Thus according to Bergson the essential secret of life is to be found in some peculiar movement of what he calls spirit; a movement which takes place in some unutterable medium, or upon some indescribable plane, the name of which is "pure time" or "duration."
And listening to all this we cannot resist a sigh of dismay. For here, in these vague de-humanized terms—"tendency," "flux," "eternity," "vibration," "duration," "dispersion"—we are once more, only with a different set of concepts, following the old metaphysical method, that very method which Bergson himself sets out to confine to its inferior place. "Tendency" or "flux" or "duration" is just as much a metaphysical concept as "being" or "not being" or "becoming."
The only way in which we can really escape from the rigid conceptualism of rational logic is to accept the judgment of the totality of man's nature. And the judgment of the totality of man's nature points unmistakably to the existence of a real substantial soul. Such a soul is the indispensable implication of personality. And the most interior and intimate knowledge that we are in possession of, or shall ever be in possession of, is the knowledge of personality.
Bergson is perfectly right when he asserts that "the consciousness which we have of our own self" introduces us "to the interior of a reality, on the model of which we must represent other realities." But Bergson is surely departing both from the normal facts of ordinary introspection and from the exceptional facts of abnormal illumination when he appends to the words "the consciousness which we have of our own self" the further words in its continual "flux." For in our normal moods of human introspection, as well as in our abnormal moods of superhuman illumination, what we are conscious of most of all is a sense of integral continuity in the midst of change, and of identical permanence in the midst of ebb and flow.
The flux of things does most assuredly rush swiftly by us; and we, in our inmost selves, are conscious of life's incessant flow. But how could we be conscious of any of this turbulent movement across the prow of our voyaging ship, if the ship itself—the substantial base of our living consciousness—were not an organized and integral reality, of psycho-chemical material, able to exert will and to make use of memory and reason in its difficult struggle with the waves and winds?
The revelation of man's complex vision with regard to the personality of the soul is a thing of far-reaching issues and implications. One of these implications is that while we have the right to the term "the eternal flux" in regard to the changing waves of sensations and ideas that pass across the horizon of the soul's vision we have no right to think of this "eternal flux" as anything else than the pressure upon us of the universe of our own vision and the pressure upon us of the universe of other visions, as they seem, for this or that passing moment, to be different from our own.
The kind of world to which we are thus committed is a world crowded with living personalities. Each of these personalities brings with it its own separate universe. But the fact that all these separate universes find their ideal synthesis or teleological orientation in "the vision of the immortals," justifies us in assuming that in a certain eternal sense all these apparently conflicting universes are in reality one. This unity of ideas, with its predominant aesthetic idea—the idea of beauty—and its predominant emotional idea—the idea of love—helps us towards a synthesis which is after all only a dynamic one, a thing of movement, growth and creation.
Such a teleological unity, forever advancing to a consummation never entirely to be attained, demands however some sort of static "milieu" as well as some sort of static "material" in the midst of which and out of which it moulds its premeditated future. It is precisely this static "milieu" or "medium," and this static "material" or formless "objective mystery," which Bergson's philosophy, of the "élan vital" of pure spirit, spreading out into a totally indetermined future, denies and eliminates.
In order to justify this double elimination—the elimination of an universal "medium" and the elimination of a formless "thing-in-itself"—Bergson is compelled to reduce space to a quite secondary and merely logical conception and to substitute for our ordinary stream of time, measurable in terms of space, an altogether new conception of time, measurable in terms of feeling.
When however we come to analyse this new Bergsonian time, or as he prefers to call it "intuitively-felt duration," we cannot avoid observing that it is merely a new "mysterious something" introduced into the midst of the system of things, in order to enable us to escape from those older traditional "mysterious somethings" which we have to recognize as the "immediate data" of human consciousness.