When we physically take apart and put together, our manual activity has the same unreality of abstractness as that of our intellectual analyses and syntheses. It is the latter outwardly expressed, intellect externalized. Wherever we find life, we are experiencing reality. But when this occurs, we are never analyzing nor synthesizing. The more one divests himself of practical bias, and regards his object not as an object for the realization of any possible activity of his own, but as it is in itself—in proportion, that is, as one gets its character as a case of life—those unreal, spatial aspects of it yield to an aspect which has nothing in common with them. The parts of an anatomical model, a papier maché manikin, you may separate and put together again. An organism, as such, a manifestation of life, could not be dissected and recomposed in its living reality. What is it that makes an organism alive, a true reality? This, that every so-called part has a function which is so essential to the true function of the whole that one is present or absent with the other. They coincide. How, then, could you possibly dissect out a part of an organism? Once recognize, what is unquestionable, that any function of it coincides in this way with the function of the whole, and your analyzing operation is prevented absolutely. Obey the rule that everything which contributes at all to the function of the part shall be taken, and everything else left, and you are in Shylock’s position after Portia’s judgment: if you want the flesh you will have to take blood with it; but you are not entitled to the blood. It is even more hopeless than that. It is not a matter of skill with your hand. You cannot make the analysis mentally, intellectually. It is not a matter of impairing or destroying the function, of injuring or killing the organism. You cannot begin the operation, not even on the corpse. The first incision separates cells whose functions were inseparably one, for there is no cell in the body that is not in organic union with every other cell.
If there is nothing of the nature of mosaic composition in the living structure, this fact is one with the fact that there is nothing mechanical in its functioning. It is not actuated from without, as every machine is actuated which is not alive; nor is its functioning, like that of such machines, an assemblage of functions predetermined so far as the machine itself is concerned—predetermined, that is to say, except for intervention from without; unalterable, as unstartable, without external cause. The character of living function is suggested by the word “focalization.” There is a perfectly indivisible concert of function throughout the organism, in every one of its infinite varieties of activity. When the engineer reverses his engine, or otherwise alters its mode of operation, what he really does is to alter the structure of the machinery. The machinery has been specially constructed with a view to unmaking and remaking its nature more or less quickly and conveniently; that is, its parts can be displaced and replaced with reference to each other. Some parts are “thrown out of gear” and shifted back. And then everything returns to its former state. Not so in life. The functioning of an organism never remains quite the same in two consecutive instants. There is an incessantly moving emphasis or focus in it. Now one of its potentialities of function is primary or focal, now another. But none can ever cease and then be resumed. In this case, to cease is not to be thrown out of gear, but to die, to perish, to be annihilated. In every phase of the life activity of the organism, all its functions are operative, subsidiary and subservient in varying degrees to that one which for the moment is the focus of all. Thus the organic or vital focus, in its physiological aspect of activity and in its psychological aspect of attention, is never at rest. The modulation is not like the sudden transformations in a kaleidoscope. The evolutions do not take place in the manner suggested by the phrase “Presto, change!” Modulation is the word that describes the process. Or, as Bergson phrases it, the change is continuous, incessant, an interpenetrating flow of processes, in which analysis can make no beginning and no separation; in which analysis, in fact, is absolutely impotent. If the eye is that which sees, the ear that which hears, and so on, it is really the organism entire, and no special, locally differentiated part of it that is the organ. Those so-called parts which, with our false intellectualism, we name the eye or other organ, are, in their reality, focal aspects of the entire organism, the organism seen with a certain restriction or limitation of interest.
But, now, how can one make any discourse about, say, an animal organism—indeed, how can this become an object of perception at all—without its lending itself to that sort of division into real parts which Bergson says is an intellectual falsification of its true nature, and therefore not true knowledge of the thing? When I look at a living body, do I not see it occupying space? Is it not, then, measurable? Is not one such body larger than another? Suppose cutting out parts of a body does alter or kill the organism: they can, neverless, be cut out, and are therefore parts? If, after, and because of, being cut out, they are then not parts of the organism from which they were cut, still, they are constituents of its volume. Surely, our ordinary speech about this part and that part of our bodies, is not all false?
Bergson’s answer is uncompromising: our ordinary perception and speech does falsify the nature of reality, but (in spite of the apparent paradox) does not mislead. For our ordinary perception and speech have nothing to do with knowing. Perception is a different function of life—it is action. Our percepts are the ways in which reality can factor in our activities. Those dissected organs, you say, are at least so much of the entire volume of the organism: but the words are no sooner spoken than their falseness shows itself. If the organism ever had volume, it certainly has not, now—neither volume nor anything else. The fact is, the only meaning there is in its ever possessing volume while it still exists, is just that you might enter into activity with it in such and such ways—as that, for instance, of hacking it up. Perception, our “virtual” or potential activity on reality, is an abstract aspect of it; what it is in itself is another matter, and the only knowledge of this is that sympathetic union with it in which space and parts disappear in an “interpenetrating flow” not of things nor of parts, but of process, of ceaseless change. Now, quality is just the fact of change, as anyone may test for himself by introspection. Reality as it is in itself, therefore, the true nature of reality, is quality. Relations are external views or aspects, no multiplication of which makes any start at constituting a concrete reality.
There is one more reflection on Bergson’s account of intellect, which, like those made above, he anticipates and tries to meet, so far as it seems an objection to denying cognitive validity to intellect. The attempt at this point, however, is not very convincing. The point I mean is this: The ways in which reality can factor in my activities are by that warrant true characters of reality. One may cheerfully add: even as the inside of my hat is, after all, a true character of my hat. For, if reality were different, it could not factor so in my activity—in other words, which would also be the words of plain common sense, I should perceive it differently, on Bergson’s own conception of what it means to perceive. The situation is this: Reality does, indeed, possess those interesting aspects of changing process and undividedness which Bergson is so preoccupied with and which he has brought to light with exquisite skill. This is one of two equally important truths about reality. The other Bergson is simply blind to, and that is that reality also possesses an aspect of permanence and divisibility. Does this seem a contradiction? It is no more a contradiction than that a curve is both convex and concave. It is not only not a contradiction: each of these antipodally opposite aspects of reality is absolutely indispensable to the very conception of the other, just as concavity is indispensable to the conception of convexity, east to the conception of west, right to the conception of left— and vice versa. This point is resumed below (pp. 77–9, 96). The object in view at present is to see how the philosopher’s method is really his primary doctrine, in which object I am not in controversy with anyone, so far as I know; but also to see how an anti-intellectualist method depends upon a purely arbitrary, or rather constitutional, psychological prepossession for a certain emphasis of living.
I said that Bergson is entirely awake to the aptness of the objection just raised to his account of intellect. In a sense, in certain passages, he even seems to grant the truth of the contention. Action, he acknowledges, for instance,[96] can be involved only with reality; and consequently the forms of perception and the categories of intellect (which are those forms rendered elaborately precise) “touch something of the absolute.” Sound truth, assuredly! The fitness of reality to enter as object into those active relationships which are the perceptive and intellectual categories makes the categories as genuinely own to the true, essential nature of objective reality as to the nature of subjective intelligence. That the categorization of reality depends on the real object’s being in relation to something else than itself is nothing peculiar to this (the categorical) character of reality. The same condition is common to every character of reality. The qualitative aspect of reality, which Bergson usually regards as the nature of reality “in itself,” depends no less than its relational or categorical aspect on the relatedness of the object. For the qualities of things are nothing but the differences they make—to consciousness or to other things. Reality not in relation is simply a phrase without a vestige of meaning. Reality “in itself” in such a sense is merely nonsense. It would seem, therefore, as if Bergson should account the intellectual mode of consciousness, which does indeed “touch something of the absolute,” as knowledge of precisely the same metaphysical status as a mode which touches anything else of the absolute. It is one thing for a mode of consciousness to be uncongenial or uninteresting to you or me; it is another for it to be invalid. The uncongeniality of a mode of consciousness depends on personal idiosyncrasy; the invalidity of a mode of consciousness depends on the logical nature of being.
As a fact, however, perhaps because this preference between two aspects of the nature of reality depends so obviously on personal bias instead of logical principles, Bergson vacillates, in a hopelessly confused and confusing way, all through his writings, between two conceptions of reality. First, reality is of one nature, namely life, which is pure quality, change, or duration (the four terms are actually synonyms to Bergson), and knowledge of which can be only sympathetic intuition of it, while intellect is merely “an appendage of action,” and not knowledge at all. In the other conception reality is cleft into a dualism more unutterably absolute than that of Descartes. Life is one kind of reality; inert matter is the other. Intuition knows the former; intellect really does know the latter (‘touching something of the absolute’), and knowledge is therefore not intuition only. Although this vacillation confuses issues in every one of Bergson’s books, the first conception is more characteristic, upon the whole, of Time and Free Will and of Creative Evolution; the other conception is pretty consistently expounded in Matter and Memory. The sphere of intellect is restricted; its cognitive validity is not explicitly denied within this sphere, but only within the domain of life. To be sure, since life exhausts reality, the sphere allotted to intellect is not real, which would seem to imply that intellect fails to know. The validity of intellectual consciousness is thus, in effect, denied equally in either case. The only difference is that the denial is conscious and explicit in one case, more or less unconsciously implied in the other.
Chapter III
THE ANCIENT PREJUDICE AGAINST ANALYSIS