Chapter 2

[1]"L'Abbaye de Fontenelle ou de Saint-Wandrille." Paris. 1827.

[2]From "The Past", by Maurice Maeterlinck.The Independent,March 6, 1902.

[3]"The Portrait of a Lady", in "The Double Garden."

[4]See her account of the performance inCentury Magazine, January, 1911.

[5]For Maeterlinck on Emerson, seePoet Lore, Vol. 10, p. 76, January, 1898, andArena, Vol. 16, p. 563, March, 1896.

[6]Metropolitan Magazine, May, 1914.

[7]"The Mystery of Justice", in "The Double Garden."

[8]The Independent, January 3, 1901.

[9]"The Double Garden."

[10]"The Mystery of Justice."

[11]For a description of the performance see "A Realization of Macbeth" by Alvan G. Sanborn inThe Independent, September 15, 1909.

[12]See his "Quarante Ans de Théâtre."

[13]His admiration for Browning appears in his reply to Professor William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, who had called attention to the close similarity between an incident in Browning's "Luria" and Maeterlinck's "Monna Vanna." Maeterlinck very frankly and courteously acknowledged his indebtedness to Browning, whom, he said, he regarded, like Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare, as common sources of literary inspiration.The Independent, March 5 and June 11, 1903.

[14]This is signed by his name in its original form, Mooris Mäterlinck. A translation of this and other tales by Belgian writers by Edith Wingate Rinder was published in 1897 in the "Green Tree Library" of Stone & Kimball (now Duffield & Co.).

[15]Figaro, August 24, 1890. Octave Mirbeau later busied himself in booming Marguerite Audoux, the Paris sempstress, who wrote "Marie-Claire."

[16]"Wisdom and Destiny," § 79.

The history of philosophy shows us chiefly the ceaselessly renewed efforts of reflection laboring to attenuate difficulties, to resolve contradictions, to measure with an increasing approximation a reality incommensurable with our thought. But from time to time bursts forth a soul which seems to triumph over these complications by force of simplicity, the soul of artist or of poet, keeping close to its origin, reconciling with a harmony felt by the heart terms perhaps irreconcilable by the intelligence. The language which it speaks, when it borrows the voice of philosophy, is not similarly understood by everybody. Some think it vague, and so it is in what it expresses. Others feel it precise, because they experience all it suggests. To many ears it brings only the echo of a vanished past, but others hear in it as in a prophetic dream the joyous song of the future.

These words, which Bergson used in his eulogy of his teacher, Ravaisson, before the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, may be applied with greater appropriateness to Bergson himself. For he, far more than Ravaisson, has shown himself an original force in the world of thought, and his philosophy also appears to some people reactionary in tendency and to others far in advance of anything hitherto formulated. But to all it appears important. "Nothing like it since Descartes", they say in France. "Nothing like it since Kant", they say in Germany. His lecture room is the largest in the Collège de France, but it is too small to accommodate the crowd which would hear him. They begin to gather at half-past three for the five o'clock lecture, though they have to listen to a political economist to hold their seats. A cosmopolitan crowd it is that on Wednesdays awaits the lecturer, talking more languages than have ordinarily been heard in the same room at any time during the period from the strike on the Tower of Babel to the universal adoption of Esperanto. French, Italian, English, American, German, Yiddish, and Russian are to be distinguished among them; perhaps the last predominate among the foreign tongues, for young people of both sexes come from Russia in swarms to put themselves under his instruction. This may rouse in us some speculation, even apprehension. Bergsonianism has already assumed some curious forms in the minds of his over-ardent disciples, and what it will become after it has been translated into the Russian language and temperament it would be rash to prophesy.

But the polyglot audience is silent as M. Bergson ascends the rostrum and begins to talk, in slow, smooth, clear tones, accented by nervous gestures of his slender hands. His figure is slight, and his face thin and pointed, almost ecclesiastical in appearance. His hair is slightly gray, but his close-cropped mustache is brown. The eyes are deep, dark, and penetrating, the eyes of seer and scientist together. He lays out his argument in advance in the formal French style, but unlike most French lecturers he does not confine himself to notes. His quick turns of thought break through the conventional forms of logic and find expression in striking and original similes drawn from his wide range of reading. I suppose all professors are given nicknames by their students; at least all who are either loved or hated, and that includes all who amount to anything. Bergson's students call him "the lark", because the higher he flies the sweeter he sings. His voice, indeed, seems to come down from some altitudinous region of the upper atmosphere, so clear and thin and high and penetrating it is. A writer in theLondon Newsput it very well when he said of Bergson's London lecture, "No one ever spoke before a large audience with more complete self-possession and less self-assertion."

As an experienced teacher he appreciates the importance of repetition, and in his lectures brings up the same idea in many varied forms and italicizes with his voice the essential points. All his life he has been a teacher, climbing up the regular educational ladder rung by rung to the top.

Henri Bergson was born in the heart of Paris, the Montmartre quarter, on October 18, 1859. He is descended from a prominent Jewish family of Poland and he owes his excellent command of the English language to his mother, for he always spoke that language with her. At the age of nine he entered the Lycée Condorcet, only a few blocks from his house on the Rue Lamartine. He was a good student and worked hard, particularly on geography, which was most difficult for him. Mathematics was his favorite study, and he then intended to make it his life work, but instead he chose a harder road, for, as he told me, philosophy is much more difficult, requires more concentrated thought than mathematics. Before he left the Lycèe at the age of eighteen he won a prize for a solution to a mathematical problem, and theAnnales de Mathématiquespublished his paper in full.

Next he entered the École Normale Supérieure, where he came under the influence of Ravaisson, Lachelier, and Boutroux. On graduation, in 1881, he was made professor of philosophy in the Lycèe of Angers for two years, afterward for five years at Clermont, then back to Paris, first in the Collège Rollin and later in the Lycée Henri IV. In 1898 he was promoted to the École Normale Supérieure, and two years later to the Collège de France. In 1901 he was elected to the Institute, and in 1914 to the Academy.

The rapid spread of his philosophy in France is due not only to its intrinsic value and the eloquence with which he presents it, but in part also to his having been a teacher of teachers. By his twenty years' work in the secondary schools orlycéesof the provinces and Paris, and in the Superior Normal School, he has molded the thought of thousands of young men who are now teaching and writing and ruling in France. His present position as lecturer to miscellaneous audiences in the Collège of France, though more conspicuous, is really not more influential than his earlier work. He has the faculty of arousing the enthusiasm and personal devotion of his students, so the soil all over the country was prepared in advance for the propagation of his ideas, and now all he has to do is to sow them broadcast. We may observe something of the kind in our own country, where Dewey's influence has been largely exercised through personal contact with teachers. If he had never published a line, the colleges, normal and high schools in the western half of the United States would, nevertheless, be teaching anonymous Deweyism. A philosopher who cares more for influence than celebrity will prefer a chair where he can reach the largest number of future teachers to any other position however exalted.

We are not left to speculation as to the extent of Bergson's influence in French education. A questionnaire on the teaching of philosophy in thelycéesconducted by Binet[1]showed that his ideas were the dominant force of the time. One school reported that "four professors here have adopted them without reserve and made them the soul of their teaching." It is interesting to note that not one of these high school professors mentioned either materialism or pantheism among their various philosophic creeds. They were equally divided between objective and subjective thinkers, or, say, between realists and idealists.

Bergson himself was a materialist to start with, and he worked his way up into his present spiritualistic philosophy when he found the inadequacy of his early conceptions. His taste was for the exact sciences, and in them he excelled while at school. He intended at that time to devote himself to the study of mechanics, and his youthful ambition was to continue and develop the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, of whom he was then an enthusiastic admirer.

But as he studied the formulas of mechanics with a view of discovering their philosophical implications, and of utilizing them in the explanation of the universe, he was struck with their inadequacy, even falsity, when applied to the phenomena of life and mind. In particular he was troubled by the symboltwhich occurs so frequently in mathematical and physical formulas, and is supposed to stand for "time." It is represented geometrically by a straight line just like the three dimensions of space. In fact, as Bergson points out, "time" as used in physical science is nothing more or less than a fourth dimension of space. It is purely a spatial conception, an empty framework in which events may be arranged in order as objects are set up in a row on a shelf. There is no change or development in it, for past and future are all the same to it.

Now, when Bergson compared this physical conception of "time" with real time or duration as he felt it within himself, he found they were entirely different things. For the mind the past does not stretch out in a line behind. It is rolled up into the present and projected toward the future. Still less is there a path or several optional paths definitely laid out ahead of us in the future. We break our own paths as we go forward. It is like the big snowballs that we boys used to roll up to make forts out of; all the snow it has passed over is a part of it, and in front the snow is trackless.

The mechanical formulas of science are admirably adapted to the purpose for which they were designed, that is, the handling of matter, but they are misleading as applied to living beings, and especially to the human mind, which is the farthest removed from the realm of material mechanics. Here is true freedom and initiative.

The advocate of free will always gets beaten in the argument with the determinist when he meets him on his own ground, for adopting the spatial conception of time and the dynamic conception of motives, reduces man to a machine and, of course, makes him amenable to the ordinary laws of mechanics. If it is correct to represent the future as two crossroads in front of the undecided individual and he pulled to right and left by "motives" on either side, then the determinist has it all his own way. The case has been conceded to him in advance, and the libertarian can only flinch from his logic. But Bergson holds that when the determinist pretends to talk about the future, he really is regarding it as already past, as definitely mapped and virtually existent.

As Bergson's first book, "Time and Free Will", was devoted to the overthrow of the metaphysical argument for determinism, so his second, "Matter and Memory", was devoted to the overthrow of the psychological argument, which is that the mind and the brain are merely different aspects of the same thing (monism) or that their action is parallel so that a certain state of consciousness always corresponds to a certain molecular motion (dualism). Since the activities of the brain are presumably controlled by the physical and chemical laws, then must be also the mental activities identical or inseparably connected with them. But Bergson, taking the position of an extreme dualist, argues that the mind is distinct from matter and only in part dependent upon it, that memories are not altogether stored in the brain or anywhere in space, and that the brain is essentially nothing more than an instrument of action.

The same is true of our senses, of our bodily organism in general. They are made for practical, not speculative, purposes. The things nearest to us are seen largest and clearest. The eye is useful because its vision is limited. If it were susceptible to all rays, like our skin, we should get, not vision, but sunburn. Now the understanding, also having a pragmatic origin, limits our knowledge just as the eye limits our vision, and for the same purpose.

Let me give a few examples of this limitation of our senses and of our intellect. Suppose we are looking at a horse or automobile going past in the street. We get an immediate sense of the movement very decidedly, but the motion itself we cannot see. We must first analyze the motion; that is, take it apart, break it up into something that is not motion. This we can do with a kinetoscope camera which takes snapshots at the rate of fifty a second. These successive pictures do not give the motion, no matter how rapidly they are taken. Each represents the object standing still, or if not quick enough for that, the picture is blurred; but show these still-life photographs to us in quick succession, and we no longer perceive them as separate views but as continuous motion. Why can the camera so deceive us? Simply because our eyes work in the same way. They are cameras, and the exposure time of the retina is about the same as that of the moving picture films. A moving object looked at steadily is merely a blurred band. But if we wink rapidly, we can catch glimpses of the legs of the horse or the spokes of the wheel, thus like the kinetoscope transforming motion into immobility by intermittent attention.

Look closely at a portrait in this book, and you will see that it consists of pure black and white. Needless to say that the face portrayed was not composed of black spots of various sizes on a white ground. In the original there were no black, no white, and no dots. There were only even shadings, lighter and darker. The picture is an absolute misrepresentation. Yet viewed with the naked eye at sufficient distance to put the dots out of sight, it imitates the shading of the original well enough to be called a "half-tone plate", although there is really not a half tone in it, nothing but black and white.

Now this trick of decomposing continuous motion into successive pictures like the kinetoscope and decomposing continuous space into successive spots like the printing process, is the way we do our thinking. The mind goes by jerks like the eye. When we think of the course of history we break it up into blocks of handy size, comparing century with century, year with year. This is perfectly justifiable, very useful, in fact inevitable, and quite innocent, provided we realize that it is a logical fiction, adapted to practical purposes merely. The trouble has come from not recognizing this. People generally, and especially scientists and philosophers, have been inclined to regard this process of rationalization as the way of getting at reality, instead of as a mere tool for handling reality.

Long ago, when men first began to think hard, they discovered the inadequacy of mere thinking. Zeno of Elea propounded among other puzzles that of Achilles and the tortoise, which has kept the world guessing for twenty-four centuries. While Achilles is making up his handicap, the tortoise has gone on a bit farther, and when Achilles has covered this distance, the tortoise is not there, but still ahead, and since space is conceived as infinitely divisible, Achilles would take an infinity of time to catch up. I do not suppose the experiment was ever tried. That was not the way of the Greeks. They placed too much reliance upon their brains and too little on anything outside of them to put a theory to the test of experiment. But it has been agreed everywhere, always and by all, that Achilles would catch the tortoise, and a considerable proportion of each generation have tried to explain how he could, often succeeding to their own satisfaction, but rarely to the satisfaction of other people. For the point to this puzzle is not to get the answer, but to say why it puzzles us, and to this point philosophers from Aristotle to Bergson have devoted much study; and doubtless the end is not yet.

I remember well the day when that ancient jest was first sprung upon me in the University of Kansas, by the instructor in philosophy, a bright young man just on from Harvard, who had the Eleatics at his finger tips. Several of the boys volunteered to explain it, but I, having the longest arm and snappiest fingers, got the floor. I suggested that we substitute a greyhound chasing a jack rabbit for Achilles and the tortoise, who must be tired of running so long. Both greyhound and jack rabbit progress by jumps, and I argued, with the aid of a piece of chalk, that these could be measured and laid off on the prairie, here represented by the blackboard, and so the whole thing figured out. But the instructor denied my petition for a change of venue. He stuck to Greece and refused to meet me on my native soil, so I retired discomfited. I thought him unaccommodating at the time, but I see now that he was merely wise. Wariness is often so mistaken for disobligingness. The paradox is solved by science and by common sense by assuming that Achilles and the tortoise move by jumps instead of continuously and then comparing these jumps, for they are of finite length and number.

In short, we know what motion is by common sense, by feeling, by intuition, but when we come to reason about it, and especially when we come to talk about it, we have to substitute for it something that is not motion, but is easier to handle and near enough like it, so that ordinarily it serves just as well. It is as much like it as the short, straight lines, substituted by the mathematician, are like the segments of the curve he is trying to solve. What is true of motion is true in a way of all our definitions, formulations, laws, and categories; they are not the real things, but merely handy surrogates. They represent some particular phase of reality more or less satisfactorily. These formulas are not designed to pick all the locks of Nature's treasure chests. They are good for the lock they are designed for and sometimes others, not all. The master key to all locks either does not exist or is too cumbrous to be wielded by man.

Bergson's theory of personality arises naturally out of his conception of time. Time is said to have one dimension. Yes, if we symbolize it by a line; otherwise not, it has no dimension. The impersonal time of the philosophers and scientists is merely the spatial symbol of duration. What our experience shows us is not this empty artificial uneventful time, butduration. And not merely duration, butdurations, for there are as many durations of different interval rhythm as there are consciousnesses. This is what is real in time. Time is really the continuous unrolling of our conscious life, of psychologic states which do not become distinct except when it pleases us to divide them. Personality is a continuity ofindivisible movement. We can draw a bucket of water out of the river, and then another bucketful, but we can never get the stream in this way, for the stream is essentially movement. The movement is what is substantial about the stream.

From immobile states we can never make of life what experience actually gives us, for life is change. Only by seizing this change directly in an integral experience can we solve the problem. To true realities no concept is applicable. Reality must be regarded itself, in itself, just as it is; and in giving a description of it, we can fix only the image of it before our eyes.

The guiding thread of philosophical problems is that the intellect is an instrument of action which has developed itself in the course of centuries in order to triumph over the difficulties that matter opposes to life. The intellect has constituted itself for the purpose of a battle. The obstacles which it would overthrow are those of brute matter. The categories of the understanding are constructed with a view of action upon matter. So where our intellect seeks to know something else than the material world, it finds itself unable to grasp it. The whole history of the evolution of life combines to show that intelligence is an instrumental function for action upon matter, to formulate and present the laws which permit us to foresee, and therefore to forestall.

In dealing with a reality like personality, the intellect will first attempt to handle the subject with the same processes that it employs for inert matter, therefore it ends in a logicalimpasse. This is the origin of the difficulties of the question. The concepts which it would apply to personality are made only for the material world. We do not know how to apply them adequately to the life of the mind, which overflows them.

To direct our attention upon the stream of our consciousness breaks it up and immobilizes it. But it may be reached by another kind of introspection, which consists in letting live, in trying to reënforce vitality. In this way activity may become consciousness without ceasing to be active. Thus the ego may be seized as it really is, as a transition and a continuity.

In his theory of evolution Bergson draws a sharp distinction between intelligence and instinct. As intelligence has reached its highest point in the human race, so instinct has reached its highest point in the ants, bees, and wasps. Here we see instinct attaining its ends by the employment of the most varied and complicated expedients. The ant is lord of the subsoil as man is lord of the soil. The solitary wasps, whom Maeterlinck would despise as primitive individualists in comparison with the socialized bees, are used by Bergson to illustrate his theory of instinct. These insects provide for the future needs of their larvæ by storing up in their underground nest spiders, beetles, or caterpillars. These are to be kept alive, as we keep turtles and lobsters, so they will be fresh, and in order to prevent them from escaping, the wasp paralyzes them by stinging them at the point or points where the motor nerves meet. One species of wasp pierces the ganglia of its caterpillar by nine successive thrusts of its sting and then squeezes the head in its mandibles, enough to cause paralysis without death. Other kinds of wasps have to use other forms of surgical treatment, according to the kind of insect they put into storage. How can this be explained? If we call it intelligence, we must assume that the wasp or its ancestors has been endowed with a knowledge of insect anatomy such as we hesitate to credit to any being lower in the scale of life than a professor of entomology. If we adopt a mechanistic hypothesis, we must assume that this marvelous skill in surgery has been gradually acquired in the course of thousands of generations, either by the survival of the descendants of those insects who happened to have stuck their stings into the nine right places (Darwinism), or by the inheritance of the acquired habit of stinging a certain species of caterpillar in that particular way (Lamarckianism). But since this knowledge or skill is never of use to the individual insect and is of no use to the species until it has arrived at a considerable degree of perfection, we can hardly adopt either theory without straining our imagination.

But the assumed difficulties vanish if we adopt the Bergsonian point of view and regard the caterpillar and wasp as two parts of the same process. It is no wonder then that they are fitted together. Slayer and slain have developed for that purpose, and what is apparently antagonism is really cooperation. The importance of this theory to those who are troubled about the moral interpretation of the universe is obvious, for the stinging of the caterpillar would seem something like picking a sliver out of the left hand by the right, but Bergson does not go into this question at all.

The formation of the eye, which is the source of much perplexity to evolutionists of all schools, provides Bergson with an excellent illustration of his theory. The eye of mollusks is similar in form and identical in function with the eye of the vertebrates, yet the two are composed of different elements and grow in a different way. The retina of the vertebrate is produced by an expansion of the central nervous system of the young embryo. It is, so to speak, a part of the brain coming out to see. In the mollusk, on the contrary, the retina is formed from the external layer of the embryo. Here heredity is out of the question because of this difference of formation and because the man is not descended from the mollusk nor the mollusk from man. The structure of the eye involves the combination of such a large number of elements and must satisfy so many conditions before it is good for anything, that it is practically impossible to explain it either as the effect of the action of light or as the result of an accretion of slight accidental variations.

But Bergson, coming in with his philosophic faith at the point where science leaves off, calls attention to the fact that while the eye is a complicated structure, seeing is one simple act. Why not begin our explanation with the simple, instead of the complex? The analytical method of the intellect, though useful in its place, does not lead us to the meaning of reality. It is as if we could only see a picture as broken up into a mosaic, or as if we could only consider a movement of the hand in the mathematician's way, as an infinite series of points arranged in a curve.

So the eye with its marvelous complexity of structure, may be only the simple act of vision, dividedfor usinto a mosaic of cells, whose order seems marvelous to us because we have conceived the whole as an assemblage....Mechanism and finalism both go too far, for they attribute to Nature the most formidable of the labors of Hercules in holding that she has exalted to the simple act of vision an infinity of infinitely complex elements, whereas Nature has had no more trouble in making an eye than I have in lifting my hand. Nature's simple act has divided itself automatically into an infinity of elements which are then found to be coordinated to one idea, just as the movement of my hand has dropped an infinity of points which are then found to satisfy one equation.—"Creative Evolution", pp. 90-91.

Mechanism and finalism both go too far, for they attribute to Nature the most formidable of the labors of Hercules in holding that she has exalted to the simple act of vision an infinity of infinitely complex elements, whereas Nature has had no more trouble in making an eye than I have in lifting my hand. Nature's simple act has divided itself automatically into an infinity of elements which are then found to be coordinated to one idea, just as the movement of my hand has dropped an infinity of points which are then found to satisfy one equation.—"Creative Evolution", pp. 90-91.

Bergson seems born to be an exception to Amiel's criticism of French philosophy: "The French lack that intuitive faculty to which the living unity of things is revealed." "Their logic never goes beyond the category of mechanism nor their metaphysic beyond dualism."

M. Bergson's residence is the Villa Montmorency in Auteuil, a quiet quarter of Paris, lying between the Seine and the Bois de Boulogne. In summer he goes to Switzerland for greater seclusion and the stimulus of a higher altitude upon his thought. Here I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with him. From Geneva, where I was staying, I took the railroad that skirts the lake upon the western side to Nyon, an old Roman town at the foot of the Dole, the highest peak of the Swiss Jura. St. Cergue, my destination, was nine miles inland and a half a mile up. The distance I had to go was therefore the square root of the sum of the squares of these distances, but I did not figure it out, because, according to Bergson, we live in time rather than space, and duration is not a measure of length. So I can only say that it was one of the longest and pleasantest hypotenuses I ever traversed. For there was a sense of exhilaration in rising ever higher as the carriage zigzagged through the woods, and in getting a grander view each time we stopped at a turn to give way to an automobile chugging slowly up or coasting swiftly down. Arrived at the little village of St. Cergue, I had still a climb and a search among the hotels, pensions, and summer homes scattered over the mountainside for Villa Bois-gentil. This was found in the middle of a meadow backed by a forest of firs, a square, two-story house, simply furnished but with no affectation of rusticity, as is common in American country homes. From the inclosed porch there is a glorious view of Mont Blanc, with the long blue crescent of Lake Geneva curving around the ramparts of its base. But, as with many another Swiss view, the effect is marred by the presence of a big box of a hotel in the immediate foreground.

One would have thought from the cordiality of my reception that a philosopher had nothing better to do than to entertain a wandering American journalist. At lunch I had an opportunity of meeting also Madame and Mademoiselle Bergson, and afterward a long talk with Professor Bergson, who later accompanied me down the steep mountain path to the village and along the winding road through the woods. His conversation has the charm of his books, the enthusiasm for the mission of philosophy, the wealth of illustrations drawn from many fields of science and art, the freshness and inspiration of his novel point of view, the candidness in the consideration of opposing arguments, the unaffected, unpretentious manner, the absence of the professional jealousy and personal arrogance which has been characteristic of many original thinkers. The reader will notice that in his reviews and criticisms of the historic systems of philosophy, he never seeks to overthrow them, but is always trying to see how much of them he can save and assimilate. He believes that it is possible for metaphysics to have a continuous and positive development like the natural sciences, each man building on what has gone before, instead of setting up a new school and endeavoring to secure a personal following.[2]

I took the liberty of extending to Professor Bergson an invitation to America, for I was able to assure him of a hearty welcome on account of the deep interest already taken here in his thought. The work of James and Dewey prepared the way for Bergson in this country, for his philosophy may be regarded as a constructive system built upon pragmatic criticism. Indeed, he has been accused by his opponents of stealing Yankee psychology and making metaphysics out of it. The truth is, James and Bergson pursued through many years lines of thought of similar tendency but of independent development, though each has repeatedly taken occasion to express his appreciation of the work of the other. It is a case of psycho-metaphysical parallelism rather than of interaction.

In February, 1913, Professor Bergson came to America at the invitation of Columbia University and gave two series of lectures, one in French and the other in English, onSpiritualité et Libertéand the Method of Philosophy. One would find reason to question the common assertion that nowadays no interest is taken in metaphysical problems when he saw the lecture rooms packed with people from the city as well as students from all departments of the university. A line of automobiles stood waiting along Broadway, as the litters waited in the streets of Rome when Plotinus, the Neoplatonist, came to lecture there seventeen hundred years ago. Those who could not beg, buy, or borrow a ticket of admission formed a line outside the door, hoping that some who had tickets would fail to appear, but that did not often happen. A lunette was discovered over the door which commanded the lecture room, and here gathered a compact group of the excluded, finding room for one eye or one ear apiece, but the fainting of a lady in the crush put a stop to this privilege. In the downtown department stores Bergson's books were stacked up on the "best sellers" counter. His American publisher sold in two years half as many copies of "Creative Evolution" as had been sold in France in fifteen. Yet Bergson is a prophet not without honor in his own country. The three weeks he spent here were so crowded with engagements that he had to be kept running on a schedule as close as a railroad time-table. As he was leaving, I asked Professor Bergson the banal question of what he thought of America. He answered: "I shall always remember America as the Land of Interrupted Conversations. I have met so many interesting people with whom I should like to talk, but then somebody else equally interesting comes up."

M. Bergson believes that it is possible to make any philosophical idea clear and acceptable to the multitude. In this he obviously differs from other philosophers, many of whom do not think it possible and some of whom do not think it desirable. But to gain the wider audience, the author must take great pains with his style. The fault with translations is that the swing, the rhythm, is apt to be lost or altered, and this is essential to the impression as well as the right words. I spoke to him of the difficulty of finding an exact English equivalent ofélan vital, which is the key word of his "Evolution créatrice", and he replied that he thought that "impetus", the word chosen by Dr. Arthur Mitchell in his translation of the work, was better than any of the others which had been suggested, such as "impulse", "momentum", "movement", "onrush", "push", "force", and "urge."

M. Bergson's method of composition is based on his theory of style. In undertaking a new book he spends as many years as may be necessary to the mastery of the literature of the subject and the development of his ideas. Then when he starts in to compose, he sets aside all his books and notes, and writes at a furious rate so as to get the book down as nearly as possible in the form it took in his mind at one time, jotting down his thoughts as rapidly as they come, often in fragmentary sentences and words, so as not to interrupt the movement of his mind. Then having put on paper the essentials of his theme with its original impetus, he devotes himself to the long process of revision, verification, and correction.

To art in all its forms Bergson has given a large place in his philosophy. The little book in which he has touched upon it, "Le Rire" (Laughter), is not so much of a digression from his fundamental line of thought as may appear. He explains that ridicule has developed as a method of social control, to whip people into line, to punish them for willful or absent-minded disregard of social usages. Laughter is incompatible with emotion. The comic addresses itself to pure intelligence. A joke cannot be perceived until the heart has a momentary anæsthesia. There is nothing comic except human beings. Man has been defined as "the laughing animal." He is also the only laughable animal. Man becomes ridiculous when we regard him from an intellectualist standpoint; that is, as a machine. The attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body are laughable in the exact degree that they seem to us mechanical. We always laugh when persons seem like things.

The bearing of this theory of the ridiculous upon his philosophy is so obvious that he does not need to state it. Bergson, too, might use ridicule as a weapon and laugh determinism out of court. The man of the mechanists would be as funny as a jack-in-the-box.

In the same volume he gives his view of the function of art, from which a few sentences may be quoted here:

What is the object of art? If reality struck our senses and our consciousness directly; if we could enter into immediate communication with things and with each other, I believe that art would be useless, or rather that we would all be artists, for our souls would then vibrate continuously in unison with nature. Our eyes, aided by our memory, would cut out in space and fix in time inimitable pictures. Our glance would seize in passing, sculptured in the living marble of the human body, bits of statuary as beautiful as those of antiquity. We would hear singing in the depths of our souls like music, sometimes gay, more often plaintive, always original, the uninterrupted melody of our interior life. All this is around us, all this is in us, and yet nothing of all this is perceived by us distinctly. Between nature and us—what do I say?—between us and our own consciousness, a veil interposes, a thick veil for the common man, a thin veil, almost transparent, for the artist and the poet. What fairy has woven this veil? Was it through malice or through friendliness? It is necessary to live, and life requires that we apprehend things relatively to our needs. Living consists in acting. To live is to receive from objects only theusefulimpression in order to respond to it by the appropriate reactions; the other impressions must obliterate themselves or come to us only confusedly. I look and I believe I see, I listen and believe I hear, I study myself and I believe I read to the bottom of my heart. But what I see and what I hear from the external world is simply what my senses extract from it in order to throw light upon my conduct; what I know of myself is what flows on the surface, what takes part in action. My senses and my consciousness give me only a practical simplification of reality.Thus, whether it be painting, sculpture, poetry or music, art has no other object than to dissipate the practically useful symbols, the generalities conventionally and socially accepted, in short all that masks reality for us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself. It is a misunderstanding on this point that has given rise to the debate between realism and idealism in art. Art is certainly only a more direct vision of reality. But this purity of perception implies a rupture with useful convention, an innate and specially localized disinterestedness of the sense or of the consciousness, in short, a certain immateriality of life which is what has always been called idealism. So one might say without in the least playing upon the sense of the words, that realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and that it is by force of ideality alone that one can regain contact with reality.

Thus, whether it be painting, sculpture, poetry or music, art has no other object than to dissipate the practically useful symbols, the generalities conventionally and socially accepted, in short all that masks reality for us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself. It is a misunderstanding on this point that has given rise to the debate between realism and idealism in art. Art is certainly only a more direct vision of reality. But this purity of perception implies a rupture with useful convention, an innate and specially localized disinterestedness of the sense or of the consciousness, in short, a certain immateriality of life which is what has always been called idealism. So one might say without in the least playing upon the sense of the words, that realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and that it is by force of ideality alone that one can regain contact with reality.

There are various other ways besides art whereby we may recover and strengthen the faculty of intuition, which has been suffered to atrophy through too exclusive a reliance upon rational processes. There is, for example, action, life itself, the sense of living, which brings us into immediate contact with reality. By the help of science, art, and philosophy, we may achieve sympathy, a feeling of the kinship of nature, a consciousness of interpenetration, a realization of the meaning of evolution. Above all, philosophy has this aim and power, to develop another faculty, complementary to the intellect, that will open to us a perspective on the other half of reality, not capable of being confined in the rigid formulas of deductive logic.

There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone can find, but it will never seek them.Intelligence and instinct are turned in opposite directions, the former toward inert matter, the latter toward life. Intelligence by means of science, which is its work, will deliver up to us more and more completely the secret of physical operations; of life it brings us, and moreover only claims to bring us, a translation in terms of inertia. It goes all around life, taking from the outside the greatest possible number of views of it, drawing it into itself instead of entering into it. But it is to the very inwardness of life thatintuitionleads—by intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely.We see that the intellect, so skillful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigor, the stiffness, and the brutality of an instrument not designed for such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us much in this matter.

There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone can find, but it will never seek them.

Intelligence and instinct are turned in opposite directions, the former toward inert matter, the latter toward life. Intelligence by means of science, which is its work, will deliver up to us more and more completely the secret of physical operations; of life it brings us, and moreover only claims to bring us, a translation in terms of inertia. It goes all around life, taking from the outside the greatest possible number of views of it, drawing it into itself instead of entering into it. But it is to the very inwardness of life thatintuitionleads—by intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely.

We see that the intellect, so skillful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigor, the stiffness, and the brutality of an instrument not designed for such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us much in this matter.

In Bergson's system metaphysics occupies the same place that it does in the works of Aristotle. Metaphysics is simply what is beyond physics, not something antagonistic to it. He has not, like many modern philosophers, been contemptuous toward physiological psychology. On the contrary, he has mastered it and built upon it. This is the reason, I think, why his ideas have met with such swift acceptance. It is as absurd for a philosopher nowadays to attempt to confine himself to the data accessible to Plato as it would be for a mathematician to attempt to solve the problems of modern physics with the use of the methods of Euclid.

Bergson applied his theory of the relation of mind and brain to the explanation of the mechanism of dreaming, in an address before theInstitut psychologiqueon March 28, 1901.[3]Here he showed how the obscure sensations of sight, touch, and hearing which reach us even during sleep furnish the basis for our dreams, and how our memories fit into this framework, so the process is similar to that of ordinary perception except that the critical faculty is less vigilant than in a waking state. Thus, light flashing upon the closed eyes may give rise to a dream of fire, and the recumbent posture and consequent absence of pressure on the soles of the feet give us the idea of floating in the air. The following passage from this paper on dreams is of especial interest, for in it Bergson brings forward the theory which since then Freud and his school have developed and in many cases carried to extravagant lengths,—the theory that our memories are stored in a state of tension like steam in a boiler, and may rise into consciousness in various guises when the vigilance of the individual is relaxed:

Our memories, at any given moment, form a solid whole, a pyramid, so to speak, whose point is inserted precisely into our present action. But behind the memories which are concerned in our occupations and are revealed by means of it, there are others, thousands of others, stored below the scene illuminated by consciousness. Yes, I believe indeed that all our past life is there, preserved even to the most infinitesimal details, and that we forget nothing, and that all that we have felt, perceived, thought, willed, from the first awakening of our consciousness, survives indestructibly. But the memories which are preserved in these obscure depths are there in the state of invisible phantoms. They aspire, perhaps, to the light, but they do not even try to rise to it; they know that it is impossible and that I, as a living and acting being, have something else to do than to occupy myself with them.But suppose that, at a given moment, I becomedisinterestedin the present situation, in the present action—in short, in all which previously has fixed and guided my memory; suppose, in other words, that I am asleep. Then these memories, perceiving that I have taken away the obstacle, have raised the trapdoor which has kept them beneath the floor of consciousness, arise from the depths; they rise, they move, they perform in the night of unconsciousness a great dance macabre. They rush together to the door which has been left ajar. They all want to get through. But they cannot; there are too many of them. From the multitudes which are called, which will be chosen? It is not hard to say. Formerly, when I was awake, the memories which forced their way were those which could involve claims of relationship with the present situation, with what I saw and heard around me. Now it is more vague images which occupy my sight, more indecisive sounds which affect my ear, more indistinct touches which are distributed over the surface of my body, but there are also the more numerous sensations which arise from the deepest parts of the organism. So, then, among the phantom memories which aspire to fill themselves with color, with sonority, in short with materiality, the only ones that succeed are those which can assimilate themselves with the color-dust that we perceive, the external and internal sensations that we catch, etc., and which, besides, respond to the effective tone of our general sensibility. When this union is effected between the memory and the sensation, we have a dream.

But suppose that, at a given moment, I becomedisinterestedin the present situation, in the present action—in short, in all which previously has fixed and guided my memory; suppose, in other words, that I am asleep. Then these memories, perceiving that I have taken away the obstacle, have raised the trapdoor which has kept them beneath the floor of consciousness, arise from the depths; they rise, they move, they perform in the night of unconsciousness a great dance macabre. They rush together to the door which has been left ajar. They all want to get through. But they cannot; there are too many of them. From the multitudes which are called, which will be chosen? It is not hard to say. Formerly, when I was awake, the memories which forced their way were those which could involve claims of relationship with the present situation, with what I saw and heard around me. Now it is more vague images which occupy my sight, more indecisive sounds which affect my ear, more indistinct touches which are distributed over the surface of my body, but there are also the more numerous sensations which arise from the deepest parts of the organism. So, then, among the phantom memories which aspire to fill themselves with color, with sonority, in short with materiality, the only ones that succeed are those which can assimilate themselves with the color-dust that we perceive, the external and internal sensations that we catch, etc., and which, besides, respond to the effective tone of our general sensibility. When this union is effected between the memory and the sensation, we have a dream.

Bergson may be called a man of three books, if we ignore "Laughter", which is merely a flying but-tress of his system. In the first, known in English as "Time and Free Will", he develops his theory of vital duration as distinct from physical time, which has been the guiding clew of all his later thinking. This volume, completed in 1887, was the outcome of a four years' study of the physical, psychological, and metaphysical conceptions of time and space. For the second book, dealing with the relation of the mind to the brain, it was necessary to master the voluminous literature of the subject, especially the clinical and experimental researches on aphasia and localization of function. This required nine years of study, embodied in "Matter and Memory", appearing in 1896. In the preparation for the third book he devoted eleven years to the study of biology and produced "Creative Evolution" in 1907. According to this rate of increase, we might expect his fourth volume in 1923, but it would be obviously unfair to apply to M. Bergson himself the mathematical determinism that he repudiates.

I call attention to this preliminary study of the sciences, because there is a danger that the anti-intellectualist tendency of the pragmatic movement should lead to a disregard of the importance of scientific research. That this danger is real and present, was shown in the Binet report on the teaching of philosophy, previously referred to. Some of the professors complained that their students, under the influence of Bergson's ideas, had come to have a disdain for the tedious and laborious methods of experimental science, believing that science does not give us reality, and assuming that, while science is good enough for mechanics and physicians, it is indifferent to philosophers.

When this point was brought up for discussion in theSociété française de Philosophie, M. Bergson made an indignant reply, declaring that in the theories attributed to him he recognized nothing that he had taught or written. He had never contemned science or subordinated it to metaphysics.

Mathematics, for instance, what have I said of that? That, however great may be the part played in it by the creative imagination, it must not lose sight of space and matter; that matter and space are realities; that matter is weighted with geometry; that geometry is consequently not a mere play but a true point of contact with the absolute. I attribute the same absolute value to the physical sciences. It is true they enunciate laws of which the form would have been different if other variables, other units of measure, had been chosen, and especially if the problems had been propounded chronologically in a different order. But all this is because we are obliged to break up nature and to examine one by one the problems it sets for us. Really, physics strives for the absolute, and it approaches more and more as it advances this ideal limit. I should like to know if there exists, among modern conceptions of science, a theory that puts a higher value upon positive science. Most of them give us science as entirely relative to human intelligence. I hold, on the contrary, that it is reality itself, absolute reality, which the mathematical and physical sciences tend to reveal to us. Science only begins to become relative, or rather symbolic, when it approaches from the physico-chemical side, the problems of life and consciousness. But even here it is quite legitimate. It only needs then to be completed by a study of another kind, that is, metaphysics. In short, all my researches have had no other object than to bring about arapprochementbetween metaphysics and science and to consolidate the one with the other without sacrificing anything of either, after having first clearly distinguished the one from the other.

This outspoken and emphatic language ought to clear the air of many current misconceptions of Bergson's philosophy. Now that he has laid down his fundamental principles, it is to be hoped that he will next take up their applications to the interpretation of history and the problems of conduct. If he does not do this himself, others will do it for him, and doubtless not always in accordance with his intentions. In fact, they are already doing it. In France, Bergsonianism is not an academic speculation, but an active force in some of the most important movements of the day. We hear of a Bergsonian art and a Bergsonian literature as well as a Bergsonian Catholicism and a Bergsonian labor movement. The two last mentioned are of especial interest as showing the influence of his novel views upon the most diverse minds. Just as there were Hegelians of the Right and Hegelians of the Left, so now there are two wings of Bergsonianism, the conservative being the Modernists and the radical being the Syndicalists.

There has rarely been seen such an outburst of enthusiasm for metaphysical thought as that of the French neo-Catholics. The pragmatic philosophy, particularly James's "Varieties of Religious Experience", pointed the way to a new Christian apologetic based upon living experience, instead of abstract reasoning. The young Catholics turned their attention to the saints rather than to the theologians, and found inspiration in a fresh study of the Catholic mystics. In a conception of truth as a growth, as an ideal convergence of beneficial beliefs, rather than as a static limit, and in a conception of history as a progressive process of verification, they attained a point of view which enabled them to retain their ecclesiastical heritage and at the same time to accept the bounty of modern science. But such speculations were deemed dangerous by the Vatican, and the movement was crushed, so far as a movement of such vigor and vitality can be crushed, by the Encyclical and Syllabus issued by Pius X in 1907, and the anti-modernist oath that was later imposed.[4]This was followed in 1914 by the placing of Bergson's works upon the Index of Prohibited Books which no good Catholic may read without the express permission of his spiritual adviser.

At the opposite extreme we find the trades unions or syndicates, whose power has been often demonstrated in recent years, but whose aims and ideals are yet indeterminate and vague. So far it is Will and not Idea that is manifested in the revolutionary labor movement, to use the Schopenhauerian terms. But becoming conscious of the need of a philosophical justification, they have seized upon one side of Bergson's doctrine and declared theélan ouvrierbrother to theélan vital, or a part of it. Their flamboyant phraseology reminds one of 1793: "The Collège de France collaborates with the Bourse du Travail" and "The flute of personal meditation harmonizes with the trumpets of the social revolution." The syndicalists, like the modernists, have their revolt against dogma, against the catchwords of republicanism as well as against the rigid formulas of Marxianism, against all attempts to confine the future in the past and to impose determinism upon conduct. And when it comes to the enforcement of conformity—or, rather, of uniformity—of profession, there is not much difference between Pope and party.[5]

It is unnecessary to say that M. Bergson teaches neither Catholicism nor revolution, and that he cannot be held accountable for all the various applications of his ideas to practical life. I mention these extremes only to show the range of their actual influence. Whatever may be the fate of Bergson's philosophy, we may be sure it will not leave the world as it found it. It is a force to be reckoned with at all events in the field of action as well as in the realm of pure reason.

Very few references to disputed questions in religion, sociology, and ethics can be found in his works, and since he prefers to use a new, clean, and unconventional vocabulary, he cannot be pocketed in any of the pigeonholes provided in advance by the historians of philosophy. To the demand for a brief formulation of his philosophy, an indignant Bergsonian retorts: "Can you put Maeterlinck's 'Pelléas and Mélisande' into a formula?"

The Post Impressionists and Futurists are fond of ascribing their novel ideas of art to Bergson, but he is not eager to assume the responsibility. When I asked him about it, he said that he had never yet been able to discover his philosophy in their paintings, and further that he was always skeptical of a movement where the theory ran so far ahead of the practice.

It is obvious that the adoption of the pragmatic principle, particularly in the extreme Bergsonian form, would radically alter our view of the past, and compel a rewriting or at least a rereading of history. If history never repeats itself, what is its lesson for us? Certainly it is not competent to foretell our future, still less to prescribe our actions. The best expression of what seems to me the legitimate ethical deductions of Bergson's philosophy is to be found in the brilliant essays by L. P. Jacks. According to the editor of theHibbert Journal, the highest morality consists, not in following the established rules, but in a voluntary rise into a higher level. The true moral act is original, creative, unprecedented. What would the author of "Folk-ways", for whom conformity was the only morality, have said to the following:

"Had men all along restricted themselves to the performance of those actions for which the warrant of moral science was then and there available, many crimes perhaps would not have been committed, but it is doubtful if the world would contain the record of a single noble deed. We cannot remind ourselves too often that the most complete scientific knowledge of what has been done up to date will never enable us to answer the question, 'What ought to be done next?'

"The subject matter of science and the subject matter of morality are entirely different and in a sense opposed; the first is the deed-as-done, the second is the doing of a deed-to-be.

"Conscience rightly understood is no faculty of abstract judgment laying down propositions as to what ought and ought not to be done; it is not a 'voice', though we often name it such, bidding us do this or that; it is rather anélan vital, an impulse, an active principle, nay, the goodWillitself."—"Alchemy of Thought", by L. P. Jacks, pp. 260, 287.

Among the numerous followers of Bergson, none is more enthusiastic or sympathetic than Edouard Le Roy, a modernist Catholic—if that, since the encyclical, is not a contradiction in terms—who has for many years been in close touch with Bergson, and has been especially interested in the religious and ethical applications of his theories. His introduction to Bergson's philosophy is therefore useful, not merely because it gives in brief a competent exposition of Bergson's ideas, for the beginner would probably find it quite as profitable and enjoyable to read the same number of pages of "Creative Evolution", but chiefly because M. Le Roy is in a way an authorized spokesman, and so we can get some notion of Bergson's opinions about questions on which he has not yet expressed himself. For example, Bergson in all his books never deals with religion, although it is obvious that his philosophy has the closest relation with religion in many of its aspects. Le Roy, however, is not so reticent, and he closes the volume with the following noteworthy passage:

"In the depths of ourselves we find liberty; in the depths of universal being we find a demand for creation. Since evolution is creative, each of its moments works for the production of an indeducible and transcendent future. This future must not be regarded as a simple development of the present, a simple expression of germs already given. Consequently we have no authority for saying that there is forever only one order of life, only one plane of action, only one rhythm of duration, only one perspective of existence. And if disconnections and abrupt leaps are visible in the economy of the past—from matter to life, from the animal to man—we have no authority again for claiming that we cannot observe to-day something analogous in the very essence of human life, that the point of view of the flesh, and the point of view of the spirit, the point of view of reason, and the point of view of charity are a homogeneous extension of it. And apart from that, taking life in its first tendency, and in the general direction of its current, it is ascent, growth, upward effort, and a work of spiritualizing and emancipating creation: by that we might define Good, for Good is a path rather than a thing.

"But life may fail, halt, or travel downward.... Each species, each individual, each function tends to take itself as its end; mechanism, habit, body and letter, which are, strictly speaking, pure instruments, actually become principles of death. Thus it comes about that life is exhausted in efforts toward self-preservation, allows itself to be converted by matter into captive eddies, sometimes even abandons itself to the inertia of the weight which it ought to raise, and surrenders to the downward current which constitutes the essence of materiality: it is thus that Evil would be defined, as the direction of travel opposed to Good. Now, with man, thought, reflection, and clear consciousness appear. At the same time also properly moral qualifications appear; good becomes duty, evil becomes sin. At this precise moment, a new problem begins, demanding the soundings of a new intuition, yet connected at clear and visible points with previous problems.

"This is the philosophy which some are pleased to say is closed by nature to all problems of a certain order, problems of reason or problems of morality. There is no doctrine, on the contrary, which is more open, and none which, in actual fact, lends itself better to further extension."

I have quoted this entire, because Professor Bergson has given it his indorsement in the plainest terms. In a letter to M. Le Roy about the book, he says:

Your study could not be more conscientious or true to the original. Nowhere is this sympathy more in evidence than where you point the possibilities of further developments of the doctrine. In this direction I should myself say exactly what you have said.

The passage quoted above from M. Le Roy's book has, then, almost the significance of a signed statement. It was observed that in his lectures in New York Professor Bergson was much more outspoken than formerly in his views upon religious matters; as, for example, when he replied affirmatively to the question whether he believed in immortality or not. It may be anticipated that his future work will be in the development of his philosophy along the lines indicated by M. Le Roy, although we may expect—judging from his former books—that this will take the form, not of the formulation of a new moral code, but of the discovery of a new way of looking at life and appraising action.

Until recently the triumphal march of Bergson into increasing popularity and influence has met with little systematic opposition. Some have found him obscure. Some have called him absurd. He has his devoted partisans and bitter opponents. But his views have not yet been subjected to the thorough criticism which they must inevitably receive sooner or later. A step in this direction is the study of the pragmatic movement by René Berthelot. The first volume of his "Utilitarian Romanticism" deals with the pragmatism of Nietzsche and Poincaré; the second with the pragmatism of Bergson. The author, after the manner of historians of philosophy, is more concerned to determine what is new in Bergson than what is true. He acts upon the old military rule "divide and conquer" and accordingly splits up Bergsonism into German romanticism and Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism, and then proceeds to dispatch these severally after the orthodox manner. This procedure is in a way begging the question, for it implicitly denies the Bergsonian thesis that there may be something new in the world. Tracing a thing back to its roots is all very well, provided that you do not assume that the roots are all there is of the plant that has grown out of them.

In tracing this genealogy of thought M. Berthelot finds Bergson related to Nietzsche on the romantic side. Both, he says, derive their romanticism from Schelling; Bergson, through his revered teacher, Ravaisson, and Nietzsche through Hoelderlin, Emerson, Schopenhauer, and Wagner. "Like the symbolists, Nietzsche and Bergson have drunk in different cups the water from the same magic fountain; an invisible Vivian has bound them both in the same enchantment."

From the other side of the house—might we say the masculine side?—Bergson derived his utilitarian empiricism; M. Berthelot traces its descent from Berkeley through Hume, Mill, Bain, and Spencer. In the course of this discussion the author introduces the following ingenious formula:

Hobbes : Berkeley :: Nietzsche : Bergson.

Those who are sufficiently expert with the application of the rule of three to metaphysics may work this out at their leisure.

One would suppose, on Mendelian principles, that a hybrid of such diverse and distinguished intellectual ancestry would show more originality than Berthelot is willing to allow to Bergson. At the end of his analysis he comes to the conclusion that Bergson has really made only one important contribution to philosophy; that is, his conception of duration as distinguished from time. As Berkeley in analyzing the idea of space showed how psychological space, that is, the notion of space derived from sensation, differed from mathematical or formal space, so Bergson has shown how concrete duration or psychological time differs from mathematical or formal time. But even this theory according to our author is misapplied by Bergson, for it is not an opposition between space and time, but between two different conceptions of both space and time. This is characteristic of Berthelot's criticism, which is mainly directed toward breaking down all along the line the dichotomy to which Bergson is addicted.

Bergson's literary skill and amazing popularity seem to annoy him as they do other professors of philosophy in various lands. Whenever Berthelot presents Bergson with a bundle of compliments, we may detect a nettle hidden in the bouquet, as when he alludes to Bergson as "the Debussy of contemporary philosophy", and he says that with an increasing floridity of style the number of thebergsonienneshas come to surpass that of thebergsoniens.But that a philosophy should become fashionable seems to me rather creditable to the public than discreditable to the originator.

Professor Bergson has on several occasions expressed an interest in the efforts of the Society of Psychical Research to throw light into dark corners, and he has shown his sympathy by accepting the presidency of the English society, a successor in that position to F. W. H. Myers, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Crookes, A. J. Balfour, and Andrew Lang. In his presidential address delivered in Æolian Hall, London, May 28, 1913, Professor Bergson made the novel suggestion that if the same amount of effort had been given toward the study of mental phenomena as has been given to physical, we might now know as much about mind as we do about matter. The concluding passage of the address is worth quoting:

What would have happened if all our science, for three centuries past, had been directed toward the knowledge of the mind, instead of toward that of matter—if, for instance, Kepler and Galileo and Newton had been psychologists? Psychology would have attained developments of which one could no more form an idea than people had been able, before Kepler and Galileo and Newton, to form an idea of our astronomy and of our physics. Probably, instead of their being disdaineda priori, all the strange facts with which psychical research was concerned would have been sought out minutely. Probably we should have had a vitalist biology quite different from ours, perhaps also a different medicine, or therapeutics by way of suggestion would have been pushed to a point of which we can form no idea. But when the human mind, having pushed thus far the science of mind, had turned toward inert matter, it would have been confused as to its direction, not knowing how to set to work, not knowing how to apply to this matter the processes with which it had been successful up till then. The world of physical, and not that of psychical, phenomena would then have been the world of mystery. It was, however, neither possible nor desirable that things should have happened thus. It was not possible, because at the dawn of modern times mathematical science already existed, and it was necessary, consequently, that the mind should pursue its researches in a direction to which that science was applicable. Nor was it desirable, even for the science of mind, for there would always have been wanting to that science something infinitely precious—the precision, the anxiety for proof, the habit of distinguishing that which is certain and that which is simply possible or probable. The sciences concerned with matter can alone give to the mind that precision, that rigor, those scruples. Let us now approach the science of mind with these excellent habits, renouncing the bad metaphysic which embarrasses our research, and the science of the mind will attain results surpassing all our hopes.

But whatever might have been the result if Kepler, Galileo, and Newton had turned their attention to psychology instead of physics, it must be confessed that the Society for Psychical Research has been a disappointment, notwithstanding that it has numbered among its zealous investigators such distinguished scientists as Lodge, Crookes, and Wallace. When the society was organized in 1882, its first president, Professor Sidgwick, called attention to the numerous reports of physical phenomena in the séance room and expressed the hope that such evidence would be forthcoming more abundantly now that competent investigators were prepared to deal with them. But quite the contrary happened. As Mr. Podmore puts it in his book on "The Naturalization of the Supernatural":

"In short, just when an organized and systematic investigation on a scale not inadequate to the importance of the subject was for the first time about to be made, the phenomena to be investigated diminished rapidly in frequency and importance, and the opportunities for investigation were further curtailed by the indifference or reluctance of the mediums to submit their claims to investigation."

It would seem, then, that since mankind, or some small portion of it, has acquired the precision, rigor, and scruples of physical science, it has become difficult, even impossible, to cultivate the occult. Still most of us would agree with M. Bergson that, assuming that there was such an alternative opened to humanity as he supposes, science has chosen the better part in undertaking the conquest of the physical world first.

The religious importance of Bergson's theory of evolution will be apparent from the quotations given. It has occurred to me in reading his later work that in some passages the word "faith" could be substituted for "philosophy", and "elohim" for "élan vital", without materially altering the sense. Then, too, his emphasis of time restores a conception which has always been a vital factor in religious faith, but which is not found in the scientific conception of the world as a reversible reaction or the metaphysical conception of the world as an illusion of an unchangeable Absolute. The present day is different from any other, and the future depends upon it. We cannot console or excuse ourselves by saying, "It will be all the same a hundred years hence." Now is the accepted time, the day of decision, the unique opportunity, and the election may be irrevocable, a turning point in the history of the creation. The atoms have lost their chance. The animals are hopelessly sidetracked. Upon us depends the future, the salvation of the world.

We must no longer speak of life in general as if it were an abstraction, or a mere rubric under which all living beings are enrolled. At a certain time, in certain points of space, a very visible current originated. This current of life, traversing the bodies which it has successively organized, passing from generation to generation, has divided itself among species and dispersed itself among individuals without losing anything of its force.—"Creative Evolution"?

Bergson's philosophy would apparently lead to a conception of God more Arminian than Calvinistic, if it is permissible to apply the old theological categories; a God perhaps conscious, personal, and anthropomorphic, but not omnipotent and unchangeable. In fact it has a striking similarity to the conception of the Alexandrian Gnostics, a creative force struggling against the intractability of inert matter and triumphing by subtlety and persistence. The motto of Louis XI,Divide et impera, applies here in a different sense:

God, thus defined, has nothing of the already made: He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely....It is as if a vague and formless being whom we may call as we will, man or superman, had sought to realize himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning part of himself on the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world and even by the vegetable world.—"Creative Evolution", pp. 248, 266.

God, thus defined, has nothing of the already made: He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely....

It is as if a vague and formless being whom we may call as we will, man or superman, had sought to realize himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning part of himself on the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world and even by the vegetable world.—"Creative Evolution", pp. 248, 266.

According to this view, the world is gradually coming to life, acquiring a consciousness. Matter is an Undine in search of a soul. A Rodin statue with human forms emerging from the unhewn stone is Bergson's philosophy in marble. We see again Milton's "tawny lion pawing to get free his hinder parts." We hear again Faust's translation of the Logos: "In the beginning was the Act."

But I must refrain from imposing such analogies upon an author who has taken pains to clothe his thought in fresh language in order to be free from the connotations of the old. Let Bergson summarize his theory of evolution in his own words:

Life as a whole, from the initial impulsion that thrust it into the world, will appear as a wave that rises, and which is opposed by the descending movement of matter. On the greater part of its surface, at different heights, the current is converted by matter into a vortex. At one point alone it passes freely, dragging with it the obstacle which will weigh on its progress but will not stop it. At this point is humanity; it is our privileged situation. On the other hand, this rising wave is consciousness, and, like all consciousness, it includes potentialities without number which interpenetrate and to which consequently neither the category of unity nor that of multiplicity is appropriate, made as they both are for inert matter. The matter that it bears along with it, and in the interstices of which it inserts itself, alone can divide it into distinct individualities. On flows the current, running through human generations, subdividing itself into individuals. This subdivision was vaguely indicated in it, but could not have been made clear without matter. Thus souls are continually being created, which, nevertheless, in a certain sense pre-existed. They are nothing else than the little rills into which the great river of life divides itself, flowing through the body of humanity. The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course. Consciousness is distinct from the organism it animates, although it must undergo its vicissitudes. As the possible actions which a state of consciousness indicates are at every instant beginning to be carried out in the nervous centers, the brain underlines at every instant the motor indications of the state of consciousness; but the interdependency of consciousness and brain is limited to this; the destiny of consciousness is not bound up on that account with the destiny of cerebral matter. Finally, consciousness is essentially free; it is freedom itself; but it cannot pass through matter without settling on it, without adapting itself to it; this adaptation is what we call intellectuality; and the intellect, turning itself back toward active, that is to say, free, consciousness, naturally makes it enter into the conceptual forms into which it is accustomed to see matter fit. It will, therefore, always perceive freedom in the form of necessity; it will always neglect the part of novelty or of creation inherent in free act; it will always substitute for action itself an imitation, artificial, approximate, obtained by compounding the old with the old and the same with the same. Thus, to the eyes of a philosophy that attempts to reabsorb intellect in intuition, many difficulties vanish or become light. But such a doctrine does not only facilitate speculation, it gives us also more power to act and to live. For, with it, we feel ourselves no longer isolated in humanity, humanity no longer seems isolated in the nature that it dominates. As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent which, is materiality itself, so all organized beings, from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.—"Creative Evolution", p. 269.

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