[427] Cf. p. 160 and [p. 262].

[428] He comes in sight of some of them, as he often does of so many things. “It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will [C.E., p. 281], man or superman, had sought to realise himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world, and even by the vegetable world, at least in what these have that is positive and above the accidents of evolution.”

[429] From what has been said in this chapter about Bergson, and from the remarks that were made in the second chapter about Renouvier and the French Critical Philosophy, the reader may perhaps be willing to admit that our Anglo-American Transcendental philosophy would perhaps not have been so abstract and so rationalistic had it devoted more attention, than it has evidently given, to some of the more representative French thinkers of the nineteenth century.

[430] We must remember that nowhere in his writings does Bergson claim any great originality for his many illuminative points of view. He is at once far too much of a catholic scholar (in the matter of the history of philosophy, say), and far too much of a scientist (a man in living touch with the realities and the theories of the science of the day) for this. His findings about life and mind are the outcome of a broad study of the considerations of science and of history and of criticism. By way, for example, of a quotation from a scientific work upon biology that seems to me to reveal some apparent basis in fact (as seen by naturalists) for the “creative evolution” upon which Bergson bases his philosophy, I append the following: “We have gone far enough to see that the development of an organism from an egg is a truly wonderful process. We need but go back again and look at the marvellous simplicity of the egg to be convinced of it. Not only do cells differentiate, but cell-groups act together like well-drilled battalions, cleaving apart here, fusing together there, forming protective coverings or communicating channels, apparently creating out of nothing, a whole set of nutritive and reproductive organs, all in orderly and progressive sequence, producing in the end that orderly disposed cell aggregate, that individual life unit which we know as an earthworm. Although the forces involved are beyond our ken, the grosser processes are evident” (Needham, General Biology, p. 175; italics mine). Of course it is evident from his books that Bergson does not take much account of such difficult facts and topics as the mistakes of instinct, etc. And I have just spoken of his optimistic avoidance of some of the deeper problems of the moral and spiritual life of man.

[431] “This amounts to saying that the theory of knowledge and theory of life seem to us inseparable [Creative Evolution, p. xiii.; italics Bergson’s]. A theory of life that is not accompanied by a criticism of knowledge is obliged to accept, as they stand, the concepts which the understanding puts at its disposal: it can but enclose the facts, willing or not, in pre-existing frames which it regards as ultimate. It thus obtains a symbolism which is convenient, perhaps even necessary to positive science, but not a direct vision of its object.”

[432] I more than agree with Bergson that our whole modern philosophy since Descartes has been unduly influenced by physics and mathematics. And I deplore the fact that the “New Realism” which has come upon us by way of a reaction (see p. 53) from the subjectivism of Pragmatism, should be travelling apparently in this backward direction—away, to say the very least, from some of the things clearly seen even by biologists and psychologists. See [p. 144].

[433] As I have indicated in my Preface, I am certainly the last person in the world to affect to disparage the importance of the thin end of the wedge of Critical Idealism introduced into the English-speaking world by Green and the Cairds, and their first followers (like the writers in the old Seth-Haldane, Essays on Philosophical Criticism). Their theory of knowledge, or “epistemology,” was simply everything to the impoverished condition of our philosophy at the time, but, as Bergson points out, it still left many of us [the fault perhaps was our own, to some extent] in the position of “taking” the scientific reading of the world as so far true, and of thinking that we had done well in philosophy when we simply partly “transformed” it. The really important thing was to see with this epistemology that the scientific reading of the world is not in any sense initial “fact” for philosophy.

INDEX

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