I gave you a very stiff lecture last time, and I fear that this one
can be little less so. The best way of entering into it will be to
begin immediately with Bergson's philosophy, since I told you that that
was what had led me personally to renounce the intellectualistic method
and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or
cannot be.
Professor Henri Bergson is a young man, comparatively, as
influential philosophers go, having been born at Paris in 1859. His
career has been the perfectly routine one of a successful french
professor. Entering the ecole normale superieure at the age of
twenty-two, he spent the next seventeen years teaching at lycees, provincial or parisian, until his fortieth year, when he was made
professor at the said ecole normale. Since 1900 he has been professor
at the College de France, and member of the Institute since 1900. So
far as the outward facts go, Bergson's career has then been commonplace
to the utmost. Neither one of Taine's famous principles of explanation
of great men, the race, the environment, or the moment, no, nor
all three together, will explain that peculiar way of looking at things
that constitutes his mental individuality. Originality in men dates
from nothing previous, other things date from it, rather. I have to
confess that Bergson's originality is so profuse that many of his ideas
baffle me entirely. I doubt whether any one understands him all over,
so to speak; and I am sure that he would himself be the first to see
that this must be, and to confess that things which he himself has not
yet thought out clearly, had yet to be mentioned and have a tentative
place assigned them in his philosophy. Many of us are profusely
original, in that no man can understand us—violently peculiar ways of
looking at things are no great rarity. The rarity is when great
peculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual command
of all the classic expository apparatus. Bergson's resources in the way
of erudition are remarkable, and in the way of expression they are
simply phenomenal. This is why in France, where l'art de bien dire
counts for so much and is so sure of appreciation, he has immediately
taken so eminent a place in public esteem. Old-fashioned professors,
whom his ideas quite fail to satisfy, nevertheless speak of his talent
almost with bated breath, while the youngsters flock to him as to a
master.
If anything can make hard things easy to follow, it is a style like
Bergson's. A 'straightforward' style, an american reviewer lately
called it; failing to see that such straightforwardness means a
flexibility of verbal resource that follows the thought without a
crease or wrinkle, as elastic silk underclothing follows the movements
of one's body. The lucidity of Bergson's way of putting things is what
all readers are first struck by. It seduces you and bribes you in
advance to become his disciple. It is a miracle, and he a real
magician.
M. Bergson, if I am rightly informed, came into philosophy through
the gateway of mathematics. The old antinomies of the infinite were, I
imagine, the irritant that first woke his faculties from their dogmatic
slumber. You all remember Zeno's famous paradox, or sophism, as many of
our logic books still call it, of Achilles and the tortoise. Give that
reptile ever so small an advance and the swift runner Achilles can
never overtake him, much less get ahead of him; for if space and time
are infinitely divisible (as our intellects tell us they must be), by
the time Achilles reaches the tortoise's starting-point, the tortoise
has already got ahead of that starting-point, and so on ad
infinitum, the interval between the pursuer and the pursued growing
endlessly minuter, but never becoming wholly obliterated. The common
way of showing up the sophism here is by pointing out the ambiguity of
the expression 'never can overtake.' What the word 'never' falsely
suggests, it is said, is an infinite duration of time; what it really
means is the inexhaustible number of the steps of which the overtaking
must consist. But if these steps are infinitely short, a finite time
will suffice for them; and in point of fact they do rapidly converge,
whatever be the original interval or the contrasted speeds, toward
infinitesimal shortness. This proportionality of the shortness of the
times to that of the spaces required frees us, it is claimed, from the
sophism which the word 'never' suggests.
But this criticism misses Zeno's point entirely. Zeno would have
been perfectly willing to grant that if the tortoise can be overtaken
at all, he can be overtaken in (say) twenty seconds, but he would still
have insisted that he can't be overtaken at all. Leave Achilles and the
tortoise out of the account altogether, he would have said—they
complicate the case unnecessarily. Take any single process of change
whatever, take the twenty seconds themselves elapsing. If time be
infinitely divisible, and it must be so on intellectualist principles,
they simply cannot elapse, their end cannot be reached; for no matter
how much of them has already elapsed, before the remainder, however
minute, can have wholly elapsed, the earlier half of it must first have
elapsed. And this ever re-arising need of making the earlier half
elapse first leaves time with always something to do before
the last thing is done, so that the last thing never gets done.
Expressed in bare numbers, it is like the convergent series 1/2 plus
1/4 plus 1/8..., of which the limit is one. But this limit, simply
because it is a limit, stands outside the series, the value of which
approaches it indefinitely but never touches it. If in the natural
world there were no other way of getting things save by such successive
addition of their logically involved fractions, no complete units or
whole things would ever come into being, for the fractions' sum would
always leave a remainder. But in point of fact nature doesn't make eggs
by making first half an egg, then a quarter, then an eighth, etc., and
adding them together. She either makes a whole egg at once or none at
all, and so of all her other units. It is only in the sphere of change,
then, where one phase of a thing must needs come into being before
another phase can come that Zeno's paradox gives trouble.
And it gives trouble then only if the succession of steps of change
be infinitely divisible. If a bottle had to be emptied by an infinite
number of successive decrements, it is mathematically impossible that
the emptying should ever positively terminate. In point of fact,
however, bottles and coffee-pots empty themselves by a finite number of
decrements, each of definite amount. Either a whole drop emerges or
nothing emerges from the spout. If all change went thus drop-wise, so
to speak, if real time sprouted or grew by units of duration of
determinate amount, just as our perceptions of it grow by pulses, there
would be no zenonian paradoxes or kantian antinomies to trouble us. All
our sensible experiences, as we get them immediately, do thus change by
discrete pulses of perception, each of which keeps us saying 'more,
more, more,' or 'less, less, less,' as the definite increments or
diminutions make themselves felt. The discreteness is still more
obvious when, instead of old things changing, they cease, or when
altogether new things come. Fechner's term of the 'threshold,' which
has played such a part in the psychology of perception, is only one way
of naming the quantitative discreteness in the change of all our
sensible experiences. They come to us in drops. Time itself comes in
drops.
Our ideal decomposition of the drops which are all that we feel into
still finer fractions is but an incident in that great transformation
of the perceptual order into a conceptual order of which I spoke in my
last lecture. It is made in the interest of our rationalizing intellect
solely. The times directly felt in the experiences of living
subjects have originally no common measure. Let a lump of sugar melt in
a glass, to use one of M. Bergson's instances. We feel the time to be
long while waiting for the process to end, but who knows how long or
how short it feels to the sugar? All felt times coexist and
overlap or compenetrate each other thus vaguely, but the artifice of
plotting them on a common scale helps us to reduce their aboriginal
confusion, and it helps us still more to plot, against the same scale,
the successive possible steps into which nature's various changes may
be resolved, either sensibly or conceivably. We thus straighten out the
aboriginal privacy and vagueness, and can date things publicly, as it
were, and by each other. The notion of one objective and 'evenly
flowing' time, cut into numbered instants, applies itself as a common
measure to all the steps and phases, no matter how many, into which we
cut the processes of nature. They are now definitely contemporary, or
later or earlier one than another, and we can handle them
mathematically, as we say, and far better, practically as well as
theoretically, for having thus correlated them one to one with each
other on the common schematic or conceptual time-scale.
Motion, to take a good example, is originally a turbid sensation, of
which the native shape is perhaps best preserved in the phenomenon of
vertigo. In vertigo we feel that movement is, and is more or
less violent or rapid, more or less in this direction or that, more or
less alarming or sickening. But a man subject to vertigo may gradually
learn to co-ordinate his felt motion with his real position and that of
other things, and intellectualize it enough to succeed at last in
walking without staggering. The mathematical mind similarly organizes
motion in its way, putting it into a logical definition: motion is now
conceived as 'the occupancy of serially successive points of space at
serially successive instants of time.' With such a definition we escape
wholly from the turbid privacy of sense. But do we not also escape from
sense-reality altogether? Whatever motion really may be, it surely is
not static; but the definition we have gained is of the absolutely
static. It gives a set of one-to-one relations between space-points and
time-points, which relations themselves are as fixed as the points are.
It gives positions assignable ad infinitum, but how the body
gets from one position to another it omits to mention. The body gets
there by moving, of course; but the conceived positions, however
numerously multiplied, contain no element of movement, so Zeno, using
nothing but them in his discussion, has no alternative but to say that
our intellect repudiates motion as a non-reality. Intellectualism here
does what I said it does—it makes experience less instead of more
intelligible.
We of course need a stable scheme of concepts, stably related with
one another, to lay hold of our experiences and to co-ordinate them
withal. When an experience comes with sufficient saliency to stand out,
we keep the thought of it for future use, and store it in our
conceptual system. What does not of itself stand out, we learn to
cut out; so the system grows completer, and new reality, as it
comes, gets named after and conceptually strung upon this or that
element of it which we have already established. The immutability of
such an abstract system is its great practical merit; the same
identical terms and relations in it can always be recovered and
referred to—change itself is just such an unalterable concept. But all
these abstract concepts are but as flowers gathered, they are only
moments dipped out from the stream of time, snap-shots taken, as by a
kinetoscopic camera, at a life that in its original coming is
continuous. Useful as they are as samples of the garden, or to re-enter
the stream with, or to insert in our revolving lantern, they have no
value but these practical values. You cannot explain by them what makes
any single phenomenon be or go—you merely dot out the path of
appearances which it traverses. For you cannot make continuous being
out of discontinuities, and your concepts are discontinuous. The stages
into which you analyze a change are states, the change itself
goes on between them. It lies along their intervals, inhabits what your
definition fails to gather up, and thus eludes conceptual explanation
altogether.
'When the mathematician,' Bergson writes, 'calculates the state of a
system at the end of a time t, nothing need prevent him from
supposing that betweenwhiles the universe vanishes, in order suddenly
to appear again at the due moment in the new configuration. It is only
the t-th moment that counts—that which flows throughout the
intervals, namely real time, plays no part in his calculation.... In
short, the world on which the mathematician operates is a world which
dies and is born anew at every instant, like the world which Descartes
thought of when he spoke of a continued creation.' To know adequately
what really happens we ought, Bergson insists, to see into the
intervals, but the mathematician sees only their extremities. He fixes
only a few results, he dots a curve and then interpolates, he
substitutes a tracing for a reality.
This being so undeniably the case, the history of the way in which
philosophy has dealt with it is curious. The ruling tradition in
philosophy has always been the platonic and aristotelian belief that
fixity is a nobler and worthier thing than change. Reality must be one
and unalterable. Concepts, being themselves fixities, agree best with
this fixed nature of truth, so that for any knowledge of ours to be
quite true it must be knowledge by universal concepts rather than by
particular experiences, for these notoriously are mutable and
corruptible. This is the tradition known as rationalism in philosophy,
and what I have called intellectualism is only the extreme application
of it. In spite of sceptics and empiricists, in spite of Protagoras,
Hume, and James Mill, rationalism has never been seriously questioned,
for its sharpest critics have always had a tender place in their hearts
for it, and have obeyed some of its mandates. They have not been
consistent; they have played fast and loose with the enemy; and Bergson
alone has been radical.
To show what I mean by this, let me contrast his procedure with that
of some of the transcendentalist philosophers whom I have lately
mentioned. Coming after Kant, these pique themselves on being
'critical,' on building in fact upon Kant's 'critique' of pure reason.
What that critique professed to establish was this, that concepts do
not apprehend reality, but only such appearances as our senses feed out
to them. They give immutable intellectual forms to these appearances,
it is true, but the reality an sich from which in ultimate
resort the sense-appearances have to come remains forever
unintelligible to our intellect. Take motion, for example. Sensibly,
motion comes in drops, waves, or pulses; either some actual amount of
it, or none, being apprehended. This amount is the datum or gabe
which reality feeds out to our intellectual faculty; but our intellect
makes of it a task or aufgabe—this pun is one of the most
memorable of Kant's formulas—and insists that in every pulse of it an
infinite number of successive minor pulses shall be ascertainable.
These minor pulses we can indeed go on to ascertain or to
compute indefinitely if we have patience; but it would contradict the
definition of an infinite number to suppose the endless series of them
to have actually counted themselves out piecemeal. Zeno made
this manifest; so the infinity which our intellect requires of the
sense-datum is thus a future and potential rather than a past and
actual infinity of structure. The datum after it has made itself must
be decompos_able ad infinitum by our conception, but of the steps by
which that structure actually got composed we know nothing. Our
intellect casts, in short, no ray of light on the processes by which
experiences get made.
Kant's monistic successors have in general found the data of
immediate experience even more self-contradictory, when intellectually
treated, than Kant did. Not only the character of infinity involved in
the relation of various empirical data to their 'conditions,' but the
very notion that empirical things should be related to one another at
all, has seemed to them, when the intellectualistic fit was upon them,
full of paradox and contradiction. We saw in a former lecture numerous
instances of this from Hegel, Bradley, Royce, and others. We saw also
where the solution of such an intolerable state of things was sought
for by these authors. Whereas Kant had placed it outside of and
before our experience, in the dinge an sich which are the
causes of the latter, his monistic successors all look for it either
after experience, as its absolute completion, or else consider it
to be even now implicit within experience as its ideal signification.
Kant and his successors look, in short, in diametrically opposite
directions. Do not be misled by Kant's admission of theism into his
system. His God is the ordinary dualistic God of Christianity, to whom
his philosophy simply opens the door; he has nothing whatsoever in
common with the 'absolute spirit' set up by his successors. So far as
this absolute spirit is logically derived from Kant, it is not from his
God, but from entirely different elements of his philosophy. First from
his notion that an unconditioned totality of the conditions of any
experience must be assignable; and then from his other notion that the
presence of some witness, or ego of apperception, is the most universal
of all the conditions in question. The post-kantians make of the
witness-condition what is called a concrete universal, an
individualized all-witness or world-self, which shall imply in its
rational constitution each and all of the other conditions put
together, and therefore necessitate each and all of the conditioned
experiences.
Abridgments like this of other men's opinions are very
unsatisfactory, they always work injustice; but in this case those of
you who are familiar with the literature will see immediately what I
have in mind; and to the others, if there be any here, it will suffice
to say that what I am trying so pedantically to point out is only the
fact that monistic idealists after Kant have invariably sought relief
from the supposed contradictions of our world of sense by looking
forward toward an ens rationis conceived as its integration or
logical completion, while he looked backward toward non-rational
dinge an sich conceived as its cause. Pluralistic empiricists, on
the other hand, have remained in the world of sense, either naively and
because they overlooked the intellectualistic contradictions, or
because, not able to ignore them, they thought they could refute them
by a superior use of the same intellectualistic logic. Thus it is that
John Mill pretends to refute the Achilles-tortoise fallacy.
The important point to notice here is the intellectualist logic.
Both sides treat it as authoritative, but they do so capriciously: the
absolutists smashing the world of sense by its means, the empiricists
smashing the absolute—for the absolute, they say, is the quintessence
of all logical contradictions. Neither side attains consistency. The
Hegelians have to invoke a higher logic to supersede the purely
destructive efforts of their first logic. The empiricists use their
logic against the absolute, but refuse to use it against finite
experience. Each party uses it or drops it to suit the vision it has
faith in, but neither impugns in principle its general theoretic
authority.
Bergson alone challenges its theoretic authority in principle. He
alone denies that mere conceptual logic can tell us what is impossible
or possible in the world of being or fact; and he does so for reasons
which at the same time that they rule logic out from lordship over the
whole of life, establish a vast and definite sphere of influence where
its sovereignty is indisputable. Bergson's own text, felicitous as it
is, is too intricate for quotation, so I must use my own inferior words
in explaining what I mean by saying this.
In the first place, logic, giving primarily the relations between
concepts as such, and the relations between natural facts only
secondarily or so far as the facts have been already identified with
concepts and defined by them, must of course stand or fall with the
conceptual method. But the conceptual method is a transformation which
the flux of life undergoes at our hands in the interests of practice
essentially and only subordinately in the interests of theory. We live
forward, we understand backward, said a danish writer; and to
understand life by concepts is to arrest its movement, cutting it up
into bits as if with scissors, and immobilizing these in our logical
herbarium where, comparing them as dried specimens, we can ascertain
which of them statically includes or excludes which other. This
treatment supposes life to have already accomplished itself, for the
concepts, being so many views taken after the fact, are retrospective
and post mortem. Nevertheless we can draw conclusions from them and
project them into the future. We cannot learn from them how life made
itself go, or how it will make itself go; but, on the supposition that
its ways of making itself go are unchanging, we can calculate what
positions of imagined arrest it will exhibit hereafter under given
conditions. We can compute, for instance, at what point Achilles will
be, and where the tortoise will be, at the end of the twentieth minute.
Achilles may then be at a point far ahead; but the full detail of how
he will have managed practically to get there our logic never gives
us—we have seen, indeed, that it finds that its results contradict the
facts of nature. The computations which the other sciences make differ
in no respect from those of mathematics. The concepts used are all of
them dots through which, by interpolation or extrapolation, curves are
drawn, while along the curves other dots are found as consequences. The
latest refinements of logic dispense with the curves altogether, and
deal solely with the dots and their correspondences each to each in
various series. The authors of these recent improvements tell us
expressly that their aim is to abolish the last vestiges of intuition,
videlicet of concrete reality, from the field of reasoning, which
then will operate literally on mental dots or bare abstract units of
discourse, and on the ways in which they may be strung in naked series.
This is all very esoteric, and my own understanding of it is most
likely misunderstanding. So I speak here only by way of brief reminder
to those who know. For the rest of us it is enough to recognize this
fact, that altho by means of concepts cut out from the sensible flux of
the past, we can re-descend upon the future flux and, making another
cut, say what particular thing is likely to be found there; and that
altho in this sense concepts give us knowledge, and may be said to have
some theoretic value (especially when the particular thing foretold is
one in which we take no present practical interest); yet in the deeper
sense of giving insight they have no theoretic value, for they
quite fail to connect us with the inner life of the flux, or with the
causes that govern its direction. Instead of being interpreters of
reality, concepts negate the inwardness of reality altogether. They
make the whole notion of a causal influence between finite things
incomprehensible. No real activities and indeed no real connexions of
any kind can obtain if we follow the conceptual logic; for to be
distinguishable, according to what I call intellectualism, is to be
incapable of connexion. The work begun by Zeno, and continued by Hume,
Kant, Herbart, Hegel, and Bradley, does not stop till sensible reality
lies entirely disintegrated at the feet of 'reason.'
Of the 'absolute' reality which reason proposes to substitute for
sensible reality I shall have more to say presently. Meanwhile you see
what Professor Bergson means by insisting that the function of the
intellect is practical rather than theoretical. Sensible reality is too
concrete to be entirely manageable—look at the narrow range of it
which is all that any animal, living in it exclusively as he does, is
able to compass. To get from one point in it to another we have to
plough or wade through the whole intolerable interval. No detail is
spared us; it is as bad as the barbed-wire complications at Port
Arthur, and we grow old and die in the process. But with our faculty of
abstracting and fixing concepts we are there in a second, almost as if
we controlled a fourth dimension, skipping the intermediaries as by a
divine winged power, and getting at the exact point we require without
entanglement with any context. What we do in fact is to harness up
reality in our conceptual systems in order to drive it the better. This
process is practical because all the termini to which we drive are
particular termini, even when they are facts of the mental order.
But the sciences in which the conceptual method chiefly celebrates its
triumphs are those of space and matter, where the transformations of
external things are dealt with. To deal with moral facts conceptually,
we have first to transform them, substitute brain-diagrams or physical
metaphors, treat ideas as atoms, interests as mechanical forces, our
conscious 'selves' as 'streams,' and the like. Paradoxical effect! as
Bergson well remarks, if our intellectual life were not practical but
destined to reveal the inner natures. One would then suppose that it
would find itself most at home in the domain of its own intellectual
realities. But it is precisely there that it finds itself at the end of
its tether. We know the inner movements of our spirit only
perceptually. We feel them live in us, but can give no distinct account
of their elements, nor definitely predict their future; while things
that lie along the world of space, things of the sort that we literally
handle, are what our intellects cope with most successfully. Does
not this confirm us in the view that the original and still surviving
function of our intellectual life is to guide us in the practical
adaptation of our expectancies and activities?
One can easily get into a verbal mess at this point, and my own
experience with pragmatism' makes me shrink from the dangers that lie
in the word 'practical,' and far rather than stand out against you for
that word, I am quite willing to part company with Professor Bergson,
and to ascribe a primarily theoretical function to our intellect,
provided you on your part then agree to discriminate 'theoretic' or
scientific knowledge from the deeper 'speculative' knowledge aspired to
by most philosophers, and concede that theoretic knowledge, which is
knowledge about things, as distinguished from living or
sympathetic acquaintance with them, touches only the outer surface of
reality. The surface which theoretic knowledge taken in this sense
covers may indeed be enormous in extent; it may dot the whole diameter
of space and time with its conceptual creations; but it does not
penetrate a millimeter into the solid dimension. That inner dimension
of reality is occupied by the activities that keep it going, but
the intellect, speaking through Hume, Kant &Co., finds itself obliged
to deny, and persists in denying, that activities have any intelligible
existence. What exists for thought, we are told, is at most the
results that we illusorily ascribe to such activities, strung along the
surfaces of space and time by regeln der verknuepfung, laws of
nature which state only coexistences and successions.[1]
Thought deals thus solely with surfaces. It can name the thickness
of reality, but it cannot fathom it, and its insufficiency here is
essential and permanent, not temporary.
The only way in which to apprehend reality's thickness is either to
experience it directly by being a part of reality one's self, or to
evoke it in imagination by sympathetically divining some one else's
inner life. But what we thus immediately experience or concretely
divine is very limited in duration, whereas abstractly we are able to
conceive eternities. Could we feel a million years concretely as we now
feel a passing minute, we should have very little employment for our
conceptual faculty. We should know the whole period fully at every
moment of its passage, whereas we must now construct it laboriously by
means of concepts which we project. Direct acquaintance and conceptual
knowledge are thus complementary of each other; each remedies the
other's defects. If what we care most about be the synoptic treatment
of phenomena, the vision of the far and the gathering of the scattered
like, we must follow the conceptual method. But if, as metaphysicians,
we are more curious about the inner nature of reality or about what
really makes it go, we must turn our backs upon our winged concepts
altogether, and bury ourselves in the thickness of those passing
moments over the surface of which they fly, and on particular points of
which they occasionally rest and perch.
Professor Bergson thus inverts the traditional platonic doctrine
absolutely. Instead of intellectual knowledge being the profounder, he
calls it the more superficial. Instead of being the only adequate
knowledge, it is grossly inadequate, and its only superiority is the
practical one of enabling us to make short cuts through experience and
thereby to save time. The one thing it cannot do is to reveal the
nature of things—which last remark, if not clear already, will become
clearer as I proceed. Dive back into the flux itself, then, Bergson
tells us, if you wish to know reality, that flux which
Platonism, in its strange belief that only the immutable is excellent,
has always spurned; turn your face toward sensation, that flesh-bound
thing which rationalism has always loaded with abuse.—This, you see,
is exactly the opposite remedy from that of looking forward into the
absolute, which our idealistic contemporaries prescribe. It violates
our mental habits, being a kind of passive and receptive listening
quite contrary to that effort to react noisily and verbally on
everything, which is our usual intellectual pose.
What, then, are the peculiar features in the perceptual flux which
the conceptual translation so fatally leaves out?
The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our
concepts are all discontinuous and fixed, and the only mode of making
them coincide with life is by arbitrarily supposing positions of arrest
therein. With such arrests our concepts may be made congruent. But
these concepts are not parts of reality, not real positions
taken by it, but suppositions rather, notes taken by ourselves,
and you can no more dip up the substance of reality with them than you
can dip up water with a net, however finely meshed.
When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and exclude everything
but what we have fixed. A concept means a that-and-no-other.
Conceptually, time excludes space; motion and rest exclude each other;
approach excludes contact; presence excludes absence; unity excludes
plurality; independence excludes relativity; 'mine' excludes 'yours';
this connexion excludes that connexion—and so on indefinitely; whereas
in the real concrete sensible flux of life experiences compenetrate
each other so that it is not easy to know just what is excluded and
what not. Past and future, for example, conceptually separated by the
cut to which we give the name of present, and defined as being the
opposite sides of that cut, are to some extent, however brief,
co-present with each other throughout experience. The literally present
moment is a purely verbal supposition, not a position; the only present
ever realized concretely being the 'passing moment' in which the dying
rearward of time and its dawning future forever mix their lights. Say
'now' and it was even while you say it.
It is just intellectualism's attempt to substitute static cuts for
units of experienced duration that makes real motion so unintelligible.
The conception of the first half of the interval between Achilles and
the tortoise excludes that of the last half, and the mathematical
necessity of traversing it separately before the last half is traversed
stands permanently in the way of the last half ever being traversed.
Meanwhile the living Achilles (who, for the purposes of this
discussion, is only the abstract name of one phenomenon of impetus,
just as the tortoise is of another) asks no leave of logic. The
velocity of his acts is an indivisible nature in them like the
expansive tension in a spring compressed. We define it conceptually as
[s/t], but the s and t are only artificial cuts
made after the fact, and indeed most artificial when we treat them in
both runners as the same tracts of 'objective' space and time, for the
experienced spaces and times in which the tortoise inwardly lives are
probably as different as his velocity from the same things in Achilles.
The impetus of Achilles is one concrete fact, and carries space, time,
and conquest over the inferior creature's motion indivisibly in it. He
perceives nothing, while running, of the mathematician's homogeneous
time and space, of the infinitely numerous succession of cuts in both,
or of their order. End and beginning come for him in the one onrush,
and all that he actually experiences is that, in the midst of a certain
intense effort of his own, the rival is in point of fact outstripped.
We are so inveterately wedded to the conceptual decomposition of
life that I know that this will seem to you like putting muddiest
confusion in place of clearest thought, and relapsing into a molluscoid
state of mind. Yet I ask you whether the absolute superiority of our
higher thought is so very clear, if all that it can find is
impossibility in tasks which sense-experience so easily performs.
What makes you call real life confusion is that it presents, as if
they were dissolved in one another, a lot of differents which
conception breaks life's flow by keeping apart. But are not
differents actually dissolved in one another? Hasn't every bit of
experience its quality, its duration, its extension, its intensity, its
urgency, its clearness, and many aspects besides, no one of which can
exist in the isolation in which our verbalized logic keeps it? They
exist only durcheinander. Reality always is, in M. Bergson's
phrase, an endosmosis or conflux of the same with the different: they
compenetrate and telescope. For conceptual logic, the same is nothing
but the same, and all sames with a third thing are the same with each
other. Not so in concrete experience. Two spots on our skin, each of
which feels the same as a third spot when touched along with it, are
felt as different from each other. Two tones, neither distinguishable
from a third tone, are perfectly distinct from each other. The whole
process of life is due to life's violation of our logical axioms. Take
its continuity as an example. Terms like A and C appear to be connected
by intermediaries, by B for example. Intellectualism calls this absurd,
for 'B-connected-with-A' is, 'as such,' a different term from
'B-connected-with-C.' But real life laughs at logic's veto. Imagine a
heavy log which takes two men to carry it. First A and B take it. Then
C takes hold and A drops off; then D takes hold and B drops off, so
that C and D now bear it; and so on. The log meanwhile never drops, and
keeps its sameness throughout the journey. Even so it is with all our
experiences. Their changes are not complete annihilations followed by
complete creations of something absolutely novel. There is partial
decay and partial growth, and all the while a nucleus of relative
constancy from which what decays drops off, and which takes into itself
whatever is grafted on, until at length something wholly different has
taken its place. In such a process we are as sure, in spite of
intellectualist logic with its 'as suches,' that it is the same
nucleus which is able now to make connexion with what goes and again
with what comes, as we are sure that the same point can lie on diverse
lines that intersect there. Without being one throughout, such a
universe is continuous. Its members interdigitate with their next
neighbors in manifold directions, and there are no clean cuts between
them anywhere.
The great clash of intellectualist logic with sensible experience is
where the experience is that of influence exerted. Intellectualism
denies (as we saw in lecture ii) that finite things can act on one
another, for all things, once translated into concepts, remain shut up
to themselves. To act on anything means to get into it somehow; but
that would mean to get out of one's self and be one's other, which is
self-contradictory, etc. Meanwhile each of us actually is his
own other to that extent, livingly knowing how to perform the trick
which logic tells us can't be done. My thoughts animate and actuate
this very body which you see and hear, and thereby influence your
thoughts. The dynamic current somehow does get from me to you, however
numerous the intermediary conductors may have to be. Distinctions may
be insulators in logic as much as they like, but in life distinct
things can and do commune together every moment.
The conflict of the two ways of knowing is best summed up in the
intellectualist doctrine that 'the same cannot exist in many
relations.' This follows of course from the concepts of the two
relations being so distinct that 'what-is-in-the-one' means 'as such'
something distinct from what 'what-is-in-the-other' means. It is like
Mill's ironical saying, that we should not think of Newton as both an
Englishman and a mathematician, because an Englishman as such is not a
mathematician and a mathematician as such is not an Englishman. But the
real Newton was somehow both things at once; and throughout the whole
finite universe each real thing proves to be many differents without
undergoing the necessity of breaking into disconnected editions of
itself.
These few indications will perhaps suffice to put you at the
bergsonian point of view. The immediate experience of life solves the
problems which so baffle our conceptual intelligence: How can what is
manifold be one? how can things get out of themselves? how be their own
others? how be both distinct and connected? how can they act on one
another? how be for others and yet for themselves? how be absent and
present at once? The intellect asks these questions much as we might
ask how anything can both separate and unite things, or how sounds can
grow more alike by continuing to grow more different. If you already
know space sensibly, you can answer the former question by pointing to
any interval in it, long or short; if you know the musical scale, you
can answer the latter by sounding an octave; but then you must first
have the sensible knowledge of these realities. Similarly Bergson
answers the intellectualist conundrums by pointing back to our various
finite sensational experiences and saying, 'Lo, even thus; even so are
these other problems solved livingly.'
When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can
reconstruct it in its wholeness. Out of no amount of discreteness can
you manufacture the concrete. But place yourself at a bound, or
d'emblee, as M. Bergson says, inside of the living, moving, active
thickness of the real, and all the abstractions and distinctions are
given into your hand: you can now make the intellectualist
substitutions to your heart's content. Install yourself in phenomenal
movement, for example, and velocity, succession, dates, positions, and
innumerable other things are given you in the bargain. But with only an
abstract succession of dates and positions you can never patch up
movement itself. It slips through their intervals and is lost.
So it is with every concrete thing, however complicated. Our
intellectual handling of it is a retrospective patchwork, a post-mortem
dissection, and can follow any order we find most expedient. We can
make the thing seem self-contradictory whenever we wish to. But place
yourself at the point of view of the thing's interior doing, and
all these back-looking and conflicting conceptions lie harmoniously in
your hand. Get at the expanding centre of a human character, the
elan vital of a man, as Bergson calls it, by living sympathy, and
at a stroke you see how it makes those who see it from without
interpret it in such diverse ways. It is something that breaks into
both honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, stupidity and
insight, at the touch of varying circumstances, and you feel exactly
why and how it does this, and never seek to identify it stably with any
of these single abstractions. Only your intellectualist does that,—and
you now also feel why he must do it to the end.
Place yourself similarly at the centre of a man's philosophic vision
and you understand at once all the different things it makes him write
or say. But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to build the
philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one and then
another and seeking to make them fit, and of course you fail. You crawl
over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling into every
microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and
never suspecting that a centre exists. I hope that some of the
philosophers in this audience may occasionally have had something
different from this intellectualist type of criticism applied to their
own works!
What really exists is not things made but things in the
making. Once made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative
conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them. But put
yourself in the making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with
the thing and, the whole range of possible decompositions coming at
once into your possession, you are no longer troubled with the question
which of them is the more absolutely true. Reality falls in
passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own
undivided life—it buds and bourgeons, changes and creates. Once adopt
the movement of this life in any given instance and you know what
Bergson calls the devenir reel by which the thing evolves and
grows. Philosophy should seek this kind of living understanding of the
movement of reality, not follow science in vainly patching together
fragments of its dead results.
Thus much of M. Bergson's philosophy is sufficient for my purpose in
these lectures, so here I will stop, leaving unnoticed all its other
constituent features, original and interesting tho they be. You may
say, and doubtless some of you now are saying inwardly, that his
remanding us to sensation in this wise is only a regress, a return to
that ultra-crude empiricism which your own idealists since Green have
buried ten times over. I confess that it is indeed a return to
empiricism, but I think that the return in such accomplished shape only
proves the latter's immortal truth. What won't stay buried must have
some genuine life. Am anfang war die tat; fact is a first
; to which all our conceptual handling comes as an inadequate second,
never its full equivalent. When I read recent transcendentalist
literature—I must partly except my colleague Royce!—I get nothing but
a sort of marking of time, champing of jaws, pawing of the ground, and
resettling into the same attitude, like a weary horse in a stall with
an empty manger. It is but turning over the same few threadbare
categories, bringing the same objections, and urging the same answers
and solutions, with never a new fact or a new horizon coming into
sight. But open Bergson, and new horizons loom on every page you read.
It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds. It tells of
reality itself, instead of merely reiterating what dusty-minded
professors have written about what other previous professors have
thought. Nothing in Bergson is shop-worn or at second hand.
That he gives us no closed-in system will of course be fatal to him
in intellectualist eyes. He only evokes and invites; but he first
annuls the intellectualist veto, so that we now join step with reality
with a philosophical conscience never quite set free before. As a
french disciple of his well expresses it: 'Bergson claims of us first
of all a certain inner catastrophe, and not every one is capable of
such a logical revolution. But those who have once found themselves
flexible enough for the execution of such a psychological change of
front, discover somehow that they can never return again to their
ancient attitude of mind. They are now Bergsonians ... and possess the
principal thoughts of the master all at once. They have understood in
the fashion in which one loves, they have caught the whole melody and
can thereafter admire at their leisure the originality, the fecundity,
and the imaginative genius with which its author develops, transposes,
and varies in a thousand ways by the orchestration of his style and
dialectic, the original theme.'[2]
This, scant as it is, is all I have to say about Bergson on this
occasion—I hope it may send some of you to his original text. I must
now turn back to the point where I found it advisable to appeal to his
ideas. You remember my own intellectualist difficulties in the last
lecture, about how a lot of separate consciousnesses can at the same
time be one collective thing. How, I asked, can one and the same
identical content of experience, of which on idealist principles the
esse is to be felt, be felt so diversely if itself be the only
feeler? The usual way of escape by 'quatenus' or 'as such' won't help
us here if we are radical intellectualists, I said, for
appearance-together is as such not appearance-apart, the world
qua many is not the world qua one, as absolutism claims. If
we hold to Hume's maxim, which later intellectualism uses so well, that
whatever things are distinguished are as separate as if there were no
manner of connexion between them, there seemed no way out of the
difficulty save by stepping outside of experience altogether and
invoking different spiritual agents, selves or souls, to realize the
diversity required. But this rescue by 'scholastic entities' I was
unwilling to accept any more than pantheistic idealists accept it.
Yet, to quote Fechner's phrase again, 'nichts wirkliches kann
unmoeglich sein,' the actual cannot be impossible, and what is
actual at every moment of our lives is the sort of thing which I now
proceed to remind you of. You can hear the vibration of an electric
contact-maker, smell the ozone, see the sparks, and feel the thrill,
co-consciously as it were or in one field of experience. But you can
also isolate any one of these sensations by shutting out the rest. If
you close your eyes, hold your nose, and remove your hand, you can get
the sensation of sound alone, but it seems still the same sensation
that it was; and if you restore the action of the other organs, the
sound coalesces with the feeling, the sight, and the smell sensations
again. Now the natural way of talking of all this[3] is to say that
certain sensations are experienced, now singly, and now together with
other sensations, in a common conscious field. Fluctuations of
attention give analogous results. We let a sensation in or keep it out
by changing our attention; and similarly we let an item of memory in or
drop it out. [Please don't raise the question here of how these changes
come to pass. The immediate condition is probably cerebral in every
instance, but it would be irrelevant now to consider it, for now we are
thinking only of results, and I repeat that the natural way of thinking
of them is that which intellectualist criticism finds so absurd.]
The absurdity charged is that the self-same should function so
differently, now with and now without something else. But this it
sensibly seems to do. This very desk which I strike with my hand
strikes in turn your eyes. It functions at once as a physical object in
the outer world and as a mental object in our sundry mental worlds. The
very body of mine that my thought actuates is the body whose
gestures are your visual object and to which you give my name.
The very log which John helped to carry is the log now borne by James.
The very girl you love is simultaneously entangled elsewhere. The very
place behind me is in front of you. Look where you will, you gather
only examples of the same amid the different, and of different
relations existing as it were in solution in the same thing. Qua
this an experience is not the same as it is qua that, truly
enough; but the quas are conceptual shots of ours at its
post-mortem remains, and in its sensational immediacy everything is all
at once whatever different things it is at once at all. It is before C
and after A, far from you and near to me, without this associate and
with that one, active and passive, physical and mental, a whole of
parts and part of a higher whole, all simultaneously and without
interference or need of doubling-up its being, so long as we keep to
what I call the 'immediate' point of view, the point of view in which
we follow our sensational life's continuity, and to which all living
language conforms. It is only when you try—to continue using the
hegelian vocabulary—to 'mediate' the immediate, or to substitute
concepts for sensational life, that intellectualism celebrates its
triumph and the immanent-self-contradictoriness of all this
smooth-running finite experience gets proved.
Of the oddity of inventing as a remedy for the inconveniences
resulting from this situation a supernumerary conceptual object called
an absolute, into which you pack the self-same contradictions
unreduced, I will say something in the next lecture. The absolute is
said to perform its feats by taking up its other into itself. But that
is exactly what is done when every individual morsel of the sensational
stream takes up the adjacent morsels by coalescing with them. This is
just what we mean by the stream's sensible continuity. No element
there cuts itself off from any other element, as concepts cut
themselves from concepts. No part there is so small as not to be
a place of conflux. No part there is not really next its
neighbors; which means that there is literally nothing between; which
means again that no part goes exactly so far and no farther; that no
part absolutely excludes another, but that they compenetrate and are
cohesive; that if you tear out one, its roots bring out more with them;
that whatever is real is telescoped and diffused into other reals;
that, in short, every minutest thing is already its hegelian 'own
other,' in the fullest sense of the term.
Of course this sounds self-contradictory, but as the
immediate facts don't sound at all, but simply are, until we
conceptualize and name them vocally, the contradiction results only
from the conceptual or discursive form being substituted for the real
form. But if, as Bergson shows, that form is superimposed for practical
ends only, in order to let us jump about over life instead of wading
through it; and if it cannot even pretend to reveal anything of what
life's inner nature is or ought to be; why then we can turn a deaf ear
to its accusations. The resolve to turn the deaf ear is the inner
crisis or 'catastrophe' of which M. Bergson's disciple whom I lately
quoted spoke. We are so subject to the philosophic tradition which
treats logos or discursive thought generally as the sole avenue
to truth, that to fall back on raw unverbalized life as more of a
revealer, and to think of concepts as the merely practical things which
Bergson calls them, comes very hard. It is putting off our proud
maturity of mind and becoming again as foolish little children in the
eyes of reason. But difficult as such a revolution is, there is no
other way, I believe, to the possession of reality, and I permit myself
to hope that some of you may share my opinion after you have heard my
next lecture.