As an experienced teacher he appreciates the importance of repetition, and in his lectures brings up the same idea in many varied forms and italicizes with his voice the essential points. All his life he has been a teacher, climbing up the regular educational ladder rung by rung to the top.
Henri Bergson was born in the heart of Paris, the Montmartre quarter, on October 18, 1859. He is descended from a prominent Jewish family of Poland and he owes his excellent command of the English language to his mother, for he always spoke that language with her. At the age of nine he entered the Lycée Condorcet, only a few blocks from his house on the Rue Lamartine. He was a good student and worked hard, particularly on geography, which was most difficult for him. Mathematics was his favorite study, and he then intended to make it his life work, but instead he chose a harder road, for, as he told me, philosophy is much more difficult, requires more concentrated thought than mathematics. Before he left the Lycèe at the age of eighteen he won a prize for a solution to a mathematical problem, and the Annales de Mathématiques published his paper in full.
Next he entered the École Normale Supérieure, where he came under the influence of Ravaisson, Lachelier, and Boutroux. On graduation, in 1881, he was made professor of philosophy in the Lycèe of Angers for two years, afterward for five years at Clermont, then back to Paris, first in the Collège Rollin and later in the Lycée Henri IV. In 1898 he was promoted to the École Normale Supérieure, and two years later to the Collège de France. In 1901 he was elected to the Institute, and in 1914 to the Academy.
The rapid spread of his philosophy in France is due not only to its intrinsic value and the eloquence with which he presents it, but in part also to his having been a teacher of teachers. By his twenty years' work in the secondary schools or lycées of the provinces and Paris, and in the Superior Normal School, he has molded the thought of thousands of young men who are now teaching and writing and ruling in France. His present position as lecturer to miscellaneous audiences in the Collège of France, though more conspicuous, is really not more influential than his earlier work. He has the faculty of arousing the enthusiasm and personal devotion of his students, so the soil all over the country was prepared in advance for the propagation of his ideas, and now all he has to do is to sow them broadcast. We may observe something of the kind in our own country, where Dewey's influence has been largely exercised through personal contact with teachers. If he had never published a line, the colleges, normal and high schools in the western half of the United States would, nevertheless, be teaching anonymous Deweyism. A philosopher who cares more for influence than celebrity will prefer a chair where he can reach the largest number of future teachers to any other position however exalted.
We are not left to speculation as to the extent of Bergson's influence in French education. A questionnaire on the teaching of philosophy in the lycées conducted by Binet[1] showed that his ideas were the dominant force of the time. One school reported that "four professors here have adopted them without reserve and made them the soul of their teaching." It is interesting to note that not one of these high school professors mentioned either materialism or pantheism among their various philosophic creeds. They were equally divided between objective and subjective thinkers, or, say, between realists and idealists.
Bergson himself was a materialist to start with, and he worked his way up into his present spiritualistic philosophy when he found the inadequacy of his early conceptions. His taste was for the exact sciences, and in them he excelled while at school. He intended at that time to devote himself to the study of mechanics, and his youthful ambition was to continue and develop the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, of whom he was then an enthusiastic admirer.
But as he studied the formulas of mechanics with a view of discovering their philosophical implications, and of utilizing them in the explanation of the universe, he was struck with their inadequacy, even falsity, when applied to the phenomena of life and mind. In particular he was troubled by the symbol t which occurs so frequently in mathematical and physical formulas, and is supposed to stand for "time." It is represented geometrically by a straight line just like the three dimensions of space. In fact, as Bergson points out, "time" as used in physical science is nothing more or less than a fourth dimension of space. It is purely a spatial conception, an empty framework in which events may be arranged in order as objects are set up in a row on a shelf. There is no change or development in it, for past and future are all the same to it.
Now, when Bergson compared this physical conception of "time" with real time or duration as he felt it within himself, he found they were entirely different things. For the mind the past does not stretch out in a line behind. It is rolled up into the present and projected toward the future. Still less is there a path or several optional paths definitely laid out ahead of us in the future. We break our own paths as we go forward. It is like the big snowballs that we boys used to roll up to make forts out of; all the snow it has passed over is a part of it, and in front the snow is trackless.