But this word "religion," which has not come once so far from Mr Bergson's pen, coming now from mine, warns me that it is time to end. No man today would be justified in foreseeing the conclusions to which the doctrine of creative evolution will one day undoubtedly lead on this point. More than any other, I must forget here what I myself may have elsewhere tried to do in this order of ideas. But it was impossible not to feel the approach of the temptation. Mr Bergson's work is extraordinarily suggestive. His books, so measured in tone, so tranquil in harmony, awaken in us a mystery of presentiment and imagination; they reach the hidden retreats where the springs of consciousness well up. Long after we have closed them we are shaken within; strangely moved, we listen to the deepening echo, passing on and on. However valuable already their explicit contents may be, they reach still further than they aimed. It is impossible to tell what latent germs they foster. It is impossible to guess what lies behind the boundless distance of the horizons they expose. But this at least is sure: these books have verily begun a new work in the history of human thought.
ADDITIONAL EXPLANATIONS
I. Mr Bergson's Work and the General Directions of Contemporary Thought.
A broad survey of the new philosophy was bound to be somewhat rapid and summary; and now that this is completed it will doubtless not be superfluous to come back, on the same plan as before, to some more important or more difficult individual points, and to examine by themselves the most prominent centres on which we should focus the light of our attention. Not that I intend to probe in minute detail the folds and turns of a doctrine which admits of infinite development: how can I claim to exhaust a work of such profound thought that the least passing example employed takes its place as a particular study? Still less do I wish to undertake a kind of analytic resume; no undertaking could be less profitable than that of arranging paragraph headings to repeat too briefly, and therefore obscurely, what a thinker has said without any extravagance of language, yet with every requisite explanation.
The critic's true task, as I understand it, in no way consists in drawing up a table of contents strewn with qualifying notes. His task is to read and enable others to read between the lines, between the chapters, and between the successive works, what constitutes the dynamic tie between them, all that the linear form of writing and language has not allowed the author himself to elucidate.
His task is, as far as possible, to master the accompaniment of underlying thought which produced the resonant atmosphere of the inquirer's intuition, the rhythm and toning of the image, resulting in the shade of light which falls upon his vision. His task, in a word, is to help understanding, and therefore to point out and anticipate the misunderstandings to be feared. Now it seems to me that there are a few points round which the errors of interpretation more naturally gather, producing some astounding misconceptions of Mr Bergson's philosophy. It is these points only that I propose to clear up. But at the same time I shall use the opportunity to supply information about authorities, which I have hitherto deliberately omitted, to avoid riddling with references pages which were primarily intended to impart a general impression.
Let us begin by glancing at the milieu of thought in which Mr Bergson's philosophy must have had birth. For the last thirty years new currents are traceable. In what direction do they go? And what distance have they already gone? What, in short, are the intellectual characteristics of our time? We must endeavour to distinguish the deeper tendencies, those which herald and prepare and near future.
One of the essential and frequently cited features of the generation in which Taine and Renan were the most prominent leaders was the passionate, enthusiastic, somewhat exclusive and intolerant cult of positive science. This science, in its days of pride, was considered unique, displayed on a plane by itself, always uniformly competent, capable of gripping any object whatever with the same strength, and of inserting it in the thread of one and the same unbroken connection. The dream of that time, despite all verbal palliations, was a universal science of mathematics: mathematics, of course, with their bare and brutal rigour softened and shaded off, where feasible; if possible, supple and sensitive; in ideal, delicate, buoyant, and judicious; but mathematics governed from end to end by an equal necessity. Conceived as the sole mistress of truth, this science was expected in days to come to fulfil all the needs of man, and unreservedly to take the place of ancient spiritual discipline. Genuine philosophy had had its day: all metaphysics seemed deception and fantasy, a simple play of empty formulae or puerile dreams, a mythical procession of abstraction and phantom; religion itself paled before science, as poetry of the grey morning before the splendour of the rising sun.