Spirit, therefore, is pure energy and movement and matter is pure heaviness and resistance. Out of the necessity of this conflict emerge all those rigid logical concepts and mathematical formulae, of which space and time, in the ordinary sense of those words, are the ultimate generalization.
Our criticism of this theory is that both these things—this "spirit" and this spirit-evoked "matter"—are themselves meaningless concepts, concepts which, in spite of Bergson's contempt for ordinary metaphysic, are in reality entirely metaphysical, being in fact, like the old-fashioned entities whose place they occupy, nothing but empty bodiless generalizations abstracted from the concrete living reality of the soul. But quite apart from our criticism of the Bergsonian "spirit" and "matter" on the ground of their being unreal conceptions illegitimately abstracted from real personality we are compelled to note a second vivid difference between our point of view and his in regard to this matter of opposites and their contradiction. Bergson's monism, as we have seen, resolves itself into a duality which may be defined as conscious activity confronted by unconscious inertness.
Our duality, on the contrary, which has behind it, not monism, but pluralism, may be denned as conscious creation, or conscious love, confronted by conscious resistance to creation, or conscious inert malice. Thus while Bergson finds his ultimate axiomatic "data" in philosophical abstractions, we find our ultimate axiomatic "data" in the realities of human experiences. Bergson seeks to interpret human life in terms of the universe. We seek to interpret the universe in terms of human life. And we contend that we are justified in doing this since what we call "the universe," as soon as it is submitted to analysis, turns out to be nothing but an act of faith according to which an immense plurality of separate personal universes find a single universe of inspiration and hope in the vision of the immortal gods.
The ultimate duality revealed by the complex vision is a duality on both sides of which we have unfathomable abysses of consciousness. On the one side this consciousness is eternally creative. On the other side this consciousness is eternally malicious, in its deliberate inert resistance to creation. It is natural enough, therefore, that while Bergson's "creative evolution" resolves itself into a series of forward-movements which are as easy and organic as the growth of leaves on a tree, our advance toward the real future which is also a return to the ideal past, resolves itself in a series of supremely difficult rhythms, wherein eternally conscious "good" overcomes eternally conscious "evil."
Our philosophy, therefore, may, in the strictest sense, be called a "human" philosophy in contra-distinction to a "cosmic" philosophy; or, if you please, it may be called a "dramatic" philosophy in contra-distinction to a "lyric" philosophy. From all this it will be clearly seen that it would be impossible for us to hypostasize a super-moral or sub-moral universe in complete disregard of the primordial conscience of the human soul. It will be equally clearly seen that it would be impossible for us to project a theoretical universe made up of "cosmic streams of tendency," whether "spiritual" or "material," in complete disregard of the soul's primordial aesthetic sense.
The logical scrupulosity and rationalistic passion which drive a cosmic philosopher forward, in his attempt to construct a universe in disregard of the human conscience and the human aesthetic sense, are themselves evidence that while he has suppressed in himself the first two of the three primordial ideas of which we speak, he has become an all-or-nothing slave of the last of these three ideas—namely, the idea of truth. He has sacrificed his conscience and his taste to this isolated and abstracted "truth," the quest of pure reason alone, and, as a result of this fanaticism, the real "true truth," that is to say the complete rhythmic vision of the totality of man's nature, has been suppressed and destroyed.
It must be fully admitted at this point that the fanaticism of the so-called "pure saint" and the so-called "pure artist" who suppress, the one for the sake of "goodness" and the other for the sake of "beauty," the third great primordial idea which we have called "truth," is a fanaticism just as one sided and just as destructive of the complete harmonious vision as those other kinds.
That this is the case can easily be proved by recalling how thin, how strained, how morbid, how ungracious, how inhuman, those so-called "saints" and "artists" become, when, in their neglect of reason and truth, they persist in following their capricious, subjective, fantastic, individual dreams, out of all concrete relation to the actual world we live in.
We arrive, therefore, at a point from which we are able to detect the true inner spirit of the nature of art; and what we discover may thus be stated. Art is the expression, through the medium of an individual temperament, of a beauty which is one of the primordial aspects of this pluralistic world. The eternal duality of things implies that this beauty is always manifested as something in perpetual conflict with its opposite, namely with that antagonistic aspect of the universe which we name the hideous or the ugly.
This duality exists as the eternal condition of each one of the three primordial ideas out of which the universe is evoked. Each of these three ideas is only known to us as the result of a relative victory over its opposite. Beauty is known to us as a relative victory over hideousness. Goodness is known to us as a relative victory over evil. Truth is known to us as a relative victory over the false and the unreal. The fact that each of these ideas can only be known in a condition of conflict with its opposite and in a condition of relative victory over its opposite is due to the fact that all three of them are in their own nature only clarifying, selecting, and value-giving activities; whereas the actual material upon which they have to work, as well as the energy from which they derive their motive-power, is nothing else but that mysterious outflowing of the soul itself which we call emotion.