A New Philosophy

by Edouard Le Roy

We may, already, then, draw one conclusion: Reality, at bottom, is becoming. But such a thesis runs counter to all our familiar ideas. It is imperative that we should submit it to the test of critical examination and positive verification.

One system of metaphysics, I said some time ago, underlies common-sense, animating and informing it. According to this system, which is the inverse of that which we have just intimated, reality in its very depths is fixity and permanence. This is the completely static conception which sees in being exactly the opposite of becoming: we cannot become, it seems to say, except in so far as we are not. It does not, however, mean to deny movement. But it represents it as fluctuation round invariable types, as a whirling but captive eddy. Every phenomenon appears to it as a transformation which ends where it began, and the result is that the world takes the form of an eternal equilibrium in which "nothing is created, nothing destroyed." The idea does not need much forcing to end in the old supposition of a cyclic return which restores everything to its original conditions. Everything is thus conceived in astronomical periods. All that is left of the universe henceforward is a whirl of atoms in which nothing counts but certain fixed quantities translated by our systems of equations; the rest has vanished "in algebraical smoke." There is therefore nothing more or less in the effect than in the group of causes; and the causal relation moves towards identity as towards its asymptote.

Such a view of nature is open to many objections, even if it were only a question of inorganised matter. Simple physics already betoken the insufficiency of a purely mechanic conception. The stream of phenomena flows in an irreversible direction and obeys a determined rhythm. "If I wish to prepare myself a glass of sugar and water, I may do what I like, but I must wait for my sugar to melt." ("Creative Evolution", page 10.) Here are facts which pure mechanism does not take into account, regarding as it does only statically conceived relations, and making time into a measure only, something like a common denominator of concrete successions, a certain number of coincidences from which all true duration remains absent, which would remain unchanged even if the world's history, instead of opening out in consecutive phases, were to be unfolded before our eyes all at once like a fan. Do we not indeed speak today of aging and atomic separation. If the quantity of energy is preserved, at least its quality is continually deteriorating. By the side of something which remains constant, the world also contains something which is being used up, dissipated, exhausted, decomposed.

Further still, a specimen of metal, in its molecular structure, preserves an indelible trace of the treatment it has undergone; natural philosophers tell us that there is a "memory of solids." These are all very positive facts which pure mechanism passes over. In addition, must we not first of all postulate what will afterwards be preserved or deteriorated? Whence we get another aspect of things: that of genesis and creation; and in reality we register the ascending effort of life as a reality no less startling than mechanic inertia.

Finally, we have a double movement of ascent and descent: such is what life and matter appear to immediate observation. These two currents meet each other, and grapple. It is the drama of evolution, of which Mr Bergson once gave a masterly explanation, in stating the high place which man fills in nature:

"I cannot regard the general evolution and progress of life in the whole of the organised world, the co-ordination and subordination of vital functions to one another in the same living being, the relations which psychology and physiology combined seem bound to establish between brain activity and thought in man, without arriving at this conclusion, that life is an immense effort attempted by thought to obtain of matter something which matter does not wish to give it. Matter is inert; it is the seat of necessity; it proceeds mechanically. It seems as if thought seeks to profit by this mechanical inclination in matter to utilise it for actions, and thus to convert all the creative energy it contains, at least all that this energy possesses which admits of play and external extraction, into contingent movements in space and events in time which cannot be foreseen. With laborious research it piles up complications to make liberty out of necessity, to compose for itself a matter so subtile, and so mobile, that liberty, by a veritable physical paradox, and thanks to an effort which cannot last long, succeeds in maintaining its equilibrium on this very mobility.

"But it is caught in the snare. The eddy on which it was poised seizes and drags it down. It becomes prisoner of the mechanism it has set up. Automatism lays hold of it, and life, inevitably forgetting the end which it had determined, which was only to be a means in view of a superior end, is entirely used up in an effort to preserve itself by itself. From the humblest of organised beings to the higher vertebrates which come immediately before man, we witness an attempt which is always foiled and always resumed with more and more art. Man has triumphed; with difficulty, it is true, and so incompletely that a moment's lapse and inattention on his part surrender him to automatism again. But he has triumphed..." ("Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)

And Mr Bergson adds in another place: ("Creative Evolution", pages 286-287.) "With man consciousness breaks the chain. In man and in man only it obtains its freedom. The whole history of life, till man, had been the history of an effort of consciousness to lift matter, and of the more or less complete crushing of consciousness by matter falling upon it again. The enterprise was paradoxical; if indeed we can speak here, except paradoxically, of enterprise and effort. The task was to take matter, which is necessity itself, and create an instrument of liberty, construct a mechanical system to triumph over mechanism, to employ the determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net it had spread. But everywhere, except in man, consciousness let itself be caught in the net of which it sought to traverse the meshes. It remained taken in the mechanisms it had set up. The automatism which it claimed to be drawing towards liberty enfolds it and drags it down. It has not the strength to get away, because the energy with which it had supplied itself for action is almost entirely employed in maintaining the exceedingly subtile and essentially unstable equilibrium into which it has brought matter. But man does not merely keep his machine going, he succeeds in using it as it pleases him.

"He owes it without doubt to the superiority of his brain, which allows him to construct an unlimited number of motor mechanisms, to oppose new habits to old time after time, and to master automatism by dividing it against itself. He owes it to his language, which furnishes consciousness with an immaterial body in which to become incarnate, thus dispensing it from depending exclusively upon material bodies, the flux of which would drag it down and soon engulf it. He owes it to social life, which stores and preserves efforts as language stores thought, thereby fixing a mean level to which individuals will rise with ease, and which, by means of this initial impulse, prevents average individuals from going to sleep and urges better people to rise higher. But our brain, our society, and our language are only the varied outer signs of one and the same internal superiority. Each after its fashion, they tell us the unique and exceptional success which life has won at a given moment of its evolution. They translate the difference in nature, and not in degree only, which separates man from the rest of the animal world. They let us see that if, at the end of the broad springboard from which life took off, all others came down, finding the cord stretched too high, man alone has leapt the obstacle."

But man is not on that account isolated in nature: "As the smallest grain of dust forms part of our entire solar system, and is involved along with it in this undivided downward movement which is materiality itself, so all organised beings from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the times in which we live, and in all places as at all times, do but demonstrate to our eyes a unique impulse contrary to the movement of matter, and, in itself, indivisible. All living beings are connected, and all yield to the same formidable thrust. The animal is supported by the plant, man rides the animal, and the whole of humanity in space and time is an immense army galloping by the side of each of us, before and behind us, in a spirited charge which can upset all resistance, and leap many obstacles, perhaps even death." ("Creative Evolution", pages 293-294.)