M. Bergson’s philosophy is a vindication of intuition, the faculty upon which the poets, the Shelleys and the Keatses, the Villons and the Verlaines, have always depended for their knowledge of themselves, of the universe, and of their relations to the universe. We who are not poets are the deluded victims, says M. Bergson in effect, of our reasoning faculty, which is constantly playing hob with us. We should submit to the authority of intuition, for to do a thing without reason, even against reason, may in certain cases be to act from the best of reasons. This does not mean that reason should be despised or discarded, as some of the philosopher’s overzealous followers are prone to proclaim,—even the great poet must resort to it in expressing the conceptions his intuition gives him,—but rather that reason is a highly useful subordinate of intuition, bearing much the same relation thereto that the housemaid bears to the housewife, the mason or carpenter to the architect, the private soldier to the strategist. In short, M. Bergson’s attitude toward reason is essentially that of the immortal seers. It recalls Pascal’s “The heart has its reasons which reason knoweth not,” Joubert’s “It is easy to know God if you do not attempt to define Him,” Emerson’s “With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do,” and Browning’s “Others may reason and welcome, ’t is we musicians know.”
Our William James pronounced every page of Henri Bergson to be “like the breath of morning and the song of birds.” M. Bergson’s style, though delightfully free from affectation, is not so simple and direct as these comparisons imply. They suggest admirably its freshness, melodiousness, graciousness, and grace, but they fail to suggest the exquisite subtlety which is its most distinctive trait. They may be given a fair approach to adequacy, however, by substituting for “the morning,” a morning of luminous haze such as Corot loved to paint, and for “the song of birds,” the cuckoo’s “wandering voice.” As soft, tenuous, filmy, fluid as mist or wreathing smoke, it is as precise, not to say geometrical, in design as the spider’s gossamer web, and is equally iridescent. The critic who characterized it as Arachnean, therefore, was most happily inspired, though his purpose in doing so was, if I remember right, to hold it up to derision. No living writer, not even Maurice Maeterlinck, surpasses Henri Bergson in evoking, in projecting, in visualizing, so to speak, those subconscious activities of the soul which are commonly esteemed unanalyzable and, great poetry, possibly, apart, unutterable. He “forces language to express things for which language was not intended.” With impalpable pigments and ghostly brushes he paints upon imaginary canvases veritable landscapes of the soul. We do not go to pure philosophers for esthetic sensations,—no one ever frequented Kant, for instance, for his style,—and in general we enjoy or do not enjoy them according as they do or do not succeed in convincing us. Henri Bergson is a striking exception to this rule. We read Bergson, as we read Plato, out of sheer infatuation with his verbal artistry, and we should continue to read him ecstatically if he should undertake to prove that the moon was made of green cheese.
Such as he is in the lecture-room, such as he is in his books, unassuming, unpedantic, gracious, well-poised, subtle, tactful, alert, resourceful, stimulating, such Henri Bergson is in his every-day existence. In his case, and to an unusual degree, the style is the man. An easy talker, ever ready to speak freely upon all subjects,—his personal affairs, work, and politics excepted,—he nevertheless goes little into society, not because he dislikes social functions, but because he cannot contrive to make the necessary leisure. He resides about midway between the Seine and the Bois de Boulogne, in an umbrageous and incredibly tranquil corner of the Auteuil quarter, where he is well nigh as secure from the hustle and bustle of Paris as he would be in a provincial village; and he spends his summers in Switzerland at St.-Cergue, almost ten miles from the nearest railway station, in a modest two-story villa, surrounded by meadows and evergreen woods, the front windows and veranda of which afford ravishing views of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc. Winter and summer alike, six in the morning finds him installed at his desk, and from that moment until he retires for the night he allows himself virtually no respite save that which is afforded by an occasional varying of occupations.
Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson
HENRI BERGSON
FROM THE PORTRAIT BY JACQUES BLANCHE
Though so little of a Parisian in the sense in which the word is currently employed, M. Bergson is one of the relatively few famous Frenchmen who possess a clear title to that distinction. He was born in Paris on the eighteenth of October, 1859. From nine to eighteen he attended as a day student the Lycée Condorcet (then Lycée Bonaparte), in the Opéra quarter, an institution founded in 1803 under the consulship of the First Napoleon, which numbers among its illustrious alumni Dumas fils, De Banville, the Goncourts, Eugène Sue, and Hippolyte Taine. Less precocious than Pascal, who at sixteen wrote a treatise on conic sections that excited the admiration of Descartes, and who is said to have rediscovered at twelve the first propositions of Euclid, young Bergson was nevertheless sufficiently advanced at eighteen to produce in the concours général of the Paris lycées a mathematical solution which was accorded the unusual honor of being published in full in the “Annales Mathématiques,” and which, if I mistake not, exempted him from the obligation of military service. From the Lycée Condorcet he went to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, matriculating in the section of letters, which he had chosen over the section of sciences after not a little hesitation and misgiving, for he was at that time an ardent disciple of Herbert Spencer and dreamed of perfecting Spencerianism. While at the Ecole Normale he came under the joint influence of Félix Ravaisson, harmonizer of the Greek spirituality of the intelligence and the Christian spirituality of the will and of the heart, and Emile Boutroux, author of a memorable assault upon the then dominant determinism entitled “De la contingence des lois de la nature,” and now President of the Institut de France, who speedily freed him from his Spencerian obsession and turned him in the direction he has since followed. Obliged, after his graduation from the Ecole Normale to submit, like the majority of its graduates, to a period of banishment from Paris, he taught philosophy for two years at the Lycée of Angers, in the province of Anjou, and for five years at the Lycée of Clermont-Ferrand, in the province of Auvergne. During his stay at Clermont, he delivered a number of lectures in the university of that city, and wrote the work “L’essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience,” which revealed him as an original thinker and as a redoubtable antagonist of determinism. At Clermont he also mapped out his life-work (studies, researches, and publications), calculating carefully the time to be allotted to each subject, and thus far he has not only succeeded in executing his program to the letter, but he has been able to permit himself such interludes as a course of lectures on Plotinus, his essay on laughter, a lecturing sojourn at Oxford, and the projected visit to the United States.
His “stage” in the provinces over, he taught first in the Collège Rollin and then in the Lycée Henri IV, located upon the very spot where Abélard held his open-air classes. While connected with the latter institution, he published “Matière et mémoire,” and it is thanks, no doubt, to the sensation this work created in the university world that he was called in 1897 to an assistant professorship in the Ecole Normale, and, in 1900, to his present professorship at the Collège de France.
Teaching, for Henri Bergson, is not a makeshift, but a veritable sacrament. His former pupils are virtually unanimous in testifying to his conscientiousness and zeal, as well as to his magnetic qualities as a teacher. Not a few of them, become teachers in their turn, call upon him often for counsel and guidance, which he invariably bestows gladly, however preoccupied and harassed by his formidable undertakings he may be at the time. And this is not the least of the reasons why a goodly proportion of the younger professors of philosophy in the French lycées and collèges of France proclaim themselves Bergsonians. Furthermore, the young men who have attended his classes or his lectures or who have come under the less direct, but only a shade less potent, spell of his writings, seem to be possessed with a passion for “living things”—for “doing things,” we would say in America—as distinguished from analyzing things.