[417] Cf. “We must break with scientific habits which are adapted to the fundamental requirements of thought, we must do violence to the mind, go counter to the natural bent of the intellect. But that is just the function of philosophy” (Creative Evolution, p. 31).
[418] “So art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself” (Laughter, p. 157). It is true that if we read further on this page, and elsewhere in Bergson, we will be able to see that there is for him in art and in the spiritual life a kind of intelligence and knowledge. But it is difficult to work out an expression or a characterisation of this intelligence and this knowledge. “Art,” he says, “is only a more direct vision of reality.” And again: “Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through ideality that we can resume contact with reality” (ibid.).
[419] It is only fair to Bergson to remember that he is himself aware of the appearances of this dualism in his writings, that he apologises as it were for them, intending the distinction to be, not absolute, but relative. “Let us say at the outset that the distinctions we are going to make will be too sharply drawn, just because we wish to define in instinct what is instinctive, and in intelligence what is intelligent, whereas all concrete instinct is mingled with intelligence, as all real intelligence is penetrated by instinct. Moreover [this is quite an important expression of Bergson’s objection to the old “faculty” psychology], neither intelligence nor instinct lends itself to rigid definition; they are tendencies and not things. Also it must not be forgotten that ... we are considering intelligence and instinct as going out of life which deposits them along its course” (Creative Evolution, p. 143).
[420] He talks in the Creative Evolution of a “real time” and a “pure duration” of a real duration that “bites” into things and leaves on them the mark of its tooth, of a “ceaseless upspringing of something new,” of “our progress in pure duration,” or a “movement which creates at once the intellectuality of mind and the materiality of things” (p. 217). I have no hesitation in saying that all this is unthinkable to me, and that it might indeed be criticised by Rationalism as inconsistent with our highest and most real view of things.
[421] He admits himself that “If our analysis is correct, it is consciousness, or rather supra-consciousness that is at the origin of life” (Creative Evolution, p. 275).
[422] “Now, if the same kind of action is going on everywhere, whether it is that which is striving to remake itself, I simply express this probable similitude when I speak of a centre from which worlds shoot out as rockets in a fireworks display—provided, however, that I do not present [there is a great idea here, a true piece of ‘Kantianism’] this centre as a thing, but as a continuity of shooting out. God thus defined has nothing of the already made. He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation so conceived is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely” (Creative Evolution, p. 262).
[424] It is somewhat difficult, and it is not necessary for our purposes, to explain what might be meant by the “Idealism” of Bergson—at least in the sense of a cosmology, a theory of the “real.” It is claimed for him, and he claims for himself that he is in a sense both an “idealist” and a “realist,” believing at once (1) that matter is an “abstraction” (an unreality), and (2) that there is more in matter than the qualities revealed by our perceptions. [We must remember that he objects to the idea of qualities in things in the old static sense. “There are no things; there are only actions.”] What we might mean by his initial idealism is the following: “Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of images. And by ‘image’ we mean [Matter and Memory, the Introduction] a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing—an existence placed half-way between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation.’ This conception of matter is simply that of common sense.” ... “For common sense, then, the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is in itself pictorial, as we perceive it: image it is, but a self-existing image.” Now, this very idea of a “self-existing image” implies to me the whole idealism of philosophy, and Bergson is not free of it. And, of course, as we have surely seen, his “creative-evolution” philosophy is a stupendous piece of idealism, but an idealism moreover to which the science of the day is also inclining.
[425] There is so much that is positive and valuable in his teaching, that he is but little affected by formal criticism.
[426] Cf. “We have now enumerated a few of the essential features of human intelligence. But we have hitherto considered the individual in isolation, without taking account of social life. In reality man is a being who lives in society. If it be true [even] that the human intellect aims at fabrication, we must add that, for that as well as other purposes, it is associated with other intellects. Now it is difficult to imagine a society whose members do not communicate by signs,” etc. etc. (Creative Evolution, p. 166). Indeed all readers of Bergson know that he is constantly making use of the social factor and of “co-operation” by way of accounting for the general advance of mankind. It may be appropriate in this same connexion to cite the magnificent passage towards the close of Creative Evolution in which he rises to the very heights of the idea [Schopenhauer and Hartmann had it before him, and also before the socialists and the collectivists] of humanity’s being possibly able to surmount even the greatest of the obstacles that beset it in its onward path: “As the smallest grain of dust [Creative Evolution, pp. 285–6] is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself, so all organised beings, from the humblest to the highest, ... do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.”