But it remained for Bergson to demonstrate that the mechanical view was the inevitable product of the mental processes which we describe by the word "intellect."
The path which led Bergson to this goal will have to be briefly indicated by us.
Characteristics of the Intellect.—What is the "intellect," to which we look in vain for any complete explanation of existence? This is the preliminary question.
Our intellect is, as James had taught, a faculty developed by the evolutionary process in our species to enable it to deal with its material environment. And Bergson was the first to point out that as a consequence of its having been developed for this particular purpose (i.e., dealing with a material environment), intellect is "never quite at its ease, never entirely at home, except when it is working upon inert matter." If it has to deal with "living" matter, it "treats it as inert, without troubling about the life that animated it."
Such is the first characteristic of the intellect: it feels at home in dealing with dead matter, and living matter it prefers to treat "as inert."
Another characteristic of intellect is that, just as it treats the living as if it were non-living, so it prefers to treat the mobile as though it were motionless. Motion is a thing which the intellect simply cannot grasp; it has to treat it artificially, and represent a process which in reality is continuous and indivisible, as discontinuous and divisible—a succession of points, out of which no magic can conjure motion. Philosophy became aware of this as soon as it opened its eyes. Hence the paradox of Zeno, that Achilles will never overtake the tortoise, if the latter once gets a start. For if space and time are infinitely divisible (as intellect holds them to be), by the time Achilles has reached the tortoise's starting point, the tortoise has already got ahead of that starting point, and so on ad infinitum; the interval between them being endlessly diminished, but never disappearing.
Zeno's paradox arises because of an innate fault in the "intellectual" method of dealing with motion; a method which Bergson calls "cinematographical," because it regards a single movement as a succession of infinitely small motions. That method is hopeless; and if we expect to understand motion by its means,
"You will always experience the disappointment of the child, who tries, by clapping its hands together to crush the smoke. The movement slips through the interval, because every attempt to reconstitute change out of states implies the absurd proposition that movement is made up of immobilities."[55]
So that the intellect is best fitted to deal, not with living and moving, but with dead and motionless matter. Of the latter it can form a clear idea; but in dealing with the former, it finds itself at a loss; it has to abstract the life and the motion from what lives or moves, and what it cannot grasp, it must treat as non-existent.
Bergson's Anti-Intellectualism.—A penetrating remark of James' will help us, at this point, to understand the significance for philosophy of these new theories.