct. This halo represents the remains of the first nebulous vapour at the expense of which intelligence was constituted like a brilliantly condensed nucleus; and it is still today the atmosphere which gives it life, the fringe of touch, and delicate probing, inspiring contact and divining sympathy, which we see in play in the phenomena of discovery, as also in the acts of that "attention to life," and that "sense of reality" which is the soul of good sense, so widely distinct from common-sense. And the peculiar task of the philosopher is to reabsorb intelligence in instinct, or rather to reinstate instinct in intelligence; or better still, to win back to the heart of intelligence all the initial resources which it must have sacrificed. This is what is meant by return to the primitive, and the immediate, to reality and life. This is the meaning of intuition. Certainly the task is difficult. We at once suspect a vicious circle. How can we go beyond intelligence except by intelligence itself? We are apparently inside our thought, as incapable of coming out of it as is a balloon of rising above the atmosphere. True, but on this reasoning we could just as well prove that it is impossible for us to acquire any new habit whatsoever, impossible for life to grow and go beyond itself continually. We must avoid drawing false conclusions from the simile of the balloon. The question here is to know what are the real limits of the atmosphere. It is certain that the synthetic and critical intelligence, left to its own strength, remains imprisoned in a circle from which there is no escape. But action removes the barrier. If intelligence accepts the risk of taking the leap into the phosphorescent fluid which bathes it, and to which it is not altogether foreign, since it has broken off from it and in it dwell the complementary powers of the understanding, intelligence will soon become adapted and so will only be lost for a moment to reappear greater, A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson stronger, and of fuller content. It is action again under the name of experience which removes the danger of illusion or giddiness, it is action which verifies; by a practical demonstration, by an effort of enduring maturation which tests the idea in intimate contact with reality and judges it by its fruits. It always falls therefore to intelligence to pronounce the grand verdict in the sense that only that can be called true which will finally satisfy it; but we mean an intelligence duly enlarged and transformed by the very effect of the action it has lived. Thus the objection of "irrationalism" directed against the new philosophy falls to the ground. The objection of "non-morality" fares no better. But is has been made, and people have thought fit to accuse Mr Bergson's work of being the too calm production of an intelligence too indifferent, too coldly lucid, too exclusively curious to see and understand, untroubled and unthrilled by the universal drama of life, by the tragic reality of evil. On the other hand, not without contradiction, the new philosophy has been called "romantic," and people have tried to find in it the essential traits of romanticism: its predilection for feeling and imagination, its unique anxiety for vital intensity, its recognised right to all which is to be, whence its radical inability to establish a hierarchy of moral qualifications. Strange reproach! The system in question is not yet presented to us as a finished system. Its author manifests a plain desire to classify his problems. And he is certainly right in proceeding so: there is a time for everything, and on occasion we must learn to be just an eye focussed upon being. But that does not at all exclude the possibility of future works, treating in due order of the problem of human destiny, and perhaps even in the work so far completed we may descry some attempts to bring this future within ken. But universal evolution, though creative, is not for all that quixotic or anarchist. It forms a sequence. It is a becoming with direction, undoubtedly due, not to the attraction of a clearly preconceived goal, or the guidance of an outer law, but to the actual tendency of the original thrust. In spite of the stationary eddies or momentary backwashes we observe here and there, its stream moves in a definite direction, ever A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson swelling and broadening. For the spectator who regards the general sweep of the current, evolution is growth. On the other hand, he who thinks this growth now ended is under a simple delusion: "The gates of the future stand wide open." ("Creative Evolution", page 114.) In the stage at present attained man is leading; he marks the culminating point at which creation continues; in him, life has already succeeded, at least up to a certain point; from him onwards it advances with consciousness capable of reflection; is it not for that very reason responsible for the result? Life, according to the new philosophy, is a continual creation of what is new: new--be it well understood--in the sense of growth and progress in relation to what has gone before. Life, in a word, is mental travel, ascent in a path of growing spiritualisation. Such at least is the intense desire, and such the first tendency which launched and still inspires it. But it may faint, halt, or travel down the hill. This is an undeniable fact; and once recognised does it not awake in us the presentiment of a directing law immanent in vital effort, a law doubtless not to be found in any code, nor yet binding through the stern behest of mechanical necessity, but a law which finds definition at every moment, and at every moment also marks a direction of progress, being as it were the shifting tangent to the curve of becoming? Let us did that according to the new philosophy the whole of our past survives for ever in us, and by means of us results in action. It is then literally true that our acts do to a certain extent involve the whole universe, and its whole history: the act which we make it accomplish will exist henceforward for ever, and will for ever tinge universal duration with its indelible shade. Does not that imply an imperious, urgent, solemn, and tragic problem of action? Nay, more; memory makes a persistent reality of evil, as of good. Where are we to find the means to abolish and reabsorb the evil? What in the individual is called memory becomes tradition and joint responsibility in the race. On the other hand, a directing law is immanent in life, but in the shape of an appeal to endless transcendence. In dealing with this future transcendent to our daily life, with this further shore of present experience, where are we to seek the inspiring strength? And is there not ground for A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson asking ourselves whether intuitions have not arisen here and there in the course of history, lighting up the dark road of the future for us with a prophetic ray of dawn? It is at this point that the new philosophy would find place for the problem of religion. But this word "religion," which has not come once so far from Mr Bergson's pen, coming now from mine, warns me that it is time to end. No man today would be justified in foreseeing the conclusions to which the doctrine of creative evolution will one day undoubtedly lead on this point. More than any other, I must forget here what I myself may have elsewhere tried to do in this order of ideas. But it was impossible not to feel the approach of the temptation. Mr Bergson's work is extraordinarily suggestive. His books, so measured in tone, so tranquil in harmony, awaken in us a mystery of presentiment and imagination; they reach the hidden retreats where the springs of consciousness well up. Long after we have closed them we are shaken within; strangely moved, we listen to the deepening echo, passing on and on. However valuable already their explicit contents may be, they reach still further than they aimed. It is impossible to tell what latent germs they foster. It is impossible to guess what lies behind the boundless distance of the horizons they expose. But this at least is sure: these books have verily begun a new work in the history of human thought. ADDITIONAL EXPLANATIONS I. Mr Bergson's Work and the General Directions of Contemporary Thought. A broad survey of the new philosophy was bound to be somewhat rapid and summary; and now that this is completed it will doubtless not be superfluous to come back, on the same plan as before, to some more important or more difficult individual points, and to examine by themselves the most prominent centres on which we should focus the light A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson of our attention. Not that I intend to probe in minute detail the folds and turns of a doctrine which admits of infinite development: how can I claim to exhaust a work of such profound thought that the least passing example employed takes its place as a particular study? Still less do I wish to undertake a kind of analytic resume; no undertaking could be less profitable than that of arranging paragraph headings to repeat too briefly, and therefore obscurely, what a thinker has said without any extravagance of language, yet with every requisite explanation. The critic's true task, as I understand it, in no way consists in drawing up a table of contents strewn with qualifying notes. His task is to read and enable others to read between the lines, between the chapters, and between the successive works, what constitutes the dynamic tie between them, all that the linear form of writing and language has not allowed the author himself to elucidate. His task is, as far as possible, to master the accompaniment of underlying thought which produced the resonant atmosphere of the inquirer's intuition, the rhythm and toning of the image, resulting in the shade of light which falls upon his vision. His task, in a word, is to help understanding, and therefore to point out and anticipate the misunderstandings to be feared. Now it seems to me that there are a few points round which the errors of interpretation more naturally gather, producing some astounding misconceptions of Mr Bergson's philosophy. It is these points only that I propose to clear up. But at the same time I shall use the opportunity to supply information about authorities, which I have hitherto deliberately omitted, to avoid riddling with references pages which were primarily intended to impart a general impression. Let us begin by glancing at the milieu of thought in which Mr Bergson's philosophy must have had birth. For the last thirty years new currents are traceable. In what direction do they go? And what distance have they already gone? What, in short, are the intellectual characteristics of our time? We must endeavour to distinguish the deeper tendencies, those which herald and prepare and near future. One of the essential and frequently cited features of the generation in which Taine and Renan were the most prominent leaders was the A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson passionate, enthusiastic, somewhat exclusive and intolerant cult of positive science. This science, in its days of pride, was considered unique, displayed on a plane by itself, always uniformly competent, capable of gripping any object whatever with the same strength, and of inserting it in the thread of one and the same unbroken connection. The dream of that time, despite all verbal palliations, was a universal science of mathematics: mathematics, of course, with their bare and brutal rigour softened and shaded off, where feasible; if possible, supple and sensitive; in ideal, delicate, buoyant, and judicious; but mathematics governed from end to end by an equal necessity. Conceived as the sole mistress of truth, this science was expected in days to come to fulfil all the needs of man, and unreservedly to take the place of ancient spiritual discipline. Genuine philosophy had had its day: all metaphysics seemed deception and fantasy, a simple play of empty formulae or puerile dreams, a mythical procession of abstraction and phantom; religion itself paled before science, as poetry of the grey morning before the splendour of the rising sun. However, after all this pride came the turn of humility, and humility of the very lowest. This deified science, borne down in its hour of triumph by too heavy a weight, had necessarily been recognised as powerless to go beyond the order of relations, and radically incapable of telling us the origin, end, and basis of things. It analysed the conditions of phenomena, but was ill-suited ever to grasp any real cause, or any deep essence. Further, it became the Unknowable, before which the human mind could only halt in despair. And in this way destitution arose out of ambition itself, since thought, after trusting too exclusively to its geometrical strength, was compelled at the end of its effort to confess itself beaten when confronted with the only questions to which no man may ever be indifferent. This double attitude is no longer that of the contemporary generation. The prestige of illusion has vanished. In the religion of science we see now nothing but idolatry. The haughty affirmation of yesterday appears today, not as expressing a positive fact or a result duly established, but as bringing forward a thesis of perilous and unconscious metaphysics. Let us go even further. If true intelligence is mental expansion and aptitude A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson for understanding widely different things, each in its originality, to the same degree, we must say that the claim to reduce reality to one only of its modes, to know it in one only of its forms, is an unintelligent claim. That is, in brief formula, the verdict of the present generation. Not, of course, that it in any way misconceives or disdains the true value of science, whether as an instrument of action for the conquest of nature, or as intelligible language, allowing us to know our whereabouts in things and "talk" them. It is aware that in all circumstances positive methods have their evidence to produce, and that, where they pronounce within the limits of their power, nothing can stand against their verdict. But it considers first of all that science was conceived of late under much too stiff and narrow a form, under the obsession of too abstract a mathematical ideal which corresponds to one aspect of reality only, and that the shallowest. And it considers afterwards that science, even when broadened and made flexible, being concerned only with what is, with fact and datum, remains radically powerless to solve the problem of human life. Nowhere does science penetrate to the very depth of things, and there is nothing in the world but "things." Experience has shown where the dream of universal mathematics leads us. Number is driven to the heart of phenomena and nature dissected with this delicate scalpel. Speaking in more general terms, we adopt spatial relation as the perfect example of intelligible relation. I do not wish to deny the use of such a method now and again, the services it may render, or the beauty of construction peculiar to the systems it inspires. But we must see what price we pay for these advantages. Do we choose geometry for an informing and regulating science? The more we advance towards the concrete and the living, the more we feel the necessity of altering the pure mathematical type. The sciences, as they get further from inert matter, unless they agree to reform, pale and weaken; they become vague, impotent, anaemic; they touch little but the trite surface of their object, the body, not the soul; in them symbolism, artifice, and relativity become increasingly evident; at length, arbitrary and conventional elements crop up and devour them. In a word, the claim to A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson treat the living as inert matter conduces to the misconception in life of life itself, and the retention of nothing but the material waste. This experience furnishes us with a lesson. There is not so much one science as several sciences, each distinguished by an autonomous method, and divided into two great kingdoms. Let us therefore from the outset follow Mr Bergson in tracing a very sharp line of demarcation between the inert and the living. Two orders of knowledge will thereby become separate, one in which the frames of geometrical understanding are in place, the other where new means and a new attitude are required. The essential task of the present hour will now appear to us in a precise light; it will henceforward consist, without any disregard of a glorious past, in an effort to found as specifically distinct methods of instruction those sciences which take for objects the successive moments of life in its different degrees, biology, psychology, sociology;-- then in an effort to reconstruct, setting out from these new sciences and according to their spirit, the like of what ancient philosophy had attempted, setting out from geometry and mechanics. By so doing we shall succeed in throwing knowledge open to receive all the wealth of reality, while at the same time we shall reinstate the sense of mystery and the thrill of higher anxieties. A further result will be that the phantom of the Unknowable will be exorcised, since it no longer represents anything but the relative and momentary limit of each method, the portion of being which escapes its partial grip. This is one of the first controlling ideas of the contemporary generation. Others result from it. More particularly, it is for the same body of motives, in the same sense, and with the same restrictions, that we distrust intellectualism; I mean the tendency to live uniquely by intelligence, to think as if the whole of thought consisted in analytic, clear and reasoning understanding. Once again, it is not a question of some blind abandonment to sentiment, imagination, or will, nor do we claim to restrict the legitimate rights of intellectuality in judgment. But around critical reason there is a quickening atmosphere in which dwell the powers of intuition, there is a half-light of gradual tones in which insertion into reality is effected. If A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson by rationalism we mean the attitude which consists in cabining ourselves within the zone of geometrical light in which language evolves, we must admit that rationalism supposes something other than itself, that it hangs suspended by a generating act which escapes it. The method therefore which we seek to employ everywhere today is experience; but complete experience, anxious to neglect no aspect of being nor any resource of mind; shaded experience, not extending on the surface only, in a homogeneous and uniform manner; on the contrary, an experience distributed in depth over multiple planes, adopting a thousand different forms to adapt itself to the different kinds of problems; in short, a creative and informing experience, a veritable genesis, a genuine action of thought, a work and movement of life by which the guiding principles, forms of intelligibility, and criteria of verification obtain birth and stability in habits. And here again it is by borrowing Mr Bergson's own formula from him that we shall most accurately describe the new spirit. That the attitude and fundamental procedure of this new spirit are in no way a return to scepticism or a reaction against thought cannot be better demonstrated than by this resurrection of metaphysics, this renaissance of idealism, which is certainly one of the most distinctive features of our epoch. Undoubtedly philosophy in France has never known so prosperous and so pregnant a moment. Notwithstanding, it is not a return to the old dreams of dialectic construction. Everything is regarded from the point of view of life, and there is a tendency more and more to recognise the primacy of spiritual activity. But we wish to understand and employ this activity and this life in all its wealth, in all its degrees, and by all its functions: we wish to think with the whole of thought, and go to the truth with the whole of our soul; and the reason of which we recognise the sovereign weight is reason laden with its complete past history. And what is that, really, but realism? By realism I mean the gift of ourselves to reality, the work of concrete realisation, the effort to convert every idea into action, to regulate the idea by the action as much as the action by the idea, to live what we think and think what we live. But that is positivism, you will say; certainly it is positivism. But how changed! A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson Far from considering as positive only that which can be an object of sensation or calculation, we begin by greeting the great spiritual realities with this title. The deep and living aspiration of our day is in everything to seek the soul, the soul which specifies and quickens, seek it by an effort towards the revealing sympathy which is genuine intelligence, seek it in the concrete, without dissolving thought in dreams or language, without losing contact with the body or critical control, seek it, in fine, as the most real and genuine part of being. Hence its return to questions which were lately declared out of date and closed; hence its taste for problems of aesthetics and morality, its close siege of social and religious problems, its homesickness for a faith harmonising the powers of action and the powers of thought; hence its restless desire to hark back to tradition and discipline. A new philosophy was required to answer this new way of looking at things. Already, in 1867, Ravaisson in his celebrated "Report" wrote these prophetic lines: "Many signs permit us to foresee in the near future a philosophical epoch of which the general character will be the predominance of what may be called spiritualist realism or positivism, having as generating principle the consciousness which the mind has in itself of an existence recognised as being the source and support of every other existence, being none other than its action." This prophetic view was further commented on in a work where Mr Bergson speaks with just praise of this shrewd and penetrating sense of what was coming: "What could be bolder or more novel than to come and predict to the physicists that the inert will be explained by the living, to biologists that life will only be understood by thought, to philosophers that generalities are not philosophic?" ("Notice on the Life and Works of M. Felix Ravaisson-Molien", in the Reports of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, 1904.) But let us give each his due. What Ravaisson had only anticipated Mr Bergson himself accomplishes, with a precision which gives body to the impalpable and floating breath of first inspiration, with a depth which renews both proof and theses alike, with a creative originality which prevents the critic who is anxious for justice and precision from insisting A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson on any researches establishing connection of thought. One reason for the popularity today enjoyed by this new philosophy is doubtless to be found in the very tendencies of the milieu in which it is produced and in the aspirations which work it. But, after once remarking these desires, we must further not forget that Mr Bergson has contributed more than anyone else to awaken them, determine them, and make them become conscious of themselves. Let us therefore try to understand in itself and by itself the work of genius of which just now we were seeking the dawning gleams. What synthetic formula will be best able to tell us the essential direction of its movement? I will borrow it from the author himself: "It seems to me," he writes, ("Philosophic Intuition" in the "Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", November 1911.) "that metaphysics are trying at this moment to simplify themselves, to come nearer to life." Every philosophy tends to become incarnate in a system which constitutes for it a kind of body of analysis. Regarded literally, it appears to be an infinite complication, a complex construction with a thousand alcoves of high architecture, "in which measures have been taken to provide ample lodging for all problems." (Ibid.) Do not let us be deceived by this appearance: it signifies only that language is incommensurable with thought, that speech admits of endless multiplication in approximations incapable of exhausting their object. But before constructing such a body for itself, all philosophy is a soul, a mind, and begins with the simple unity of a generating intuition. Here is the fitting point at which to see its essence; this is what determines it much better than its conceptual expression, which is always contingent and incomplete. "A philosophy worthy of the name has never said but one thing; and that thing it has rather attempted to say than actually said. And it has only said one thing, because it has only seen one point: and that was not so much vision as contact; this contact supplied an impulse, this impulse a movement, and if this movement, which is a kind of vortex of a certain particular form, is only visible to our eyes by what it has picked up on its path, it is no less true that other dust might equally well have been raised, and that it would still have been the same vortex." ("Philosophic Intuition" in the "Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson November 1911.) Hence comes the fact that a philosophy is at bottom much more independent of its natal environment than one might at first suppose; hence also the fact that ancient philosophies, though apparently relative to a science which is out of date, remain always living and worthy of study. What, then, is the original intuition of Mr Bergson's philosophy, the creative intuition whence it comes forth? We cannot hesitate long: it is the intuition of duration. That is the perspective centre to which we must indefatigably return; that is the principle which we must labour to expose in its full light; and that is, finally, the source of light which will illumine us. Now a philosophy is not only an expressed intuition; it is further and above all an acting intuition, gradually determined and realised, and tested by its explanatory works; and it is by its fruits that we can understand and judge it. Hence the review upon which we are entering. II. Immediacy. The philosopher's first duty is in clear language to declare his starting- point, with what a mathematician would call the "tangent to the origin" of the path along which he is travelling, as afterwards the critic's first duty is to describe this initial attitude. I have therefore first of all to indicate the directing idea of the new philosophy. But it is not a question of extracting a quintessence, or of fencing the soul of doctrine within a few summary formulae. A system is not to be resumed in a phrase, for every proposition isolated is a proposition falsified. I wish merely to elucidate the methodical principle which inspires the beginning of Mr Bergson's philosophy. To philosophy itself falls the task and belongs the right to define itself gradually as it becomes constituted. On this point, an anticipation of experience seems hardly possible; here, as elsewhere, the finding of a synthetic formula is a final rather than preliminary question. However, we are obliged from the outset of the work to determine the programme of the inquiry, if only to direct our research. It is the same on the threshold of every science. There, it is true, the analogy ceases. For in any science properly speaking the determination of beginning consists in the A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson indication of an object, and a matter, and beyond that, to each new object a new science reciprocally corresponds, the existence of the one involving the legitimacy of the other. But if the various sciences--I mean the positive sciences--divide different objects thus between them, philosophy cannot, in its turn, come forward as a particular science, having a distinct object, the designation of which would be sufficient to characterise and circumscribe it. Such was always the traditional conception: such will ours continue to be. For, as a matter of fact, every object has a philosophy and all matter can be regarded philosophically. In short, philosophy is chiefly a way of perceiving and thinking, an attitude and a proceeding: the peculiar and specific in it is more an intuition than a content, a spirit rather than a domain. What, then, is the characteristic function of philosophy, at least its initial function, that which marks its opening? To criticise the works of knowledge spontaneously effected; that is to say, to scrutinise their direction, reach, and conditions: that is today the unanimous answer of philosophers when questioned about the goal of their labours. In other terms, what they study is not so much such and such a particular "thing" as the relation of mind to each of the realities to be studied. Their object, if we must employ the word, is knowledge itself, it is the act of knowing regarded from the point of view of its meaning and value. Philosophy thus appears as a new "order" of knowledge, co- extensive with what is knowable, as a kind of knowledge of the second degree, in which it is less a question of learning than of understanding, in which we aim at progressing in depth rather than in extent; not effort to extend the quantity of knowledge, but reflection on the quality of this knowledge. Spontaneous thought--vulgar or scientific--is a direct, simple, and practical thought turned towards things and partial to useful results; seeking what is formulable rather than what is true, or at least so fond of formulae which can be handled, manipulated, or transmitted, that it is always tempted to see the truth in them; a thought which, moreover, sets out from more or less unguarded postulates, abandons itself to the motive impulses of habits contracted, and goes straight on indefinitely without self-examination. Philosophy, on the contrary, desires to be thought A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson about thought, thought retracing its life and work, knowledge labouring to know itself, fact which aspires to fact about itself, mental effort to become free, to become entirely transparent and luminous in its own eyes, and, if need be, to effect self-reform by dissipating its natural illusions. What we have before our eyes then are the initial postulates themselves, the first spontaneous thoughts, the obscure origins of reason; and we are proceeding towards a point of departure rather than arrival. The new philosophy does not refuse to carry out this first critical task; but it carries it out in its own way after determining more precisely the real conditions of the problem. At the hour when methodical research begins, the philosopher's mind is not clean-swept; and it would be chimerical to wish to place oneself from the beginning, by some act of transcendence, outside common thought. This thought cannot be inspected and judged from outside. It constitutes, whether we wish it or no, the sole concrete and positive point of departure. Let us add that common- sense constitutes also our sole point of insertion into reality. It can only then be a question of purifying it, not in any way of replacing it. But we must distinguish in it what is pure fact, and what is ulterior arrangement, in order to see what are the problems which really are presented, and what are, on the contrary, the false problems, the illusory problems, those which relate only to our artifices of language. The search for facts is then the first necessary moment of all philosophy. But common thought comes before us at the outset as a piece of very composite alluvial ground. It is a beginning of positive science, and also a residue of all philosophical opinions which have had some vogue. That, however, is not its primary basis. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari, says the proverb. In certain respects, "speculation is a luxury, whilst action is a necessity." ("Creative Evolution", page 47.) But "life requires us to apprehend things in the relation they have to our needs." ("Laughter", page 154.) Hence comes the fundamental utilitarianism of common-sense. Therefore if we wish to define it in itself and for itself, and no longer as a first approximation of such and such a system of metaphysics, it appears to us no longer as rudimentary science and A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson philosophy, but as an organisation of thought in view of practical life. Thus it is that outside all speculative opinion it is effectively lived by all. Its proper language, we may say, is the language of customary perception and mechanical fabrication, therefore a language relative to action, made to express action, modelled upon action, translating things by the relations they maintain to our action; I mean our corporal and synthetic action, which very evidently implies thought, since it is a question of the action of a reasonable being, but which thus contains a thought which is itself eminently practical. However, we are here regarding common-sense considered as a source of fact. Its utilitarianism then becomes a kind of spontaneous metaphysics from which we must detach ourselves. But is it not the very task of positive science to execute this work of purification? Nothing of the kind, despite appearances and despite intentions. Let us examine more closely. The general categories of common thought, according to Mr Bergson, ("Philosophic Intuition" in the "Metaphysical and Moral Review", November 1911, page 825.) remain those of science; the main roads traced by our senses through the continuity of reality are still those along which science will pass; perception is an infant science and science an adult perception; so much so that customary knowledge and scientific knowledge, both of them destined to prepare our action upon things, are of necessity two visions of the same kind, though of unequal precision and reach. It does not follow that science does not practise a certain disinterestedness as far as immediate mechanical utility is concerned; it does not follow that it has no value as knowledge. But it does not set itself genuinely free from the habits contracted in common experience, and to inform its research it preserves the postulates of common-sense; so that it always grasps things by their "actable" side, by their point of contact with our faculty for action, under the forms by which we handle them conceptually or practically, and all it attains of reality is that by which nature is a possible object of language or industry. Let us turn now towards another aspect of natural thought, to discover in it the germ of the necessary criticism. By the side of "common-sense," which is the first rough-draft of positive science, there is "good sense," A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson which differs from it profoundly, and marks the beginning of what we shall later on call philosophic intuition. (Cf. an address on "Good Sense and Classical Studies", delivered by Mr Bergson at the Concours general prize distribution, 30th July 1895.) It is a sense of what is real, concrete, original, living, an art of equilibrium and precision, a fine touch for complexities, continually feeling like the antennae of some insects. It contains a certain distrust of the logical faculty in respect of itself; it wages incessant war upon intellectual automatism, upon ready-made ideas and linear deduction; above all, it is anxious to locate and to weigh, without any oversights; it arrests the development of every principle and every method at the precise point where too brutal an application would offend the delicacy of reality; at every moment it collects the whole of our experience and organises it in view of the present. It is, in a word, thought which keeps its freedom, activity which remains awake, suppleness of attitude, attention to life, an ever-renewed adjustment to suit ever-new situations. Its revealing virtue is derived from this moving contact with fact, and this living effort of sympathy. This is what we must tend to transpose from the practical to the speculative order. What, then, will be for us the beginning of philosophy? After taking cognisance of common utilitarianism, and to emerge from the relativity in which it buries us, we seek a departure-point, a criterion, something which decides the raising of inquiry. Where are we to find such a principle, except in the very action of thought; I mean, this time, its action of profound life independent of all practical aim? We shall thus only be imitating the example of Descartes when solving the problem of temporary doubt. What we shall term return to the immediate, the primitive, the pure fact, will be the taking of each perception considered as an act lived, a coloured moment of the Cogito, and this will be for us a criterion and departure-point. Let us specify this point. Immediate data or primitive data or pure data are apprehended by us under forms of disinterested action; I mean that they are first of all lived rather than conceived, that before becoming material for science, they appear as moments of life; in brief, that A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson perception of them precedes their use. It is at this stage previous to language that we are by these pure data in intimate communion with reality itself, and the whole of our critical task is to return to them through a regressive analysis, the goal of which is gradually to make our clear intelligence equal to our primordial intuition. The latter already constitutes a thought, a preconceptual thought which is the intrinsic light of action, which is action itself so far as it is luminous. Thus there is no question here of restricting in any degree the part played by thought, but only of distinguishing between the perceptive and theoretic functions of mind. What is "the image" of which Mr Bergson speaks at the beginning of "Matter and Mind" except, when grasped in its first movement, the flash of conscious existence "in which the act of knowledge coincides with the generating act of reality"? ("Report of the French Philosophical Society", philosophical vocabulary, article "Immediate".) Let us forget all philosophical controversies about realism and idealism; let us try to reconstruct for ourselves a simplicity, a virginal and candid glance, freeing us from the habits contracted in the course of practical life. These then are our "images": not things presented externally, nor states felt internally, not portraits of exterior beings nor projections of internal moods, but appearances, in the etymological sense of the word, appearances lived simply, without our being distinguished from them, as yet neither subjective nor objective, marking a moment of consciousness previous to the work of reflection, from which proceeds the duality of subject and object. And such also, in every order, appear the "immediate feelings"; as action in birth, previous to language. (Cf. "Matter and Memory", Foreword to the 7th edition.) Why depart from the immediate thus conceived as action and life? Because it is quite impossible to do otherwise, for every initial fact can be only such a pulsation of consciousness in its lived act, and the fundamental and primitive direction of the least word, were it in an enunciation of a problem or a doubt, can only be such a direction of life and action. And we must certainly accord to this immediacy a value of absolute knowledge, since it realises the coincidence of being and A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson knowledge. But let us not think that the perception of immediacy is simple passive perception, that it is sufficient to open our eyes to obtain it, today when our utilitarian education is completed and has passed into the state of habit. There is a difference between common experience and the initial action of life; the first is a practical limitation of the second. Hence it follows that a previous criticism is necessary to return from one to the other, a criticism always in activity, always open as a way of progressive investigation, always ready for the reiteration and the renewal of effort. In this task of purification there is doubtless always to be feared an illusion of remaining in the primitive stage. By what criteria, by what signs can we recognise that we have touched the goal? Pure fact is shown to be such on the one hand because it remains independent of all theoretical symbolism, because the critique of language allows it to exist thus as an indissoluble residue, because we are unable not to "live" it, even when we free ourselves from the anxiety of utility; on the other hand, because it dominates all systems, and imposes itself equally upon them all as the common source from which they derive by diverging analyses, and in which they become reconciled. Assuredly, to attain it, to extricate it, we must appeal to the revelations of science, to the exercise of deliberate thought. But this employment of analysis against analysis does not in any way constitute a circle, for it tends only to destroy prejudices which have become unconscious: it is a simple artifice destined to break off habits and to scatter illusions by changing the points of view. Once set free, once again become capable of direct and simple view, what we accept as fact is what bears no trace of synthetic elaboration. It is true that here a last objection presents itself: how shall we think this limit, purely given, to any degree at all in fact, if it must precede all language? The answer is easy. Why speak thus of limit? This word has two senses: at one time it designates a last term in a series of approximations, and at another a certain internal character of convergence, a certain quality of progression. Now, it is the second sense only which suits the case before us. Immediacy contains no matter statically defined, and no thing. The A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson notion of fact is quite relative. What is fact in one case may become construction in another. For example, the percepts of common experience are facts for the physicist, and constructions for the philosopher; the same applies to a table of numerical results, for the scholar who is trying to establish a theory, or for the observer and the psychologist. We may then conceive a series in which each term is fact in relation to those which follow it, and constructed in relation to those which precede it. The expression "primitive fact" then determines not so much a final object as a direction of thought, a movement of critical retrogression, a journey from the most to the least elaborate, and the "contact with pure immediacy" is only the effort, more and more prolonged, to convert the elements of experience into real and profound action. III. Theory of Perception. Of what the work of return to immediacy consists, and how the intuition which it calls up reveals absolute fact, we shall see by an example, if we study more closely a capital point of Mr Bergson's philosophy, the theory of external perception. If the act of perceiving realises the lived communion of the subject and object in the image, we must admit that here we have the perfect knowledge which we wish to obtain always: we resign ourselves to conception only for want of perception, and our ideal is to convert all conception into perception. Doubtless we might define philosophy by this same ideal, as an effort to expand our perceptive power until we render it capable of grasping all the wealth and all the depth of reality at a single glance. Too true it is that such an ideal remains inaccessible to us. Something, however, is given us already in aesthetic intuition. Mr Bergson has pointed it out in some admirable pages, ("Laughter", pages 153-161.) and has explained to us also how philosophy pursues an analogous end. (First lecture on "The Perception of Change", delivered at Oxford, 26th May 1911.) But philosophy must be conceived as an art implying science and A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson criticism, all experience and all reason. It is when we look at metaphysics in this way that they become a positive order of veritable knowledge. Kant has conclusively established that what lies beyond language can only be attained by direct vision, not by dialectic progress. His mistake was that he afterwards believed such a vision for ever impossible; and whence did this mistake arise, if not from the fact that, for his new vision, he exacted intuitive faculties quite different from those at man's disposal. Here again the artist will be our example and model. He appeals to no transcendent sense, but detaches common-sense from its utilitarian prejudices. Let us do the same: we shall obtain a similar result without lying ourselves open to Kant's objections. This work is everywhere possible, and it is, par excellence, the work of philosophy: let us try then to sketch it in relation to the perception of matter. We must distinguish two senses of the word "perception." This word means first of all simple apprehension of immediacy, grasp of primitive fact. When we use it in this sense, we will agree to say pure perception. It is perhaps in place to see in it nothing but a limit which concrete experience never presents unmixed, a direction of research rather than the possession of a thing. However that may be, the first sense is the fundamental sense, and what it designates must be at the root of all ordinary perception; I mean, of every mental operation which results in the construction of a percept: a term formed by analogy with concept, representing the result of a complex work of analysis and synthesis, with judgment from externals. We live the images in an act of pure perception, whilst the objects of ordinary perception are, for example, the bodies of which we speak in common language. With regard to the relation of the two senses which we have just distinguished, common opinion seems very precise. It might be thus resumed: at the point of departure we have simple sensations, similar to qualitative atoms (this is the part of pure perception), and afterwards their arrangement into connected systems, which are percepts. But criticism does not authorise this manner of looking at it. Nowhere does knowledge begin by separate elements. Such elements are A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson always a product of analysis. So there is a problem to solve to regain the basis of pure perception which is hidden and obscured by our familiar percepts. Do not suppose that the solution of this problem is easy. One method only is of any use: to plunge into reality, to become immersed in it, in a long-pursued effort to assimilate all the records of common-sense and positive science. "For we do not obtain an intuition of reality, that is to say, an intellectual sympathy with its inmost content, unless we have gained its confidence by long companionship with its superficial manifestations. And it is not a question merely of assimilating the leading facts; we must accumulate and melt them down into such an enormous mass that we are sure, in this fusion, of neutralising in one another all the preconceived and premature ideas which observers may have unconsciously allowed to form the sediment of their observations. Thus, and only thus, is crude materiality to be disengaged from known facts." ("Introduction to Metaphysics" in the "Metaphysical and Moral Review", January 1903. For the correct interpretation of this passage ("intellectual sympathy") it must not be forgotten that before "Creative Evolution", Mr Bergson employed the word "intelligence" in a wider acceptation, more akin to that commonly received.) A directing principle controls this work and reintroduces order and convergence, after dispensing with them at the outset; viz. that, contrary to common opinion, perception as practised in the course of daily life, "natural" perception does not aim at a goal of disinterested knowledge, but one of practical utility, or rather, if it is knowledge, it is only knowledge elaborated in view of action and speech. Need we repeat here the proofs by which we have already established in the most positive manner that such is really the meaning of ordinary perception, the underlying reason which causes it to take the place of pure perception? We perceive by habit only what is useful to us, what interests us practically; very often, too, we think we are perceiving when we are merely inferring, as for example when we seem to see a distance in depth, a succession of planes, of which in reality we judge by differences of colouring or relief. A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson Our senses supplement one another. A slow education has gradually taught us to co-ordinate their impressions, especially those of touch to those of vision. (H. Bergson, "Note on the Psychological Origins of Our Belief in the Law of Causality". Vol. i. of the "Library of the International Philosophical Congress", 1900.) Theoretical forms come between nature and us: a veil of symbols envelops reality; thus, finally, we no longer see things themselves, we are content to read the labels on them. Moreover, our perception appears to analysis completely saturated