And what is that, really, but realism? By realism I mean the gift of ourselves to reality, the work of concrete realisation, the effort to convert every idea into action, to regulate the idea by the action as much as the action by the idea, to live what we think and think what we live. But that is positivism, you will say; certainly it is positivism. But how changed! Far from considering as positive only that which can be an object of sensation or calculation, we begin by greeting the great spiritual realities with this title. The deep and living aspiration of our day is in everything to seek the soul, the soul which specifies and quickens, seek it by an effort towards the revealing sympathy which is genuine intelligence, seek it in the concrete, without dissolving thought in dreams or language, without losing contact with the body or critical control, seek it, in fine, as the most real and genuine part of being.
Hence its return to questions which were lately declared out of date and closed; hence its taste for problems of aesthetics and morality, its close siege of social and religious problems, its homesickness for a faith harmonising the powers of action and the powers of thought; hence its restless desire to hark back to tradition and discipline.
A new philosophy was required to answer this new way of looking at things. Already, in 1867, Ravaisson in his celebrated "Report" wrote these prophetic lines: "Many signs permit us to foresee in the near future a philosophical epoch of which the general character will be the predominance of what may be called spiritualist realism or positivism, having as generating principle the consciousness which the mind has in itself of an existence recognised as being the source and support of every other existence, being none other than its action."
This prophetic view was further commented on in a work where Mr Bergson speaks with just praise of this shrewd and penetrating sense of what was coming: "What could be bolder or more novel than to come and predict to the physicists that the inert will be explained by the living, to biologists that life will only be understood by thought, to philosophers that generalities are not philosophic?" ("Notice on the Life and Works of M. Felix Ravaisson-Molien", in the Reports of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, 1904.)
But let us give each his due. What Ravaisson had only anticipated Mr Bergson himself accomplishes, with a precision which gives body to the impalpable and floating breath of first inspiration, with a depth which renews both proof and theses alike, with a creative originality which prevents the critic who is anxious for justice and precision from insisting on any researches establishing connection of thought.
One reason for the popularity today enjoyed by this new philosophy is doubtless to be found in the very tendencies of the milieu in which it is produced and in the aspirations which work it. But, after once remarking these desires, we must further not forget that Mr Bergson has contributed more than anyone else to awaken them, determine them, and make them become conscious of themselves. Let us therefore try to understand in itself and by itself the work of genius of which just now we were seeking the dawning gleams. What synthetic formula will be best able to tell us the essential direction of its movement? I will borrow it from the author himself: "It seems to me," he writes, ("Philosophic Intuition" in the "Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", November 1911.) "that metaphysics are trying at this moment to simplify themselves, to come nearer to life." Every philosophy tends to become incarnate in a system which constitutes for it a kind of body of analysis.
Regarded literally, it appears to be an infinite complication, a complex construction with a thousand alcoves of high architecture, "in which measures have been taken to provide ample lodging for all problems." (Ibid.) Do not let us be deceived by this appearance: it signifies only that language is incommensurable with thought, that speech admits of endless multiplication in approximations incapable of exhausting their object. But before constructing such a body for itself, all philosophy is a soul, a mind, and begins with the simple unity of a generating intuition. Here is the fitting point at which to see its essence; this is what determines it much better than its conceptual expression, which is always contingent and incomplete. "A philosophy worthy of the name has never said but one thing; and that thing it has rather attempted to say than actually said. And it has only said one thing, because it has only seen one point: and that was not so much vision as contact; this contact supplied an impulse, this impulse a movement, and if this movement, which is a kind of vortex of a certain particular form, is only visible to our eyes by what it has picked up on its path, it is no less true that other dust might equally well have been raised, and that it would still have been the same vortex." ("Philosophic Intuition" in the "Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", November 1911.)
Hence comes the fact that a philosophy is at bottom much more independent of its natal environment than one might at first suppose; hence also the fact that ancient philosophies, though apparently relative to a science which is out of date, remain always living and worthy of study.
What, then, is the original intuition of Mr Bergson's philosophy, the creative intuition whence it comes forth? We cannot hesitate long: it is the intuition of duration. That is the perspective centre to which we must indefatigably return; that is the principle which we must labour to expose in its full light; and that is, finally, the source of light which will illumine us. Now a philosophy is not only an expressed intuition; it is further and above all an acting intuition, gradually determined and realised, and tested by its explanatory works; and it is by its fruits that we can understand and judge it. Hence the review upon which we are entering.