All philosophers of immediacy hold Bergson as chief. Carr, like LeRoy, thinks Bergson’s doctrine as momentously original as those of the greatest classics. “Great scientific discoveries,” he writes,[158] “are often so simple that the greatest wonder about them is that humanity has had to wait so long for them.” Thus with Berkeley’s “esse est percipi” and Kant’s autonomy of the intellectual categories. And equally so with Bergson’s interpretation of reality as life, “living creative evolution,” as distinct both from solid matter and thinking mind.
James, while others find quite determinate differences between him and Bergson, was far less cognizant, himself, of differences than of agreement. He was one of the keenest of Bergsonians, and regarded himself, certainly with a great deal of genial modesty, as a follower, a disciple. “... if I had not read Bergson,” he says,[159] “I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper privately, in the hope of making ends meet that were never meant to meet ... It is certain that without the confidence which being able to lean on Bergson’s authority gives me, I should never have ventured to urge these particular views of mine ... In my opinion he has killed intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery.”
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The quantity and quality of the study of Bergson’s problems by others, which his own treatment of them has stimulated, is already an enviable monument to that best quality of philosophic genius in his work, its fertility of suggestion. Speaking, as the present writer must, from the point of view of critical reaction, the value of Bergson is indeed incalculable. This is no conventional phrase. His theoretical opponent is almost inclined to feel that the stimulus which Bergson’s lucid exposition affords, to a mind of contrary conviction, to understand itself, must be a more precious good even than the quickening which his followers so eloquently confess.
The fact is that this eloquence is always more than eloquence; it is a fervour almost like religious fervour. Witness the words just quoted from James. Every true Bergsonian testifies in the same tone. Thus LeRoy:[160] “Mr. Bergson’s readers will undergo at almost every page they read an intense and singular experience. The curtain drawn between ourselves and reality, enveloping everything, including ourselves, in its illusive folds, seems of a sudden to fall, dissipated by enchantment, and display to the mind depths of light till then undreamt, in which reality itself, contemplated face to face for the first time, stands fully revealed. The revelation is overpowering, and, once vouchsafed, will never afterwards be forgotten.
“Nothing can convey to the reader the effects of this direct and intimate mental vision. Everything which he thought he knew already finds new birth and vigor in the clear light of morning; on all hands, in the glow of dawn, new intuitions spring up and open out; we feel them big with infinite consequences, heavy and saturated with life. Each of them is no sooner blown than it appears fertile forever. And yet there is nothing paradoxical or disturbing in the novelty. It is a reply to our expectation, an answer to some dim hope....
“... whether, in the long run, we each of us give or refuse complete or partial adhesion, all of us at least have received a regenerating shock, an internal upheaval ... henceforth a new leaven works and ferments in us; we shall no longer think as we used to think.” As for the attitude of mind proper to bring to the reading of Bergson, “where the end is to understand rather than to judge, criticism ought to take second place. It is more profitable to attempt to feel oneself into the heart of the teaching, to relive its genesis, to perceive the principle of organic unity, to come at the mainspring. Let our reading be a course of meditation which we live.”
And Gaston Rageot: “... the reading of a work of Bergson’s requires at the very beginning a sort of inner catastrophe; not everyone is capable of such a logical revolution.”[161] A little further on he speaks of this preparation of the mind to receive the Bergsonian doctrine as “cette volte-face psychologique.”
Conversion to Bergsonism, indeed, suggests religious conversion. Compare James’ words with the above. “... if, as Bergson shows, [the conceptual or discursive form of reality] cannot even pretend to reveal anything of what life’s inner nature is or ought to be; why, then we can turn a deaf ear to its accusations. The resolve to turn the deaf ear is the inner crisis or ‘catastrophe’ of which [M. Rageot] spoke ... [This] comes very hard. It is putting off our proud maturity of mind and becoming again as foolish little children in the eyes of reason. But difficult as such a revolution is, there is no other way, I believe, to the possession of reality.”[162]
Is not this experience very suggestive of the “regeneration” of Christianity? I think it is, indeed; and I think this fact is suggestive of the essential nature of Bergsonism. One may turn a deaf ear to reason, one may execute a volte-face psychologique; but, whatever the rewards, it seems unlikely (to the unregenerate, of course!) that among them will be included a better comprehension of the meaning of reality.