Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

[407] I find this in Bergson’s whole attribution of much of our “perceptual” and “scientific” knowledge of things to the “needs of action,” and in the detailed reasons that we attempt on [pp. 236–238] to indicate for his polemic against rationalism.

[408] This confirmation I find in Bergson’s whole philosophy of perception and sensation referred to on p. 236, and in his idea of a living being as a “centre of action” or “a centre of indetermination.” In fact it is obvious that he is one of the very greatest of the upholders of the “freedom” of the life of the individual, and of the fact that each new individual contributes something new of its own to the sum-total of existence, to the life of its species, and to the life of the world. Of course there is no more an explanation in his teaching of the causes of “variation” or the differences at birth between the off-spring of men and of animals, than there is in the philosophy of Darwin.

[409] The idea of this necessity is confirmed in Bergson’s whole philosophy of man’s life as a life of action, as a constant surmounting of obstacles, as a life that reacts in its own way upon the life of nature, upon the life of the human species as such, upon the infinite life and energy and “love” of God—if we may soar to this great thought. See, for example, what he writes in explanation of the “discordance” of which he speaks thus: “Our freedom, in the very movements by which it is affirmed, creates the growing habits that will stifle it if it fails to renew itself by a constant effort: it is dogged by automatism. The letter kills the spirit. And our most ardent enthusiasm, as soon as it is externalised into action, is so naturally congealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, the one takes so easily the shape of the other, that we might confuse them together, doubt our sincerity, deny goodness and love.” The explanatory words are the following. [They are quite typical of the kind of philosophy of life that Bergson thinks of as alone worthy of the name of a philosophy of the living. And the reference to “love,” as the highest “dynamic” force in this world of ours, occurs at their close.] “The profound cause of this discordance lies in an irremediable difference of rhythm. Life is general, is mobility itself; particular manifestations of life accept this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. It is always going ahead; they want to mark time. Evolution in general would fain go on in a straight line; each special evolution is a kind of circle. Like eddies of dust raised by the wind as it passes, the living turn on themselves, borne up by the great blast of life. They are therefore relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility so well that we treat each of them as a thing rather than as a progress, forgetting that the very permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement. At times, however, in a fleeting vision, the invisible breath that bears them is materialised before our eyes. We have this sudden illumination before certain forms of maternal love, so striking and in most animals so touching, observable even in the solicitude of the plant for its seed. This love, in which some have seen the great mystery of life, may possibly deliver us life’s secret. It shows us each generation leaning over the generation that shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the movement by which life is transmitted” (Creative Evolution, pp. 134–5; italics mine). It is surely needless to point out how much truer to human nature, truer therefore to an important part of reality, this life-philosophy is than the abstractionism of Professor Bosanquet in the preceding chapter.

[410] This insistence is, I think, amply confirmed by the very fact of the immediate contact with life and reality indicated in the quotation that is given in the preceding note upon the “motive-awakening,” or the “dynamic” character of the philosophy of Bergson. It is also confirmed in his manifest insistence upon the one fact that all philosophy must assume (and has for ever assumed) the fact of life, the fact of the life and thought of God that underlies all our life and all our thought.

[411] This position of the pragmatists is certainly confirmed by Bergson’s entire doctrine of the brain and of the intellect—that their main service is, in the first instance, to interpret the “life” of things, its relation to our own will and to our practical activity. I have suggested, too, in this chapter that it is obviously a characteristic, or a consequence, of the philosophy of Bergson that our highest thought about ourselves and about the world should be relative to, and provocative, of our highest emotion.

[412] It is only with some degree of care and reservation that I wish to refer to any apparent confirmation of this idea by Bergson. And, as always, I object to the idea of any ultimate separation or “dualism” between faith and knowledge—faith being implied in all “knowledge.” There is no opposition in Bergson, or in the principles of his philosophy, between faith and knowledge; it is rather his idea that “the faculty of seeing should be made one with the act of willing” (Creative Evolution, 250; his italics), and that “philosophy” should “proceed, with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal reconstruction of all things, even of life” (C.E. xi.; italics mine). My reasons for finding in his writings a confirmation of the idea that it is indeed our rational and spiritual faith, rather than our demonstrable knowledge, that is to us the measure of truth and reality, are such considerations as the following (in addition to those of the clauses just quoted), his close association between the intellectual and the “volitional,” his general faith in “creative evolution,” in the idea that our “consciousness” means for us “new choices” and (real) “new possibilities,” his faith in the higher intuitions of the mind, in the spiritual nature of man, his belief that the building up of the true philosophy of the future will involve “the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting, and improving one another” (C.E. xiv.), etc. etc.

[413] See below, p. 257, note 1.

[414] See [p. 14] in reference to Dr. Schiller’s suggestion that “freedom” may “pervade the universe.”

[415] “From time to time, however, in a fit of absent-mindedness, nature raises up souls that are more detached from life.... Were this detachment complete, did the soul no longer cleave to action by any of its perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the world has never yet seen” (Laughter, p. 154).

[416] Cf. p. 235.