A New Philosophy

by Edouard Le Roy

There is here none of the homogeneity which is the property of magnitude, and the necessary condition of measurement, giving a view of the less in the bosom of the more. The element of number has vanished, and with it numerical multiplicity extended in space. Our inner states form a qualitative continuity; they are prolonged and blended into one another; they are grouped in harmonies, each note of which contains an echo of the whole; they are encircled by an innumerable degradation of halos, which gradually colour the total content of consciousness; they live each in the bosom of his fellow.

"I am the scent of roses," were the words Condillac put in the mouth of his statue; and these words translate the immediate truth exactly, as soon as observation becomes naive and simple enough to attain pure fact. In a passing breath I breathe my childhood; in the rustle of leaves, in a ray of moonlight, I find an infinite series of reflections and dreams. A thought, a feeling, an act, may reveal a complete soul. My ideas, my sensations, are like me. How would such facts be possible, if the multiple unity of the ego did not present the essential characteristic of vibrating in its entirety in the depths of each of the parts descried or rather determined in it by analysis? All physical determinations envelop and imply each other reciprocally. And the fact that the soul is thus present in its entirety in each of its acts, its feelings, for example, or its ideas in its sensations, its recollections in its percepts, its inclinations in its obvious states, is the justifying principle of metaphors, the source of all poetry, the truth which modern philosophy proclaims with more force every day under the name of immanence of thought, the fact which explains our moral responsibility with regard to our affections and our beliefs themselves; and finally, it is the best of us, since it is this which ensures our being able to surrender ourselves, genuinely and unreservedly, and this which constitutes the real unity of our person.

Let us push still further into the hidden retreat of the soul. Here we are in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego takes shape, where the spring within us gushes up, in the warm secrecy of the darkness which ushers our trembling being into birth. Distinctions fail us. Words are useless now. We hear the wells of consciousness at their mysterious task like an invisible shiver of running water through the mossy shadow of the caves. I dissolve in the joy of becoming. I abandon myself to the delight of being a pulsing reality. I no longer know whether I see scents, breathe sounds, or smell colours. Do I love? Do I think? The question has no longer a meaning for me. I am, in my complete self, each of my attitudes, each of my changes. It is not my sight which is indistinct or my attention which is idle. It is I who have resumed contact with pure reality, whose essential movement admits no form of number. He who thus makes the really "deep" and "inner" effort necessary to becoming—were it only for an elusive moment—discovers, under the simplest appearance, inexhaustible sources of unsuspected wealth; the rhythm of his duration becomes amplified and refined; his acts become more conscious; and in what seemed to him at first sudden severance or instantaneous pulsation he discovers complex transitions imperceptibly shaded off, musical transitions full of unexpected repetitions and threaded movements.

Thus, the deeper we go in consciousness, the less suitable become these schemes of separation and fixity existing in spatial and numerical forms. The inner world is that of pure quality. There is no measurable homogeneity, no collection of atomically constructed elements. The phenomena distinguished in it by analysis are not composing units, but phases. And it is only when they reach the surface, when they come in contact with the external world, when they are incarnated in language or gesture, that the categories of matter become adapted to them. In its true nature, reality appears as an uninterrupted flow, an impalpable shiver of fluid changing tones, a perpetual flux of waves which ebb and break and dissolve into one another without shock or jar. Everything is ceaseless change; and the state which appears the most stable is already change, since it continues and grows old. Constant quantities are represented only by the materialisation of habit or by means of practical symbols. And it is on this point that Mr Bergson rightly insists. ("Creative Evolution", page 3.)

"The apparent discontinuity of psychological life is due, then, to the fact that our attention is concentrated on it in a series of discontinuous acts; where there is only a gentle slope, we think we see, when we follow the broken line of our attention, the steps of a staircase. It is true that our psychological life is full of surprises. A thousand incidents arise which seem to contrast with what precedes them, and not to be connected with what follows. But the gap in their appearances stands out against the continuous background on which they are represented, and to which they owe the very intervals that separate them; they are the drumbeats which break into the symphony at intervals. Our attention is fixed upon them because they interest it more, but each of them proceeds from the fluid mass of our entire psychological existence. Each of them is only the brightest point in a moving zone which understands all that we feel, think, wish; in fact, all that we are at a given moment. It is this zone which really constitutes our state. But we may observe that states defined in this way are not distinct elements. They are an endless stream of mutual continuity."

And do not think that perhaps such a description represents only or principally our life of feeling. Reason and thought share the same characteristic, as soon as we penetrate their living depth, whether it be a question of creative invention or of those primordial judgments which direct our activity. If they evidence greater stability, it is in permanence of direction, because our past remains present to us.

For we are endowed with memory, and that perhaps is, on the whole, our most profound characteristic. It is by memory we enlarge ourselves and draw continually upon the wealth of our treasuries. Hence comes the completely original nature of the change which constitutes us. But it is here that we must shake off familiar representations! Common-sense cannot think in terms of movement. It forges a static conception of it, and destroys it by arresting it under pretext of seeing it better. To define movement as a series of positions, with a generating law, with a time-table or correspondence sheet between places and times, is surely a ready-made presentation. Are we not confusing the trajectory and its performance, the points traversed and the traversing of the points, the result of the genesis of the result; in short, the quantitative distance over which the flight extends, and the qualitative flight which puts this distance behind it? In this way the very mobility which is the essence of movement vanishes. There is the same common mistake about time. Analytic and synthetic thought can see in time only a string of coincidences, each of them instantaneous, a logical series of relations. It imagines the whole of it to be a graduated slide-rule, in which the luminous point called the present is the geometrical index.

Thus it gives form to time in space, "a kind of fourth dimension," ("Essay on the Immediate Data".) or at least it reduces it to nothing more than an abstract scheme of succession, "a stream without bottom or sides, flowing without determinable strength, in an indefinable direction." ("Introduction to Metaphysics".) It requires time to be homogeneous, and every homogeneous medium is space, "for as homogeneity consists here in the absence of any quality, it is not clear how two forms of homogeneity could be distinguished one from the other." ("Essay on the Immediate Data", page 74.)

Quite different appears real duration, the duration which is lived. It is pure heterogeneity. It contains a thousand different degrees of tension or relaxation, and its rhythm varies without end. The magic silence of calm nights or the wild disorder of a tempest, the still joy of ecstasy or the tumult of passion unchained, a steep climb towards a difficult truth or a gentle descent from a luminous principle to consequences which easily follow, a moral crisis or a shooting pain, call up intuitions admitting no comparison with one another. We have here no series of moments, but prolonged and interpenetrating phases; their sequence is not a substitution of one point for another, but rather resembles a musical resolution of harmony into harmony. And of this ever-new melody which constitutes our inner life every moment contains a resonance or an echo of past moments. "What are we really, what is our character, except the condensation of the history which we have lived since our birth, even before our birth, since we bring with us our prenatal dispositions? Without doubt we think only with a small part of our past; but it is with our complete past, including our original bias of soul, that we desire, wish, and act." ("Creative Evolution", pages 5-6.) This is what makes our duration irreversible, and its novelty perpetual, for each of the states through which it passes envelops the recollection of all past states. And thus we see, in the end, how, for a being endowed with memory, "existence consists in change, change in ripening, ripening in endless self-creation." ("Creative Evolution", page 8.)

With this formula we face the capital problem in which psychology and metaphysics meet, that of liberty. The solution given by Mr Bergson marks one of the culminating points of his philosophy. It is from this summit that he finds light thrown on the riddle of inner being. And it is the centre where all the lines of his research converge.