Such a view seems obscure and disturbing to the mathematical understanding. It cannot accustom itself to the idea of a becoming which is more than a simple change of distribution, and more than a simple expression of latent wealth. When confronted with such an idea, it always harks back to its eternal question: How has something come out of nothing? The question is false; for the idea of nothing is only a pseudo-idea. Nothing is unthinkable, since to think nothing is necessarily to think or not to think something; and according to Mr Bergson's formula, (Cf. the discussion on existence and non-existence in chapter iv. of "Creative Evolution", pages 298-322.) "the representation of void is always a full representation." When I say: "There is nothing," it is not that I perceive a "nothing." I never perceive except what is. But I have not perceived what I was seeking, what I was expecting, and I express my deception in the language of my desire. Or else I am speaking a language of construction, implying that I do not yet possess what I intend to make.
Let us abruptly forget these idols of practical action and language. The becoming of evolution will then appear to us in its true light, as phases of gradual maturation, rounded at intervals by crises of creative discovery. Continuity and discontinuity will thus admit possibility of reconciliation, the one as an aspect of ascent towards the future, the other as an aspect of retrospection after the event. And we shall see that the same key will in addition disclose to us the theory of knowledge.
VII. The Problem of Knowledge: Analysis and Intuition.
We know what importance has been attached since Kant to the problem of reason: it would seem sometimes that all future philosophy is a return to it; that it is no longer called to speak of anything else. Besides, what we understand by reason, in the broad sense, is, in the human mind, the power of light, the essential operation of which is defined as an act of directing synthesis, unifying the experience and rendering it by that very fact intelligible. Every movement of thought shows this power in exercise. To bring it everywhere to the front would be the proper task of philosophy; at least it is in this manner that we understand it today. But from what point of view and by what method do we ordinarily construct this theory of knowledge?
The spontaneous works of mind, perception, science, art, and morality are the departure-point of the inquiry and its initial matter. We do not ask ourselves whether but how they are possible, what they imply, and what they suppose; a regressive analysis attempts by critical reflection to discern in them their principles and requisites. The task, in short, is to reascend from production to producing activity, which we regard as sufficiently revealed by its natural products.
Philosophy, in consequence, is no longer anything but the science of problems already solved, the science which is confined to saying why knowledge is knowledge and action action, of such and such a kind, and such and such a quality. And in consequence also reason can no longer appear anything but an original datum postulated as a simple fact, as a complete system come down ready-made from heaven, at bottom a kind of non-temporal essence, definable without respect to duration, evolution, or history, of which all genesis and all progress are absurd. In vain do we persist in maintaining that it is originally an act; we always come round to the fact that the method followed compels us to consider this act only when once accomplished, and when once expressed in results. The inevitable consequence is that we imprison ourselves hopelessly in the affirmation of Kantian relativism.
Such a system can only be true as a partial and temporary truth: at the most, it is a moment of truth. "If we read the "Critique of Pure Reason" closely, we become aware that Kant has made the critique, not of reason in general, but of a reason fashioned to the habits and demands of Cartesian mechanism or Newtonian physics." (H. Bergson, "Report of French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.) Moreover, he plainly studies only adult reason, its present state, a plane of thought, a sectional view of becoming. For Kant, men progress perhaps in reason, but reason itself has no duration: it is the fixed spot, the atmosphere of dead eternity in which every mental action is displayed. But this could not be the final and complete truth. Is it not a fact that human intelligence has been slowly constituted in the course of biological evolution? To know it, we have not so much to separate it statically from its works, as to replace it in its history.
Let us begin with life, since, in any case, whether we will or no, it is always in life and by life that we are.
Life is not a brute force, a blind mechanism, from which one could never conceive that thought would spring. From its first pulsation, life is consciousness, spiritual activity, creative effort tending towards liberty; that is, discernment already luminous, although the quality is at first faint and diffused. In other terms, life is at bottom of the psychological nature of a tendency. But "the essence of a tendency is to develop in sheaf-form, creating, by the mere fact of its growth, diverging directions between which its impulse will be divided." ("Creative Evolution", page 108.)