A New Philosophy

by Edouard Le Roy

Concepts are the deposited sediment of intuition: intuition produces the concepts, not the concepts intuition. From the heart of intuition you will have no difficulty in seeing how it splits up and analyses into concepts, concepts of such and such a kind or such and such a shade. But by successive analyses you will never reconstruct the least intuition, just as, no matter how you distribute water, you will never reconstruct the reservoir in its original condition.

Begin from intuition: it is a summit from which we can descend by infinite slopes; it is a picture which we can place in an infinite number of frames. But all the frames together will not recompose the picture, and the lower ends of all the slopes will not explain how they meet at the summit. Intuition is a necessary beginning; it is the impulse which sets the analysis in motion, and gives it direction; it is the sounding which brings it to solid bottom; the soul which assures its unity. "I shall never understand how black and white interpenetrate, if I have not seen grey, but I understand without trouble, after once seeing grey, how we can regard it from the double point of view of black and white." ("Introduction to Metaphysics.")

Here are some letters which you can arrange in chains in a thousand ways: the indivisible sense running along the chain, and making one phrase of it, is the original cause of the writing, not its consequence. Thus it is with intuition in relation to analysis. But beginnings and generative activities are the proper object of the philosopher. Thus the conversion and reform incumbent on him consist essentially in a transition from the analytic to the intuitive point of view.

The result is that the chosen instrument of philosophic thought is metaphor; and of metaphor we know Mr Bergson to be an incomparable master. What we have to do, he says himself, is "to elicit a certain active force which in most men is liable to be trammelled by mental habits more useful to life," to awaken in them the feeling of the immediate, original, and concrete. But "many different images, borrowed from very different orders of things, can, by their convergent action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized. By choosing images as unlike as possible, we prevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it is intended to call up, since it would in that case be immediately routed by its rivals. In making them all, despite their different aspects, demand of our mind the same kind of attention, and in some way the same degree of tension, we accustom our consciousness little by little to a quite peculiar and well-determined disposition, precisely the one which it ought to adopt to appear to itself unmasked." ("Introduction to Metaphysics".)

Strictly speaking, the intuition of immediacy is inexpressible. But it can be suggested and called up. How? By ringing it round with concurrent metaphors. Our aim is to modify the habits of imagination in ourselves which are opposed to a simple and direct view, to break through the mechanical imagery in which we have allowed ourselves to be caught; and it is by awakening other imagery and other habits that we can succeed in so doing.

But then, you will say, where is the difference between philosophy and art, between metaphysical and aesthetic intuition? Art also tends to reveal nature to us, to suggest to us a direct vision of it, to lift the veil of illusion which hides us from ourselves; and aesthetic intuition is, in its own way, perception of immediacy. We revive the feeling of reality obliterated by habit, we summon the deep and penetrating soul of things: the object is the same in both cases; and the means are also the same; images and metaphors. Is Mr Bergson only a poet, and does his work amount to nothing but the introduction of impressionism in metaphysics?

It is an old objection. If the truth be told, Mr Bergson's immense scientific knowledge should be sufficient refutation.

Only those who have not read the mass of carefully proved and positive discussions could give way thus to the impressions of art awakened by what is truly a magic style. But we can go further and put it better.

That there are analogies between philosophy and art, between metaphysical and aesthetic intuition, is unquestionable and uncontested.

At the same time, the analogies must not be allowed to hide the differences.