A New Philosophy

by Edouard Le Roy

A qualitative continuity, imperceptibly shaded off, over which pass quivers that here and there converge, is the image by which we are forced to recognise a superior degree of reality.

But is this perceptible material, this qualitative continuity, the pure fact in matter? Not yet. Perception, we said just now, is always in reality complicated by memory. There is more truth in this than we had seen. Reality is not a motionless spectrum, extending to our view its infinite shades; it might rather be termed a leaping flame in the spectrum. All is in passage, in process of becoming.

On this flux consciousness concentrates at long intervals, each time condensing into one "quality" an immense period of the inner history of things. "In just this way the thousand successive positions of a runner contract into one single symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everybody the representation of a man running." ("Matter and Memory", page 233.)

In the same way again, a red light, continuing one second, embodies such a large number of elementary pulsations that it would take 25,000 years of our time to see its distinct passage. From here springs the subjectivity of our perception. The different qualities correspond, roughly speaking, to the different rhythms of contraction or dilution, to the different degrees of inner tension in the perceiving consciousness.

Pushing the case to its limits, and imagining a complete expansion, matter would resolve into colourless disturbances, and become the "pure matter" of the natural philosopher.

Let us now unite in one single continuity the different periods of the preceding dialectic. Vibration, qualities, and bodies are none of them reality by themselves; but all the same they are part of reality. And absolute reality would be the whole of these degrees and moments, and many others as well, no doubt. Or rather, to secure absolute intuition of matter, we should have on the one hand to get rid of all that our practical needs have constructed, restore on the other all the effective tendencies they have extinguished, follow the complete scale of qualitative concentrations and dilutions, and pass, by a kind of sympathy, into the incessantly moving play of all the possible innumerable contractions or resolutions; with the result that in the end we should succeed, by a simultaneous view as it were, in grasping, according to their infinitely various modes, the phases of this matter which, though at present latent, admit of "perception."

Thus, in the case before us, absolute knowledge is found to be the result of integral experience; and though we cannot attain the term, we see at any rate in what direction we should have to work to reach it.

Now it must be stated that our realisable knowledge is at every moment partial and limited rather than exterior and relative, for our effective perception is related to matter in itself as the part to the whole. Our least perceptions are actually based on pure perception, and "we are aware of the elementary disturbances which constitute matter, in the perceptible quality in which they suffer contraction, as we are aware of the beating of our heart in the general feeling that we have of living." ("The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods", 7th July 1910.)

But the preoccupation of practical action, coming between reality and ourselves, produces the fragmentary world of common-sense, much as an absorbing medium resolves into separate rays the continuous spectrum of a luminous body; whilst the rhythm of duration, and the degree of tension peculiar to our consciousness, limit us to the apprehension of certain qualities only.

What then have we to do to progress towards absolute knowledge? Not to quit experience: quite the contrary; but to extend it and diversify it by science, while, at the same time, by criticism, we correct in it the disturbing effects of action, and finally quicken all the results thus obtained by an effort of sympathy which will make us familiar with the object until we feel its profound throbbing and its inner wealth.