y ^-^S^ & I" * ^ '.A V * V I « 1 ^ Y v * \ * * S 8 I \ 'o,. * ^ - 0> ^ "^v ^ ^ v* ,0o. P a )> so that, though in itself one, it is none the less a heterogeneous multiplicity; 1 according to 1 Bergson's fundamental objection to the theory of ideas is that it involves the assumption that, though the Idea is inert and motionless, it contains more than the moving. To introduce motion, therefore, something negative, a non-being, is required, and this degrades the Idea into all its appearances, multiplies it in space and in time. This objection, which may, as we shall see, be urged with equal force against the elan vital, is based on a traditional but none the less erroneous conception of the Pla- tonic Idea. The error derives partly from the mythological manner and poetic vagaries of Plato, partly from Plato's natural tendency (in which Bergson participates) toward hypostasis, so that he often seems to deal with Ideas as if they were super- sensible and inert essences, the models for all existences in space. But nobody who counts with the great critical dialogues, the 108 William James and Henri Bergs on Spinoza, through the diversification of sub- stance, because of the mind's need of concep- tion, into infinite attributes and modes, which bear the same relation to the free, self-caused, and self-determining substance as the expe- Parmenides and the Thaeatetus, so skeptical and negative in their outcome, can persist in the notion that the hypostasis is Plato's real intention. These dialogues, as Campbell and Jackson have clearly demonstrated, came in the middle of Plato's career, between the greater Socratic dialogues, notably the Republic, and the later Platonic ones, the Philebus, the Timaeus, the Critias, the Laws. The doctrine of Ideas in the Republic is distinguished by the elaborate mythologic form in which it is set forth; but the Republic is fairly rigorous beside the Timaeus. It is hardly likely that Plato recanted and then recanted his recantation between the writing of the Republic and the writing of the Timaeus. There can scarcely have been any contradiction, in Plato's own mind, between the theory set forth in the Parmenides and that in the other dialogues. If now we take those to be poetic expressions of the theory in the Parmenides, what is the nature of the Ideas ? To begin with, the Ideas are dynamic forces, a congeries of possible being, having actual existence and leading matter on, shaping it, organizing it. They appear most clearly in action. In the tenth book of the Republic, Plato tells us that it is the user of the flute who knows the real flute. "The flute-player will tell the flute-maker which of his flutes is satisfactory to the per- former; he will tell him how he ought to make them, and the other will attend to his instruction." Generically, " the excellence or beauty or truth of every structure, animate or inanimate, and of every action of man, is relative to the use for which nature or the artist has intended them." This use or function is the idea, one, indivisible, simple, the definitive form of every material organization that expresses it or brings it about. In the second place, its activity, taken in and by itself, is of the durational sort, and is truly creative. In terms of the myth Intuition and Pragmatism 109 rience of the daily life bears to the elan vital. Substance, Nature, God, is the same inter- penetration of diversities, the same uncom- pelled spontaneous activity, natura naturans. It is an effect which is its own cause; the self- of the Timaeus, the goodness of God overflows spontaneously, without requiring the shock of non-being or space (ny 6v). The latter does not degrade the Idea from its " eternity." Its role is identical with that of space in Bergson's system: it individuates and multiplies. It gives rise to Time — "the moving image of eternity" — as a spatialized version of the non-spatial activity. But, although appearing in this spatio- temporal multiplicity, the Idea, as the Parmenides points out, cannot itself be resident in nor divided among the things whose function it is, since, if it were, it could have neither unity nor functional character, i.e., it could not be Idea. Hence it could be neither the bond between two similars, such as the eye of the Pecten mollusk and the eye of the vertebrate, nor that unity which illuminates and accounts for the variety of the particulars. It is not a concept — i.e., a static form — yet it is what the mind knows in arresting particulars, since otherwise the knowledge of it would be irrelevant to these particulars. Such then is the Idea, considered rigorously and not poetically. So considered, its resemblance to the elan in nature and in its relations to matter is extraordinarily striking. We may note, before comparing the two in detail, that in this form the Idea is not finalistic. It is a function, but it is a function that serves nothing external to itself. That it is not mechanical need not be argued. So that in its divergence from mechanism, its resem- blance to, but non-identity with, finalism, it has one of the essen- tial traits of the elan. But consider the other traits of the elan as Bergson exhibits it in its relations to particulars of existence, i.e., the elan as the function of seeing in relation to the mollus- cular and the vertebrate eye. no William James and Henri Bergson identity of the different; the simultaneity of the successive; the oneness of the many. It is the force of self-preservation of a God who loves himself with an infinite love. Natura naturata, thought, extension, things, are the Since, argues M. Bergson, the Pecten and the vertebrate separate from the parent stem and grow in divergent directions long before the eye makes its appearance, every attempt to account for their identical appearance, by mechanism, finalism, neo-Darwinism, mutationism, neo-Lamarckism, invites mon- strous assumptions of practically impossible coincidences of infinite complexity. The quality of the light to which all eyes respond is not as a physical cause a sufficient explanation of their organic structure. The eye is more than a physical effect. It solves a problem. It is a photograph which has been turned into a photographic apparatus. The eye makes use of light. Hence, the causal relationship between light and the eye is that between something which unwinds and releases, and that which is unwound and released. Now the latter is an internal activity , "something quite different from what we call an effort, for never has an effort been known to produce the slightest complication of an organ, and yet an enormous number of complications, all admirably co-ordinated, have been necessary to pass from the pigment-spot of the Infusorian to the eye of the vertebrate. .... Yet this, like hereditary change in a definite direction, which continues to accumulate and add to itself so as to build up a more and more complex machine, must certainly be related to some sort of effort, but to an effort of far greater depth than the individual effort, far more independent of circumstances, an effort common to most representatives of the same species, inherent in the germs they bear rather than in their substance alone, an effort thereby assured of being passed on to their descendants. "The elan, then, is dynamic, transcends the individuals, yet belongs to all of them. Each of the individuals that participate in it is infinitely complex. It alone is simple. There is a con- Intuition and Pragmatism in same mechanical necessities, the same "spa- tialized sequences/' as the daily life. Even the freedom of man has the undetermined, self- contained quality of totality which is the cen- tral trait of the Bergsonian notion of freedom. trast between the infinite complexity of the organ and the extreme simplicity of the function The simplicity belongs to the object itself, and the infinite complexity to the views we take in turning round it, to the ' symbols by which our senses or intel- lects represent it to us or, more generally, to elements of a differ- ent order, with which we try to imitate it artificially, but with which it remains incommensurable, being of a different nature." This is almost the very language of Plato. The analogy is, how- ever, profounder still. This different order is materiality. It does not represent means employed but obstacles avoided. "It is a negation rather than a positive reality." By right, the function of vision should reveal an infinity of things we do not see. It is enchanneled, and the eye represents the channel through which it acts. Its structure conforms to the form of the act, at once expressing and restricting it. The greater the expression, the less the restriction, consequently the difference between the pigment-spot and the vertebrate eye. Both are equally co-ordinated because they are constructed to express the same function, but the function is freest in the vertebrate. Now, how is this function in its relation to the material that it organ- izes different from the Platonic Idea? It isn't. It bears, as a special function, even the same relation to "the original impetus of life" as a particular Idea bears to the Idea of the Good. It is effected in virtue of that impetus. It is implied therein, implied because life, like the idea, "is more than anything else a tendency to act on inert matter." The conclusion is, then, that the Idea resembles the ilan in that it is a unitary force, or dynamic function, acting on inert matter, organizing it, getting itself diversely expressed through these organizations, without being itself divided or divisible. ii2 William James and Henri Bergson There are, of course, the Spinozistic parallelism and eternalism, which at first blush seem an- tipodal to Bergsonian philosophy. But the antipodation is verbal and not real. The dis- tinctions are conceptual, 1 and the eternalism is the maximal fulness of duration. 2 In point of fact, each mode of substance or individual entity is the interpenetration of the residuum of being, and is a mode or particular only when its substantial cause is considered as external to it, i.e., when, in the Bergsonian sense, it is spatialized. Conceive it in its fulness, as inter- penetrated by the rest, and it is substance itself, eternal in the sense of perduring through all its externalizations, just as the Bergsonian real duration perdures through all its spatial- izations. Now, even as Spinoza's distinctions between appearance and reality follow from his conception of substance, so do Bergson's from his. The critics of this great and profound thinker have accused him without reason of inconsistency. His premise may be false, but 1 Cf. Ethica, Book I, Definitions. 2 Cf. Bergson, Introduction a la mitaphysique. Intuition and Pragmatism 113 his deductions are not inconsistent. If reality is what Bergson thinks it, appearance must be as he describes it. But is reality as he thinks it ? II M. Bergson has a number of striking phrases by which he designates reality. It is real or pure duration (duree reelle), it is a formidable thrust (poussee formidable), it is the onrush of life (elan vital), it is the innermost spirit, it is activity, it is change, it is that of which the flow gives rise to all in experience that lives and changes. But it is not, as it appears in expe- rience, truly itself. It there appears deflected and distorted by an alien and secondary stuff with which it mixes, and which in turn it dis- torts. This alien or secondary stuff is matter or space, and duration must be extricated from its entanglement before it can be perceived in and by itself. This extrication is what has been accomplished in intuition. Now, what is the reality so attained to be known as ? To be concrete, consider the paragraph or the page I have just written. It belongs to ii4 William James and Henri Bergs on the common data of the daily life. It is an appearance of reality — a collection of marks and symbols, themselves spatial forms, spread over the space of the page, and standing for and representing something to which they are somehow allied and which has been the effective cause of this particular spatial complex. This something is the one thought which the paragraph expresses, and which you apprehend when you read the signs that compose it. But these signs are not one. The paragraph can be subdivided into sentences, each before and after another, the sentences into words, the words into letters, the letters into smaller shapes or simpler sounds, and so on endlessly. But now the idea which has so spread and ramified by means of symbols and space is not at all a thing in which I feel a definite, exclusive before-and-after, a diversity of distinct sym- bols with distinct meanings, having distinct relations to each other. All I feel is one mean- ing. Its quale is a definite tendency to write. And as I write, I am not aware of each word before I write it. I do not know what it will Intuition and Pragmatism 115 be. I discover what has become a particular word by the act of writing. The act seems to deposit the word as it moves along, and with each word deposited it has externalized itself more and more in space. It seems like the unrolling of something rolled up, but not the unrolling of a reel, on which one thing is laid over the other, but rather the unrolling of a thing all of whose parts are one inside the other, such that, without space, you cannot distin- guish part from part, all are so absolutely one. When I read the paragraph over, I recover this unity, but not in its fulness or adequacy. I have to recompose it, and I feel it as a thing attained piecemeal, not at one indivisible view. Why? Because the act has been spatialized. Suppose, now, we reverse the process, and try to roll up this act which has unrolled itself here, aiming to recover its central, indivisible tension. The mind moves hereupon not from within outward, but from without inward. Read the paragraph over several times. At the first reading, each word, perhaps each letter, stands out in its place, alone, independent, n6 William James and Henri Bergson with no clear or intimate relation to the others. At the second, they all seem closer together, the space they cover seems not so great, we say the reading is swifter, we take in a sentence at a time, now, instead of a word at a time. At the third reading, this is still more true. We feel as if we were skipping passages, but we know that we are not, because we know that in the end we can reproduce the identical one idea which the paragraph conveys, with all its ramifications and differences, without feeling anything more than the presence of this con- tinuous, unvarying ideational impulse. What has happened? The idea has been changed back from a fact into an act, from something done into something doing. In the repeated readings we have despatialized it. Letters, words, sentences have, in the mind, become more and more intimate. Instead of empty spaces between them they have touched, then from touching they have passed into one another, until each has become indiscernible from all and all from each. They have reverted to the status of that pure inward impulse of Intuition and Pragmatism 117 which they were the spatial expression, the material incarnation. Consider, however, that this impulse, which incarnated itself in the paragraph, is but one of a countless multitude of impulses which move us. Simple as it is beside the words and sentences that express it, it must be, taken in and by itself, related to the whole of our lives as words and sentences are related to it. It must be a mere spatialization of a totality which in itself is not spatial, and which, beside it, is one and infinitely complex. Let us, then, withdraw the mind's eye from the details of life in their isolation. Let us bring them together, as we brought together the letters and sentences of our paragraph. They touch, they inter- penetrate, they fuse. We behold the fulness of our selfhood, an enduring tension, which rami- fies, according to need, into memories, emotions, wishes, ideas, into those mental forms which the psychologist studies singly, but which is in itself all these at one and the same time. Nor is it alone this indivisible multiplicity. It swells, changes, grows. We feel this swelling, n8 William James and Henri Bergson changing, growing within its very heart — an increase without enlargement. How else, and where else, if we abstract space absolutely? For then there is, as there must be, the actual succession of an inner experience, but such succession cannot make a distinction of before and after. A distinction would mean a juxta- position, however slight, and juxtaposition, involving the mutual externality of the juxta- posed, is spatial. But by hypothesis and by act we have abstracted from space. We con- front the innermost essence of mind in its purity. We see that it is labile, that it is pul- sation, and that each pulsation, as it adds itself to its predecessors, preserves itself with- out distinguishing itself from them. The innermost life is a solidarity, at once self- identical and changing, "a continuous melody .... which carries itself on, indivisible from the beginning to the end of our conscious existence." Now, being innermost, this life cannot help being psychical, but its psyche is not the psyche of consciousness and personality. It is the Intuition and Pragmatism 119 more primordial spirit of which the conscious- ness we know is a spatialization, a segmenta- tion, of which the personality we are aware of is a contraction and restriction. That it is soonest and most readily to be discovered in the profundities of our own spirit is our grace, which makes humanity perhaps more its kin than any other living or moving being, since in man the cosmic spirit has most nearly liber- ated itself from the trammels of matter. But, in point of fact, man is a very limited concre- tion of it. Intuition reveals spirit as the force and go of all that moves and acts. It, and it alone, is the true metaphysical reality. What, now, are its metaphysical character- istics ? To begin with, it is flux. It is movement and change, and these, as such, are absolutely indivisible. To arrest either is to destroy it, for it is a transition, not a condition, and can, therefore, never coincide with immobility. It may be imperceptibly brief, it may be long beyond perception, infinitely long. But it cannot be decomposed. Motion is motion and 120 William James and Henri Bergs on must always be that. To spatialize it is to think it in terms of its opposite, of immobility. To spatialize it is to contradict its nature, destroy its identity. That identity may be, it will be seen, a " self -contradictory" identity, but, once captured and defined, it must remain unchanged, by the rules of the logic of identity, throughout the discussion. To these rules Bergson rigorously adheres, in all his books. Consequently the life of all existence becomes conceived qualitatively as one, and its diversity and immobility become mere appearances. " There are," he writes, 1 " changes, but there are no things that change. Change has no need of a support. There are movements, but there are not necessarily invariable things that move; movement does not imply a something that possesses it" (mobile). Immobility is really appearance which the sense of sight deceives us into taking for reality. But science assures us that all matter consists in fact of movement; and a thing's movement is but a movement of movements. Hence, movement, and not 1 Perception du changement, p. 24. Intuition and Pragmatism 121 matter, is substance, and because of the con- tinuity and unity of movement, the world it expresses itself by is maximally substantial and durable. "For if change is real and even con- stitutive of all reality, we must think of the past as persisting unchanged in its entirety in the one indivisible act of change," 1 just as the notes of a melody persist unchanged in the one indivisible melody, or the meanings of the beginnings of our paragraph in the one indi- visible meaning of the paragraph. Both are change and immutability at once. Not to believe this is to be illogical, to be subject to a mere philosophical illusion. This is the illusion that real time is decomposable into instants. Such instants are fundamental in mathematics, but mathematics is only a science of space. It required that any two of them cannot be separated by a time-interval, for time is nothing more than their juxtapo- sition. But if they are separated by nothing, they are one and not two. Two mathematical 1 The italics are mine. There is the significant deductive transition in the phrase "we must think," for the necessity is logical only. 122 William James and Henri Bergson points that touch are confounded one in the other: they interpenetrate and become an identity. Logic, hence, compels the assump- tion of an "interval of duration." How great this interval shall be is determined only by our capacity for attention. Let the attention expand indefinitely, and it embraces more and more and more of the past. The present, indeed, is merely the field of instant attention. To say that any portion of it is destroyed when it drops from attention would be obviously wrong. It does not cease to exist, but it becomes past. The past is that part of the present which the mind neglects; when the mind again attends to it, it becomes present. But this present is not a mere simultaneity. It is " something continually present and con- tinually moving," "an enduring present," in which the past stays subconscious, waiting only on our needs to bring up to consciousness its appropriate part, and surging up in its totality whenever the attention on externals is relaxed, as in the cases of drowning and other forms of vital crisis and sudden death. Then Intuition and Pragmatism 123 the attention turns inward, and one's whole life unrolls before the mind's eye. Logic and expe- rience both thus compel us to believe the past conserves itself automatically, that this self- conservation in the present is cosmic, and that it is nothing else than the indivisibility of change. But if this is the nature of the cosmos, then, though an infinite deal is continually adding itself to whatever exists, nothing is ever, nor can be, subtracted. The substantiality and dura- bility of the world are maximal. Change itself is that hidden substance which philosophers have sought, which flows through the fingers that seek by grasping to arrest it. Perceived in its nakedness, it is neither unstable nor immutable, but the very stuff of duration, at once indivisible and changing. Yet further: that which is indivisibly dynamic cannot truly be differentiated into cause and effect. Life is a concrete duration, the unity of the past with the present. Hence, if it changes, the source of the change is in itself, not in anything external. Cause is self -caused; effect is self- 124 William James and Henri Bergs on effectuation; change is creative growth, deter- mined neither mechanically nor teleologically. In other words, life, as perceived in intuition is free. For, if it were not, the indivisibility of change would be destroyed, duration would be spatialized, it would be possible to fore- cast events infallibly. Indeed, determinism is equivalent to the possibility. Yet how is any foretelling whatever possible? Does not the understanding of the true nature of a cause require also the perception of its effect? And how is the effect to be perceived unless it is already present, and, if it is already present, what can be meant by prediction? Actually, in the inwardness of duration, not even action itself can predict. There are multitudes in the realization of an ideal that the ideal has no inkling of. Life, then, eludes prediction. But does it also escape causation? Determinism is not alone the possibility of prediction, it is also mechanistic causal necessity. Can life elude this necessity? Yes, however cause be defined, life can. For intuition shows us life as persistent variation; hence, cause, defined Intuition and Pragmatism 125 as unvarying antecedent of its effect, cannot apply to life. Or take cause as common-sense tends to take it; as a compromise between the identity of cause and effect with time, or differ- entiating creative activity. Its necessity is reached by the element of identity, by the repetition of the same — the same number, the same quality, the same relation — in the effect. Then, as cause approaches necessity, it goes farther and farther from true activity, farther and farther from duration and freedom, where alone true causation exists. There necessity is a pure negation. There the future exists in the present only as a vague possibility. The transition from present to future is seen by intuition to be, first of all, an effort, and, secondly, an effort which does not always real- ize the felt possibility, yet which rests quite complete in whatever future it has brought about. Life is free. In sum : Ultimate reality is of the same stuff as our inner life, something akin to the will, the go of our own existence, which " unwinds " itself — an enduring act, continuous, indivisible, 126 William James and Henri Bergs on substantial, creative, free, an act which is the unity and interpenetration of all that lives and moves and has its being, an incessant life which is the concretion of all durations, of all that apparent diversity of beings whose existence is materialization of this same formidable impetus, this elan of life, which is their unshatterable and persistent substance. Such, then, is the fundamental reality which intuition reveals. How different in character and direction from the reality of the daily life, with its numerous individuals, its unchanging solids, its immutable concepts, its many checks and defeats, its few successes! How could so perfect a thing as the elan vital give rise to so imperfect a thing as conscious experience? Never, of itself. The ordinary world of men and things is a degradation of the elan. It is the disruption of its unity by means of the shock of space and matter. These are the enemy, these are the evil principle, and of the war of these with the life-force worlds are born. What are they? How are they known? The more fundamental one is space. This Intuition and Pragmatism 127 Bergson assumes, but whether as the meta- physical peer of pure duration, or something secondary and inferior, one may not absolutely say. In his earlier thinking, the notion appears that space is a Kantian form of intuition and has no reality apart from the mind that thinks it. "We have assumed," he writes in Donnees immediates de la conscience, "the existence of a homogeneous space, and, with Kant, dis- tinguished this space from the matter that fills it. With him we have admitted that homo- geneous space is a form of our sensibility. " It is an "infinitely fine network which we stretch beneath material continuity in order to make ourselves masters of it, to decompose it accord- ing to the plan of our activities and need." And this notion occurs again and again, though less explicitly stated, in his later work. Space, in Matter and Memory , is called a "diagram- matic design of our eventual action on matter." And in Creative Evolution it is more than once designated as the practical form of our intelli- gent action on things. From this point of view, it is not a secondary thing but a tertiary one, 128 William James and Henri Bergs on arising after a creature having need of it has been created by the evolutionary action of duration. But this view of space is incidental to the exigencies of exposition. It is not com- pelled by the demands of Bergson's first inde- finable, pure duration. That requires over against it, if it is to be a factor in accounting for the course and character of experience, some- thing with which it may combine, on which it may act. This something need not be so real as pure duration is, it may be metaphysically secondary, an inversion, but it must be opposite. Such an opposite is space. "There is a real space without duration .... and a real duration, the heterogeneous moments of which interpenetrate." Space is the inversion of duration. Duration is interpenetration, the psychical organization of heterogeneous quali- ties that are immanently successive, one to another. Space is juxtaposition, the simul- taneous externality of homogeneous points, whose essential character is quantitative, not qualitative. Space is an empty and homo- Intuition and Pragmatism 129 geneous medium which is self-sufficient, void of every quality, amorphous, inert, but a "reality as solid as sensations themselves," though of a different order. Consequently space is a thing outside ourselves, "a mutual externality without succession," but an absolute reality on which we act (and it must be real therefore, since it is impossible for action to move in the unreal) and which we can and do know in its absoluteness by means of mathematics. But mathematics, absolute, real — are not these contradictory terms? They would be, if they were not discoverable in the same intui- tion that reveals real duration. The only difference is that the direction of the intuition must be changed. Consider again the intui- tion of any paragraph of this chapter. Its psychic purity is attained by the incessant accumulation and interpenetration of its details. What dilutes this purity? The fact that in expression these details, instead of staying an ever-changing, fluid, tensive unity, become external to one another. This externalization 130 William James and Henri Bergson is dissipation. 1 Instead of there being from moment to moment more than there was before, there is from moment to moment less. The force spreads, dissipates, tends to cease. If it could cease utterly and absolutely, it would be indistinguishable from space. That, however, does not happen. The written or spoken paragraph is not pure space. It is matter. Matter is disintegrating spirit, spirit running down, on the way to space. 2 Spirit absolutely run down would have become its opposite, space. Space gathered up, inter- penetrated, might possibly be spirit. Conse- quently, behind these two " absolutes," " dura- tion' ' and " space," which are inversions of one another, opposite orders, interfering with one another in such a way that the absence of one means the presence of its opposite, there is a unity " vaster and higher" of which these are perhaps complementary differentiations, as in- stinct and intelligence are of the life of man. 1 Cf. Creative Evolution, pp. 249-59. 2 M. Bergson regards the second law of thermodynamics as the most metaphysical of all physical laws. Intuition and Pragmatism 131 And between these two poles of the utterly transcendent and barely suggested unity of which they are differentiations lies matter, just as real as they, to be known immediately and directly by the same intuitive act, only reversed in its duration. For matter is life " undoing itself," an absolute reality which physics studies and reveals, a thing no more than "pure duration ballasted by geometry" and partaking of the nature of both. But the intuitive act reversed in its direction is intelligence, concep- tualization, analysis. The ultimate province of the intellect, consequently, must be pure space; and its ultimate form, geometry. Now intermediate between the intuition of life and the intuition of space lies the intuition of matter. This is attained in "pure perception" and in the mutually external categories and forms of the understanding, in concepts, these being static, isolated, cinematographic snap- shots of the flux, catching its externalizations. "In reality, life is a movement, materiality is the inverse movement, and each of these two movements is simple, the matter which forms 132 William James and Henri Bergs on a world being an undivided flux, and undivided also the life that runs through it, cutting out in it living beings all along its track." 1 Hence, matter, in so far as it implies dura- tion, is also a continuum and conterminous with spirit. It involves a before and after, because it is spatial, but it involves also the linking to- gether of these successive moments of time "by a thread of variable quality which cannot be without some likeness to the continuity of our own consciousness." Matter endures and is, qua enduring, the pure flux of dynamic energy which the physicist has made the goal of his researches. But if matter is a continuous flux of energy, it cannot be the collection of the dis- crete objects of experience to which we formally apply the term. These are tertiary in that they are derivatives of matter. They are the ap- pearance of appearance, and are appearance to appearance. They are the latest events in the cosmic drama whose climax is Man. The title of this drama is Creative Evolution. Its great protagonists, its hero and villain, 1 Creative Evolution, p. 249. Intuition and Pragmatism 133 when M. Bergson raises the curtain for us, are Pure Duration and Space, Spirit and Matter, Elan Vital, and Inertia, these complementary and inverse aspects of reality, so essentially like Spinoza's Cogitatio and Extensio, attributes of one substance and in it, identical; so essentially like Plato's idea and non-being, absorbable in the neo-Platonic One. The drama arises out of the inward incompatibility of these two with one another. They cannot live together in democratic amity. The existence of the one involves the mutilation if not the destruction of the other, without concession, without com- promise, even in that apparent compromise we call matter. The life-force, which is conscious- ness, "need to create," free, spiritual, self- cumulative, is suppressed and constrained by the rigidity and vacuity of space. A power, finite and given once for all, but containing within itself numberless potentialities, not unlike Platonic ideas, it cannot freely generate, fulfil, and gather within itself the more that continuously grows from it. For the life-force is a thing that grows by what it feeds on, and 134 William James and Henri Bergson it feeds upon itself. Matter hinders and inter- rupts this creative growth, and hence it becomes the task of the life-force to overcome the checks and hindrances of its opponent, and to convert it from an opponent into a servant. Life suc- ceeds in doing so, but not without a price. It pays for its conquest with its unity. In its contact with matter, life is comparable to an impulsion or an impetus; regarded in itself, it is "an immensity of potentiality, a mutual encroachment of thousands and thousands of tendencies, " which nevertheless are thousands and thousands "only when regarded as outside each other, i.e., when spatialized." 1 It is com- pelled to divide, to adopt divergent lines of growth, in unforeseeable directions; it is com- pelled to "insinuate" itself into matter, "to adopt its rhythm" and movement. By so doing, however, it attains its ends. It con- quers matter, and, by organizing, diverts it from its own rigidity to the uses of life. The core of this diversion is the accumulation and expenditure of stores of energy "by means of 1 Creative Evolution, p. 258. Intuition and Pragmatism 135 a matter as supple as possible in directions variable and unforeseen." The first act in the conquest of matter, hence, is the evolution of the vegetable. Whatever life may feed on, its ultimate food is vegeta- tion. " Vegetables alone gather in the solar energy and animals do but borrow it from them." By means of the " chlorophyllian function," vegetation uses the solar energy to fix the carbon of carbon-dioxid gas, and thereby to store it, for use as need be. But the vege- table is torpid, it is nearer in its action to mat- ter than to the unexpected freedom of life. It could not both gradually store and suddenly use energy. In the vegetable, therefore, the struggle between life and matter is something of a draw. Life has gathered up matter, but the matter holds back life. Life has still not come to its own freedom. The second act consists of the divergence of organization under the stress of this tendency toward action in variable and unforeseen directions. Plants went on doing as they always did, but side by side with them there 136 William James and Henri Bergs on developed the animal, whose characteristic it is to set free stored-up energy. This act involved many scenes, many more divergences, in not all of which did life conquer matter. We must take into account retrogressions, arrests, accidents of every kind. And we must remember above all that each species behaves as if the general movement of life had stopped at it, instead of passing through it. It thinks only of itself, it lives only for itself. Hence the numberless struggles that we behold in nature. Hence a discord, striking and terrible, but for which the original principle of life must not be held responsible. 1 Alone to the compulsion of matter does the responsibility belong. For life itself is not thinkable either as pure unity or pure multi- plicity. It is One that rejects the category of oneness; many, yet rejecting the category of manyness. It might have been, and would more easily have been, just itself, rather than the diversity of individuals and of societies where struggle for life is that discord "so strik- ing and terrible." But unity and multiplicity as such belong to matter, and matter compels it to choose one of the two. Yet its choice will 1 Op. cit., pp. 254-55. Intuition and Pragmatism 137 never be definitive; it will leap from one to the other indefinitely. The pure animal, though more explosive and unaccountable than the plant, is automatic. Its explosions are marked by the absence of variety, by sameness. Spirit is not yet com- pletely liberated. To become so, it needs an organized matter of maximum instability. The making and maintenance of this is the third act of life's struggle with matter, the climactic act, in which it asserts itself, master of matter at last, by means of the human brain. This differs from other brains in that "the number of mechanisms it can set up, and con- sequently the choice that it gives as to which among them shall be released, is unlimited." This makes it differ from other brains not in degree, but in kind. 1 So "with man, con- sciousness breaks the chain. In man and man alone it sets itself free." 2 His body is his machine which he uses as he pleases. Because of his complex brain with its capacity for 1 Ibid., p. 263. 2 Ibid., p. 264. 138 William James and Henri Bergs on opposed motor mechanisms; because of his language with its capacity for incarnating consciousness in an immaterial body; because of his social life with its capacity for storing and preserving effort as language preserves thought, man is free. In him Spirit triumphs completely over Matter, Duration over Space, the Life-Force over Inertia. The drama has a happy ending. Seeing the world so, we feel ourselves no longer isolated in humanity, humanity no longer seems isolated in the nature that it dominates. As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent which is mate- riality itself, so all organized beings, from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the move- ment 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 time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an over- whelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death. 1 1 Op. cit., pp. 270-71. Intuition and Pragmatism 139 III There exists in philosophy, writes William James, 1 a plain alternative. Is the manyness in oneness that indubitably characterizes the world we inhabit, a property only of the absolute whole of things, so that you must postulate that one-enormous-whole indi- visibly as the prius of there being any many at all — in others words, start with the rationalistic block- universe, entire, unmitigated, complete? — or can the finite elements have their own aboriginal forms of manyness in oneness, and where they have no imme- diate oneness still be continued into one another by intermediary terms — each one of these terms being one with its next neighbors, and yet the total " one- ness' ' never getting absolutely complete? Of this alternative, Bergson, we have seen, chooses explicitly neither horn. In its intrin- sic nature pure duration is an ineffable totum simul, not yet differentiated into the inverse movements of life and matter, and rejecting, like Plotinos' One, the categories of both one- ness and manyness. Implicitly Bergson chooses the former of these alternatives. He observes with James that experience has contradictory 1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 326. 140 William James and Henri Bergs on aspects, that it possesses both oneness and manyness at the same time. Their co-presence in experience gives rise to innumerable philo- sophic difficulties, notably the great antino- mies which troubled philosophers from Zeno to Kant. How surmount the difficulties, how solve the antinomies? If you study their 'basis and origin, you observe that they arise from the attempt to explain manyness by one- ness and oneness by manyness. Philosophic salvation, then, must lie in a new principle of explanation. What shall it be, and be new? Why, simply rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's. No wonder logical puzzles and essential con- tradictions persist in philosophy. They must, since they are no more than attempts to recon- cile the irreconcilable. Segregate these, let the same account for the same alone, let each principle account only for itself, and the puzzle disappears. You find, to begin with, the ab- solute oneness, the undesignable and tran- scendent unity of life, accounting for motion, action, continuity, for all that has the quality Intuition and Pragmatism 141 of unity. In the Bergsonian world, the quali- tative basis is given at once, and whatever comings there are, are somewhat forecast in the " original impetus" and contingent on its material obstacles: "Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by the dissociation and division." It is crea- tion that goes on forever in virtue of an initial movement, which constitutes the unity of the organic world. It is the continuity of a "single and identical elan" which has split up along the lines of a divergent evolution. It is what is "common" to all divergences, and these are complements one of the other, in such wise that their very complementariness and harmony contain and presuppose and depend on an "identity of impulsion." The quoted terms are Bergson's own. On the other hand, you find the absolute manyness, the Bradleyan unrelatable discreteness which is the designable diversity of space, accounting for all that derives from it. And so long as you confine each principle to its own sphere, you get into no difficulties. Seek, however, to take the 142 William James and Henri Bergs on concrete individuality of experience at its face value, as manyness-in-oneness, and try to explain one by the other — then, presto, all the difficulties reappear. Time, action, life, can explain only those things which are identical with them; space, inertness, matter, can explain only those things which are identical with them. Antinomies arise when the explanations offered are transverse. In point of fact they are not alternatives; each member of the pair is valid in its own field. If, therefore, the universe seems disorderly, it seems so merely. There is no real disorder. There is only the substitution of the spatial for the temporal order, the material for the spiritual, and conversely. Chaos and the void are pseudo-ideas. The realities are spirit and space. Ultimately, of course, these two fields may be derivable from something vaster and higher, a unity which embraces and reconciles both. How, is not written. The course of experience is nevertheless to be ex- plained by these diverse and opposite principles. Hence, unity immediately and ultimately includes for Bergson a one-enormous- whole Intuition and Pragmatism 143 indivisibly given as the prim of the vital or organic many. Diversity, similarly, involves an absolutely irreconcilable externality. Both of these are transcendental principles and not discoverable as such in the immediacies of expe- rience. Each requires, in order to be perceived, the absoluteness of intuition, the intuition of the spirit, in the one case; of the intellect, in the other. Each is the limit reached by a rigorous application of the identity logic. Con- sequently the Bergsonian philosophy is involved in both the fallacies of traditional metaphysics — the fallacy of division which is the differen- tia of apriorism and the fallacy of composi- tion which is the differentia of empiricism. Each of these fallacies is a metaphysical dogma. One says that the part has no reality save in terms of the whole; the other says that the whole is nothing more than an aggregate of parts. What is significant is the bond that unites the two and makes them harmonious parts of one identical tradition. This bond is the dogma of unreality of relations. For apriorism, relations have ever been internal, 144 William James and Henri Bergs on so that the universe was always a block: the whole concentrated in every point. For empiri- cism relations have been utterly external such that the entities or impressions which compose the flux of experience could never touch, never influence each other, never make any real difference to each other. This double status of relations is accepted in toto by Bergson. In the elan, the interpenetration of the hetero- geneous is such that distinctions cannot be made and hence must be artificially supplied by the mind; in space the discreteness is so absolute that nothing happens there unless a mind internalizes its contents. 1 Now, if any one thing more than any other sets James beyond the philosophic tradition and distinguishes radical and immediate empiricism from both the empiricism and the apriorism of tradition, it is his readiness to take relations, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, internal no less than external, at their face value, whenever and wherever they appear. Neither the sub- stantial flux, he points out, interpenetrative to 1 Cf. Creative Evolution, pp. 147-49, 250, 356, 367-68. Intuition and Pragmatism 145 the uttermost, nor yet the discrete space, external to the uttermost, is barren of con- junctive relations. Neither one is oppugnant to and completely exclusive of the other. There is not a block of oneness that we call life, and a hegemony of bare homogeneous many- ness that we call space, nor yet an ineffable totum simul which is, and still is not that, like Plotinos' One, rejecting both categories. There is & real combination of manyness and oneness in which the relations that bind, and whose ac- tion makes the oneness, are as immediate data of sense-perception as the terms that are bound; and the relations that distinguish, and whose actions make the manyness, have as legitimate a metaphysical status as the terms that they differentiate. There is no whole in which all that is to be is somehow foreshadowed and predetermined; there is no contingency which is extra-spiritual and involves no difference in the quality of spirit. There is no necessary conservation of the past. Destruction is as real as creation, contingency is a trait of every entity that exists, and, what exists, exists 146 William James and Henri Bergs on piecemeal, and not in terms of a whole, in- divisible act which cuts through matter. The divergence here indicated is so profound that it seems strange that any similarity what- ever should exist between these two thinkers, and stranger still that the one should feel him- self indebted to the other for anything what- ever. But does not, indeed, the existence of such a conjunction amid such diversity consti- tute a prima facie exhibition of the manyness- and-oneness of experience which James points out ? We have seen 1 that both these thinkers are, from the outset, temporalists, that both are agreed as to the inadequacy of static con- cepts to act as substitutes for activities, and as to the distortion of reality which arises when concepts are taken as the identical equivalents of things which they represent. Concepts, like the rest of reality, are only self-revealing, and in use they are controllers rather than revealers. But here the resemblance stops. The self which concepts reveal is the selfhood of matter and space according to Bergson, and 1 Supra, chap. ii. Intuition and Pragmatism 147 the dimension in which they exist is not the dimension of life at all. They are metaphysi- cally as well as functionally tertiary. Not so for James. Their metaphysical status is not different from that of any other entity; it is their function that is different, and it is the confusion of status with function that is, for him, the source of metaphysical error. Now, it is with Bergson's treatment of con- cepts in their relation to activity, movement, and life that James is most concerned. What is it that he gains from Bergson? He gains, to begin with, freedom to accept experience at its face value; he gains, in the second place, confirmation that this face value is not illusory. The assumption which underlay James's treatment of the greater problems of psychology was the assumption of the dualism of mind and matter. The assumption was methodological, not metaphysical, and the theory of psycho- physical parallelism was dirempted at one point by a theory of interaction for which the warrant was empirico-ontologic, rather than a logical deduction from the parallelistic premise. 148 William James and Henri Bergs on Logic demanded the correlation of brain states with mental states. But whereas brain states might be compounded, mental states could not so be. They were fluid, evanes- cent, not perdurable, and for each brain state there could be but one and only one mental state. The so-called mental compounds are simple psychic reactions of a higher type. The form itself of them . ... is something new. 1 We can't say that aware- ness of the alphabet as such is nothing more than twenty-six awarenesses, each of a separate letter; for those are twenty-six distinct awarenesses of single letters without others, w T hile their so-called sum is one aware- ness of every letter with its comrades. There is thus something new in the collective consciousness. It means the same letters, indeed, but it knows them in this novel way. It is safer .... to treat the con- sciousness of the alphabet as a twenty-seventh fact, the substitute and not sum of the twenty-six simpler consciousnesses, and to say that while under certain physiological conditions they alone are produced — other, more complex physiological conditions result in in its production instead The higher thoughts .... are psychic units, not compounds; but, for all that, they may know together as a collective multi- tude the very same objects which under other condi- 1 The italics are mine. Intuition and Pragmatism 149 tions are known separately by as many simple thoughts. The theory of combination, I was forced to conclude, is thus untenable, being both logically nonsensical and practically unnecessary. 1 Such is the logical outcome enforced by the assumption of psychophysical parallelism. But this is an outcome which, while true in many instances, flies none the less in the face of the facts in many others. In the physical world, for instance, we make with impunity the assumption that one and the same material object can figure in an indefinitely large number of different processes at once. An air particle or an ether particle " compounds" the differ- ent directions of movement imprinted on it without obliterating their several individualities. It delivers them distinct, on the contrary, at as many several " receivers" (ear, eye, or what not) as may be " tuned" to that effect. 2 Why, distinctly true in physics, should this not also be true in psychology ? In the " expe- rience of activity" what is "the true relation of the longer-span to the shorter-span activi- ties"? 1 A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 188-89. 2 Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 125-26. 150 William James and Henri Bergson When, for example, a number of "ideas" .... grow confluent in a larger field of consciousness, do the smaller activities still coexist with the wider activities then experienced by the conscious subject? And, if so, do the wide activities accompany the narrow ones inertly or do they exert control ? Or do they perhaps utterly supplant and replace them and short circuit their effects P 1 Wundt and other psychologists had had the advantage of conceiving the " compounding of consciousness" as analogous to the com- pounding of matter. They exceeded thereby strict logic, and until he had read Bergson, James was unwilling to commit this excess. But the theory of consciousness which Bergson maintains and defends is, significantly enough, exactly that which, because of his reading of Bergson's works, James abandons. The idea of the alphabet is, indeed, for Bergson, a " simple psychic reaction of a higher type" of which "the form itself is something new." It is true that, according to the Bergsonian phi- losophy, the earlier states are conserved as memory, but not each in its individuality after 1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 394. Intuition and Pragmatism 151 the analogy of physical motions cited above, but penetrated through and through by all the rest, " every letter with its comrades," and the whole heterogeneous unity related internally. So that the consciousness of the aphabet is a twenty-seventh fact, a psychic unit, not a com- pound, a thing absolutely new. There can be found in Bergson's notion of compounding nothing analogous to a physical compounding of entities to which James has committed himself. Extraordinary and paradoxical! until the can- did reader of James observes that what con- cerns him in the Bergsonian philosophy is not its conceptions of spirit and of matter, but its critique of intellectualism, its analysis of the relations of concepts to motion, to the con- tinuum, to the perceptual flux. This analysis frees James from the decrees of logic and per- mits him to accept unequivocally the self- portrayal of immediate experience. And in all this Bergson is still at the position in psychology that James has abandoned, and where James strikes out toward a neutralistic pluralism and radical empiricism, Bergson 152 William James and Henri Bergson erects the methodological assumptions of psy- chophysics into the ontological dualism of spirit and matter of the philosophic tradition, sub- dued by the shadow of a Plotinian monism. IV James's acceptance of the principle of com- pounding, in essence identical with that of naturalistic physics, completely destroyed, for him, the barrier between mind and matter, a barrier already considerably broken in the development of his philosophy of pure expe- rience, 1 with its insistence on the experiential reality of relations, and on the metaphysical equality of all experiential entities. It is no more than the acknowledgment of the onto- logic validity of the manyness-and-oneness which is the face of experience, and its salva- tion from the stigma of " appearance" which tradition, and Bergson with it, tend to attach to it as such. Reality is a compenetration, but not that complete and utter internalization of qualities which Bergson calls spirit. Reality 1 Cf. Essays in Radical Empiricism, Essays III and IV. Intuition and Pragmatism 153 is a multiplicity, yet not that complete and utter externalization of qualityless points which Bergson calls space and the goal of matter. Here and now, where things happen, in the region of all temporal reality without excep- tion, exists this many-in-one. The oneness is the sensible continuity of the stream of expe- rience. Herein every element is really next to its neighbors, every point of flux, a conflux, so that there is literally nothing between. The manyness are the elements which exist there, so continuous. Nothing real is absolutely simple .... every, smallest bit of experience is a multum in parvo plurally related, .... each relation is one aspect, character, or function, way of its being taken or way of its taking something else; and .... a bit of reality when actu- ally engaged in one of these relations is not by that very fact engaged in all the other relations simultaneously. The relations are not all what the French call solidaires with one another. Without losing its identity a thing can either take up or drop another thing. 1 This offers us a multitude, a multiverse, but our multiverse still makes a "universe," for every part, tho it may not be in actual or immediate 1 A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 322-23. 154 William James and Henri Bergs on connexion, is nevertheless in some possible or mediated connexion with every other part, however remote, through the fact that each part hangs together with its next neighbors in inextricable interfusion. The type of union, it is true, is different from the monistic type of alleinheit. It is not a universal co-implication or integration durcheinander. It is what I call the strung- along type, the type of continuity, contiguity, or concatenation. 1 What is remarkable about this statement is the extraordinary sobriety of judgment and clearness of vision so characteristic of James and so likely to cause men of lesser restraint and narrower insight to accuse him of incon- sistency. The unity and continuity here described are those of an utter and transitive nextness. They are the exact opposite of Bergson's unity and continuity which are the solidarity of compenetrating qualities, a literal integration durcheinander. It would seem as if James were logically required to pass from a somewhat similar solidarity in the bits of experience, every portion of which is somehow its own Hegelian other, to the similar solidarity of the whole. This is exactly what, under the 1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 325. Intuition and Pragmatism 155 compulsion of logic, Bergson does. But for James, such a procedure would be a fallacy of composition, and he insists on characterizing the larger units of experience as they appear, and on taking them at their face value. He has committed himself to the theory of compound- ing which Bergson freed him to adopt, in toto. The parts do retain their identity and do function in the wholes which they constitute in terms of their own unique natures, and the wholes again do have powers and attributes and efficacies not given to the parts and in no sense foreshadowed in them. Each must be taken in its individual integrity and judged on its own showing. Hence, the happenings, which constitute temporal reality, are not one happening, unique, indivisible, concrete, sub- stantial; they are truly plural and truly dis- crete. Inwardly complex and interpenetrative, with " rearward and forward looking ends/' they are outwardly just next each other, and their overflowing at their edges is not through and through. The relations that bind are external as well as internal. 156 William James and Henri Bergs on Consequently, while each pulse of experience is an interpenetrative unity of past and present, a passing moment, it is only next its fellows and not absolutely in them. Reality is genuinely discrete and grows by drops. If a bottle had to be emptied by an infinite num- ber of successive decrements, it is mathematically impossible that the emptying should ever positively terminate. In point of fact, however, bottles and coffee-pots empty themselves by a finite number of decrements, each of definite amount. Either a whole drop emerges or nothing emerges from the spout. If all change went thus dropwise, so to speak, if real time sprouted or grew by units of duration of determinate amount, 1 just as our perceptions of it grow by pulses, there would be no Zenonian paradoxes or Kantian antinomies to trouble us. All our sensible experiences, as we get them immediately, do thus change by dis- crete pulses of perception, each of which keeps us saying "more, more, more," or "less, less, less," as the definite increments or diminutions make themselves felt. 2 But is not the continuity of a reality so describable " really' ' discontinuity? Yes, but only in logic, not in fact. The discontinuity is consonant with the " radically pluralist, empiri- 1 The italics are mine. 2 Op. cit.y p. 231; cf. above, p. 44. Intuition and Pragmatism 157 cist, perceptualist position, and James adopts it in principle, qualifying it, however, so as to fit it closely to perceptual experience." 1 The principle is that reality changes "by steps finite in number and discrete." The qualifi- cation is that such changing involves not an experiential but a mathematico-logical discon- tinuity. "The mathematical definition of con- tinuous quantity as 'that between any two elements or terms of which there is another term f is directly opposed to the more empirical or perceptual notion that anything is continu- ous when its parts appear as immediate next neighbors, with absolutely nothing between." 2 The discontinuous, thus, is also at the same time continuous. The continuity is not that which is merely thought, or deduced, or sym- bolized; it is the continuity discovered and perceived. Here, again, the principle of com- pounding forced on James by experience in the face of ratiocination is rigorously applied. His empiricism shows itself once more to be radical. 1 Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 172. 2 Ibid., p. 187. 158 William James and Henri Bergs on V Such, then, is the structure of reality con- sidered in its nearness and intimacy. Is it characterized by a prepotent order or a duality of orders? Does it, as a whole, contain a dominant stuff, or substance? Again, to say so would be to commit the fallacy of compo- sition. With respect to order, experience as a whole presents itself as a chaos or quasi- chaos, i.e., a much-at-once. Its constitution appears to be, at least, non-rational, and there is to be found no good warrant for ever suspecting the existence of any reality of a higher denomination than that dis- tributed and strung along and flowing sort of reality we finite beings swim in. 1 .... No more of reality collected together at once is extant anywhere perhaps, than in my experience of reading this page, or in yours of listening Sensational experiences are their "own others" .... both internally and externally. Inwardly they are one with their parts, and outwardly they pass continuously into their next neighbors, so that events separated by years of time in a man's life hang together unbrokenly by intermediary events. 2 1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 213. 2 Ibid., p. 285. Intuition and Pragmatism 159 We are, it would seem, only warranted in concluding that experience as a whole is a process of time, whereby innumerable particular terms lapse and are super- seded by others that follow upon them by transitions which, whether disjunctive or conjunctive in content, are themselves experiences, and must in general be accounted at least as real as the terms which they relate The whole system .... as immedi- ately given presents itself as a quasi-chaos through which one can pass out of an initial term in many directions and yet end in the same terminus, moving from next to next by a great many possible paths. 1 Again, there is vastly more discontinuity in the sum total of experiences than we commonly suppose. The objec- tive nucleus of every man's experience, his own body, is, it is true, a continuous percept; and equally continu- ous as a percept (though we may be inattentive to it) is the material environment of that body, changing by gradual transition w T hen the body moves. But the distant parts of the physical world are at all times absent from us, and form conceptual objects merely, into the perceptual reality of which our life inserts itself at points discrete and relatively rare. Round their several objective nuclei, partly shared and com- mon and partly discrete, of the real physical world, innumerable thinkers, pursuing their several lines of physically true cogitation, trace paths that intersect 1 Essays in Radical\Enipiricism, p. 134. 160 William James and Henri Bergson one another only at discontinuous perceptual points, and the rest of the time are quite incongruent; and around all the nuclei of shared "reality" .... floats the vast cloud of experiences that are wholly subjec- tive, that are non-substitutional, that find not even an eventual ending for themselves in the perceptual world — the mere day-dreams and joys and sufferings and wishes of the individual minds. They exist with one another, indeed, and with the objective nuclei; but, out of them, it is probable that to all eternity no interre- lated system of any kind will ever be made. 1 The world is radically a pluralism, existence is piecemeal, and " piecemeal existence is inde- pendent of complete collectibility Some facts at any rate exist only distributively, or in form of a set of eaches, which (even if in infinite number) need not in any intelligible sense either experience themselves or get experi- enced by anything else, as members of an All." Metaphysical and experiential beings are, we may conclude, coincident with respect to order. There is neither monism nor dualism nor alternation of two orders. There are just terms and relations, conjunctive and disjunctive. The multiverse is discrete and radically plural. Reality is externally related. 1 Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 65, 66. Intuition and Pragmatism 161 Everything you can think of, however vast or inclusive, has .... a genuinely " external" envi- ronment of some sort or amount. Things are "with" one another in many ways, but nothing includes every- thing, or dominates over everything. The word " and " trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes. "Ever not quite" has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness. The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom. However much may be collected, however much may report itself as present at any effective centre of con- sciousness or action, something is self-governed and absent and unreduced to unity. 1 Moreover, metaphysical is coincident with experiential being not alone in its discrete- ness, but in its continuity. The latter is constituted by " positively conjunctive transi- tion." This involves neither chasm nor leap. Being the very original of what we mean by con- tinuity, it makes a continuum wherever it appears. Our fields of experience have no more definite bound- aries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds. 2 .... Life is in the transition as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more 1 A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 321, 322. 2 Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 70, 71. 162 William James and Henri Bergs on emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn. In this line we live prospectively as well as retrospectively. It is "of" the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly by the past's continuation; it is "of" the future in so far as the future, when it comes, will have continued it. 1 Reality is a mosaic in which the pieces cling together by their edges, the transitions between them forming their cement. From this mosaic no experiential entity is excluded. Particu- larly, time is harmoniously copresent with space, and conversely. There is no ontological alternation or substitution of one for the other as in the Bergsonian account, no difference by the presence or absence of extension. 2 Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts, is that of things conjunct and separated. The great continua of time, space, and the self envelop everything betwixt them, and flow together without interfering. 3 The things that they envelop come as separate in some ways and as continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce with some ideas, and others 1 Essays of Radical Empiricism, p. 87. 2 Ibid. , p. 31. 3 Ibid., pp. 94-95. The italics are mine. Intuition and Pragmatism 163 are irreconcilable. Qualities compenetrate one space or exclude each other from it In all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely co- ordinate matters of immediate feeling And the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simul- taneous feeling of novelty. In all this, again, the unity or continuity is that of " concatenation/' not of " consolida- tion." "The world hangs together from next to next in a variety of ways, so that when you are off one thing you can always be onto something else without ever dropping out of your world." 1 As there is no dominant and prevailing order in reality, but a compenetration and a conflict of all orders, so also there is no dominant and prevailing substance. The stuff of reality is whatever it appears to be — "that, just what appears, space, intensity, flatness, heaviness, brownness, whatnot." "There is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are ' natures ' in the things experienced." 2 Particularly is 1 Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 31. 2 Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 26, 27. 164 William James and Henri Bergson it to be denied that there exists any such special order of dominations as mind and matter, taken metaphysically — and Bergson so takes them. " There is .... no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made." 1 There is no " impalpable inner flowing" given as an immediate consciousness of consciousness itself. 2 There is no inextension : Descartes for the first time defined thought as the absolutely unextended, and later philosophers have accepted the description as correct. But what possible meaning has it to say that, when we think of a foot- rule or a square yard, extension is not attributable to our thought ? Of every extended object, the adequate mental picture must have all the extension of the object itself. The difference between objective and sub- jective extension is one of relation to a context solely. In the mind the various extents maintain no necessarily stubborn order relatively to each other, while in the physical world they bound each other stably, and added together, make the real enveloping Unit which we believe in and call real Space. As " outer" they carry themselves adversely, so to speak, to one another, 1 Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 3. 2 Ibid., p. 6. Intuition and Pragmatism 165 exclude one another, and maintain their distances; while as " inner" their order is loose and they form a durcheinander in which the unity is lost The two worlds differ, not by the presence or absence of extension, but by the relations of the extensions which in both worlds exist. 1 Bergson, observing the same data, identifies the relations with the substance and rules extension out of the mental world altogether. James goes by the facts. For him there is no intuition of thought " flowing as life within us, in absolute contrast with the objects which it so unremittingly escorts." 2 There is no mind- stuff, there is no matter. There are only thoughts in the concrete and there are things, and thoughts in the concrete are made of the same sort of stuff as things are. Even affec- tional facts, valuations, emotions, and so on indefinitely, do not belong to one realm exclu- sively, but are by usage determined now to this place, now to that. If " physical" and " mental" meant two different kinds of intrinsic nature immediately, intuitively, and 1 Ibid., pp. 30, 31; cf. also A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 253, 254, cited in chap. ii. Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 36. 1 66 William James and Henri Bergson infallibly discernible, and each fixed forever in what- ever bit of experience it qualified, one does not see how there could ever have arisen any room for doubt or ambiguity. But, if, on the contrary, these words are words of sorting, ambiguity is natural. For then, as soon as the relations of a thing are sufficiently various, it can be sorted variously. Take a mass of carrion, for example, and the " disgustingness " which for us is part of the experience. The sun caresses it, and the zephyrs woo it as if it were a bed of roses. So the dis- gustingness fails to operate within the realm of suns and breezes — it does not function as a physical quality. But the carrion " turns our stomach" by what seems a direct operation — it does function physically, there- fore, in that limited part of physics. We can take it as physical or as non-physical according as we take it in the narrower or wider context, and conversely, of course, we must treat it as non-mental or as mental. Our body itself is the primary instance of the ambiguous. Sometimes I treat my body purely as a part of outer nature. Sometimes, again, I think of it as "mine," I sort it with the "me," and then certain local changes and determinations in it pass for spiritual happenings. Its breathing is my " thinking," its sensorial adjustments are my " attention," its kinaesthetic alterations are my "efforts," its visceral perturbations are my "emotions." The obstinate controversies that have arisen over such statements as these .... prove how hard it is to decide by bare introspection what it is in experiences that shall make them either spiritual or material. It surely can be nothing intrinsic in the individual experience. It is Intuition and Pragmatism 167 their way of behaving toward each other, their system of relations, their function; and all these things vary with the context in which we find it opportune to consider them. Empirically and radically then, " there is no original spirituality or materiality of being, intuitively discerned." 1 Even concepts, secondary formations though they are, in substance less than, and in the functions, additive to, the experiential flux, are not of another and different metaphysical status. Their stuff is like that of the residual reality. They are the " natures" in the things experienced, and their being is an act that is part of the flux of feeling, while their meanings are part of the concrete disjunctions and dis- cretenesses which diversify that same flux. 2 They too have the many-and-oneness which comes in every instance of experience, and are as real as percepts. Percepts and they " inter- penetrate and melt together, impregnate and fertilize each other. Neither, taken alone, 1 Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 148, 152-54. 2 Cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 48. / 1 68 William James and Henri Bergson knows reality in its completeness. We need them both, as we need both of our legs to walk with." 1 Percepts and concepts are consub- stantial. They are made of the same kind of stuff, and melt into each other when we handle them together. How could it be otherwise when the concepts are like evaporations out of the bosom of perception, into which they condense again whenever practical service summons them ? No one can tell, of the things he now holds in his hands and reads, how much comes in through his eyes and fingers, and how much, from his apperceiving intellect, unites with that and makes of it this particular "book." The universal and the par- ticular parts of experience are literally immersed in each other, and both are indispensable. Conception is not like a painted hook, on which no real chain can be hung; for we hang concepts upon percepts, and percepts upon concepts, interchangeably and indefi- nitely The world we practically live in is one in which it is impossible, except by theoretic retro- spection, to disentangle the contributions of intellect from those of sense Intellectual reverbera- tions enlarge and prolong the perceptual experience which they envelop, associating it with the remoter parts of existence. And the ideas of these in turn work like those resonators that pick out partial tones Cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 52, 53. Intuition and Pragmatism 169 in complex sounds. They help us to decompose our percept into parts and to abstract and isolate its elements. 1 In sum, for James, the fundamental fact is the immediate experience taken at its face value. As such it is a much-at-once, contain- ing terms and relations, continuities and dis- cretenesses, inextricably mingled. There exists a real compounding, so that the empirical individual data, both those that are substantive and those that are transitive, maintain their identities and yet compose larger wholes, present at the same time and in the same way : wholes which are truly wholes and exhibit new characteristics neither implied by nor other- wise foreshadowed in the aboriginal elements of which these wholes are composed. And all of these, although they must be taken temporally, are absolutely co-ordinate matters of being, there existing no one dominant order, no one dominant substance, but a con- geries and aggregate of " natures" and orders, metaphysically the peers one of the other. 1 Ibid., pp. 107, 108. 170 William James and Henri Bergson VI The divergence of this insight, which is the insight of radical empiricism (an insight which does take reality at its face value, absolutely without reservations), from the philosophic tradition, both the "empirical" and "rational- ist" are patent. Patent also must be its con- trast with the Bergsonian philosophy. From that, indeed, its difference extends still more deeply. It reaches out to those perceptions which both great thinkers have so vigorously defended against the enemy, and concerning the reality of which they are unanimous. Those are the perceptions of activity, of free- dom, of novelty, of causation. By Bergson, these terms are practically equated one with the other, and finally identified with elan vital and duree reelle. To his thinking, they are, in a word, simply different symbols designating his fundamental metaphysical intuition — real duration, spirit, life. To James they stand for distinct experiential data, coimplicative perhaps, but not identical one with the other, and certainly not identical with a predomi- nating metaphysical substance. Intuition and Pragmatism 171 Taken in its broadest sense any apprehension of something doing, is an experience of activity Mere, restless, zig-zag movement, or a wild Ideen- flucht or Rhapsodie der Wahrnehmung, as Kant would say, would constitute an active from an inactive world The word " activity' ' has no imaginable content whatever save these experiences of process, obstruction, strivings, strain, or release, ultimate qualia as they are of the life given us to be known. 1 And that is all. James denies categorically that he maintains "a metaphysical principle of activity. " There is no pragmatic need nor aesthetic justification of one. 2 Now these experiences of activity, " ultimate qualia" as they are of life, are all experiences of activity and of nothing more; they are not all expe- riences of freedom and of novelty. These last words mean that what happens in the world is not pure repetition, which would still be activity, but that each fresh situation comes "with an original touch." But the "original touch" does not imply a "principle of free will," for what could it do, "except rehearse the 1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 377; Some Problems of Philoso- phy, p. 212. 2 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 391, note. 172 William James and Henri Bergs on phenomenon beforehand" P 1 It implies simply that in some respect the future is not coimplica- tive with the past, that there are real and utterly unforeseeable disjunctive additions with nothing to link them "save what the words 'plus/ 'with/ or 'and' stand for"; that, to use James's famil- iar metaphor, reality grows by drops; that future and past are discrete, that activities are plural and not one. So James is not involved in that Eleatic- Heracleitan admixture, which is character- istic at once of neo-Platonism and Bergsonian temporalism. For to the latter the poussee formidable is given all at once and once for all, and it is an act continuous and indivisible and substantial, of which the discrete actions of experience, all the activities designated and enumerated by James, are but spatial corrup- tions and deteriorations. Creation is indi- viduation of the unindividual, under the shock t A Pluralistic Universe, p. 392. That is really what Berg- son's duree reelle does, since in it everything is somehow fore- shadowed and prepared for, though not predetermined. Change is a sort of explication of the implicit or exteriorization of the internal. Intuition and Pragmatism 173 or opposition of matter. Duration is somewhat different from this creation, for it requires that the past shall be both altered and unaltered in an internal and through-and-through addition, which is not altogether an addition, to the "tem- poral extent" already given. Genuine chance is precluded from such a reality, although unf oreseeability, and freedom in the Spinozistic sense of the word, alteration that springs out of the total nature of the elan are not. Con- tingency does not reside in the elan itself; it resides in the matter on which it acts. The elan would still have diversified in the direction of intelligence and of instinct, even though the particular natural energy of which it made use were not carbonaceous, and hence no men and no bees and no ants were formed. The ca- pacity for them would, of course, still reside in it as a foreshadowing tension; it would simply not have been corrupted toward exten- sion by means of carbon. Such considerations are, however, entirely foreign to James's views of chance or con- tingency. For him contingency is real here 174 William James and Henri Bergson and now, and chance is genuine immediately. In this view, activity becomes co-ordinate and equivalent with causation, as freedom and chance do with novelty. Now causation, concretely taken, involves for James, as for Bergson, something dramatic, a sustaining of a felt purpose against felt obstacles, and over- coming or being overcome. The content of "sustaining" is what it is "known-as," nothing more. It is not the rejection of either "final" or "efficient" causation by a tertium quid, but (at least in our personal activities which we most readily experience) the coalescence of both as activity. Such a coalescence is durational. Something persists. But also something is lost, and something is gained. The activity sets up more effects than it proposes literally. The end is defined beforehand in most cases only as a general direction, along which all sorts of novelties and surprises lie in wait. 1 The novelties and surprises are utter and complete. 1 Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 213. Intuition and Pragmatism 175 In every series of real terms, not only do the terms themselves and their environment change, but we change, and their meaning for us changes, so that new kinds of sameness and types of causation continually come into view and appeal to our interest. Our earlier lines, having grown irrelevant, are then dropped. The old terms can no longer be substituted nor the relations "transferred/' because of so many new di- mensions into which experience has opened Professor Bergson, believing as he does in a Heracleitan devenir reel, ought, if I rightly understand him, posi- tively to deny that in the actual world the logical axioms hold good without qualification. Not only, according to him, do terms change, so that after a certain time the very elements of things are no longer what they were, but relations also change, so as no longer to obtain in the same identical way between the new things that have succeeded upon the old ones. If this were really so, then however indefinitely sames might be substituted for sames in the logical world of nothing but pure sameness, in the world of real opera- tions every line of sameness actually started and followed up would eventually give out and cease to be traceable farther. Sames of the same in such a world will not always (or rather, in a strict sense, will never) be the same as one another, for in such a world there is no literal or ideal sameness among numerical differents. Nor in such a world will it be true that the cause of the cause is unreservedly the cause of the effect, for if we follow the line of real causation, instead of contenting ourselves with Hume's and Kant's eviscerated sche- matism, we find that remoter effects are seldom aimed 176 William James and Henri Bergson at by causal intentions, that no one kind of causal activity continues indefinitely. 1 Professor Bergson, though of course he ought to, does not believe anything of the sort, since the Heracleitan devenir reel is not so real to him as the Plotinian duration, which is also eternity, 2 and since the continuity, indivisibility, and substantiality of that transcendental and metaphysical change which is real duration, vital impulse, creative evolution, preclude utterly just these empirical descriptions of how change and activity do go on and novelties do arise. His critique of intellect- ualism, indeed, points to a recognition of the purely empirical character of change, but this is always incidental, and underneath it always stands the firm assumption of the unity of duration, of its diversification into the two inverse movements of spirit, and of the composition of the world of actual expe- rience by the confrontation of these two forces. 1 A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 397, 398. 3 Cf . Introduction a la metaphysique, and supra. Intuition and Pragmatism 177 The main outlines of Bergson's thought are the main outlines of all transcendentalism. The main outlines of James's thought are not prefigured in the history of philosophy. Seek- ing to build no system, not even an eclectic one, he organizes no material in any particular way. He speaks of pragmatism as a mediator between rationalism and empiricism, monism and pluralism. He accepts apriorities in thought when they confirm themselves empiri- cally as such; and he rejects dogmas when they do not so confirm themselves. 1 His alliances with traditional empiricism are not stronger than his alliances with traditional idealism. His ultimate alignment must be, as he himself points out, with realism. " Radical empiricism .... has more affinities with natural realism than with the views of Berkeley or of Mill." 2 Indeed it is naive or logical realism* freed from 1 Cf . Principles of Psychology, II, chap, xxviii. 2 Radical Empiricism, p. 76. 3 Cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 106: "What I am affirm- ing here is the platonic doctrine that concepts are singulars, that concept-stuff is inalterable, and that physical realities are con- stituted by the various concept-stuffs of which they 'partake.' It is known as 'logical realism' in the history of philosophy; and 178 William James and Henri Bergs on intellectualistic bias, and restored to that integrity and impartiality of insight which is the source of all that is systematic or domina- tive in philosophic perception. has usually been more favored by rationalistic than by empiricist minds. For rationalism, concept-stuff is primordial, and percep- tual things are secondary in nature. The present book, which treats concrete percepts as primordial and concepts as of second- ary origin, may be regarded as somewhat eccentric in its attempt to combine logical realism with otherwise empiricist mode of thought.' ' CHAPTER V DIVINITY, ITS NATURE AND ITS ROLE IN HUMAN AFFAIRS Is there, or can there be, in a world such as James sees, place for superhuman spirits, for the gods, for God ? In our biographies, essentially a sensational flux, chaotic, multiform, overrich in orders, this world makes of our minds at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness [in the revised and only acceptable sense of the term, i.e., in the sense of a specific sort of rela- tion] consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of atten- tion. The highest and most elaborate mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives, very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from all eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the 179 180 William James and Henri Bergson rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever differ- ent our several views of it may be, all lay imbedded in the primordial chaos of sensations which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while, the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extri- cated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpres- sive chaos! My world is but one of a million alike imbedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the mind of eel, cuttle-fish, or crab! 1 Different, but equally real! The insistent metaphysical democratism dominates the province of pure psychology also. And it is from this that it reaches finally to the ultimate walls of the world. For the psychological region is the region of appreciation and judg- ment, par excellence, and judgment and appre- ciation would never be made if there were no life to conserve, no environment to adapt, no 1 Principles of Psychology, I, 288-89. Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 181 chaos to organize for the sake of that life. If, then, interest compels us to select and selection generates practice and practice molds our originally plastic and indifferent alertness into habit, gradually reducing the give-and-take of our characters, hardening them into fixed orders and definitely articulate processes, is there not reason to believe that a similar con- summation goes on in every entity that exists, living or inert, conscious or torpid ? Each has the same passive resistance to change, each offers similarly a certain active response to envi- ronment, each determines its environment, be it ever so little, with reference to itself as center, and from its own view carves out a world. The foot molds itself to the shoe as much as the shoe to the foot, the road and the driver to the automobile as much as the automobile to the driver and the road. We see habits form- ing everywhere — everywhere an original for- eignness and plasticity, everywhere a growing intimacy and interaccommodation and harden- ing; everywhere diversity passing into union and union into novel differentiations bred by 182 William James and Henri Bergs on the very habit which is this union. If, then, we take the evolutionary hypothesis radically enough, we see a struggle for survival, an activity of selection, a constant unification by adaptation, and a diversification by spon- taneous variation, throughout the entire range of being. The universe, in a word, is tychistic. Chance is real in it. Destruction is as possible as salvation, and evil is as actual as good. What is central is the fact that evil and good are relations, and not substances, that each entity which struggles can of itself and in its own right contribute to the everlasting damna- tion or eternal salvation of the world. There is no eternal law; there is no over-arching destiny, no all-compelling Providence. Law itself is no more than cosmic habit, a modus vivendi, which things that have come together by chance, and are staying together by choice, have worked out as men work out communal customs facilitating contacts. Whether gravi- tation or tobacco-smoking, there is a difference in scope, not in history! And the spontane- ous individualities whose collective habits the Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 183 "laws of nature" express are greater and more real than those laws. These individualities in their privacy and inwardness are reals in the completest sense of the term, and through them the axis of larger being runs. How otherwise should the history of the cosmos unfold itself ? How be read ? If ... . one takes the theory of evolution radically, one ought to apply it not only to the rock-strata, the animals, and the plants, but to the stars, to the chemical elements, to the laws of nature. There must have been a far-off antiquity, one is then tempted to suppose, when things were really chaotic. Little by little, and out of the haphazard possibilities of that time, a few connected things and habits arose, and the rudiments of regular performance began. Every variation in the way of law and order added itself to this nucleus, which inevitably grew more considerable as history went on; while the aberrant and inconstant variations, not being similarly preserved, disappeared from being, wandered off as unrelated vagrants, or else remained so imper- fectly connected with the part of the world that had grown regular as only to manifest their existence by occasional lawless intrusions Wisps and shreds of the original chaos, they would be connected enough with the cosmos to affect its periphery now and then, as by a momentary whiff or touch or gleam, but not enough ever to be followed up and hunted down and 184 William James and Henri Bergson bagged. Their relation to the cosmos would be tangential solely. 1 Superhuman minds are, clearly, not impos- sible in a world like this. They are admissible ab origine; they are admissible as evolutionary growths or as spontaneous variations. Their naturalness in reality is not in question: what is in question is their nature. What is their specific nature? What is their status? Do they belong to the steadily consolidating co-operative cosmos, or are they tangential, momentary whiffs and touches? Do they work ? and good ? or ill ? How do they enter the world's natural constitution, keeping single the field of experience and the cosmos unsplit into a realm of nature and a realm of grace ? What difference do they make in that consti- tution? How would it be otherwise, if they did not exist ? Since, at least for us human beings, reality resides in the parts more deeply and finally than in the whole, since the immediacies of experience, of the here and now, are in the pro- 1 Memories and Studies, pp. 192, 193. Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 185 foundest sense the models of whatever other organizations of the real we choose to pursue, it is clear that superhuman consciousnesses must attach themselves in their own way to our individual lives, as do all the objects that interest selects out of the chaos to transvalue into a cosmos. Now these things, James finds, are what religious objects do supremely, and the inward life itself seems never so near reality as in religious experience. "By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ulti- mate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard," 1 and religion, hence, "occupying herself with personal destinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities we know, must necessarily play a part in human history." 2 So far as mankind is concerned, then, the religious object is integral to the human cosmos. Whether the gods be tangential to the world in its democratic indifference or no, they are not tangential to the destiny of man and must ever belong to 1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 501. 2 Ibid., p. 503. 1 86 William James and Henri Bergson that one of the equally real millions of worlds which we carve out, for the sake of our interests and the filling of our needs, from the boundless sensational flux. The gods reside, then, at least to our belief, far down with those depths of feeling which are the core of our reality and the very seat and go of what is individual and personal, or what is real. But this residence is not suffi- cient to establish their status. Tables and chairs, number-systems, fairies, and vain imagi- nings reside there, too. Concepts have a fire- side corner in that inwardness. It is itself multifold and chaotic, and the order of its being as various as the strands that comprise it. The gods may be, like concepts, consubstantial with percepts, with actual tables and tangible chairs, and still be derivative and secondary functions, mere meanings whose whole significance is in their prophetic outcome, not in their active and individuate being. Indeed, the reality of the concept "God" is just such afunctional reality, the reality of a tendency in our private natures, of a "faith-state," rather than of Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 187 a living impelment in an independent object, existing by the primacy of its own will, main- taining that existence by its own force, and claiming it as its own metaphysical right. Such an existence would not be truly indi- vidual and real. It would be a member but not an efficacy in the cosmos. Its force would be the force of the human personality which bred it, its place the place which that person- ality assigned it. Not quite tangential, neither would it be altogether integral in the cosmos. Its position would be peripheral without being beyond the reach of the influences radiating from the center. The locus of the gods or of God is, however, much more nearly central than that, and their reality is profoundly more solid. Infrequently though, and at the cost of however much order and peace, they do appear; their reality, when it does reveal itself, reveals itself in ways over- mastering. Perceived essentially not other- wise than our fellows and things are perceived, they operate, through our perception of them, the transvaluation of all our values, the 1 88 William James and Henri Bergson reconstruction and reordering of our private worlds. It then seems as if we were the chisels and they sculptors, and the systems they carve with and for and through us seem infinitely righter and better than those we had carved for ourselves. They renew the heavens, they renew the earth, they renew the human heart. Their mode of renewal is not yet well studied. Its existence is established, its strongest fea- tures are known, its operations are explicable. It is not an interruption of the world's order, but a reassurance and continuation of it. The science of the psychologist may, within narrow limits, exhibit and analyze it. But its outcome escapes except in works. Concretely, the mode is knowledge-of- acquaintance. But its content is so enor- mously ineffable that the directness and immediacy of apprehension which constitutes its psychologic nature is overshadowed by this other quality. It is commonly regarded not as a knowledge at all, but as a mystery. There is sufficient reason for such a regard, seeing that the powers of perception which touch and Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 189 apprehend it are not those of daily use, and that their activity, indeed, often requires the suspension of those in daily use. Massive somatic reflexes seem often at work; the " higher centers" seem independently energetic. There is implicated, in a word, a condition of neural tension in which the customary modes of discharge, on the ordinary levels of sensa- tion and perception, have somehow been abolished — perhaps through anesthetics, per- haps through ritual and purificatory exercises, perhaps through no known natural cause — or have not yet re-established themselves. Con- sciousness, the while, is present and reaches into regions not comparable with the known ones of the daily life. This consciousness seems deeper, seems to reside on levels lower down and more extensive than those of the self of waking life, to reside on " subconscious " levels, and there it appears to be preternaturally alert and explicit. What it is awake to and apprehends is, by report which as little as anything else in the world is open to question, spirit. And in the apprehension of this spirit 190 William James and Henri Bergson consists the mystic experience. 1 This expe- rience is multifold in its objects and manifes- tations, 2 exceedingly varied in its consequences and complicated in its connections, as full of contradictions and enmities reconciled and active as is the sensory flux. "They do not contradict these facts [already objectively before us] as such or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized. 5 ' 3 They are additive to the rest of experience, their effect being revaluative, not transubstantiative. They enter through a region in our nature that is obviously the larger part of each of us, for it is the abode of everything that is latent and the reservoir of everything that passes unrecorded or unobserved. It contains, for example, such things as all our momen- tarily inactive memories, and it harbors the springs of all our obscurely motived passions, impulses, likes, dislikes, and prejudices. Our intuitions, hypotheses, fancies, superstitions, persuasions, convictions, and, in general, all our non-rational operations come from it. It is the source of our dreams, and apparently they may return to it. In it arise whatever mystical expe- riences we may have, and our automatisms, sensory 1 Cf. Varieties of Religious Experience, chapter on "Mysti- cism/' particularly pp. 504-6. 2 Ibid., p. 425. 3 Ibid., p. 427. Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 191 or motor; our life in hypnotic and "hypnoid" condi- tions, if we are subject to such conditions; our delu- sions, fixed ideas, and hysterical accidents, if we are hysteric subjects; our supranormal cognitions if such there be, and if we are telepathic subjects. It is also the fountainhead of much that feeds our religion. In persons deep in the religious life, as we have abundantly seen, .... the door into this region seems unusually wide open; at any rate, experiences making their entrances through that door have had emphatic influ- ence in shaping religious history. 1 Spirit then, pours into the daily life through the funnel of the subconscious, and in a fellow- ship which prejudices its acknowledgment and does it otherwise no good. But be its fellow- ship the most favorable and commending, it must still "be sifted and tested and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience, just like what comes from the outer world of sense." Such sifting and test- ing reveals that it may be evil and diabolical, the enemy of life; as well as good and divine, the conserving friend of life. 2 It wears, in a word, the same significance for our interests as the other entities of experience, and is not 1 Ibid. , pp. 483, 484. 2 Ibid,, p. 426. 192 William James and Henri Bergson confined to being merely propitious. It has a nature and destiny of its own, and its bearing toward humanity, like the bearing of men toward each other, may in no small degree be determined by mankind's bearing toward the destiny of such supranormal spirits. The relation of the two is moral; there is, empiri- cally, a conventional give-and-take. The " mystic" behaves otherwise than an environ- ment not containing spirit would require. He acknowledges its actual presence, he seeks union or harmonious relations with it as his true end, and, in his contact with it, in prayer or inner communion, "work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phe- nomenal world." And all this at just these points where reality is felt at its glowing fulness of force and presence, in the concrete imme- diacy of individual experience as such. There, in all religious experience, among all peoples, in all times, in all places, the individual "becomes conscious that .... [this] higher part is conterminous and continuous with a Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 193 more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with and in a fashion get on board of, and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck." There underlies here the assumption that the "more" and the mystic have a common aim, in so far forth, and the assurance that they are of identical substance. Concerning the specific nature of this substance there is disagreement. Some find just a "stream of ideal tendency," others genuine and differing personalities; but all find it dynamic, dynamo- genie, efficacious. Subtract the quarrels of creeds and schools, and what remains is "lit- erally and objectively true " and "what remains' ' is this: "the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving expe- riences come," continuous without being deper- sonalized, coactive without being absorbed. The relation is external as well as internal. Religion in the strict sense of the term is an empirical instance of the "compounding of 194 William James and Henri Bergs on consciousness" which we saw to be so central in the Jamesian apprehension of reality. 1 These unhuman, superior, and saving con- sciousnesses are of course finite, and certainly not reducible to one. The facts exhibit a "supernaturalism" which is not universalistic, but " piecemeal/' and whatever the power or the status of the supranormal spirits, they live in an environment with which they must cope even as man must with his, and they too work for a salvation which has the chance of being lost as well as attained. Men and gods may be fellow-soldiers in a struggle to banish evil from the world, to make reality over into a complete cosmos. Whatever the extent of the world may be, gods, not otherwise than men, are less than it. Both empirically and dia- lectically, there is a residuum which is differ- ent and additive, with which gods must cope as man does. And in this struggle, men may help gods perhaps as much as gods help men. "Who knows whether the faithfulness of indi- viduals here below to their own poor over- 1 Supra, chaps, ii and iv. Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 195 beliefs, may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks ?" x From the standpoint of radical empiricism, then, in a world having the history and the constitution the world of radical empiricism shows itself to possess, superhuman conscious- ness is not merely not ruled out by hypothesis; it is established by experience as immediate and as coercive as any other experience men base deductions on. It is additive to the rou- tinal content of the daily life, but integrally additive; no momentary whiff or touch; enter- ing the normal constitution of the world by way of the "subliminal" self, and working through it both evil and good, but chiefly good. And this conclusion is born of no dia- lectical analysis, no syllogistic deduction. It is an inductive summary of recorded fact. Quite the contrary in the Bergsonian phi- losophy. Bergson nowhere directly faces the problems put by religious experience as such, nor does he consider that the content of 1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 519. 196 William James and Henri Bergson religious emotion is different from the content revealed in the intuition of anything moving and active. Of the uniqueness, the persistence, and the significance of the " religious senti- ment" he is convinced. It belongs to the profundities of our nature. The ideas in religion, on the contrary, are external. One gives way to another; none endures. 1 They are mere symbols of a deeper thing. But is this deeper thing "God"? Is it a "more" like ourselves from which men may draw, in their need, aid and comfort? A thing warm and intimate and personal, in the human sense of "personal" ? One can hardly say so. The considerations [writes Bergson in a letter to a friend 2 ] set forth in my " essay' ' on the immediate data of consciousness are intended to bring to light the fact of liberty; those in Matter and Memory touch upon the reality of spirit; those in Creative Evolution present creation as a fact. From all this, there clearly emerges the idea of a God, creator and free; the gen- erator at once of matter and of life, whose creative efforts as regards life are continued through the evo- 1 Cf. Charpin, La question religieuse. 2 Printed by E. LeRoy in line philosophie nouvelle. Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 197 lution of species and the constitution of human per- sonalities. Such a god is a totality. That his nature is spiritual need not be argued. But his spirit is not the spirit which is manifest in the daily life. The daily life is spatial and this spirit is disengaged from space. It is the spirit revealed in intuition, the common, impersonal psyche, both subhuman and transhuman, which is the go in all going things. It is the elan vital. Not, however, the elan revealed in the mani- fest movement of existence here and now. As such, it is limited and inhibited by its opposite, matter. For "life is a movement, materiality is the inverse movement, and each of these two movements is simple, the matter which forms a world being an undivided flux, and undivided also the life that runs through it, cutting out in it living beings all along its track." 1 The "God, creator and free," must be something "vaster and higher," the eternal spring of both matter and life. The whole universe reveals the force which mounts and 1 Creative Evolution, p. 299. 198 William James and Henri Bergson the force which falls, and the movement is as from a center, "a center from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fireworks display." This center fe God. God is not a thing, but a " continuity of shooting-out." "He has nothing of the ready-made; he is unceasing life, action, freedom." Unbounded by any environment, it is the utterly indeterminate spontaneity of becoming, self-contained and self-limited, hence in the traditional sense of the word, infinite. It is only "the force which is evolving throughout the organized world" that is a limited force, that is always seeking to transcend itself, that is always inadequate to its own aspirations. The center from which this force springs has not these limitations. It is the making, indifferently, of both matter and elan, and its bearing on human destiny therefore cannot with any honesty be said to be propitious. It is both the enemy and the friend, whereas the elan alone is utterly good, utterly a saving "more." Thus: Life appears in its entirety as an immense wave which, starting from a center, spreads outward, and Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 199 which at almost the whole of its circumference is stopped and converted into oscillation: at one single point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has passed freely. It is this freedom that the human form registers. Everywhere but in man, consciousness has come to a stand; in man alone it has kept on its way. Man, then, continues the vital movement indefinitely, although he does not draw along with him all that life carries in itself. On other lines of evolution there have travelled other tendencies which life implied, and of which, since everything interpenetrates, man has doubtless kept something, but of which he has kept very little. It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call as we will, man, or superman, had sought to realize himself and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way From this point of view, the discordances of which nature offers us the spectacle are singularly weakened. The organized world as a whole becomes the soil on which was to grow either man himself or a being who morally must resemble him. The animals, however distant they may be from our species, however hostile to it, have none the less been useful travelling com- panions on whom consciousness has unloaded whatever encumbrances it was dragging along and who have enabled it to rise, in man, to heights from which it sees an unlimited horizon open again before it. 1 The elan, then, is good on the whole. That evils exist is not denied, but their source is not 1 Ibid., pp. 266, 267. 200 William James and Henri Bergson the elan itself. Their source is the obstruction that the elan meets. This always opposes it, turns it aside, divides it. For this elan, being finite, cannot overcome all obstacles, and the conflict with those obstacles comprises organic evolution. This is individuation of the initial impetus which has been given once for all, and individuation with its consequent individuali- ties are the basis and the source of evil. Each species thinks only for itself and lives only for itself, creating thus the " numberless struggles that occur in nature," the " discord as striking as it is terrible." But for this discord "the original principle of life must not be held respon- sible."* The original principle of life! Not, how- ever, God, the central source of this principle; the central source of its enemy, matter; in whom both of these are one; between whom and man they move in ascending and descend- ing hierarchies. Man seems to be the cosmic destiny by the cosmos' own choice, the goal and pinnacle of creation, the very image of God. 1 Ibid., p. 255. Italics mine. Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 201 And yet this god, if god it is, is a finite and lesser god, and the goodness of the ascending flux of spirit with which man's spirit is coinci- dent in intuition is counterbalanced and over- weighed by the evil of the descending flux of matter, the great enemy of essential man. The opposing flux seems to be of an inverse order, the devil, a machine; while the great source of both is a center of indifference morally, quite as much as it is a center of continuous creation. Hence, Bergson seems on the one hand to entertain conceptions that are hardly to be distinguished from orthodox theism, and, in so far forth, to be in tendency (only in tend- ency) of the same opinion as James. He asserts the probability of a Fechnerian hierarchy of beings, one within the other. There exist, he argues, objects both inferior and superior to us, although, nevertheless, in a certain sense, within us. Intuition reveals their harmonious existence. Once you instal yourself by an act of intuition within the heart of duration, you cannot help perceiving this. For all intuition 202 William James and Henri Bergson is o'f the same genus, no doubt, but of different species. And each species is identical with a distinct degree of being. These degrees you perceive in intuition. You are there possessed by the perception of a certain very definite durational tension, and its definite- ness has the appearance of a choice among an infinity of possible durations. Thence you perceive as many durations as you please, each different from its fellows, and all different from each other. They constitute, however, a Berg- sonian continuity, a continuity which you may follow, whether up or down. The pursuit will cost you enormous effort; it requires you to do violence to your normal selfhood. But the reward of violence is an expansion in which you transcend your normal selfhood. You may move down, from quality to quantity, to the pure repetition by which matter is desig- nated, or up, to eternity. The movement is without a joint or break, an ineffable, inter- penetrating many-in-one. Its uppermost limit Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 203 is not the barren and inert eternity of Spinoza's God but rather the overflowing goodness of Philo's and Plotinos'. It is "a living, ever-moving eternity, where we find our own duration, as vibrations are found in light, and eternity which is the concretion of all duration just as matter is its deglutition." 1 And this absolute, concrete eternity embracing both matter and spirit is the greatest God of all. God, so defined, however, is an utter totality. It is prior to the degrees and steps of duration, both the subhuman and the trans- human, by coincidence with which man attains its completeness. From it all these derive; upon it, all depend; while in itself it is exter- nal to nothing and depends upon nothing. So that, on the other hand, the Bergsonian vision soars to an utter God of gods whose total immanence constitutes the reality of all that is. Herein it allies itself with historic idealism and monism, with the radical anti- 1 Cf. Introduction a la ntetaphysique, pp. 20, 25. 204 William James and Henri Bergson orthodox position concerning the nature of religion's God. This position is and has ever been the position of the philosophic tradition. It makes no consummation of the common report of many men. It abandons the expe- riential records of that daily life which com- munes with the gods. It reconstitutes the latter into a transcendental totality which becomes the subject of dialectic discourse. It identifies religion with philosophy. And this, in the end, is what Bergson does. " Intui- tion moves between these two extreme limits [matter and eternity] and this movement is metaphysics itself." 1 Touching the moral bearings of the inter- mediate durations, their ultimate relation to man and his destiny, Bergson says explicitly nothing. There are only the hints concerning the goodness of the elan as a whole, the tendency of each degree to think only of itself, and the consequent evil. May not a wider duration think only of itself? and therefore, even though spirit, be the enemy of man? And 1 Cf. Introduction a la meta physique, p. 25. Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 205 is not the all-good elan itself, favoring man as such, yet as a whole, if not on the whole, the enemy of each and every one of its parts? What is the destiny of man if the world be as Bergson describes it? And what, if it be as James describes it ? CHAPTER VI THE ORIGIN AND DESTINY OF MAN If the feeling of substantial identity with the all-creative force be religious feeling, if the perception of that identity in intuition be religious experience, if the designation of that force as good on the whole be religious assur- ance, if the characterization of man as the implicit goal of creative evolution be religious providence, then Bergson is orthodoxly reli- gious, in the essential sense of the term. There are difficulties, however, as we have seen, in reconciling this conception with whatever explicit statements concerning the nature of God Bergson has made. If the elan vital is God, then the universal center of creation from which springs matter (peer of the elan), is a super-god. And if what is overt and distinct- ive in human nature is at a qualitatively far remove from the elan, how much more alien must it be to the " center of continuous creation"! 206 The Origin and Destiny of Man 207 There is an inevitable antithesis and oppo- sition between what is distinctly human and what is cosmic. It is the abandonment of its humanity, not the bold and convinced mainte- nance of it, that reunites our spirit with the cosmic spirit. Intuition is an " inversion 5 ' of the most determinate and fixed direction of the overt life, a rupture of the most " cher- ished habits" of the soul. What is uniquely human in us, our intelligence, is the very stuff and being of matter, not of spirit. None the less, in man the elan has freed itself from the restrictions and opposition of matter, and men are free wills, integrally and completely creative, renewers, the paragons of earth! A contra- diction, this? Not necessarily. Just because God is the flowing of spirit and matter at one and the same time; just because in God these streams cross and combat one another; just because all reality is this immense dualism, there is no life whose nature is an individuation of the cosmical elan which, by that very fact, does not deeply and completely participate in the dualism, and man more than all. For 208 William James and Henri Bergson man is a microcosm. He images the world. In him, corresponding to the spirit and matter of the universal cosmos, are instinct and intelli- gence, with intelligence dominant. Indeed he does live and move and have his being in the absolute. And for that very reason, the truly he of him, the differentiae that constitute his humanity, are mere appearance, and his indi- viduality is a thing secondary, not primary. It is primary only in his selfishness and ego- centricity, only because he regards himself as the be-all and end-all of this cosmic evolution. Bergson does not disapprove this self -regarding attitude. Indeed he may be said to warrant it by his designation of man as the cosmic goal. But he holds it to be none the less the source of all evil, and pure good to be only in the unin- dividuated totality of the elan. What then is the nature of human individu- ality? What its status? What its destiny? The cosmic life, confronted and opposed by matter, seeks to break through the obstruc- tion, to overcome it, to abolish it. But abolition is impossible; matter is as durable The Origin and Destiny of Man 209 as life. Life proceeds, therefore, by " insin- uating" itself into matter, by even adopting matter's rhythms, by so molding, organizing, shaping matter that its geometric rigidity becomes flexible, that its determination becomes indetermination, its necessity as nearly freedom as may be. The goal of life is its own free mobility. The enemy of that mobility is matter. Hence the work of life is the con- quest of matter. Organic existence in all its ranges of kind and complexity is just so many experiments which life makes in the conquest of matter, just so many attempts at escape from the material prison in which life finds itself inclosed. For this reason, living bodies represent, in the light of the intention and potency of life, so many obstacles avoided, not so many tasks achieved. By means of none, however, are obstacles so completely avoided as by means of the central nervous system in man, particularly by his brain. The brain is a very " center of indetermination." It pre- sents to the psychic stream an enormous variety of paths of discharge, and it allows the stream 210 William James and Henri Bergs on of consciousness to be at each moment of its flow an inward fiat, undetermined by the brain's mechanical constitution; a chosen movement, unique, novel, simple, in an unfore- seeable direction along one of the countless paths of discharge which comprise the cen- tral structure. The consciousness so arising and so per- ceived is not any longer, however, that cosmic spirit, multiple yet interpenetratively one, which is opposed to matter, matter being no less than life an undivided flux, but " weighted with geometry." This consciousness is quite another thing, and its existence means a specific modification of the flux of both matter and spirit. Each of these is a continuance. But the continuity of spirit is cumulative, spirit endures and grows; while the continuity of matter is conservative, matter redistributes and repeats. Spiritual action elapses; mate- rial action is instantaneous. Consequently spirit is free, creative, unique from pulse to pulse; matter is mechanical, repetitive, com- mon, and the same from pulse to pulse. Both, The Origin and Destiny of Man 211 in their totality, are impersonal. The evolu- tion of organic life is personalization of the impersonal. In the person, life has given up some of its spontaneity, matter some of its rigidity, and personification is the process of this mutual interaccommodation. The two encounter each other first in "pure perception/' This is the direct contact of spirit and matter, a contact unindividualized and universal. Life's task, if it is to vanquish in this encounter, must be to overcome the inertia of matter, to delay the mechanical and ceaseless repetition of the same which is matter's action, to prolong this action from instantaneity to duration. If it can do this, it can open an outlet in matter through which consciousness may flow. And it does do this in organic bodies, particularly in human bodies, with their infinitely complex brains. The organic body is cut out and set somewhat apart from the cosmic continuity of matter; it has a freedom of movement and activity which the non-organic does not possess; and more par- ticularly, it has a liberty of response that 212 William James and Henri Bergson inorganic bodies do not possess. The latter are compelled to react to and to transmit any action that they receive in a predetermined direction and a fixed mode. Not so organic bodies. And most completely not so the human body with its central nervous system. This, indeed, is nothing but a " center of inde- termination." In it reaction is not immediate, but suspended; activity accumulates, gets turned into the potential action of the body. But this accumulating and enduring activity is life, is spirit itself, set free from the self- annulling instantaneity of reaction which is matter. Yet it is no longer, on this level, the pure transcendental spirit. On this level, it is spirit literally incarnate, personalized; and the incarnation and personification have con- sisted in the enchannelment of the cumu- lative activity within the motor organs of the body. So enchanneled, it exists as the consciousness we feel in the daily life. It is nothing more than the potential action of the physical organism, nothing more than the outline of this action, reflected back upon The Origin and Destiny of Man 213 the material continuum whence the action came. Personification, then, is, in its first phase, limitation, enchannelment. There is to be found in it, on the level of pure perception, something more akin to matter than to spirit. It is no more than the spirit in matter, liberated. Complete personality, however, demands more than that. It demands biog- raphy, intimacy, memory. And these are what is supplied. For the incoming activity, which, by means of the brain, is arrested and accu- mulated, looks not only back to its source, in the character of the form of the body's poten- tial reaction to that source, it looks also inward to the creative spirit which is the life of the body. At the same time that it outlines in matter, as a reflection, our eventual action upon it, it is also reflected in memory, and there dissolved into spirit and sucked down below the level of consciousness. Now this dual movement has required changes in the body, and these changes are copresent. Consciousness feels them. It feels them to be quite different 214 William James and Henri Bergs on from memory or perception, neither the outline of an action that may be, nor the quality of an action that has been. They are a real action, "the permanent and unique" factor in that group of "images" with which the needs of consciousness are concerned. To this, then, both perception and memory attach them- selves, and when they are so attached, the triad constitutes a "person." Perception reaches outward into matter; memory inward to spirit; in the action of the body, these two mingle their lights, and spirit overcomes the resistance of matter. One's body is thus a center in which there flows a congeries of accu- mulating possibilities of action; about which there floats the integrate fusion of one's his- tory in the unity of one's past, the condensation of one's history. For memory, let me repeat, is perception joining spirit instead of going back to matter. It "doubles perception" and conserves itself automatically, though subconsciously. It is narrowed down to per- sonality, is kept distinct and individual by being attached to the body. Each unique The Origin and Destiny of Man 215 item of one's unique past is a guide directing the motor mechanisms of the nervous system. The body's needs raise it from the level of the unconscious past to that of the conscious present, materialize it; nor is there anything more in the present than the feelings of the body and of the guiding memories taking form through its needs. The consciousness of our lives from day to day, it follows, the selfhood that is near and characteristic and individual and personal is always the present. Whatever it contains that is truly unique and other, truly individual, depends upon the body, which alone can invoke the images of memory from the depths of the subconscious, the impersonal spirit, which is pure activity. But such a recalling is an exteriorization of what is interpenetrative and one. It is a spatialization of spirit. Hence our life proceeds on an artificial and super- ficial level, and the very quality of our natures makes it impossible for us naturally to appre- hend the spiritual reality from which we derive. 216 William James and Henri Bergson For emphatically, what personalizes is that only which constitutes our present. And that is the feeling of the body's action. The imper- sonal is dragged out of its interpenetrative retreat to serve the needs of this action. Indi- viduality is physical, hence spatial. What- ever relates to it, therefore, must be equally spatial. In consequence our daily life, as described by empirical psychology, can be described in terms of habit, of association, of reflection. None of these terms applies to the depths of spirit. All apply to the levels of matter. What is distinctive about us is non- spiritual. How should this be, about us, in whom, as Bergson tells us repeatedly, spirit has broken the wall of matter and flows freely? It is because, in us, spirit has had "to adopt matter's very rhythms," to become matter. For what distinguishes man from other living creatures ? Intelligence. And what is intelligence if not an essential geometry in its form, and an essen- tial capacity to handle unorganized bodies, to construct machines, in its process. Geometry The Origin and Destiny of Man 217 is the analysis of space, and space, the opposite of spirit, is the complete externality of points to one another, of points different merely in number, but in substance homogeneous. Its essence, therefore, is the repetition of identities, and this is the dominant principle of the " identity-logic," which is the form of intelli- gence. We think differents in terms of the same , always; our intellect can rearrange reality but can never discover anything new in it, nor deal with it in its totalities, as do crea- tures highly endowed with instincts, such as ants, bees, wasps, and women. Compare man with the other animals and you find that, on the one hand, he is, of all, least protected by nature and structure against the environment, while, on the other hand, he alone has organs not attached by specific function to a restricted environment. Man's hands are free. He has and exercises the capacity of using the material environment by manufacturing unorganized instruments of it, supplying himself out of it with what nature doesn't endow him: defense, shelter, food. 218 William James and Henri Bergson To do this, man must understand and know his environment. But this environment is matter, and such understanding and knowing must be an adaptation to the habits of matter. Thus intelligence, in its use, is the insinuation of spirit into matter, the adoption of its rhythm and character. Intelligence is conscious mate- riality in action. It will tend, therefore, to establish relations, such as the Kantian cate- gories, by means of which things are external one to another — categories of equivalence, whole and part, causation, and so on. Intelli- gence is and acts the Kantian architectonic, the regulative principles of "pure reason." It is not, however, added to space from the outside, but derived from space from the in- side. Its forms and principles do, therefore, rightly constitute the presupposition of the in- ventive genius of man, the homo faber, and are the actual framework of the physicist's world of matter and space. In intelligence, spirit and matter are identical, and spirit even exceeds matter in its movement toward space. For matter never quite geometrizes; its content The Origin and Destiny of Man 219 and form never become absolutely spatial; they exceed and deviate from the precision of law, their reality is never quite grasped by science. In intelligence, consequently, spirit completely inverts itself, where in matter spirit only partly inverts itself. What is most distinctive of man is least distinctive of the elan vital; what is individual is unreal. In the creative current of life the individual is only an excrescence on the essential progress which is the heart of life; a mere channel and thoroughfare, the essence of whose living resides in the movement by which life is transmitted. Race and individual, what is different and dis- tinct in them, are accidental and relatively unreal in the universe. Beside the creative center, the flux of life, the downrush of matter, the totality of organic beings, these former are unrealities, mere appearance, the superficies and last steps of becoming, not its deep and throbbing heart, not the "need to create." However, let no hopeful and aspiring mind fall to despair thereby. Ephemeral incident though the individual be, the undivided, 220 William James and Henri Bergs on indivisible, creative onrush that belittles him also glorifies and saves him. The inward will to live in man is deceived by no illusion of immortality; even in his altogether partitive and individuate being, the elan has prefigured and shall perhaps continue him without the body. For in the corporate body of humanity, spirit possesses a machine which triumphs over mechanism; in the brain, in language, in social life, man has instruments that make for an ever greater and greater lability and spontaneity of action. And it is only as such a creative freedom that man has been pre- figured, not formally and teleologically. Human freedom, moreover, is not complete freedom; human consciousness is largely intel- lect; and the totality of freedom is not alone creative of matter, but of spirit also: to intel- lect must be added intuition. "A complete and perfect humanity would be that in which these two forms of conscious activity should attain their full development." 1 Such a human- ity would possess in intuition all that is given 1 Creative Evolution, p. 159. The Origin and Destiny of Man 221 to intellect and instinct both, the deepest unity of the spiritual life. 1 Such a humanity will see "the life of the body just where it really is, on the road that leads to the life of the spirit." It will see the spirit there, as a rising wave, composed of innumerable interpenetrating potentialities, a continuous elan, neither one nor many. It will see this elan in its onrush, breaking up by force of the matter through which it flows into individuals, but individuals which "are vaguely indicated in it" and need the help of matter to become clear. They pre-exist, indeed, and yet are created. Matter helps them to pass from potentiality to actuality, and the body is this aid. And even as the individual was "vaguely indicated" before his incarnation in matter, so, enriched by his experience in the body, he may go on, after his separation from the body; "the destiny of consciousness .... is not bound up with the destiny of cerebral matter." 2 Indeed, in the attack of life upon matter, "the whole of I Ibid. ) p. 267. 2 Ibid., p. 270. 222 William James and Henri Bergson humanity in space and time is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and to clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death." 1 So individuality is derived, justified, abol- ished and resurrected, all in one stroke of intuition. Purely a limitation and narrowing of the wider stream of spirit which is life itself, an excrescence and excess, its status is alto- gether secondary and representative. It holds neither strength nor excellence in its own right: all its goodness comes to it by grace of the " larger life" from which matter breaks it, and all its goodness must to that life return: to find itself it must deny itself. The intuition is contradictory, but eminently satisfactory in its compensatory import. Now to William James nothing could be more repugnant than a conception of indi- viduality like this. To him the pre-existence or the postexistence of individuals was largely 1 Op. cit., p. 271. The Origin and Destiny of Man 223 unimportant. But individuality as such, whatever its origin or level, he held most pre- cious. It is that which impresses him in Bergson himself: " Neither one of Taine's famous principles of explanations of great men, the race, the environment, or the moment, no, nor all three together will explain that pecul- iar way of looking at things that constitutes his mental individuality. Originality in men dates from nothing previous, other things date from it rather." 1 There is an absolute and irreducible hceceitas in individuality, fore- shadowed not even dimly, furnished by neither matter nor spirit, but the very uniqueness and peculiarity of the particular life which is both, given as that uniqueness and peculiarity, w^hich alone is the potent and operative thing in human life, determining its social direction and establishing its particular worth. Its origin, consequently, is a matter of indifference. James assumes the Darwinian hypothesis, naturally: what is human in man is a spontaneous variation, a mutation upon 1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 226. 224 William James and Henri Bergs on the subhuman surviving by force of its inward power. What matters to him, however, is this: that, whatever the origin of individual- ity, whether it be primary or derived, once it it occurs, it is the thing that counts, not its source. And it counts because there is in it something absolute and ^accountable, which cannot be brought back to a " larger whole/' a background, an environment, or a cause. In that unaccountable differentia lie its force, significance, and worth. What it is in its uniqueness defies analysis. Generically it is a dynamogenic activity of " appropriation" whose center and " invariant" is the body, and whose " continuous identity" as personal con- sciousness is "the practical fact that new expe- riences come which look back on the old ones, find them "warm," and greet and appropriate them as "mine." The "warmth" is a group of somatic feelings of direction: that is, of "attention," of "interest," of the vividness and immediacy of motor consciousness. This group is the I, the me, the central and nuclear self, appropriation by which gives any entity The Origin and Destiny of Man 225 a personic status and a place in a biography. The stuff of it is " constant play of further- ances and hindrances in my thinking, of checks and releases, of tendencies which run with desire and tendencies which run the other way The mutual inconsistencies and agreements, reinforcements and obstructions, which obtain among these objective matters, reverberate backward and produce what seems to be incessant reactions of my spontaneity upon them, welcoming or opposing, appro- priating or disowning, striving with or against, saying yes or no. This palpitating inward life is ... . that central nucleus," 1 that core of adjustments continually repeated, to all which the stream of thought brings up. This " all" is made up of parts as variable and conflicting as the central core itself, and even more so; and any harmonious congregations of such parts may constitute a self which is both a peer and in fact a dilemmatic alternative of perhaps a hundred other such harmonious congregations. Experience is thus always 1 Principles of Psychology, I, 299. 226 William James and Henri Bergs on saying to the individual either -or; "either mil- lionaire or saint, either bon vivant or philan- thropist : either philosopher or lady-killer. ' ' To the honest observer the mind is a theater of gregarious and struggling possibilities, all equal, but only one capable of realization at any time. Its individuality is constituted ultimately by that unique quality of fiat, which, throughout a life, chooses a realization of a determinate kind. Its identity maintains and reveals itself as the continuity of this act of choice, or, where discontinuity is felt, as resemblance of the dis- continuities in some fundamental respect, for continuity and similarity carry onward the " warmth" and immediacy of the choosing or appropriating act. And selfhood is at its core exactly this passing, this appropriation, this choosing — a bridge between what was the warm and living I, and what becomes this I. The universal conscious fact is not " feelings and thoughts exist/' but "I think " and "I feel." No psychology, at any rate, can question the existence of personal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their worth. A French writer, speaking of our The Origin and Destiny of Man 227 ideas, says somewhere, in a fit of anti-spiritualistic excitement, that, misled by certain peculiarities which they display, we "end by personifying" the procession which they make, such personification being regarded by him as a great philosophic blunder on our part. It could only be a blunder if the notion of personality meant something essentially different from anything to be found in the mental procession. But if the procession be itself the very "original" of the notion of personality, to personify it cannot possibly be wrong. It is already personified. There are no marks of personality to be gathered aliunde and then found lacking in the train of thought. It has them already, so that to whatever farther analysis we may subject that form of personal selfhood under which thoughts appear, it is, and must remain, true that the thoughts which psychology studies do continually tend to appear as parts of personal selves. 1 The I or Ego is here not deduced, but dis- covered, as primary and immediate a datum of experience, at least, as any other, and in fact more primary and immediate than any other. Such accounts of self which the philosophic tradition gives, and Bergson's with them, are simply hypostases of some phase of the actual continuum of the " mental procession." 1 Principles, I, 226 f. 228 William James and Henri Bergs on The literature of the Self is large [writes James], but all its authors may be classed as radical or miti- gated representatives of ... . three schools .... substantialism, associationism, or transcendentalism. Our own opinion, must be classed apart, although it incorporates essential elements from all three schools. There need never have been a quarrel between asso- ciationism and its rival if the former had admitted the indecomposable unity of every pulse of thought 1 and the latter been willing to allow that "perishing" pulses of thought might recollect and know. 2 Each Ego, then, consists of indecomposable pulses of thought — selections, recollections, and cognitions, operating together uniquely as an individual. It is a central and unceasing activity, a vortex of choosing, whose tendency and direction is the definitive constituent of character. It contains all that is empirically required to define the qualities and attributes of individuality and selfhood. There is no detachment from a greater mass, no indi- viduation, no decrease; rather the opposite. Individuality is much more a synthesis, an integration, than an analysis, and what is 1 It is this that Bergson hypos tatizes. 2 Principles, I, pp. 369 f . The Origin and Destiny of Man 229 most characteristic of it, therefore, is not intellect as the form of matter , but intellect as the facile movement of spirit; intellect, conse- quently, not as a mere substitution for reality but as the very creative act, the inventiveness, of the human spirit. Therein it is that those great ideas grow which afterward become the organizing concepts of scientific systems; there, in a chaos of variations, both spontaneous and caused, from which the lower and more durable levels of existence afterward select — some, to conserve and to perpetuate; some, to destroy. There is the zone of insecurity, the formative zone of conscious life and growth; the seat, hence, of all the progress that mankind knows. Not the immediate push of society or the remoter onrush of an elan, but the constant choices of the individual, urge humanity forward. The flat of belief that asserts its object before it is assured of the being of that object, the inward "need to create," the demand for rationality in the individual soul as that soul reveals itself empirically — these and these alone are sufficient to alter and direct 230 William James and Henri Bergson the movement of the universe and the destiny of man. 1 The pluralistic insistence on individuality runs, we have seen, through all of James's thinking. It is perhaps nowhere so clear as in his utterances concerning the ultimate destiny of man. Morally, he urges over and again, not less than metaphysically, reality is a multiverse. There is a warfare of moral ideals. No part of existence was made/ar any other part; each is concerned primarily with itself, and tends to appropriate the others in the interests of its selfhood. The struggle for survival is ontological. It is the quality of existence through and through, so that por- tions of reality may be easily lost altogether beyond the shadow of a possibility of redemp- tion. A pluralism with time as its force, the world reveals nothing absolutely fixed, nothing absolutely certain. Risk attaches to every- thing: even the most firm "universal" proposi- tion involves a dangerous leap beyond evidence. x Cf. "The Importance of Individuals" in The Will to Believe, etc. The Origin and Destiny of Man 231 Every doubt is a conflict in beliefs; every belief a bridge thrust across a darkness of ignorance, and the other shore, the shore of "fact" it is intended to reach, may not exist. Now overtly, the intimate essence of life is belief, belief being literally preference, choice, and the risk attached to believing. And beliefs are fertile and germinative; often they breed out of their very substance the object to which they attach, nowhere so much^as in social relations. Social facts exist in virtue of the "precursive faith in one another of those imme- diately concerned." The wish is father to the fact. And in our constant struggle for life, and amid the ever-present options, living, momentous, forced, 1 which that struggle engenders, belief, which is the act of having liefer, choosing one possibility out of the innumerable others, elects the direction of safety and o'erleaps uncertainty by action. When it does so with repeated success, it is reason, and the world it so binds satisfies "the sentiment of rationality." 1 Cf. The Will to Believe, loc. cit. 232 William James and Henri Bergson Further, for the reason that reality is a con- geries of struggling entities, its ultimate form and character depend more on any single indi- vidual or group within that congeries than on the mass as a whole. The salvation of man, consequently, is not preordained, but neither is it foreclosed. That it does not reside, for James, in any external assurance gained through pre-existent " deeper" or higher being, as Berg- son thinks, is obvious. Human salvation must inevitably be salvation by humanity. Nor human salvation alone. The gods themselves, if gods there be, may need our help and require perhaps to be sustained even as men sustain one another. Life, for this reason, can be, from the moral point of view, only what each man makes it. Its value lies in the conquest of the evil he, as an individual, finds in it, its literal reformation according to his personal lights. Civilization is such a reformation, such a harmonization of an alien nature with human nature, such a conversion of the f oreign- ness of being into intimacy and ease. Now in civilization, whose history is the history of The Origin and Destiny of Man 233 mankind, nothing has been so potently direct- ive as the individual. Himself the field of persistent choosing, of a battle for existence between possibilities, he himself is the seat of what value reality has. This value relates to his inward demands, his beliefs and desires and strivings, and its compulsion upon him is not the compulsion of a pressure from with- out; it is that of an inward acceptance. There is no infallible authority, no dominating elan. Obligation exists for the individual on his own recognition and thereon alone. Consequently the good of one man is easily the poison of another, and conversely. The moral universe, too, is not a monarchy but a federal republic. Its positive mark is not certainty; its posi- tive mark is hope and fear. If men were really optimists and pessimists, they would be unanimous in action. But history is the history of attempted transmutations of evil into good, of actions impossible without belief in the efficacy of change; i.e., with- out hope and fear. Morally the universe is melioristic. 234 William James and Henri Bergson Hence, what is of the highest importance in the general improvement cannot, of course, be the generality, and must be the individual. Society's most precious products are its undis- ciplinables. Its most creative and masterful dynamic forces are its unaccountable geniuses. Their function is that of a ferment, which sets loose and gives direction to the dormant and blind energies stored up in peoples. What were Germany without Bismarck? England without Bob Clive? Athens without Peri- cles? Once an individual of genius arises, he becomes a point of bifurcation, a cross-roads for society. If, in his nature, spontaneity or inventiveness is stronger than imitation, and if the environment responds to him favorably, the whole of society goes following after him, realizing undreamed-of powers, accomplishing unthought-of masteries. If not, he pays for being different by becoming the object of society's laughter and hatred. And any other view that denies this power to individuality is "an utterly vague and unscientific concep- tion, a lapse from modern scientific determinism The Origin and Destiny of Man 235 into the most ancient oriental fatalism." For fundamentally only the individual must be reckoned, whether conceived deterministically as by " science" or indeterministically as by radical empiricism. "The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anony- mously is now well known to be the silliest of absurdities. Mankind does nothing save through initiative on the part of inventors, great or small, and imitation by the rest of us. These are the sole factors active in social progress." 1 In the winning of the world and the amelioration of reality, the individual counts first, and therefore counts most. The winning of the world! But what, in the end, is won ? There is civilization, but how is civilization better than crude nature? Only in this: that, in the face of an overwhelming pluralism of existences, it confirms man's humanity to man, rather than abolishes it by absorption in a superhuman elan. James is no transcendentalist. He is a moralist, a humanist. 1 Memories and Studies, p. 318. 236 William James and Henri Bergs on The winning, he teaches, 1 is chiefly an assur- ance, the active sentiment of rationality, the feeling "of the sufficiency of the present mo- ment, of its absoluteness, the absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it." It is the fluency of the movement of our proper life, ever enlarging its range and scope, so that more and more of the environing reality gets unified, more and more gets clear. Its empiri- cal content is the world, become a familiar place, in which the oncoming future is more and more assured, evil more and more elimi- nated, so that the congruity of reality with our spontaneous powers makes itself felt contin- uously: "there is no ' problem of the good.' " The rationalization of the world consists, in a word, of its civilization, and the sentiment of rationality is the feeling of intimacy, the con- tinuous widening "warmth" of appropriation which naturalizes the alien by dominion of law and the rule of good. Behind this con- quest, its very go and force, is the will to believe — in politics, in art, or in science; the will to 1 Cf. ibid., "The Sentiment of Rationality." The Origin and Destiny of Man 237 believe — the "sort of dumb conviction that the truth must be in one direction rather than another " — the "sort of preliminary assurance that a notion can be made to work." Reach- ing out far beyond evidence, in the bitter struggle for existence, the fittest belief or con- ception survives, and, surviving, confirms still more deeply in existence the human value that it both assumes and postulates. Faith thus is only a working hypothesis. Its test is our willingness to act upon it — "to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance." Life is no game with loaded dice; its watchword must be courage, not peace. Ever the lonely and cour- ageous soul is winning its livelihood at the hazard of its life, ever the army of mankind follows along the way which that soul has opened. The beginning and the end of that way is humanity. Man hath no aim but man, no destiny but mankind. For ever his choice is of himself alone. It was to realize and to sustain this choice that the shortcomings of experience were 238 William James and Henri Bergson repaired by the hypostatization of ideals — ideals being our instruments and programs of life — particularly of the universally human ideals, which the philosophic tradition, and Bergson with it, designates by the eulogium of reality — the ideals of the unity, eternity, goodness and spirituality of the world, and of the freedom and immortality of man. We have seen how careful James has been to indicate, with respect to most of these, just how much is actually discoverable as direct content of experience, just how much is really ideal, is but a standard of value by which our nature masters and judges its environment, a method of controlling the environment, a mode of functioning proper to the creative intelligence of mankind. In the large, and in the long run, the world is mani- fold, chaotic, chanceful, evil, a struggle for existence of innumerable entities whose stuff is temporal. These ideals are philosophic desiderates, not actual contents of experience; programs to be realized, not origins nor results to rest in. Objects of belief, they are believed in at constant risk, a risk that involves "cour- The Origin and Destiny of Man 239 age weighted with responsibility — such courage as the Nelsons and Washingtons never failed to show after they had taken everything into account that might tell against their success and made every provision to minimize dis- aster." It is the courage of knowledge, not of illusion. If there are risks, "it is better to face them open-eyed than to act as if we did not know them to be there." 1 And to rest at ease in belief as a compensatory substitute for reality, to hypostatize its objects, by no matter what feeling or argument, is to be blind. "Openness of eye" is their watchful use in the reconstruction and discovery of reality. Even with respect to the most apparently inward and ultimate compensatory ideal, this openness of eye is necessary. If men do in fact survive after death, that fact, like the existence of the gods, must reveal itself as a datum of immediate experience. It must be subjected to the control and the tests which science applies to all data of experience. 1 The Will to Believe, Preface, p. xi. 240 William James and Henri Bergson Personally James was skeptical of the evidence for survival after death and unconcerned about such survival. To him, as to all great human- ists, humanity was a quality not a quantity, and it was with the excellences, not the dura- tion of our natures, that he occupied himself. But the belief in " immortality," an expression of our innermost nature, was to his humane view even more entitled to the tests of veri- fication than other beliefs. If we believe, therefore, let there be no obstructions in the way of free investigation. Let belief launch itself into the regions where its object is said to hide. Let it bring the light of honest and just thought and investigation into those, let it enter courageously into the struggle for survival among facts and ideas, ready and glad to die if need be. For if reality is really a fluxful congeries of beings, and every- thing must ultimately lapse, the important question for man is not "how long" but "how good" is the existence out of which he builds his life. "There is no conclusion," James writes measuredly in the very last The Origin and Destiny of Man 241 paper his hand touched. " There is no con- clusion. What has concluded that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told and there is no advice to be given — Farewell." 1 For Bergson, it will be remembered, there is a conclusion, and that conclusion has been prefigured from the beginning. The conquest of death is implied metaphysically, not to be verified experientially. Man is born at home in the world, a microcosm essentially at one with it. For James the difference of man from the world is the fundamental thing. He is not born at home in it, he makes a home of it. Metaphysically and morally his life is self- grounded, and his enmities and friendships are equally attended with risk. He makes his destiny as an excellence, a value, not as a period of time. It resides in character rather than in length of days, and its watchword is Courage. By facing the risk open-eyed, man may master it, and if he fails, he will win by failing in so far as he has surrendered 1 Memories and Studies, p. 410. 242 William James and Henri Bergson nothing of his nature or his values to the enemy, in so far as he is able to say with Job, "I know that he will slay me; I have no hope: nevertheless will I maintain mine integrity before him." INDEX INDEX Activity, internal, no, note; creative, 125; James on, 171 f. Animal, place of, in evolution, 136. Antinomies, 140 f. Appearance, evil as, 3 ; idea as, 88. Aristotle, theory of knowledge of, 61, 67. Auscultation, intellectual, 72. Belief as "sentiment of ration- ality," 231. Berkeley, 7. Bernard, St., 64, 65. Body, the organic, 211; and personality, 214; and spirit, 221. Boehme, 64. Boutroux, E., 47, 48. Brain, human, in evolution, 137 f.; importance of, 209. Causation, James on, 174. Cause and freedom, 123. Chance, 173 f. Change, 120 f.; James on, 175. Compensations in discourse, 6. Compensatory desiderates, 7, 10, 15, 28. Concept and percept, 89; Bergson on, 98; James on, 98. Concepts, 131; status of, 146 f., 167 f. Consciousness, 179, 210; com- pounding of, 150; human, 212; and the present, 215. Continuity, 156, 157. Control and intuition, 79; as truth, 1 01. Courage, 237, 241. Creative evolution, drama of, 132 f. Dante, 64. Descartes, 1. Desiderates, philosophic, 4. Determinism, 124. Duration, 76, 77; hyposta- tized, 89, note; magnitude of intervals of, 122, 128. Eckhardt, 64. Elan vital, relation to Pla- tonic Idea, 108, note; as reality, 113; as the good, 200. Empiricism, true, 71. Epicureans, 59. Experience, James's character- ization of, 159; Bergson on religious, 196; as philosophy, 204. Fallacies of traditional meta- physics, 143. Flournoy, 47, 49. 245 246 William James and Henri Bergs on Freedom, 171, 173; and causa- tion, 123. Galileo, 19. God, concept of, 186; locus of, 187; influence of, 188; op- erations of, 189; status of, 192; finitude of, 194; de- pendence on man, 194; Bergson on, 196 f.; relation to man, 198; Bergson on moral status of, 200 f . Gods, the, and feeling, 186. Goethe, 1. Habit, cosmic, as law, 182. Hartley, 56. Hegel, 1. Holt, Edwin, 35. Homo fdber, 79. Hume, 7, 8, 56. Hypostasis of the instrument, 16 f.; in science, 24. Ideals, 238. Ideas, Platonic, 60; and knowledge, 60; as knowl- edge-about, 86; as fact, 87; relation to elan vital, 107, 108, note, Illusions, the philosophical, 121. Immediacy and knowledge, 82 f.; and truth, 94. Immortality, 220; James on, 239 f. Individuality and space, 216, 219; James on, 223. Instinct and intuition, 75. Instrument, hypostasis of, 16 f. Intellect, James on, 229; and intuition, 75; and instinct, 75- Intellectualism, vicious, 98, 99. Intelligence and matter, 216; and space, 218. Intuition, Bergson's definition of, 70; and instinct, 75; and control, 79; as hypos- tasis of instrument, 81; and knowledge- of- acquaintance, 90, 94; and utility, 92; and truth, 92; and space, 129. Kant, 56, 57, 69, 70, 127, 140, 171. Knowl edge-about, 84; relation to knowledge-of-acquaint- ance, 84; and immediacy, 89. Knowledge- of -acquaintance , 82 ; and intuition, 90. Law as cosmic habit, 182. Leibniz, 56. Life, nature of, 119 f.; and mechanism, 124. Locke, 7. Man, relation to God, 198; antithesis to cosmic, 207; a microcosm, 208; homo faber, 218; James on destiny of, 230; salvation of, 232. Many and One, 140 f.; James on, 153. Matter, 77, 78, 113, 180, 210; defined, 130 f.; James on, 164 f.; and personality, 213; and intelligence, 216. Index 247 Meaning, pragmatic definition of, 81, 84; and knowledge- about, 86, 87. Melioristic, 233. Memory and personality, 213; and perception, 214. Menard, M., 47. Moisant, X., 64, note. Motion, nature of, 119. "Necessary connexion/' 8. Necessity, 124, 125. "New Philosophy/ ' the, 34. New Realism, 35 f., 50. Novelty, 171. One, the, of Plotinos, 63, 64, 77; of Spinoza, 66; and the Many, 140 f.; James on, 53. Parallelism, psycho-physical, logical result of, 148. Pascal, 59. Past, the, 122. Pecten mollusc, 109, note. Percept and concept, 89; James on, 98. Percepts, 167 f. Personification, 210 f.; and the body, 214. Phidias, 1. Philosophy, relation to science, 73 f. Pitkin, W. B., 47. Plato, 1, 55, 107, 108, 133; theory of knowledge of, 59 f., 67, 80. Plotinos, theory of knowledge °f, 61, 67, 75, 78, note. Pragmatism, 13, 80, 81; thir- teen varieties of, 23, note; as a way of passing, 25 f.; on duration, 89, 90. Prediction, and change, 123. Present, the, 122. "Problem of Knowledge/ ' the, how raised, 55 f.; various solutions of, 58; Bergson's solution of, 69 f.; James's solution of, 69 f . "Pseudo-ideas," 142. Psychology, relation of, to philosophy, 6, 7. "Pure perception/' 131, 211; and memory, 214. Radical empiricism, 10, 27 f. Raphael, 1. Realism, James on, 177. Reality, 41; and appearance, 3; and system, 22; percept as, 88; elan vital as, 113; definition of, 125 f.; James on, 152 f.; as chaos, 158; as mosaic, 162; and religion, 185. Relations and truth, 97; dogma of unreality of, 143; Bergson on, 144; James on, 145; externality of, 160, 161; good and evil as, 182. Religion and reality, 185. Salvation, 232. Schelling, 59. Schopenhauer, 15. Science, relation to philosophy, 73 *. 248 William James and Henri Bergson Selfhood, priority of, 226. Sheffer, H. M., 64, note. Space, 113; Bergson's various views on, 126 f.; denned, 128 f.; and intuition, 129; and individuality, 216. Spinoza, 108, 112, 133; episte- mology of, 65, 67, 80. Stoics, 59. Subconscious, the, 189 f. Substance, Spinozistic, and appearance, 108 f. Survival, cosmic struggle for, 182. Systems of philosophy, nature of, 13; as reality, 22. Truth and hypothesis, 24, 84; Bergson on pragmatic con- ception of, 90 f.; and utility, 91; and intuition, 92 f.; in the philosophic tradition, 93; pragmatic conception of , 94 f.; and relations, 97; hypostatized by Bergson, 101; as control, 101. Tychism, 27. Utility and truth, 91; and intuition, 92 f. Vegetable, place of, in evolu- tion, 135. Will-to-believe, the, 236. Zeno, 140. °>. * N > x ^. • * C , 0o x. '/ .0* ^*°/ J C I ^ ^ * >0* **: '." v- v <^ '<>« A.