Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. By Henri Bergson, Member of the Institute, Professor at the Collége de France. Authorised Translation by F. L. Pogson, M.A. (Library of Philosophy)-London: Sonnenschein & Co., 1910.Pp. xxiii+252. · Matter and Memory. By Henri Bergson. Authorised Translation by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer.-(Library of Philosophy) -London: Sonnenschein & Co. 1911.-Pp. xx+339. Creative Evolution. By Henri Bergson. Authorised Translation by Arthur Mitchell, Ph.D. - London: Macmillan & Co. 1911.- On the eve of the appearance of M. Bergson's chief philosophical works in English dress, it was entirely appropriate that the Hibbert Journal should prepare the way for a suitable reception of them by articles such as those which have already appeared.1 It was further entirely appropriate that these should be by writers who are in enthusiastic agreement with him in his supposed antagonism to British Idealism. Yet there is a danger of doing the illustrious French writer some wrong in mingling with our welcome anything which is likely to give an exaggerated impression of the difference which separates him from older established forms of thought in England and America. More particularly the enthusiastic acceptance of his leadership by writers whose names are associated with the pluralism towards which so strong a current has recently been setting, is not unlikely to have had the result of establishing by anticipation a prejudice against him in the minds of those to whom that whole movement seems to be founded on error. It may not, therefore, be out of place to endeavour to try to adjust the perspective by a more critical examination of M. Bergson's relation to current pragmatism and neo-Kantianism, from which the latter is so largely a revolt. This is the more necessary owing to M. Bergson's own reticence on the subject. Though he frequently alludes to the associationist philosophy represented by J. S. Mill, and though his whole philosophical contention may from one point of view be regarded as a criticism of Berkeleyan or, as he calls it, "English" Idealism, there is a singular absence of allusion to the Anglo-Saxon movement which, while it has inherited from Berkeleyanism the name of Idealism, is in reality 1 Vol. vii. p. 562 sqq., by Professor W. James; and vol. viii. p. 873 sqq., by H. W. Carr. founded on the "Refutation" of it and the vindication of external reality by which Kant sought to set it aside. A. Pragmatism in the wider sense of the term may be said to stand for the revolt against the "intellectualism" which marked, though in a different degree, alike the empirical and the a priori philosophy of the middle of the nineteenth century. But as the discussions, to which its more recent crystallisation into a definite creed gave rise, proceeded, it became evident that with the entirely legitimate reaction in favour of a sounder psychology and a more fluid conception of the world as a whole, there were mixed up more ambiguous elements drawing their strength from the popular but misleading distinctions between theory and practice on the one hand, liberty and necessity on the other. Granted that the ultimate test of truth, as pragmatism maintains, is whether or not it works, what, we may ask, in particular are the works by which we shall know it, what are the ends by which its "workings" must itself be tested? Are these confined to the ends commonly known as practical and social, or must we add to those others, which, like art, science and philosophy, though definitely related to them, are deeply misrepresented when taken as merely instrumental? Granted again that the universe cannot consistently be conceived as a closed sphere, composed of parts, that shift as the colours of a kaleidoscope, but have no power of shooting out into new created forms: granted that we are required to conceive of it, on the contrary, as having an open front to the void that gives room for change and development: granted, in other words, that we can no longer be satisfied with the idea of a merely static perfection, are we thereby committed to thinking of reality as in essence indeterminate and characterless, devoid of any overruling quality or virtue that implies unity of direction? What is characteristic of pragmatism in its most popular form is the opening it leaves for ambiguity in the answer to both of these questions. It has been apt to assign an altogether too narrow sense to the practical, and, on the ground that the world is not a unity of one kind, to deny to it unity of any kind. It is because M. Bergson's authority has been claimed on behalf of both of these errors that it becomes important to realise the precise bearing of his philosophy upon the assumptions which underlie them. 1. There can, of course, be no doubt as to his general view of the place and function of scientific theory. If there is one doctrine that can be said to dominate his thinking in all the three volumes, it is the subordination of the distinctions and methods of the logical understanding to the needs of practical life. For practical purposes it is essential that we should be able to analyse effects into causes, equate events with their antecedent and coexistent conditions, reduce qualitative differences to quantitative variations of homogeneous units. But the success of these methods in dealing with the world which we "use" ought not to blind us to the process of simplification which they involve and which renders them wholly inapplicable to the apprehension of the reality of things as they are in themselves, where all is the precise opposite of the assumptions that underlie them. Instead of simplicity, reality gives us complexity; instead of the externality of part to part, permeation; instead of extension, intension; instead of identity, difference; instead of relativity and dependence, absoluteness and individuality. Yet so habituated have we become to the methods of the physical sciences, so obsessed with the idea of their all-sufficiency, that we carry them unhesitatingly into the region of metaphysics to the falsification of all true knowledge. To escape from the shadow to the reality what is needed is a complete reversal of the scientific attitude. Starting from the unity of the whole, we have broken it up into parts. But by no mere piecing together of the parts can we restore the whole that we have lost any more than we can restore the rocket from the rain of cinders it leaves behind it as it rises, or the pressure of the watch-spring from the swings of the pendulum and the jerks of the hands in which it disperses itself. For the analysis, isolation, pulverisation (the ideals which are also the idols of the intelligence) we must substitute an altogether different process which is much more analogous to the immediacy of sense than the elaboration of science. So far we are on firm ground, and there seems every justification for identifying Professor Bergson with the view which subordinates theory to practice, contemplation to life. Yet any candid examination of his philosophy as a whole will make it clear that there is another equally characteristic side to his teaching. So far from limiting reality to what we find to be consistent with our practical purposes in the narrower sense, he holds that these purposes themselves form but an insignificant fragment of what we may assume to be real. How, indeed, could it be otherwise with a philosophy which finds the principle of spirit in a region of purity or "virtuality," to which the "facts" of our practical and social life bear much the same relation as physical facts bear in turn to them. There are doubtless difficulties, perhaps insuperable difficulties, in the distinction that is drawn between "pure memory" which is of reality, and the practical memory, which is a merely mechanical habit of mind in its dealings with phenomena. But there is no doubt as to the general meaning of the doctrine or as to the consequences that flow from it. It means that outbordering and overlapping the will to live in the narrower sense, as the soul's inner life outborders its material existence, is the will to know, to be conscious, self-contained, self-enacting spirit. Besides the outgoing movement represented by practical life there is a return movement of the spirit upon itself. In this movement knowledge in the ordinary sense is indeed condemned, but only that it may give place to a deeper kind of knowledge at once the test and the disposer of the other's achievements. We are told, it is true, that metaphysics or philosophy -the name that is given to this form of knowledge-is "an attempt to transcend human conditions," to put off, as Aristotle expresses it in a similar connexion, our mortality. But it is an attempt to which we are committed by the deepest human instincts. As such, it is identical with true empiricism "which proposes to press as close as possible to the original itself, to deepen its life, and, by a kind of intellectual sounding, feel the palpitation of its soul." I do not urge this with a view to identifying M. Bergson with any form of modern intellectualism, but merely in order to show that he approaches this question from a plane wholly different from that of ordinary pragmatism, and, while perhaps consistent in rejecting Platonic idealism on the ground that "it assigns more reality to the immovable than to the moving," yet allies himself on this side of his philosophy with the great line of gnostics of which Plotinus was the founder. 2. In trying to answer the first of our questions we have already anticipated to a certain extent the answer to the second, but it is necessary to go rather more into detail in order to show that neither from the side of his theory of reality nor from that of his theory of the faculty which apprehends it, is there any conclusive ground for identifying M. Bergson with an out-an-out pluralism. Here, too, I believe it can be shown that he approaches the problems of philosophy from a plane and with reservations of which ordinary pragmatism knows nothing. That there is a pluralistic side to Professor Bergson's philosophy has been already admitted to the full. He is the champion of process. He carries on an incessant war against the conception of a "bloc universe." His very difference with ordinary dualism and its doctrine of independent things is made the basis of a new form of pluralism. "There are no things," he says, "but only actions." If all is thus movement, "incessant life, action, liberty," what room is there for the fixed thoughts and purposes that theists attribute to the Creator, or for the all-embracing and therefore all-limiting absolute of the pantheist? Pluralistic, too, is his conception of the two currents within this creative movement. Life, we are told, is one movement, matter is the inverse movement; each is simple and individual in itself. Life itself separates into the two divergent lines of the unconscious and instinctive, and the conscious and intelligent. Finally, intelligence divides itself between the downward or outward path that leads to the organisation of matter for practical ends, and the upward or inward that leads to the extension and organisation of experience to feed the life of the spirit. But we have already seen reason to be on our guard against the mere form of expression in so many-sided a writer. In connection with the distinctions just enumerated it does not require much research to find evidence of the purely relative validity which he attaches to each of them, and of persistent efforts to subordinate them to a deeper unity. To set against these may, indeed, also be found passages in which he protests explicitly against the very idea of unity, but this is because of the peculiar 1 "Introduction à la Métaphysique" (Révue de métaphysique et de morale, Jan. 1903), par H. Bergson. meaning he attaches to the "one" as the contrary of the many, and thus as constituting itself by a kind of paradox a difference in a deeper unity. So far from resting in any facile pluralism, he is led by the very depth of his own monism to reject the current statements of it. His philosophy may be said to be in reality an appeal from a shallower to a deeper form of unity. It is in this spirit that, while insisting on the reality of the new and the unforeseen in the processes of creation as a whole, he refuses to conceive of the world at any moment as mere indeterminate possibility. If there is no definable end, there is, at least, unity of direction in the creative impulse. It is this which he at one time calls freedom (Creative Evolution, p. 285), at another the union of individuality and association (ibid., p. 273), at another "reflection." Looked at from without, the cosmic process appears to be dispersed among millions of individuals; looked on in itself it is measureless promise and potency (" une immensité de virtualité"). It is like an inspiration that falls on the outer ear in multitudinous words, verses, and strophes, but within the soul preserves its unity through them all and moulds them to a form which is a symbol of itself. Similarly from the side of the antithesis between liberty and necessity. Amid endless diversity the stream has a unity of direction without which history would be impossible. The problem of history has ever been "to create out of matter, which is very necessity, an instrument of liberty, to make a machine which may triumph over mechanism, to employ the fixity of nature to pass beyond the meshes of the net which it had spread" (ibid., p. 278). A like overruling power makes itself manifest in the apparently opposite tendencies of animate life upon earth. Life, as we know it, begins in a form which is neither instinct nor intelligence, but the unbroken unity of both. Thereafter it seems to divide itself between them; but, after the division, it reaches a point where union again is possible, and moves forward to the goal of a state in which instinct no longer wastes itself in conflict with reason but passes back into the stream of intelligent life to give it volume and energy. So, at least, I interpret the suggestive passage in which the "creative thrust" is compared to the currents that disperse themselves in a partly closed basin, only to be beaten back from the sides and find their way as reinforcing tributaries into the main stream that rushes out towards freedom (ibid., p. 273). Even between the races of creatures that represent the abortive effort of nature to escape from necessity, and the human species that represents its success, there is no such absolute opposition as appears. Remote from us, enemies even to us, as the animals may appear, they have not failed to prove useful companions of the way, relieving consciousness of useless burdens and enabling it to rise into a purer air. The relation of the life of conscious action and the apparently unconscious yet psychical existence of the spirit in the world of "pure memory" remains, indeed, to my mind, obscure, though not so much because of the difficulty of conceiving how we can have awareness without |