[388] “I look and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart. But what I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a selection made by my senses to serve as a light to my conduct; what I know of myself is what comes to the surface, what participates in my actions. My senses and my consciousness, therefore, give me no more than a practical simplification of reality in the vision they furnish me of myself and of things, the differences that are useless to man are obliterated, the resemblances that are useful to him are emphasised; ways are traced out for me in advance along which my activity is to travel. These ways are the ways which all mankind has trod before me. Things have been classified with a view to the use I can derive from them” (Laughter, p. 151). “Life implies the acceptance of the utilitarian side of things in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions; all other impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred” (ibid. p. 131). These last words give us a glimpse of a very important part of Bergson’s teaching—his idea, namely (Voltaire has it in his Micromégas), that “matter” is greater than our perceptions, that our perceptions reveal to us only those aspects of the physical universe with which we are practically concerned.
[389] Some years ago psychologists began to distinguish a “structural” from a “functional” psychology, meaning by the former what is otherwise called Psycho-Physics or (to some extent) Experimental Psychology.
[390] Cf. “At first sight it may seem prudent to leave the consideration of facts to positive science, to let physics and chemistry busy themselves with matter, the biological and psychological sciences with life. The task of the philosopher is then clearly defined. He takes facts and laws from the scientist’s hand, and whether he tries to go beyond them in order to reach their deeper causes, or whether he thinks it impossible to go further, and even proves it by the analysis of scientific knowledge, in both cases he has for the facts and relations, handed over by science, the sort of respect that is due to a final verdict. To this knowledge he adds a critique of the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks proper, a metaphysic; but the matter of knowledge he regards as the affair of science, and not of philosophy” (Creative Evolution, pp. 204–5). [All this represents only too faithfully what even some of our Neo-Kantians have been saying, and teaching, although there is an error in their whole procedure here.]
[391] Schopenhauer’s phrase. See my book upon Schopenhauer’s System.
[392] It is chiefly in Matter and Memory (in which, by the way, there are pages and pages of criticism of the rationalism of philosophy that are as valuable as anything we have in philosophy since the time of Descartes—Kant not excepted) that we are to look for the detailed philosophy of sensation and of perception, and the detailed philosophy of science upon which this protest of Bergson’s against the excesses of “conceptualism” rests. I indicate, too, at different places in this chapter some of the other special considerations upon which it rests. The gist of the whole is to be found, perhaps, in his contention that our science and our philosophy of the past centuries have both regarded “perception” as teaching us (somehow) what things are independently of their effect upon us, and of their place in the moving equilibrium of things—the truth being on the contrary (with Pragmatism and Humanism) that our knowledge has throughout a necessary relation to ourselves and to our place in the universe, and to our liberation from matter in the life of the spirit.
[393] He expresses this idea in the following way in the Introduction to Matter and Memory: “Psychology has for its object the study of the human mind for practical utility,” whereas in “metaphysics” we see “this same mind striving (the idea, as we say elsewhere, is not free from difficulty) to transcend the conditions of useful action and to come back to itself as to a pure creative energy.” Or in the following sentences from his Creative Evolution: “We must remember that philosophy, as we define it, has not yet become completely conscious of itself. Physics understands its role when it pushes matter into the direction of spatiality; but has metaphysics understood its role when it has simply trodden the steps of physics, in the chimerical hope of going farther in the same direction? Should not its own task be, on the contrary, to remount the incline that physics descends, to bring matters back to its origins, and to build up progressively a cosmology which would be, so to speak, a reversed psychology. All that which seems positive to the physicist and to the geometrician would become, from this new point of view, an interruption or inversion of the true positivity which would have to be defined in psychological terms” (pp. 219–20, italics mine).
[394] As an indication of what the acceptance of the dynamic instead of the static view of matter on the part of Bergson means, I cite the phrase (or the conception) on p. 82 of Matter and Memory, the effect that “matter is here as elsewhere the vehicle of an action,” or the even more emphatic declaration on p. 261 of Creative Evolution, “There are no things, there are only actions.” It is impossible, of course, that these mere extracts can convey to the mind of the casual reader the same significance that they obtain in their setting in the pages of Bergson, although it is surely almost a matter of common knowledge about his teaching, that one of the first things it does is to begin with the same activistic or “actionistic” view of nature and matter that seems to be the stock in trade of the physics of our time since the discoveries pertaining to radio-activity, etc. Being only a layman in such matters, I may be excused for quoting from a recent booklet (whose very presence in the series in which it appears is to people like myself a guarantee of its scientific reliability) in which I find this same activistic view of matter that I find in Bergson. “What are the processes by which the primary rock material is shifted? There is the wind that, etc. etc.... There are the streams and rivers that, etc.... There is the sea constantly wearing away, etc.... Then there are ‘subtle’ physical and ‘chemical’ forces. And the action of plants.... Hence by various mechanical, organic, and chemical processes the materials originally scattered through the rocks of the earth’s crust, and floating in the air or water, are collected into layers and form beds of sand, clay, limestone, salt, and the various mineral fuels, including peat and coal” (The Making of the Earth, by Professor Gregory, F.R.S., of Glasgow University: Williams and Norgate).
It is only right to state here, or to remind the reader in this matter of a “dynamic” view of matter, that Bergson not only dissipates matter into force or energy or activity (as do the physicists of to-day), but also actually credits the world of matter and life with a kind of consciousness (and why not be courageous about it?) in which what I have already called the “susceptibility of everything to everything else,” or the action of everything upon everything else, becomes credible and intelligible. “No doubt, also, the material universe itself, defined as the totality of images, is a kind of consciousness in which everything compensates and neutralises everything else, a consciousness of which all the potential parts, balancing each other by a reaction which is always equal to the action, reciprocally hinder each from standing out” (Matter and Memory, p. 313).
[395] See [Chapter III.], and also the references to Mach, Ostwald, Poincaré, and others, in the second chapter and elsewhere.
[396] “There is no intelligence in which some traces of instinct are not to be discovered, more, no instinct that is not surrounded with a fringe of intelligence” (Creative Evolution, p. 143).