If then, in every province, the triumph of life is expressed by creation, ought we not to think that the ultimate reason of human life is a creation which, in distinction from that of the artist or man of science, can be pursued at every moment and by all men alike? I mean the creation of self by self, the continual enrichment of personality by elements which it does not draw from outside but causes to spring forth from itself.... If we admit that with man consciousness has finally left the tunnel; that everywhere else consciousness has remained imprisoned; that every other species corresponds to the arrest of something which in man succeeded in overcoming resistance and in expanding almost freely, thus displaying itself in true personalities capable of remembering all and willing all and controlling their past and their future, we shall have no repugnance in admitting that in man, though perhaps in man alone, consciousness pursues its path beyond this earthly life.
On the other suppositions of Bergson’s philosophy this is by no means so far-fetched as are most theories of immortality. For the consciousness which cuts out the patterns of our spatial life here could easily cut out others in the beyond, like enough to our present ones to carry on the continuity of our active existence. The idea of survival, or an idea that may be applied to transmundane survival, is suggested by Laurence Binyon in a recent volume of poems entitled “Auguries.” He writes:
And because in my heart is a flowing no hour can bind
Because through the wrongs of the world looking forth and behind
I find for my thoughts not a close, not an end,
With you will I follow, nor crave the strength of the strong
Nor a fortress of time to enshield me from storms that rend.
This is life, this is home, to be poured as a stream as a song.
This is quoted not only because it represents the poetical realization of Bergson’s message, but because it points to one reason why the charge of pessimism has been brought against Bergson even in this connection.
If only progress is our home, if there be no stability, how is that permanence of values to be achieved which Höffding declares to be the essential axiom of religion? We may love our faithful dog, but according to Bergson it represents an evolutionary blind alley. We may create as we will, but we shall survive our creations. Here, after all, is at the best a tempered optimism. No reunions are promised in the Bergsonian paradise. Only a perpetual streaming that does not, so far as Bergson has yet told us (and that is an important point) ever wind safely home to sea.