“Instinct alone,” he says, “is knowledge at a distance. It has the same relation to intelligence that vision has to touch.” We may observe in passing that, as appears in many passages, Bergson is a strong visualizer, whose thought is always conducted by means of visual images.
The essential characteristic of intuition is that it does not divide the world into separate things, as the intellect does; although Bergson does not use these words, we might describe it as synthetic rather than analytic. It apprehends a multiplicity, but a multiplicity of interpenetrating processes, not of spatially external bodies. There are in truth no things: “things and states are only views, taken by our mind, of becoming. There are no things, there are only actions.” This view of the world, which appears difficult and unnatural to intellect, is easy and natural to intuition. Memory affords no instance of what is meant, for in memory the past lives on into the present and interpenetrates it. Apart from mind, the world would be perpetually dying and being born again; the past would have no reality, and therefore there would be no past. It is memory, with its correlative desire, that makes the past and the future real and therefore creates true duration and true time. Intuition alone can understand this mingling of past and future: to the intellect they remain external, spatially external as it were, to one another. Under the guidance of intuition, we perceive that “form is only a snapshot view of a transition,” and the philosopher “will see the material world melt back into a single flux.”
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Closely connected with the merits of intuition are Bergson’s doctrine of freedom and his praise of action. “In reality,” he says, “a living being is a centre of action. It represents a certain sum of contingency entering into the world, that is to say, a certain quantity of possible action.” The arguments against free will depend partly upon assuming that the intensity of psychical states is a quantity, capable, at least in theory, of numerical measurement; this view Bergson undertakes to refute in the first chapter of Time and Free Will. Partly the determinist depends, we are told, upon a confusion between true duration and mathematical time, which Bergson regards as really a form of space. Partly, again, the determinist rests his case upon the unwarranted assumption that, when the state of the brain is given, the state of the mind is theoretically determined. Bergson is willing to admit that the converse is true, that is to say, that the state of brain is determinate when the state of mind is given, but he regards the mind as more differentiated than the brain, and therefore holds that many different states of mind may correspond to one state of brain. He concludes that real freedom is possible: “We are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.”
In the above outline, I have in the main endeavoured merely to state Bergson’s views, without giving the reasons adduced by him in favour of their truth. This is easier than it would be with most philosophers, since as a rule he does not give reasons for his opinions, but relies on their inherent attractiveness, and on the charm of an excellent style. Like advertisers, he relies upon picturesque and varied statement, and on apparent explanation of many obscure facts. Analogies and similes, especially, form a very large part of the whole process by which he recommends his views to the reader. The number of similes for life to be found in his works exceeds the number in any poet known to me. Life, he says, is like a shell bursting into fragments which are again shells. It is like a sheaf. Initially, it was “a tendency to accumulate in a reservoir, as do especially the green parts of vegetables.” But the reservoir is to be filled with boiling water from which steam is issuing; “jets must be gushing out unceasingly, of which each, falling back, is a world.” Again “life appears in its entirety as an immense wave which, starting from a centre, spreads outwards, and
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which on almost the whole of its circumference is stopped and converted into oscillation: at one single point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has passed freely.” Then there is the great climax in which life is compared to a cavalry charge. “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 to clear many obstacles, perhaps even death.”
But a cool critic, who feels himself a mere spectator, perhaps an unsympathetic spectator, of the charge in which man is mounted upon animality, may be inclined to think that calm and careful thought is hardly compatible with this form of exercise. When he is told that thought is a mere means of action, the mere impulse to avoid obstacles in the field, he may feel that such a view is becoming in a cavalry officer, but not in a philosopher, whose business, after all, is with thought: he may feel that in the passion and noise of violent motion there is no room for the fainter music of reason, no leisure for the disinterested contemplation in which greatness is sought, not by turbulence, but by the greatness of the universe which is mirrored. In that case, he may be tempted to ask whether there are any reasons for accepting such a restless view of the world. And if he asks this question, he will find, if I am not mistaken, that there is no reason whatever for accepting this view, either in the universe or in the writings of M. Bergson.
II
The two foundations of Bergson’s philosophy, in so far as it is more than an imaginative and poetic view of the world, are his doctrines of space and time. His doctrine of space is required for his condemnation of the intellect, and if he fails in his condemnation of the intellect, the intellect will succeed in its condemnation of him, for between the two
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it is war to the knife. His doctrine of time is necessary for his vindication of freedom, for his escape from what William James called a “block universe,” for his doctrine of a perpetual flux in which there is nothing that flows, and for his whole account of the relations between mind and matter. It will be well, therefore, in criticism, to concentrate on these two doctrines. If they are true, such minor errors and inconsistencies as no philosopher escapes would not greatly matter; while if they are false, nothing remains except an imaginative epic, to be judged on aesthetic rather than on intellectual grounds. I shall begin with the theory of space, as being the simpler of the two.
Bergson’s theory of space occurs fully and explicitly in his Time and Free Will, and therefore belongs to the oldest parts of his philosophy. In his first chapter, he contends that greater and less imply space, since he regards the greater as essentially that which contains the less. He offers no arguments whatever, either good or bad, in favour of this view; he merely exclaims, as though he were giving an obvious reductio ad absurdum: “As if one could still speak of magnitude where there is neither multiplicity nor space!” The obvious cases to the contrary, such as pleasure and pain, afford him much difficulty, yet he never doubts or re-examines the dogma with which he starts.
In his next chapter, he maintains the same thesis as regards number. “As soon as we wish to picture number to ourselves,” he says, “and not merely figures or words, we are compelled to have recourse to an extended image,” and “every clear idea of number implies a visual image in space.” These two sentences suffice to show, as I shall try to prove, that Bergson does not know what number is, and has himself no clear idea of it. This is shown also by his definition: “Number may be defined in general as a collection of units, or speaking more exactly, as the synthesis of the one and the many.”
In discussing these statements, I must ask the reader’s patience for a moment while I call attention to some distinctions which may at first appear pedantic, but are really vital. There are three entirely different things which are confused by Bergson in the above statements, namely: (1) number, the general concept applicable to the various particular numbers; (2) the various particular numbers; (3) the various collections to which the various particular numbers are applicable. It is this last that is defined by Bergson when he says that number is a collection of units. The twelve apostles, the twelve tribes
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of Israel, the twelve months, the twelve signs of
