A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson Part 6

("Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)

Is not that the case here? The affirmative seems all the more inevitable inasmuch as the language of transformism is the only language known to the biology of today. Evolution can, it is true, be transposed, but not suppressed, since in any actual state there would always remain this striking fact that the living forms met with as remains in geological layers are ranged by the natural affinity of their characteristics in an order of succession parallel to the succession of the ages. We are not really then inventing a hypothesis in beginning with the affirmation of evolution. But what we have to do is to appreciate its object.

Evolution! We meet the word everywhere today. But how rare is the true idea! Let us ask the astronomers who originate cosmogonical hypotheses, and invent a primitive nebula, the natural philosophers who dream that by the deterioration of energy and the dissipation of movement the material world will obtain final rest in the inertia of a h.o.m.ogeneous equilibrium, let us ask the biologists and psychologists who are enemies of fixed species and inquisitive about ancestral history. What they are anxious to discern in evolution is the persistent influence of an initial cause once given, the attraction of a fixed end, a collection of laws before the eternity of which change becomes negligible like an appearance. Now he who thinks of the universe as a construction of unchangeable relations denies by his method the evolution of which he speaks, since he transforms it into a calculable effect necessarily produced by a regulated play of generating conditions, since he implicitly admits the illusive character of a becoming which adds nothing to what is given.

Finality itself, if he keeps the name, does not save him from his error, for finality in his eyes is nothing but an efficient cause projected into the future. So we see him fixing stages, marking periods, inserting means, putting in milestones, continually destroying movement by halting it before his gaze. And we all do the same by instinctive inclination.

Our concept of law, in its cla.s.sical form, is not general: it represents only the law of co-existence and of mechanism, the static relation between two numerically disconnected terms; and in order to grasp evolution we shall doubtless have to invent a new type of law: law in duration, dynamic relation. For we can, and we must, conceive that there is an evolution of natural laws; that these laws never define anything but a momentary state of things; that they are in reality like streaks determined in the flux of becoming by the meeting of contrary currents.

"Laws," says Monsieur Boutroux, "are the bed down which pa.s.ses the torrent of facts; they have dug it, though they follow it." Yet we see the common theories of evolution appealing to the concepts of the present to describe the past, forcing them back to prehistoric times, and beyond the reasoning of today, placing at the beginning what is only conceivable in the mind of the contemporary thinker; in a word, imagining the same laws as always existing and always observed. This is the method which Mr Bergson so justly criticises in Spencer: that of reconstructing evolution with fragments of its product.

If we wish thoroughly to grasp the reality of things, we must think otherwise. Neither of these ready-made concepts, mechanism and finality, is in place, because both of them imply the same postulate, viz. that "everything is given," either at the beginning or at the end, whilst evolution is nothing if it is not, on the contrary, "that which gives."

Let us take care not to confound evolution and development. There is the stumbling-block of the usual transformist theories, and Mr Bergson devotes to it a closely argued and singularly penetrating criticism, by an example which he a.n.a.lyses in detail. ("Creative Evolution", chapter i.) These theories either do not explain the birth of variation, and limit themselves to an attempt to make us understand how, once born, it becomes fixed, or else through need of adaptation they look for a conception of its birth. But in both cases they fail.

"The truth is that adaptation explains the windings of the movement of evolution, but not the general directions of the movement, still less the movement itself. The road which leads to the town is certainly obliged to climb the hills and go down the slopes; it adapts itself to the accidents of the ground; but the accidents of the ground are not the cause of the road, any more than they have imparted its direction."

("Creative Evolution", pages 111-112.)

At the bottom of all these errors there are only prejudices of practical action. That is of course why every work appears to be an outside construction beginning with previous elements; a phase of antic.i.p.ation followed by a phase of execution, calculation, and art, an effective projecting cause, and a concerted goal, a mechanism which hurls to a finality which aims. But the genuine explanation must be sought elsewhere. And Mr Bergson makes this plain by two admirable a.n.a.lyses in which he takes to pieces the common ideas of disorder and nothingness in order to explain their meaning relative to our proceedings in industry or language.

Let us come back to facts, to immediate experience, and try to translate its pure data simply. What are the characteristics of vital evolution?

First of all it is a dynamic continuity, a continuity of qualitative progress; next, it is essentially a duration, an irreversible rhythm, a work of inner maturation. By the memory inherent in it, the whole of its past lives on and acc.u.mulates, the whole of its past remains for ever present to it; which is tantamount to saying that it is experience.

It is also an effort of perpetual invention, a generation of continual novelty, indeducible and capable of defying all antic.i.p.ation, as it defies all repet.i.tion. We see it at its task of research in the groping attempts exhibited by the long-sought genesis of species; we see it triumphant in the originality of the least state of consciousness, of the least body, of the tiniest cell, of which the infinity of times and s.p.a.ces does not offer two identical specimens.

But the reef which lies in its way, and on which too often it founders, is habit; habit would be a better and more powerful means of action if it remained free, but in so far as it congeals and becomes materialised, is a hindrance and an obstacle. First of all we have the average types round which fluctuates an action which is decreasing and becoming reduced in breadth. Then we have the residual organs, the proofs of dead life, the encrustations from which the stream of consciousness gradually ebbs; and finally we have the inert gear from which all real life has disappeared, the ma.s.ses of shipwrecked "things" rearing their spectral outlines where once rolled the open sea of mind. The concept of mechanism suits the phenomena which occur within the zone of wreckage, on this sh.o.r.e of fixities and corpses. But life itself is rather finality, if not in the anthropomorphic sense of premeditated design, plan, or programme, at least in this sense, that it is a continually renewed effort of growth and liberation. And it is from here we get Mr Bergson's formulae: vital impetus and creative evolution.

In this conception of being consciousness is everywhere, as original and fundamental reality, always present in a myriad degrees of tension or sleep, and under infinitely various rhythms.

The vital impulse consists in a "demand for creation"; life in its humblest stage already const.i.tutes a spiritual activity; and its effort sends out a current of ascending realisation which again determines the counter-current of matter. Thus all reality is contained in a double movement of ascent and descent. The first only, which translates an inner work of creative maturation, is essentially durable; the second might, in strictness, be almost instantaneous, like that of an escaping spring; but the one imposes its rhythm on the other. From this point of view mind and matter appear not as two things opposed to each other, as static terms in fixed ant.i.thesis, but rather as two inverse directions of movement; and, in certain respects, we must therefore speak not so much of matter or mind as of spiritualisation and materialisation, the latter resulting automatically from a simple interruption of the former.

"Consciousness or superconsciousness is the rocket, the extinguished remains of which fall into matter." ("Creative Evolution", page 283.)

What image of universal evolution is then suggested? Not a cascade of deduction, nor a system of stationary pulsations, but a fountain which spreads like a sheaf of corn and is partially arrested, or at least hindered and delayed, by the falling spray. The fountain itself, the reality which is created, is vital activity, of which spiritual activity represents the highest form; and the spray which falls is the creative act which falls, it is reality which is undone, it is matter and inertia. In a word, the supreme law of genesis and fall, the double play of which const.i.tutes the universe, comprises a psychological formula.

Everything begins in the manner of an invention, as the fruit of duration and creative genius, by liberty, by pure mind; then comes habit, a kind of body, as the body is already a group of habits; and habit, taking root, being a work of consciousness which escapes it and turns against it, is little by little degraded into mechanism in which the soul is buried.

III.

The main lines and general perspective of Mr Bergson's philosophy now perhaps begin to appear. Certainly I am the first to feel how powerless a slender resume really is to translate all its wealth and all its strength.

At least I wish I could have contributed to making its movement, and what I may call its rhythm, clearer to perception. It is from the books of the master himself that a more complete revelation must be sought.

And the few words which I am still going to add as conclusion are only intended to sketch the princ.i.p.al consequences of the doctrine, and allow its distant reach to be seen.

The evolution of life would be a very simple and easy thing to understand if it were fulfilled along one single trajectory and followed a straight path. "But we are here dealing with a sh.e.l.l which has immediately burst into fragments, which, being themselves species of sh.e.l.ls, have again burst into fragments destined to burst again, and so on for a very long time." ("Creative Evolution", page 107.) It is, in fact, the property of a tendency to develop itself in the expansion which a.n.a.lyses it. As for the causes of this dispersion into kingdoms, then into species, and finally into individuals, we can distinguish two series: the resistance which matter opposes to the current of life sent through it, and the explosive force--due to an unstable equilibrium of tendencies--carried by the vital impulse within itself. Both unite in making the thrust of life divide in more and more diverging but complementary directions, each emphasising some distinct aspect of its original wealth. Mr Bergson confines himself to the branches of the first order--plant, animal, and man. And in the course of a minute and searching discussion he shows us the characteristics of these lines in the moods or qualities signified by the three words--torpor, instinct, and intelligence: the vegetable kingdom constructing and storing explosives which the animal expends, and man creating a nervous system for himself which permits him to convert the expense into a.n.a.lysis. Let us leave aside, as we must, the many suggestive views scattered lavishly about, the many flashes of light which fall on all faces of the problem, and let us confine ourselves to seeing how we get a theory of knowledge from this doctrine. There we have yet another proof of the striking and fertile originality of the new philosophy.

More than one objection has been brought against Mr Bergson on this head. That is quite natural: how could such a novelty be exactly understood at once? It is also very desirable; it is the demands for enlightenment which lead a doctrine to full consciousness of itself, to precision and perfection. But we must be afraid of false objections, those which arise from an obstinate translation of the new philosophy into an old language steeped in a different metaphysic. With what has Mr Bergson been reproached? With misunderstanding reason, with ruining positive science, with being caught in the illusion of getting knowledge otherwise than by intelligence, or of thinking otherwise than by thought; in short, of falling into a vicious circle by making intellectualism turn round upon itself. Not one of these reproaches has any foundation.

Let us begin by a few preliminary remarks to clear the ground. First of all, there is one ridiculous objection which I quote only to record.

I mean that which suspects at the bottom of the theories which we are going to discuss some dark background, some prepossession of irrational mysticism. On the contrary, the truth is, we have here perhaps better than anywhere, the spectacle of pure thought face to face with things.

But it is a complete thought, not thought reduced to some partial functions, but sufficiently sure of its critical power to sacrifice none of its resources. Here, we may say, really is the genuine positivism, which reinstates all spiritual reality. It does not in any way lead to a misunderstanding or depreciation of science. Even where contingency and relativity are most visible in it, in the domain of inert matter, Mr Bergson goes so far as to say that physical science touches an absolute.

It is true that it touches this absolute rather than sees it.

More particularly it perceives all its reactions on a system of representative forms which it presents to it, and observes the effect on the veil of theory with which it envelops it. At certain moments, all the same, the veil becomes almost transparent. And in any case the scholar's thought guesses and grazes reality in the curve drawn by the succession of its increasing syntheses. But there are two orders of science. Formerly it was from the mathematician that we borrowed the ideal of evidence. Hence came the inclination always to seek the most certain knowledge from the most abstract side. The temptation was to make a kind of less severe and rigorous mathematics of biology itself.

Now if such a method suits the study of inert matter because in a manner geometrical, so much so that our knowledge of it thus acquired is more incomplete than inexact, this is not at all the case for the things of life. Here, if we were to conduct scientific research always in the same grooves and according to the same formulae, we should immediately encounter symbolism and relativity. For life is progress, whilst the geometrical method is commensurable only with things. Mr Bergson is aware of this; and his rare merit has been to disengage specific originality from biology, while elevating it to a typical and standard science.

But let us come to the heart of the problem. What was Kant's point of departure in the theory of knowledge? In seeking to define the structure of the mind according to the traces of itself which it must have left in its works, and in proceeding by a reflective a.n.a.lysis ascending from a fact to its conditions, he could only regard intelligence as a thing made, a fixed system of categories and principles.

Mr Bergson adopts an inverse att.i.tude. Intelligence is a product of evolution: we see it slowly and uninterruptedly constructed along a line which rises through the vertebrates to man. Such a point of view is the only one which conforms to the real nature of things, and the actual conditions of reality; the more we think of it, the more we perceive that the theory of knowledge and the theory of life are bound up with one another. Now what do we conclude from this point of view? Life, considered in the direction of "knowledge," evolves on two diverging lines which at first are confused, then gradually separate, and finally end in two opposed forms of organisation, intelligence and instinct.

Several contrary potentialities interpenetrated at their common source, but of this source each of these kinds of activity preserves or rather accentuates only one tendency; and it will be easy to mark its dual character.

Instinct is sympathy; it has no clear consciousness of itself; it does not know how to reflect; it is hardly capable of varying its steps; but it operates with incomparable certainty because it remains lodged in things, in communion with their rhythm and with inner feeling of them.

The history of animals in this respect supplies many remarkable examples which Mr Bergson a.n.a.lyses and discusses in detail. As much might be said of the work which produces a living body, and of the effort which presides over its growth, maintenance, and functions. Take a natural philosopher who has long breathed the atmosphere of the laboratory, who has by long practice acquired what we call "experience"; he has a kind of intimate feeling for his instruments, their resources, their movements, their working tendencies; he perceives them as extensions of himself; he possesses them as groups of habitual actions, thus discoursing by manipulations as easily and spontaneously as others discourse in calculation. Doubtless that is only an image; but transpose it and generalise it, and it will help you to understand the kind of action which divines instinct. But intelligence is something quite different. We are talking, of course, of the a.n.a.lytic and synthetic intelligence which we use in our acts of current thought, which works throughout our daily action and forms the fundamental thread of our scientific operations. I need not here go back to the criticism of its ordinary proceedings. But I must now note the service which suits them, the domain in which they apply and are valid, and what they teach us thereby about the meaning, reach, and natural task of intelligence.

Whilst instinct vibrates in sympathetic harmony with life, it is about inert matter that intelligence is granted; it is a rider to our faculty of action; it triumphs in geometry; it feels at home among the objects in which our industry finds its supports and its tools. In a word, "our logic is primarily the logic of solids." (Preface to "Creative Evolution".) But if we enter the vital order its incompetence is manifestly apparent.

It is very important that deduction should be so impotent in biology.

Still more impotent is it perhaps in matters of art or religion; whilst, on the contrary, it works marvels so long as it has only to foresee movements or transformations in bodies. What does this mean, if not that intelligence and materiality go together, that language with its a.n.a.lytic steps is regulated by the movements of matter? Philosophy once again then must leave it behind, for the duty of philosophy is to consider everything in its relation to life.

Do not conclude, however, that the philosopher's duty is to renounce intelligence, place it under tutelage, or abandon it to the blind suggestions of feeling and will. It has not even the right to do so.

Instinct, with us who have evolved along the grooves of intelligence, has remained too weak to be sufficient for us. Besides, intelligence is the only path by which light could dawn in the bosom of primitive darkness. But let us look at present reality in all its complexity, all its wealth. Round intelligence itself exists a halo of instinct. This halo represents the remains of the first nebulous vapour at the expense of which intelligence was const.i.tuted like a brilliantly condensed nucleus; and it is still today the atmosphere which gives it life, the fringe of touch, and delicate probing, inspiring contact and divining sympathy, which we see in play in the phenomena of discovery, as also in the acts of that "attention to life," and that "sense of reality" which is the soul of good sense, so widely distinct from common-sense. And the peculiar task of the philosopher is to reabsorb intelligence in instinct, or rather to reinstate instinct in intelligence; or better still, to win back to the heart of intelligence all the initial resources which it must have sacrificed. This is what is meant by return to the primitive, and the immediate, to reality and life. This is the meaning of intuition.

Certainly the task is difficult. We at once suspect a vicious circle.

How can we go beyond intelligence except by intelligence itself? We are apparently inside our thought, as incapable of coming out of it as is a balloon of rising above the atmosphere. True, but on this reasoning we could just as well prove that it is impossible for us to acquire any new habit whatsoever, impossible for life to grow and go beyond itself continually.

We must avoid drawing false conclusions from the simile of the balloon.

The question here is to know what are the real limits of the atmosphere.

It is certain that the synthetic and critical intelligence, left to its own strength, remains imprisoned in a circle from which there is no escape.

But action removes the barrier. If intelligence accepts the risk of taking the leap into the phosph.o.r.escent fluid which bathes it, and to which it is not altogether foreign, since it has broken off from it and in it dwell the complementary powers of the understanding, intelligence will soon become adapted and so will only be lost for a moment to reappear greater, stronger, and of fuller content. It is action again under the name of experience which removes the danger of illusion or giddiness, it is action which verifies; by a practical demonstration, by an effort of enduring maturation which tests the idea in intimate contact with reality and judges it by its fruits.

It always falls therefore to intelligence to p.r.o.nounce the grand verdict in the sense that only that can be called true which will finally satisfy it; but we mean an intelligence duly enlarged and transformed by the very effect of the action it has lived. Thus the objection of "irrationalism" directed against the new philosophy falls to the ground.

The objection of "non-morality" fares no better. But is has been made, and people have thought fit to accuse Mr Bergson's work of being the too calm production of an intelligence too indifferent, too coldly lucid, too exclusively curious to see and understand, untroubled and unthrilled by the universal drama of life, by the tragic reality of evil. On the other hand, not without contradiction, the new philosophy has been called "romantic," and people have tried to find in it the essential traits of romanticism: its predilection for feeling and imagination, its unique anxiety for vital intensity, its recognised right to all which is to be, whence its radical inability to establish a hierarchy of moral qualifications. Strange reproach! The system in question is not yet presented to us as a finished system. Its author manifests a plain desire to cla.s.sify his problems. And he is certainly right in proceeding so: there is a time for everything, and on occasion we must learn to be just an eye focussed upon being. But that does not at all exclude the possibility of future works, treating in due order of the problem of human destiny, and perhaps even in the work so far completed we may descry some attempts to bring this future within ken.

But universal evolution, though creative, is not for all that quixotic or anarchist. It forms a sequence. It is a becoming with direction, undoubtedly due, not to the attraction of a clearly preconceived goal, or the guidance of an outer law, but to the actual tendency of the original thrust. In spite of the stationary eddies or momentary backwashes we observe here and there, its stream moves in a definite direction, ever swelling and broadening. For the spectator who regards the general sweep of the current, evolution is growth. On the other hand, he who thinks this growth now ended is under a simple delusion: "The gates of the future stand wide open." ("Creative Evolution", page 114.) In the stage at present attained man is leading; he marks the culminating point at which creation continues; in him, life has already succeeded, at least up to a certain point; from him onwards it advances with consciousness capable of reflection; is it not for that very reason responsible for the result? Life, according to the new philosophy, is a continual creation of what is new: new--be it well understood--in the sense of growth and progress in relation to what has gone before.

Life, in a word, is mental travel, ascent in a path of growing spiritualisation. Such at least is the intense desire, and such the first tendency which launched and still inspires it. But it may faint, halt, or travel down the hill. This is an undeniable fact; and once recognised does it not awake in us the presentiment of a directing law immanent in vital effort, a law doubtless not to be found in any code, nor yet binding through the stern behest of mechanical necessity, but a law which finds definition at every moment, and at every moment also marks a direction of progress, being as it were the shifting tangent to the curve of becoming?

Let us did that according to the new philosophy the whole of our past survives for ever in us, and by means of us results in action. It is then literally true that our acts do to a certain extent involve the whole universe, and its whole history: the act which we make it accomplish will exist henceforward for ever, and will for ever tinge universal duration with its indelible shade. Does not that imply an imperious, urgent, solemn, and tragic problem of action? Nay, more; memory makes a persistent reality of evil, as of good. Where are we to find the means to abolish and reabsorb the evil? What in the individual is called memory becomes tradition and joint responsibility in the race.

On the other hand, a directing law is immanent in life, but in the shape of an appeal to endless transcendence. In dealing with this future transcendent to our daily life, with this further sh.o.r.e of present experience, where are we to seek the inspiring strength? And is there not ground for asking ourselves whether intuitions have not arisen here and there in the course of history, lighting up the dark road of the future for us with a prophetic ray of dawn? It is at this point that the new philosophy would find place for the problem of religion.

But this word "religion," which has not come once so far from Mr Bergson's pen, coming now from mine, warns me that it is time to end. No man today would be justified in foreseeing the conclusions to which the doctrine of creative evolution will one day undoubtedly lead on this point. More than any other, I must forget here what I myself may have elsewhere tried to do in this order of ideas. But it was impossible not to feel the approach of the temptation. Mr Bergson's work is extraordinarily suggestive. His books, so measured in tone, so tranquil in harmony, awaken in us a mystery of presentiment and imagination; they reach the hidden retreats where the springs of consciousness well up.

Long after we have closed them we are shaken within; strangely moved, we listen to the deepening echo, pa.s.sing on and on. However valuable already their explicit contents may be, they reach still further than they aimed. It is impossible to tell what latent germs they foster. It is impossible to guess what lies behind the boundless distance of the horizons they expose. But this at least is sure: these books have verily begun a new work in the history of human thought.

ADDITIONAL EXPLANATIONS