All these confusions are due to the initial confusion of subjective and objective. The subject–a thought or an image or a memory–is a present fact in me; the object may be the law of gravitation or my friend Jones or the old Campanile of Venice. The subject is mental and is here and now. Therefore, if subject and object are one, the object is mental and is here and now; my friend Jones, though he believes himself to be in South America and to exist on his own account, is really in my head and exists in virtue of my thinking about him; St. Mark’s Campanile, in spite of its great size and the fact that it ceased to exist forty years ago, still exists, and is to be found complete inside me. These statements are no travesty of Bergson’s theories of space and time; they are merely an attempt to show what is the actual concrete meaning of those theories.
The confusion of subject and object is not peculiar to Bergson, but is common to many idealists and many materialists. Many idealists say that the object is really the subject, and many materialists say that the subject is really the object. They agree in thinking these two statements very different, while yet holding that subject and object are not different. In this respect, we may admit, Bergson has merit, for he is as ready to identify subject with object as to identify object with subject. As soon as this identification is rejected, his whole system collapses: first his theories of space and time, then his belief in
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real contingency, then his condemnation of intellect, and finally his account of the relations of mind and matter.
Of course a large part of Bergson’s philosophy, probably the part to which most of its popularity is due, does not depend upon argument, and cannot be upset by argument. His imaginative picture of the world, regarded as a poetic effort, is in the main not capable of either proof or disproof. Shakespeare says life’s but a walking shadow, Shelley says it is like a dome of many-coloured glass, Bergson says it is a shell which bursts into parts that are again shells. If you like Bergson’s image better, it is just as legitimate.
The good which Bergson hopes to see realized in the world is action for the sake of action. All pure contemplation he calls “dreaming,” and condemns by a whole series of uncomplimentary epithets: static, Platonic, mathematical, logical, intellectual. Those who desire some prevision of the end which action is to achieve are told that an end foreseen would be nothing new, because desire, like memory, is identified with its object. Thus we are condemned, in action, to be the blind slaves of instinct: the life-force pushes us on from behind, restlessly and unceasingly. There is no room in this philosophy for the moment of contemplative insight when, rising above the animal life, we become conscious of the greater ends that redeem man from the life of the brutes. Those to whom activity without purpose seems a sufficient good will find in Bergson’s books a pleasing picture of the universe. But those to whom action, if it is to be of any value, must be inspired by some vision, by some imaginative foreshadowing of a world less painful, less unjust, less full of strife than the world of our every-day life, those, in a word, whose action is built on contemplation, will find in this philosophy nothing of what they seek, and will not regret that there is no reason to think it true.
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CHAPTER XXIX WILLIAM JAMES
WILLIAM JAMES ( 1842-1910)was primarily a psychologist, but was important in philosophy on two accounts: he invented the. doctrine which he called “radical empiricism,” and he was one of the three protagonists of the theory called “pragmatism” or “instrumentalism.” In later life he was, as he deserved to be, the recognized leader of American philosophy. He was led by the study of medicine to the consideration of psychology; his great book on the subject, published in 1890, had the highest possible excellence. I shall not, however, deal with it, since it was a contribution to science rather than to philosophy.
There were two sides to William James’s philosophical interests, one scientific, the other religious. On the scientific side, the study of medicine had given his thoughts a tendency towards materialism, which, however, was held in check by his religious emotions. His religious feelings were very Protestant, very democratic, and very full of a warmth of human kindness. He refused altogether to follow his brother Henry into fastidious snobbishness. “The prince of darkness,” he said, “may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.” This is a very characteristic pronouncement.
His warm-heartedness and his delightful humour caused him to be almost universally beloved. The only man I know of who did not feel any affection for him was Santayana, whose doctor’s thesis William James had described as “the perfection of rottenness.” There was between these two men a temperamental opposition which nothing could have overcome. Santayana also liked religion, but in a very different way. He liked it aesthetically and historically, not as a help towards a moral life; as was natural, he greatly preferred Catholicism to Protestantism. He did not intellectually accept any of the Chrisdm
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dogmas, but he was content that others should believe them, and himself appreciated what he regarded as the Christian myth. To James, such an attitude could not but appear immoral. He retained from his Puritan ancestry a deep-seated belief that what is of most importance is good conduct, and his democratic feeling made him unable to acquiesce in the notion of one truth for philosophers and another for the vulgar. The temperamental opposition between Protestant and Catholic persists among the unorthodox; Santayana was a Catholic free-thinker, William James a Protestant, however heretical.
James doctrine of radical empiricism was first published in 1904, in an essay called “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” The main purpose of this essay was to deny that the subject-object relation is fundamental. It had, until then, been taken for granted by philosophers that there is a kind of occurrence called “knowing,” in which one entity, the knower or subject, is aware of another, the thing known or the object. The knower was regarded as a mind or soul; the object known might be a material object, an eternal essence, another mind, or, in self-consciousness, identical with the knower. Almost everything in accepted philosophy was bound up with the dualism of subject and object. The distinction of mind and matter, the contemplative ideal, and the traditional notion of “truth,” all need to be radically reconsidered if the distinction of subject and object is not accepted as fundamental.
For my part, I am convinced that James was right on this matter, and would, on this ground alone, deserve a high place among philosophers. I had thought otherwise until he, and those who agreed with him, persuaded me of the truth of his doctrine. But let us proceed to his arguments.
Consciousness, he says, “is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumour left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy.” There is, he continues, “no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made.” He explains that he is not denying that our thoughts perform a function which is that of knowing, and that this function may be called “being conscious.” What he is denying might be put crudely as the view that consciousness is a “thing.” He holds that there is “only one primal stuff
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or material,” out of which everything in the world is composed. This stuff he calls “pure experience.” Knowing, he says, is a particular sort of relation between two portions of pure experience. The subjectobject relation is derivative: “experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity.” A given undivided portion of experience can be in one context a knower, and in another something known.
He defines “pure experience” as “the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection.”
It will be seen that this doctrine abolishes the distinction between mind and matter, if regarded as a distinction between two different kinds of what James calls “stuff.” Accordingly those who agree with James in this matter advocate what they call “neutral monism,” according to which the material of which the world is constructed is neither mind nor matter, but something anterior to both. James himself did not develop this implication of his theory; on the contrary, his use of the phrase “pure experience” points to a perhaps unconscious Berkeleian idealism. The word “experience” is one often used by philosophers, but seldom defined. Let us consider for a moment what it can mean.
Common sense holds that many things which occur are not “experienced,” for instance, events on the invisible side of the moon. Berkeley and Hegel, for different reasons, both denied this, and maintained
