Bergson makes Freedom a very central point in his philosophy, and his treatment of it bears signs of the influence of De Biran, Ravaisson, Lachelier, Guyau and Boutroux. He rejects, however, the doctrine of finality as upheld by Ravaisson, Lachelier and Boutroux, while he stresses the contingency which this last thinker had brought forward. His solution of the problem is, however, peculiarly his own, and is bound up with his fundamental idea of change, or LA DURÉE.
In his work Les Données immédiates de la Conscience, or Time and Free-Will, he criticises the doctrine of physical determinism, which is based on the principle of the conservation of energy, and on a purely mechanistic conception of the universe. He here points out, and later stresses in his Matiere et Mémoire, the fact that it has not been proved that a strictly determined psychical state corresponds to a definite cerebral state. We have no warrant for concluding that because the physiological and the psychological series exhibit some corresponding terms that therefore the two series are absolutely parallel. To do so is to settle the problem of freedom in an entirely a priori manner, which is unjustifiable.
The more subtle and plausible case for psychological determinism Bergson shows to be no more tenable than that offered for the physical. It is due to adherence to the vicious Association-psychology, which is a psychology without a self. To say the self is determined by motive will not suffice, for in a sense it is true, in another sense it is not, and we must be careful of our words. If we say the self acts in accordance with the strongest motive, well and good, but how do we know it is the strongest? Only because it has prevailed—that is, only because the self acted upon it, which is totally different from claiming that the self was determined by it externally. To say the self is determined by certain tives is to say it is self-determined. The essential thing in all this is the vitality of the self.
The whole difficulty, Bergson points out, arises from the fact that all attempts to demonstrate freedom tend only to strengthen the artificial case for determinism, because freedom is only characteristic of a self in action. He is here in line on this point with Renouvier and Boutroux, although the reasons he gives for it go beyond in psychological penetration those assigned by these thinkers. When our action is over, says Bergson, it seems plausible to argue a case for determinism because of our spatial conception of time and the relationships of events in time. We have a habit of thinking in terms of space, by mathematical time, not in real time or la durée as Bergson calls it, the time in which the living soul acts.
Bergson thus makes room in the universe for a freedom of the human will, a creative activity, and thus delivers us from the bonds of necessity and fatalism in which the physical sciences and the associationist psychology would bind us. We perceive ourselves as centres of indetermination, creative spirits. We must guard our freedom, for it is an essential attribute of spirit. In so far as we tend to become dominated by matter, which acts upon us in habit and convention, we lose our freedom. It is not absolute, and many never achieve it, for their personality never shines forth at all: they live their lives in habit and routine, victims of automatism. We have, however, Bergson urges, great power of creation. He stresses, as did Guyau, the Conception of Life, as free, expanding, and in several respects his view of freedom is closer to that of Guyau than to that of Boutroux, in spite of the latter’s contingency. There is no finalism admitted by Bergson, for he sees in any teleology only “a reversed mechanism.”
Obviously the maintenance of such a doctrine of freedom as that of Bergson is of central importance in any philosophy which contains it. Our conceptions of ethics and of progress depend upon our view of freedom. For Bergson “the portals of the future stand wide open, the future is being made.” He is an apostle of a doctrine of absolute contingency which he applied to the evolution of the world, in his famous volume L’Evolution Créatrice (published in 1907). His philosophy has been termed pessimistic by some in view of his rejection of any teleological conception. Such a doctrine would conflict with his “free” universe and his absolute contingency. On the other hand, it leaves open an optimistic view, because of its freedom, its insistence upon the possibilities of development. It is not only a reaction against the earlier doctrines of determinism, it is a deliverance of the human soul which has always refused, even when religious, to abandon entirely the belief in its own freedom.
Such is the doctrine of freedom which closes our period, a striking contrast to the determinism which, under the influence of modern science, characterised its opening. The critique of science and the assaults upon determinism proceeded upon parallel lines. In many respects they were two aspects of the one problem, and in themselves were sufficient to describe the essential development in the thought of our half century, for the considerations of progress, ethics and religion to which we now turn derive their significance largely from what has been set forth in these chapters on Science and Freedom.
CHAPTER V
PROGRESS
INTRODUCTORY : Freedom and Progress intimately connected—Confidence in Progress, a marked feature of the earlier half of the nineteenth century, was bound up with confidence in Science and Reason, and in a belief in determinism, either natural or divine—Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Comte and others proclaim Progress as a dogma.
I. The idea of progress in Vacherot, Tame and Renan—Interesting reflections of Renan based on belief in Reason.