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 HUMANISTIC STUDIES 
 
 Vol. I, N0..2 
 
 STUDIES IN 
 BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR MITCHELL, Ph. D. 
 Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the University of Kansas 
 
 LAWRENCE, JANUARY, 1914 
 
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 HUMANISTIC STUDIES 
 
 Vol. 1 January 1, 1914 No. 2 
 
 STUDIES IN 
 BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR MITCHELL, PH.D. 
 Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the University of Kansas 
 
 LAWRENCE. JANUARY. 1914 
 PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY
 
 1
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PART ONE 
 
 BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 
 
 Page 
 Chapter I 
 The Relation of Philosophic Method to the Definition of 
 
 Philosophy 
 
 Chapter II 
 Bergson's Critique of Pure Reason 17 
 
 Chapter III 
 The Ancient Prejudice against Analysis 26 
 
 PART TWO 
 BERGSON'S SYSTEM OF DOCTRINE 
 
 Chapter I 
 Ontology and Epistemology S7 
 
 Chapter II 
 Mind and Matter, Spirit and Body 64 
 
 Chapter III 
 Doctrine of Freedom 82 
 
 Chapter IV 
 Bergson's Abhorrence of Determinateness 94 
 
 Chapter V 
 The Mystical Yearning of Intuitionism 102 
 
 PART THREE 
 
 BERGSON'S GENIUS 107
 
 PREFACE 
 
 In the second part of this essay material from two papers pub- 
 lished in the Journal uf Philosophy, Psychology unci Scientific 
 Methods has been laid under contribution, and also from my 
 doctor's thesis. Much of this material was written in 1909, since 
 which time a number of views which some of mine resemble more 
 or less have been published. It has not seemed to me necessary 
 always to note these agreements of thought arrived at indepen- 
 dently by myself and others. 
 
 I have reported a part of the brilliant critique of Bergson's doc- 
 trine of freedom by Monsieur Gustave Belot. This exi)resses with 
 elegance and force much of mj' own reaction to the doctrine. 
 Indebtedness to Belot and other authors is acknowledged 
 throughout the essay. Except possibly Professor Bergson himself, 
 there is no one who has influenced my thinking so much as Pro- 
 fessor Ralph Barton Perry, my teacher who introduced me to 
 Bergson's philosophy. Professor Perry's writings are full of 
 finished renderings of less articulate convictions of my own; and, 
 though I have often referred to and quoted from his work explicitly, 
 his instruction and stimulus have had so much to do with the 
 history of my thinking that I could never say just what I owe him, 
 but only that I owe him much. 
 
 Professor Bergson has permitted me to translate from a private 
 letter some comments of his on certain of my criticisms. 
 
 Professor Edmund H. Hollands has given the first two parts a 
 careful reading, in the manuscript, and his able criticisms and 
 suggestions, mainly concerning the matter itself, have been of 
 great benefit. 
 
 I am no less obliged, for help in improving the literary form, 
 to Professor S. L. Whitcomb, whose critical ability has been
 
 patiently applied to a careful revision, page by page, of the whole 
 manuscript. 
 
 I have tried, in the third part, to justify explicitly the great and 
 unique value which I attach to Professor Bergson's work, antago- 
 nistic though my own convictions are to his results. And, besides 
 this aim, it has seemed to me interesting and instructive, in view 
 of the very considerable literature which has grown up about 
 Bergson's philosophy, to bring together in a comparative view the 
 judgments of a number of his exponents. 
 
 For literature by and about Bergson, the reader is referred to 
 the exhaustive bibliography jjrepared last year by the Columbia 
 University Press under the direction of Miss Isadore G. Mudge, the 
 Reference Librarian. "The bibliogi'aphy inclufles 00 books and 
 articles by Professor Bergson (including translations of his works) 
 and 417 books and articles about him. The.se 417 items repre.sent 
 11 different languages divided as follows: — French 170, English 
 159, German 40, ItaHan 10, Polish 5, Dutcii .S, Spanish S, Rou- 
 manian 2, Swedish 2, Hungarian 1." This work is invaluable to 
 tlie student of Bergson. It is iiiconiparably the fullest Berg.son 
 bibliography extant. 
 
 -Vkthi K Mitchell. 
 University of Kansas, 
 Januarv, 1014.
 
 PART ONE 
 BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHIC METHOD
 
 i
 
 Chapter I 
 
 THE RELATION OF PHILOSOPHIC METHOD TO THE DEFINITION OF 
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 One of tlie problems of philosophy is the nature of philosophy 
 itself. In recognizing such a problem at all, I suppose, the begin- 
 ning of its solution has been made. For the very question, what 
 is this or that ? is conditioned on an incipient definition of the sub- 
 ject of it, a discriminating acknowledgement of it as something in 
 particular, and, so, as something already more or less qualified or 
 defined. Certainly there would be no common problem and no 
 difference of theory without such initial agreement as a point of 
 reference in disagreeing. 
 
 But the explicit statement of this starting point of agreement 
 encounters a practical dilemma. On the one hand, anything can 
 be defined in terms so general that the thing is bound to be in- 
 cluded: make the genus large enough and it includes anything. 
 The limit, in this direction, would be to define the object as a case 
 of being; which would be safe, but hardly a start toward deter- 
 mining anything about it. On the other hand, the least advance 
 toward narrowing the meaning incurs a very rigorous obligation 
 to produce a i)rinciplc of selection which shall be a satisfactory 
 logical warrant for narrowing it in just the way selected, since this 
 way excludes others whose claims may be in question. The 
 situation is thus beset with the pitfall of logical presumption. 
 
 There are three quite distinct conceptions of philosophy, in the 
 form of ill criticized assumption, each of which is taken by its 
 adherents to be unquestionable — as safe as the concept "being." 
 I will word them thus: (1) An absolute evaluation of reality; (2) 
 A revelation of reality in its essential nature; (3) A comprehension 
 of the meaning of reality.
 
 10 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [SO 
 
 The first of these conceptions is that of Kant and Fichte and 
 those philosophers to whom reahty seems unrehited to appre- 
 hending consciousness, rehited only to will. Reality is neither 
 directly nor indirectly perceivable. Knowledge of it is {K)ssible — 
 if the term is proper at all— only in the broadest sense of "knowl- 
 edge," the sense equivalent to "consciousness," within which 
 will is sharply distinguished from two more or less receptive or 
 cognitive modes, tliinking and feeling. Knowledge of reality is 
 thus, for this type of philosopher, a practical, i>er.sonal evaluation 
 of it, only; a moral disposition or attitude. 
 
 The second conception is Profes.sor Berg.son's; its meaning is a 
 peculiarly intimate acquaintance with reality. It is a relationshij) 
 between reality and consciousness in the testhetic mode, con- 
 sciousness as the quality-knowing faculty, ver>' explicitly dis- 
 tinguished by Bergson, under the name "intuitifui." fn>m the 
 relation-knowing or intellectual faculty. 
 
 The third conception, the analytic or intellectualistic, means 
 knowledge about reality, snch knowledge as may l)e relatively 
 independent of acquaintance. J'lie second and third con(e|)tion.s 
 are distinct from each other only in emphasis, and may l>e in- 
 definitely approximated toward eadi other, to the limit of nmtual 
 indentity. But, historically, tli<* ])hiIosopher's besetting sin of 
 hypostasis has pushed the emphasis, in each of these two con- 
 ceptions, to so vicious an extreme that they contrast witli each 
 other sharply. Pushed to such extreme, the tliird concei)tion has 
 been stigmatized by adherents of the second as "vicious" con- 
 ceptuaHsm or intellectualisin. By the same right, the intellec- 
 tualist may denounce intuitionism as ecpially " vicious. " 
 
 To these three conceptions of philosophy this is common : a 
 relationship between reality and consciousness which is ai>ogeal. 
 Philosophy is at any rate a supreme experience, a mode of con- 
 sciousness which is eminent over other modes. But this initial 
 generaUzation is too indetermiiuite to constitute a satisfactory 
 theory of the nature of philosophy; whereas (for the other horn of 
 the dilemma), the above attempts at greater specificity ap|)ear to 
 invoke no logical principle, but rather to follow a deep-lying 
 personal instinct, without due critical reflection on it; in other 
 words, without logical justification of it. The\- all l>eg the 
 question. 
 
 Such ill criticized assumption concerning the nature of philos-
 
 81] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsoiia Philosophy 11 
 
 ophy is what determines a philosopher's "method" in distinction 
 from his "doctrine." The names voluntarism, intuitionism and 
 rationalism have been appUed to philosophies whose method is one 
 or other of the three outlined above. Religion, art and science 
 are their models, respectively. Under voluntarism fall the ro- 
 mantic and the pietistic philosophies, wherein value is all that is 
 real, and personal attitude towards value is the only mode of 
 consciousness that illuminates reality. Intuitionism includes rad- 
 ical empiricism, temporalism and mysticism. Such philosophies are 
 based on the conviction that only quality is real, only intuition is 
 knowledge. And under rationalism are positivism and absolutism, 
 in which reality is order and knowledge is reason. 
 
 If art, science and rehgion correspond to the ancient triad feeling 
 (intuition), thought (intellect) and will, it would seem either that 
 philosophy must be consciousness employed in one or more of 
 these modes, or else that a fourth mode of consciousness, co- 
 ordinate with these, must correspond to philosophy. Such a mode 
 has not been discovered. Philosophy nuist therefore be one 
 or two or all three of tlic above things. Can analysis of that 
 generalization which was dorived above from the more specific 
 definitions produce a logical principle capable of determining the 
 genuine philosophic method among the three modes of con- 
 sciousness, feeling, thought and will ? Yes, such analysis of the 
 supremacy which is a feature common to all three concep- 
 tions of philosophy proves unequivocally that philosophy must be 
 a function of intellect, and caiuiot be a function either of will or 
 of intuition. 
 
 This would not be the case, needless to say, if "supremacy" 
 were here a eulogism. ?2ulogistically, either of the three modes 
 of consciousness has e(iual claim to supremacy. That mode of 
 con.sciousness to which reality is most interesting is supreme, in 
 the eulogistic sense, and this depends on the philosopher's personal 
 constitution. To the man of dominating intuition, the relations 
 and teleology of things may be incidental characters of them; but, 
 by comparison with reality's qualitative aspect, those other as- 
 pects are relatively extrinisic and accidental. In whatever sense 
 it may not be true, in the eulogistic sense it is true that such a 
 man's supreme experience is intuitional rather than intellectual 
 or ethical. Bergson's psychological life seems to be of such a 
 type. But, for the man of ethical, and for the man of intellectual
 
 12 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [82 
 
 prepossession, supreme experience cannot be intuitional, in this 
 sense of supreme. Yet, if an intuitional bent be regarded by any- 
 one as a hopeful qualification for effective philosophizing, no in- 
 tuitionist denies to the man in whom reason or will, instead, is 
 paramount, the possibility, by proper effort, of achieving the 
 genuinely philosophic — that is to say, intuitional — activity. And 
 when such a man does, in spite of difficulty, achieve it, it has the 
 same supremacy, as philosophy, that it has for the intuitionist, 
 for whom it is, more fortunately, also supremely congenial and 
 "worth while". It is not this latter supremacy, therefore, but 
 the other, which distinguishes philosophy, on the intuitionist 
 conception; and that other supremacy has a meaning which is 
 thus proved to be independent of relation to any constitutional 
 prepossession or aptness. If philosophy is intuitional, this is not 
 because intuition is any man's most characteristic faculty. 
 
 And so of the two other modes of consciousness, reason and will, 
 in which, in different beings, according to their constitution, 
 life most naturally and best finds realization: for each of these 
 modes of consciousness, as for the intuitional mode, there is one 
 sort of experience, called philosophy, which is distinguished by 
 a certain supremacy of self-same nature, independent of any dis- 
 tinction of personal constitution among philosoi)hers. The vol- 
 untarist, indeed, might claim a peculiarly eulogistic sui)remacy 
 for volitional experience over any other kind; for it is ethically 
 supreme for all, whatever one's constitutional bent. But its 
 ethical supremacy is no more the p/u7o.foy>///c(/?m/<? of volitional ex- 
 perience, on the voluntaristic conception of philosophy, than is 
 its other eulogistic supremacy, its mere congeniality, for the 
 strongly volitional type of character. For, men of such character 
 may be conspicuously deficient in philosophic faculty in the judg- 
 ment of all, including the voluntarist philosoj)hcr. 
 
 Reason, finally, commands recognition of supremacy, among the 
 modes of consciousness, in another sense, a sense distinct from the 
 imperative or ethical supremacy of will. The sujjremacy of reason 
 is its exclusive reflectiveness; and reflectiveness as the quale of 
 reason is the same character as criticalness; that is, it is the faculty 
 of judgment. It is important to note that this critical reflective- 
 ness is a differentia of reason; it is not a character of intuition nor 
 of will. The proof is that reflection is the substitution of a re- 
 lational for a substantive object of consciousness, and relationality
 
 83] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 13 
 
 is nothing else than rationality. Thus, if feeling, will and rational 
 thought are conceptually distinct, reflectiveness is foreign to the 
 first two, and to anything coiirdinately distinct from rational 
 thought. When consciousness is employed with an emphasis on 
 the qualities of its object, in distinction from aspects of value and 
 relation (which also belong to any object), consciousness is in- 
 tuitive, in the intuitionist sense of the term. In entering a con- 
 sciousness, the (jualities become, ipso facto, content of that 
 consciousness, taking their place in this setting under the name 
 "sensations," or ''.sense data." It is the act of reflection which 
 "sets" the mind's data in contexts; which is aware of contexts, 
 that is, and of the setting of data in them. It is the reflective act 
 which names its data accordingly, as "quality" or "sensation", 
 and is conscious of them as elements of their relational setting. 
 Consciousness is volitional when its focus is a value. In the con- 
 text of the subject's consciousness, the value becomes a purpose. 
 Thus value as substantive object of consciousness, again, is object 
 of will just as the substantive quality was object of intuition; 
 while value as element in the relational complex in which it is 
 known as "purpose," is object of reflection. Reason, then, — 
 that is to .say, mind active in the relation-knowing way — is the 
 mode of consciousness in virtue of which mind is reflective, crit- 
 ical, judgment-forming; and it is a confusion among defini- 
 tions of intuition, will and reason, to attribute reflectiveness to 
 intuition or to will, as such. The peculiar supremacy of reason 
 which inheres in reason's reflectiveness is due to the inclusion of 
 consciousness itself in the content of relational consciousness and 
 of no other mode of consciousness. 
 
 Intuitionists and voluntarists, the same as intellectualists, do, 
 as a fact, always characterize that supremacy which distinguishes 
 philosophy, in no other way than the critical way. There is no 
 dissent, in intuitionist or voluntarist schools of philosophic method, 
 from this residual core of meaning in the conception of philosophy : 
 by universal consent philosophy is consciousness (in whatever 
 mode) sitting in judgment on its own findings; philosophy is 
 critical reflection. And therein is an ultimateness and absolute- 
 ness — in a word, a supremacy — which belongs to philosophy, on 
 any view of philosophy, and to no other type of mental activity. 
 But in rationalism, or intellectualism, alone, it is recognized that 
 reflection, as such, is essentially and distinctively rational.
 
 IJf. IJnkersiiy of Kansas Humanistic Studies [8Jf 
 
 It is, then, the contention of this essay that the supremacy 
 pecuhar to philosophy— which, by common consent of volunta- 
 rism and intuitionism, is no eulogistic nor even ethical supremacy, 
 but critical — decides absolutely, among the three modes of con- 
 sciousness, against will and intuition in favor of intellect, as the 
 organ of philosophy, of intellectualism as the sole genuinely 
 philosophic method. Kant called his voluntarism the "Critical 
 Philosophy," to distinguish it, as genuine piiil()soi)hy, from what 
 would be but failed (because it was not critical) to be philosophy. 
 Critical his philosophy is; but beca-ise it is critical, it contrailicts 
 its own voluntarism — the assertion that reality is knowable only 
 in obedience of will, and not in judgment. A contradiction; for 
 this (the gist of his voluntarism) is a judgment whose subje<-t is 
 reality. The inevitable fundamental intiUccluality of noumcnal 
 knowledge is concealed, for Kant, under the phrase "postulate 
 of will." A postulate, so far as it is genuine kn<)wle<lge, has 
 indeed the character of necessity, bul ifs urcessily is simply 
 the fact of logical implication. 
 
 With the intuitionist variety, and particularly tlic Borgsoniaii 
 variety of anti-intellectualism, this essay is largely to be con- 
 cerned. At this point I merely note the inevitable contradiction 
 in Bergson's intuitionism, as in Kant's voluntarism. Intuition, 
 Bergson explains, is "instinct that has become disinterested, self- 
 conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it 
 indefinitely."^ Now, consciousness reflecting upon its own data is 
 criticism, predication, classification, judgment — whatever it is, 
 it is the objectifying of the data of consciousness, a thing whith 
 it is essential to instinct or intuition, on Bergson's own conception 
 of them, never to do, and which, i)recisely, on his conception, is 
 the distinguishing function of intellect. "Instinct is sympathy, ' 
 says Bergson, in the same passage; and the sen.se in which in- 
 stinct is sympathy is lucidly and emiihatically explained as just 
 this, that there is no distinction of subject and object, in instinct; 
 they are identical. Whereas, intelligence or intellect i.s explicitly 
 distinguished by him from instinct jirimarily in the disjunction 
 
 1. Creative Evolution p. 176. I have itaUcizt-d TcniH-tiiiK" and ohjccf to In- 
 dicate the contradiction of "instinct. • .\nd since, for HerKson. intuition is philo- 
 sophic consciousness, this reflectiveness which lie Imputes to It is no accident, no 
 inadvertence. Intuition must, indeed, in order to he pliilosophlc. he reflective: 
 that is to say. it must absolutely contradict its own nature. (In all of the referenced 
 to Bergson's works, the pages mentioned are those nf the English translation.)
 
 85] MitcheU: Studies in Bery.son.s Philosophy 15 
 
 of subject and object. It is merely to turn his back on his own 
 use of these terms to describe philosophy as instinct extending 
 its object and reflecting upon itself. 
 
 That tlie case of philosophical anti-intellectualism is a hopeless 
 paradox, whether in voluntarism or in intuitionism, each of these 
 methods itself best proves by its own inevitable intellectualism. 
 The terms voluntarism, intuitionism, and rationalism express no 
 real distinction of psychological mode, in philosophizing, since 
 the psyschology of every philosophy is necessarily characterized 
 by that critical reflectiveness which constitutes philosophy a 
 function of intellect. Philosophy is always interpretation, a 
 function alien to what anybody ever meant either by will or by 
 intuition; a function whose es.sential distinctness from both those 
 functions is attested universally in such .synonyms of " interpreta- 
 tion" as judgment, conception, understanding, reason. 
 
 There are, it is true, voluntaristic and intuitionistic, philos- 
 ophies of the highest imi)ortance. And the intention of their 
 authors is to distinguish their method from the rationalistic 
 method. Arc they foredoomed to futility on this account? So 
 far as this intention is realized — yes, unquestionably. No phi- 
 losophy that were itself a function either of will or of intuition is 
 conceivable, since it would then lack the es.sence of philosophy, 
 which is critical primacy. That philosophies designated by the.se 
 methodological terms may be invalu.il)lc j)roducts, it is necessary 
 only that these terms apply in fact not to the psychological method 
 of the i)hilosophy but to its psychological starting-point. They 
 express a constitutional l)ias in the philo.sopher, who, after all, 
 is human. To some the (pialities of things; to others, value; 
 and, finally, to other some, the order of reality is the "essence" of 
 reality. Such esscntialness is eulogism, of course. For it is an 
 irreducible psychological fact that there are religious, iesthetic 
 and .scientific types of mind. Each to his bias; each to his taste. 
 The apogee of living is religion to the first, art to the second, 
 science to the third. Hence the illusion that philosophy, which 
 must needs l>e exi^crience supremely critical, is experience eulog- 
 istically sui)remc. Is not this illusion chargeable to failure to 
 see in the.se three modes of consciousness three emphases or 
 biases of living? To the lesthete, certainly, quahty must be 
 realest es.sence. l^ut it cannot be so to the zealot; for, to him,
 
 IS University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [86 
 
 that is value: nor to the intellectuahst ; to him it is order. 
 If sesthete and zealot will philosophize, they are at this dis- 
 advantage with the wise man, that their philosophy can do no 
 more, in expressing the nature of this "realest essence" of reaUty, 
 than the wise man's rationalism may do — discourse about it, 
 interpret it. Philosophy indeed never can, and never should 
 aspire to enter into the inner nature of reality in any such sense as 
 the immediatism of Bergson and James summons it to do. There 
 is art and there is rehgion for that. It is not clear how the qual- 
 itative or how the teleological aspect of reality is more internal to 
 it than its relational aspect; but, at any rate, philosophy ha.s its own 
 interest, and that is distinct from those of art and religion. 
 Wlierefore the own proper interest of art or of religion is not 
 served in their philosophy; in their philosophy they deny them- 
 selves. The efforts of such philosophies to wrest from reality, in 
 a non-intellectual way, its secret, must be rather superhuman. 
 This characterization is hardly a burlcstjue of Bcrgson's own 
 observations on his method, for it is little less than the repudiation 
 of our natural constitution, to wjiich he exhorts us.- But, as 
 with Kant, so with Bergson, j)rodigies of subtlety fail to produce 
 a revelation of truth that is so subtle as to l)e inarticulate because 
 immediate, or that does not lend itself lo (iiscussion and interpre- 
 tation. Or, if this is not to be looked for in a j)liil()sophy which is 
 *a method rather than a doctrine,' neither is there any sugges- 
 tion how such revelation may be socialized, rciulered human; or 
 even, in fact, how it can assume meaniny, moaning to the philoso- 
 pher himself (which is surely indispensable to truth), without be- 
 coming predication — assertion and denial;— that is to say, with- 
 out becoming judgment. If humans make suj)erhuman effort, it 
 should not be surprising if the result is self-contradiction. 
 
 2. See especially Creative Evolution, pp. 191-2 aud 266.
 
 Chapter II 
 bergson's critique of pure reason 
 
 \Miat, then, is called philosophic "method" and is distinguished 
 thereby from "doctrine," is really, in fact, always the cardinal 
 principle of the content of the philosophy in question, its funda- 
 mental doctrine. If this doctrine is acceptable to reason, if it is 
 reasonable, logical princij)les must determine it. No anti-in- 
 tellectualist philosophy legitimately evades the rules of the game 
 of dialectic by the representation that it is a 'method rather than 
 a doctrine. ' For this is the game that anyone plays who under- 
 takes to show, by reasonal)le discourse, why reality and knowledge 
 conform to a certain definition, or (the same mental procedure) 
 why they do not conform to other definitions. Since dialectic 
 is just significant discourse with a meaning to be judged, it may 
 vary in form l)etween any degree of syllogistic baldness, at one 
 extreme, and of suggestive sul)tlety at the other. It is dialectic 
 if it is constituted of statements, explicit or implied, which relate to 
 each other. 
 
 There is, therefore, I say, a misleading irrelevance in the char- 
 acterization which Bergson himself has set the fashion of attribut- 
 ing to his philosophy, the characterization of it as rather a method 
 than a system of doctrine. A method implies a system, that is 
 to say an ordered conviction about the nature of reality and 
 knowledge. Such a system is essential to any meaning in Berg- 
 son's method. 
 
 Intellectualism in philosophy implies the conviction that the 
 parts of reality are connected together in thinkable ways; that a 
 comprehensive understanding of things as a connected system or 
 unity is therefore theoretically possible; if actually impossible, 
 
 17
 
 18 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [88 
 
 this is merely because of the endlessness of relationsliips and the 
 limitedness of any actual thinker's time and strength. But in 
 fact even human finitude is no obstacle to a comprehension of 
 the principles of reality. Detail is immaterial to the unity of 
 such a view. 
 
 One of the sayings attributed to Professor James is that there 
 is one thing you can always pronounce with assurance, upon 
 any philosophical system, in advance of hearing a word of it, 
 and that is that it is false. This suggests at any rate, very 
 well, the meaning of philosoi)hioal anti-intellectualism, which im- 
 plies the conviction contradictor%' to intellectualism, to wit that 
 the parts of reality are not connected in thinkable ways. 
 
 The connectedness of the intellectualist's universe may have 
 any degree of significance or casualness. A mere "and" may 
 express much of it,' Intellectualism may be as pluralistic in this 
 sense as you like, or as monistic. lint if things are a universe in 
 any such sense that they are comprehensible in intellect's dis- 
 cursive way, which anti-intellectualism denie.s — on such a hy- 
 pothesis anti-intellectualisni an<l intellectualism have commonly 
 agreed that some principle is embodied in this total comprehcn- 
 sibleness, a supreme induction, which would constitute the final 
 interpretation of any fact. Like a master-key, it woidd oi)eM 
 all the chambers of the many-mansioned universe. Every [)hi- 
 losopher, as a fact, has some controUing thought which has the 
 value, for him, of such a supreme principle. Ibit always, it seems, 
 there are doors which the master-key will not unlock. It is the 
 conviction of intellectualism that this is because the maker of 
 the key has missed them, and so left them out of account in 
 fashioning it; while anti-intellectualism believes it is an illusion 
 to see the situation as a case of locks to be turne<I by a key, 
 at all. Entrance into possession of reality is otherwise condi- 
 tioned, altogether; the procedure, in con.sequence, is radically 
 different from this. But it is, I think, a true historical general- 
 ization that the success with which a j)liilosopher, of whatever 
 method, avoids a supreme principle of interjjretation, corresjwnds 
 exactly with the success with which he avoids being a philo.sopher 
 at all. I suppose Omar Khayyam and Aristippus the Cyrenaic 
 
 3. Cf. R. B. Perry s Pnsmt Philosophical Tfiidencifs. thv first two 8.H-tlun!» 
 of Chapter XI.
 
 89] Mitchell: Studies in BergsorCs Philosophy 19 
 
 are two of the least unifying philosophers of history; yet their 
 philosophy, like that of any absolutist, can be resumed in a single 
 idea, Omar has uttered it in one of his own famous sentences: 
 "Oh take the cash, and let the credit go!" 
 
 Aside from the presence, in each, of a generative principle, 
 there is little enough in common between the anti-intellectualism 
 of Omar and that of Henri Bergson. If critics have been able 
 to find seeds of skepticism and of pessimism in Bergson,* these 
 characters are at any rate foreign to any intention visible in its 
 author. No more positive philosophy, in its intention, was ever 
 composed. The positiveness of its name, intuitionism, is alto- 
 gether proper. Its significance, to be sure, is sharply defined by 
 its negative relation to intcllectualism, and therefore I stated it 
 negatively above as the thesis that the parts of reality are not 
 connected in a thinkable way. But the intuitionist would readily 
 admit: if not in a thinkable way, then in no way, evidently. 
 And, again, if not connected at all, no more are the parts of 
 reality (liscoiin<?cted, since any disconnection between things is 
 only their particular mode of connection. The fact is, reality 
 ha.s no parts, and that is just why intellect, which sees parts in 
 everything, is alien and blind to the true nature of reality. Still 
 one may object that intellect is itself a fact. What possible 
 meaning can there be in .saying that any fact is alien to reality? 
 As Bergson himself has said, we swim in reality, and cannot 
 possibly get clear of it. We cannot talk, we cannot think, we 
 cannot act about nothing. 
 
 The answer to this objection is the master principle of Bergson's 
 metaphysics: reaUty is life. Knowledge is "sympathetic" living. 
 If intellect is real, so is every abstraction, e. g., the inside of your 
 hat. The inside and the hat itself are at any rate real in senses 
 so importantly different that "real" and "unreal" hardly ex- 
 aggerate the contrast. Intellect, says Bergson, is the cross- 
 sectioning of reality. There is no thickness, no concreteness in 
 it. It exists as much in inert matter as in consciousness; in fact, 
 it exists in neither except in the sense in which a surface can be 
 said to exist in a solid body. What is the surface in itself? Why, 
 nothing; it is an abstract aspect of the body. The body is real. 
 
 4. J. W. Scott, Pessimism of Bergson, Ilibbrrt Journal, XI, 99-116. See also 
 below p. 94.
 
 20 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [90 
 
 but its aspects are not real, because they do not constitute the 
 body — no multiplication or addition of them does so. No millions 
 of surfaces make any thickness. In this sense the surface is other 
 than and alien to the real nature of the body. And so other mani- 
 festations of intellect — space, juxtaposition, extension, number, 
 part out of part — have no existence, as the surface has none. 
 
 As facts, nevertheless, what are they? How are they facts? 
 What is their raison d' etre ? Their raison d' eire is a faculty life 
 has, the faculty of action. They are the ways in which life acts. 
 They are not concrete entities In this, they are alien to the 
 concreteness of reality. Try to reconstruct reality out of such 
 abstractions, and the result is a construction like that of 
 geometrical imagination. You have constructed an abstract 
 symbol of the reaUty, which symbol the mind, preoccupied with 
 its practical bias, can mistake for the reality only because it is 
 so preoccupied. 
 
 ^Vhen we physically take apart and put together, our manual 
 activity has the same unreality of abstractness as that of our 
 intellectual analyses and syntheses. It is the latter outwardly 
 expressed, intellect externalized. Wherever we find life, we are 
 experiencing reahty. But when this occurs, we are never analyzing 
 nor synthesizing. The more one divests himself of practical 
 bias, and regards his object not as an object for the realization of 
 any possible activity of his own, but as it is in itself — in proportion, 
 that is, as one gets its character as a case of life — those unreal, 
 spatial aspects of it yield to an aspect which has nothing in common 
 with them. The parts of an anatomical model, a -papier machS 
 manikin, you may separate and put together again. An or- 
 ganism, as such, a manifestation of life, could not be dissected and 
 recomposed in its living reality. What is it that makes an or- 
 ganism alive, a true reahty? This, that ever>' so-called part 
 has a function which is so essential to the true function of the 
 whole that one is present or absent with the other. They coincide. 
 How, then, could you possibly dissect out a part of an organism? 
 Once recognize, what is unquestionable, that any function of it 
 comcides in this way with the function of the whole, and your 
 analyzing operation is prevented absolutely. Obey the rule that 
 everything which contributes at all to the function of the part 
 shall be taken, and everything else left, and you are in Shylock's 
 position after Portia's judgment: if you want the flesh you will
 
 91] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy 21 
 
 have to take blood with it; but you are not entitled to the blood. 
 It is even more hopeless than that. It is not a matter of skill 
 with your hand. You cannot make the analysis mentally, in- 
 tellectually. It is not a matter of impairing or destroying the 
 function, of injuring or killing the organism. You cannot begin 
 the operation, not even on the corpse. The first incision separates 
 cells whose functions were inseparably one, for there is no cell 
 in the body that is not in organic union with every other cell. 
 
 If there is nothing of the nature of mosaic composition in the 
 living structure, this fact is one with the fact that there is nothing 
 mechanical in its functioning. It is not actuated from without, 
 as every machine is actuated which is not alive; nor is its function- 
 ing, like that of such machines, an assemblage of functions prede- 
 termined so far as the machine itself is concerned — prede- 
 termined, that is to say, except for intervention from without; 
 unalterable, as unstartable, without external cause. The character 
 of living function is suggested by the word "focalization." There 
 is a perfectly indivisible concert of function throughout the or- 
 ganism, in every one of its infinite varieties of activity. When 
 the engineer reverses his engine, or otherwise alters its mode of 
 operation, what he really does is to alter the structure of the 
 machinery. The machinery has been specially constructed with 
 a view to unmaking and remaking its nature more or less quickly 
 and conveniently; that is, its parts can be displaced and replaced 
 with reference to each other. Some parts are "thrown out of 
 gear" and shifted back. And then everything returns to its former 
 state. Not so in life. The functioning of an organism never 
 remains quite the same in two consecutive instants. There is 
 an incessantly moving emphasis or focus in it. Now one of its 
 potentialities of function is primary or focal, now another. But 
 none can ever cease and then be resumed. In this case, to cease 
 is not to be thrown out of gear, but to die, to perish, to be 
 annihilated. In everj' phase of the life activity of the organism, 
 all its functions are operative, subsidiary and subservient in 
 varying degrees to that one which for the moment is the focus 
 of all. Thus the organic or vital focus, in its physiological aspect 
 of activity and in its psychological aspect of attention, is never 
 at rest. The modulation is not like the sudden transformations 
 in a kaleidoscope. The evolutions do not take place in the manner 
 suggested by the phrase "Presto, change!" Modulation is the
 
 22 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [92 
 
 word that describes the process. Or, as Bergson phrases it, 
 the change is continuous, incessant, an interpenetrating flow of 
 processes, in which analysis can make no beginning and no sep- 
 aration; in which analysis, in fact, is absolutely impotent. If 
 the eye is that which sees, the ear that which hears, and so on. 
 it is really the organism entire, and no special, locally differentiat- 
 ed part of it that is the organ. Those so-called parts which, 
 with our false intellectualism, we name the eye or other organ, 
 are, in their reality, focal aspects of the entire organism, the 
 organism seen with a certain restriction or limitation of interest. 
 
 But, now, how can one make any discourse about, say, an 
 animal organism — indeed, how can this become an object of 
 perception at all — without its lending it.self to that sort of division 
 into real parts which Bergson says is an intellectual falsification 
 of its true nature, and therefore not true knowledge of the thing.' 
 When I look at a living body, do I not see it occupying space? 
 Is it not, then, measurable? Is not one such body larger than 
 another? Suppose cutting out parts of a body does alter or kill 
 the organism: they can, neverless, l)e cut out, and are therefore 
 parts? If, after, and because of, being cut out, they are then not 
 parts of the organism from which they were cut, still, they are 
 constituents of its volume. Surely, our ordinary speech about 
 this part and that part of our bodies, is not all false? 
 
 Bergson 's answer is uncomi)romising: our ordinary perception 
 and speech does falsify the nature of reality, but (in spite of the 
 apparent paradox) does not mislead. For our ordinary perception 
 and speech have nothing to do with knowing. Perception is 
 a different function of life — it is action. Our percepts are the 
 ways in which reality can factor in our activities. Those dis- 
 sected organs, you say, are at least so nuich of the entire volume 
 of the organism: but the words are no sooner spoken than their 
 falseness shows itself. If the organism ever had volume, it cer- 
 tainly has not, now — neither volume nor anything else. The 
 fact is, the only meaning there is in its ever possessing volume 
 while it still exists, is just that you might enter into activity with 
 it in such and such ways— as that, for instance, of hacking it up. 
 Perception, our "virtual" or potential activity on reaUty, is an 
 abstract aspect of it; what it is in itself is another matter, and 
 the only knowledge of this is that sympathetic union with it in 
 which space and parts disappear in an "interpenetrating flow"
 
 Uo] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy 23 
 
 not of things nor of parts, but of process, of ceaseless change. 
 Now, quality is just the fact of change, as anyone may test for 
 himself by introspection. Reality as it is in itself, therefore, 
 the true nature of reality, is quality. Relations are external 
 views or aspects, no nuiltiplication of which makes any start at 
 constituting a concrete reality. 
 
 There is one more reflection on Bergson's account of intellect, 
 which, like tho.se made above, he anticipates and tries to meet, 
 .so far as it seems an objection to denying cognitive validity to 
 intellect. The attempt at this point, however, is not very con- 
 vincing. The point I mean is this: The ways in which reality 
 can factor in my activities are by that warrant true characters of 
 reality. One may cheerfully add: even as the inside of ray hat 
 is, after all, a true character of my hat. For, if reality were 
 different, it could not factor so in my activity — in other words, 
 which would also l)e the words of plain common sense, I should 
 perceive it differently, on Bergson's own conception of what it 
 means to perceive. The situation is this: Reality does, indeed, 
 possess tho.se interesting aspects of changing process and un- 
 dividedness which Bergson is so preoccupied with and which he has 
 brought to light with exquisite skill. This is one of two equally 
 important truths about reality. The other Bergson is simply 
 blind to, and that is tliat reality also possesses an aspect of per- 
 manence and divisibility. Does this seem a contradiction? It 
 is no more a contradiction than that a curve is both convex and 
 concave. It is not only not a contradiction: each of these an- 
 tipodally opposite aspects of reality is absolutely indispensable 
 to the ver>' conception of the other, just as concavity is indis- 
 pensable to the conception of convexity, east to the conception 
 of west, right to the conception of left — and vice versa. This 
 point is resumed below (pp. 77-0,96). The object in view at present 
 is to see how the philosopher's method is really his primary 
 doctrine, in which object I am not in controversy with anyone, 
 so far as I know; but al.so to see how an anti-intellectualist method 
 depends upon a purely arbitrary, or rather constitutional, psy- 
 chological prepos-session for a certain emphasis of living. 
 
 I .said that Bergson is entirely awake to the aptness of the 
 objection just raised to his account of intellect. In a sense, 
 in certain passages, he even seems to grant the truth of the con-
 
 S4 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [9^ 
 
 tention. Action, he acknowledges, for instance,* can be involved 
 only with reahty; and consequently the forms of perception and 
 the categories of intellect (which are those forms rendered elabor- 
 ately precise) "touch something of the absolute." Sound truth, 
 assuredly! The fitness of reahty to enter as object into those 
 active relationships which are the perceptive and intellectual 
 categories makes the categories as genuinely own to the true, 
 essential nature of objective reality as to the nature of subjective 
 intelligence. That the categorization of reality depends on the 
 real object's being in relation to something else than itself is 
 nothing pecuhar to this (the categorical) character of reality. 
 The same condition is common to every character of reality. 
 The qualitative aspect of reality, which Bergson usually regards 
 as the nature of reality "in itself," depends no less than its re- 
 lational or categorical aspect on the rclatedness of the object. 
 For the qualities of things are nothing l)ut the differences they 
 make — to consciousness or to other things. Reality not in re- 
 lation is simply a phrase without a vestige of meaning. Reality 
 "in itself" in such a sense is merely nonsense. It would seem, 
 therefore, as if Bergson should account the intellectual mode of 
 consciousness, which does indeed "touch something of the ab- 
 solute," as knowledge of precisely the same metaphysical status 
 as a mode which touches anything else of the absolute. It is 
 one thing for a mode of consciousness to be uncongenial or un- 
 interesting to you or me; it is another for it to be invalid. The 
 uncongeniality of a mode of consciousness depends on personal 
 idiosyncrasy; the invalidity of a mode of consciousness depends 
 on the logical nature of being. 
 
 As a fact, however, perhaps because this preference between 
 two aspects of the nature of reality depends so obviously on per- 
 sonal bias instead of logical principles, Bergson vacillates, in 
 a hopelessly confused and confusing way, all through his writings, 
 between two conceptions of reality. First, reality is of one nature, 
 namely life, which is pure quality, change, or duration (the four 
 terms are actually synonyms to Bergson), and knowledge of which 
 can be only sympathetic intuition of it, while intellect is merely 
 "an appendage of action," and not knowledge at all. In the 
 other conception reality is cleft into a dualism more unutterably 
 
 5. Creative Evolution, p. xi.
 
 96] 
 
 Mitchell: Studies in Berg son's Philosophy 
 
 25 
 
 absolute than that of Descartes. Life is one kind of reality; 
 inert matter is the other. Intuition knows the former; intellect 
 really does Txnow the latter ('touching something of the absolute'), 
 and knowledge is therefore not intuition only. Although this 
 vacillation confuses issues in every one of Bergson's books, the 
 first conception is more characteristic, upon the whole, of Time 
 and Free Will and of Creative EvoltUion; the other conception is 
 pretty consistently expounded in Matter and Memory. The sphere 
 of intellect is restricted; its cognitive validity is not explicitly . 
 
 denied within this sphere, but only within the domain of life. J ^1,^^^ 
 
 sure, snice life exhausts reality, the sphere allotted to in- 
 tellect isnorTw*l»Jxliich would seem to imply that intellect fails 
 to know. The validi ty oTTti LcllcoUiaLconsciousness is thus, in 
 effect, denied equally in either case. The onTy^rJiffeignce is that 
 the denial is conscious and explicit in one case, more or lesS 
 consciously implied in the other. 
 
 
 l\y
 
 Chapter III 
 
 THE ANCIENT PREJUDICE AGAINST ANALYSIS 
 
 The restrictive conception of intellect is a very old one. The in- 
 compatibiUty of intellect and life, as cognitive organ and object, 
 is certainly as old a belief as the era of the Sophists. It can be 
 said, that is, with historical certainty, that, from the time of 
 Protagoras — and I have no doubt it has been tme ever since the 
 first philosopher, whoever he was, undertook to make an examin- 
 ation of the universe as one thing — it has always been true that 
 many of the best minds have been convinced, by the futile results 
 of such undertakings, that the universe as one thing, on one 
 hand, and intellect, on the other, make a pair as incompatible, 
 in the relation of cognitive organ and object, as the faint star 
 and the fovea: you have an organ and an object which by nature 
 are unsuited to each other. That kind of organ cannot see that 
 kind of object. Not that the faint star is invisible, but, to see 
 it, you musn't look! Then it will swim into the field of the organ 
 that is made to see it, the retinal tissue surrounding the fovea. 
 Thus it is not a question of human finitude or limitation. The 
 formulae of intellect, applied to such an object, are mere silliness, 
 reducible, as Kant showed, to all manner of antinomy and par- 
 adox. Not only that, but whatever is most important and inter- 
 esting within this whole, everything concerning the nature and 
 meaning of concrete cases of life, eludes antl baffles conceptual 
 statement, — which is the only kind of statement there is, — in- 
 evitably eludes it, like smoke in a child's hand who tries to catch 
 it. Your essences or definitions, of life or any of its manifesta- 
 tions, are stuff and nonsense, not inadequate, but absurd. >Miat 
 logical sentence has ever been uttered that, upon the least re- 
 flection, does not fail to develop into a grotesquely false cari- 
 
 26
 
 97] Mitchell: Studies in BergsorCs Philosophy 27 
 
 cature when applied to any genuine phase or interest of hfe, 
 great or small — whether God, freedom, immortality, or the heart 
 of a woman, or of a child, or of a man (to take them in a descending 
 order of their unsearchableness) ? You may labor your conception 
 with prodigious precision — the truth of the matter is always 
 beyond, when you are speaking of matters that are real. 
 
 This is the artist's temper of mind when the artist has inad- 
 vertently gulped down a noxious dose of metaphysics. It is the 
 feeling of the novehsts, the dramatists, the poets, that Bergson 
 voices : life may be lived — nobly or basely, courageously or coward- 
 ly, truly or falsely; — and the flavor and significance of life may be 
 heightened, life may be realized more abundantly, in artistic 
 activity, which is jjutting oneself into one's object, making it 
 become not an object, indentifying oneself with it. But one 
 thing is not given to man, and that is to interpret life. 
 
 Everyone is familiar with the telling dramatic force of the device 
 which consists in involving a philosophical hero, a man addicted 
 to principles of high generality, in sudden overwhelming emotional 
 chaos, in which all his j)hilosophy goes to smash. The refrac- 
 toriness of sexual love, for instance, to all his theories is such a 
 delicious redudio ad absurdum of the theories. First you make 
 your philosopher develop his maxims, in a besotted, fatuous con- 
 viction of their infallibility; then a particularly impossible she 
 enters, one who is conspiciously unfitted, by artlessness or dis- 
 abilities of worldly station, for the upsetting of principles great 
 and high. The philosopher goes through his paces, eating his 
 maxims whole, with unction; and you have the spectacle of Life 
 rising serene, untouched, above the futilities of theory. The 
 theory doesn't work. The obvious conclusion is that there is 
 some fundamental incommensurability between it and the simple 
 facts of Hfe that can flout it so. Simon the Jester is a very 
 dehghtful example of what I mean. Simon is bound to come to 
 grief, he is so smugly philosophical. The wise novel-reader 
 knows what to expect. Not that philosophy is not an ornament 
 to a man, a civilizing, disciplining exercise. All that is one thing, 
 but acting as if such notions apply is quite another. This good 
 philosophical chap gives the result of his philosophy in regulating 
 his life, as follows : 
 
 "Surely no man has fought harder than I have done to con- 
 vince himself of the deadly seriousness of existence; and surely
 
 28 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [9S 
 
 before the feet of no man has Destiny cast such stumbling-blocks 
 to faith. . . No matter what I do, I'm baffled. I look upon 
 sorrow and say, 'Lo, this is tragedy!' and hey, presto! a trick of 
 lightening turns it into farce. I cry aloud, in perfervid zeal, ' Life 
 is real, life is earnest, and the apotheosis of the fantastic is not its 
 goal, ' and immediately a grinning irony comes to give the lie to my 
 credo. 
 
 "Or is it that, by inscrutable decree of the Almighty Powers, 
 I am undergoing punishment for an old unregenerate point of 
 view, being doomed to wear my detested motley for all eternity, 
 to stretch out my hand forever to grasp realities and find I can 
 do naught but beat the air with my bladder; to listen with strained 
 ear perpetually expectant of the music of the spheres, and catch 
 nothing but the mocking jingle of the bells on my fool's cap? 
 
 " I don't know. I give it up. " 
 
 Giving it up is obviously the moral, here. The change of at- 
 titude implied in the last words marks the beginning of an era 
 of glorious fulfilment of life in the former philosopher's historj'. 
 What was necessary was that he should stop theorizing and learn 
 to live. That is, philosophy, as supreme experience, is the art 
 of living. It is the artist that really knows, that knows inwardly 
 and truly. The genuine philosopher is the artist in living. Th<* 
 intellectualist philosopher is a dissector of life's defunct remains. 
 
 The nature of the opposition between the two modes of con- 
 sciousness called intuition and intellect is discussed in the chapter 
 on Bergson's epistemology. The intuitionist philosopher is such 
 never for logical reasons, always for temperamental reasons. lie 
 is a man to whom life is richer and fuller, more self-fulfilling, more 
 natural, in the intuitional mode of consciousness than in the 
 intellectual. Hence the suspicious and disparaging disposition 
 toward the intellectual mode of consciousness, in a very numerous 
 class of minds of the highest order. From a personal feeling of 
 safety and security in intuition and of dissatisfaction with in- 
 tellectual efforts, the transition is natural to a conviction that 
 the trouble is in the essential nature of intellect. A mode of con- 
 sciousness which is so inveterately and (presumably) inevitably 
 beset with self-frustration cannot be knowledge. It is too obvious- 
 ly the opposite of knowledge, to wit error and delusion. 
 
 But once the opposition has reached this })oint, where not only 
 the convenience but the very validity of intellect is impugned.
 
 99] Mitchell: Studies in BergsorCs Philosophy 29 
 
 one is involved in a disjunction between these two modes of 
 consciousness that is demonstrably false, both logically and psy- 
 chologically. It is surely a false hypostasis of terms whose dis- 
 tinction is merely abstract, to set over against each other in this 
 way two aspects which are equally essential to any conception of 
 the nature of consciousness. For intuition and intellect can be 
 seen to imply each other with the same necessity with which 
 quality and quantity imply each other. And there is the same 
 absurdity, on the side of epistemology, in regarding intuition as 
 valid knowledge and intellect as not valid, as, on the side of onto- 
 logy, in regarding quality as real and quantity — or relation in 
 general — as not real. As if either were conceivable except as 
 a co-aspect or coeflBcient with the other, in the nature of reality. 
 This would be to conceive of quality as quality of nothing, or 
 relation as relation between no terms. 
 
 If philosophy must be reflective (and reflectiveness to some 
 degree is undoubtedly an inevitable condition of human con- 
 sciousness, perhaps of any consciousness), it must be, quatenus 
 philosophy, intellectual, and not, quatenus philosophy, intuitional. 
 Intuition will assuredly be there, in any philosophy, as the pole 
 is inseparable from its antipodes. But the philosophicalness of 
 philosophy is just its reflectiveness; that is, once more, quatenus 
 philosophy, it is intellectual. 
 
 I am recording a protest against false reification of what is 
 abstract, the very fault which intuitionism is insistent to lay to 
 the charge of intellectualism. If intuitionism were to conceptual- 
 ize intuition and intellect, instead of reifying them, it could not 
 appropriate validity to either mode of consciousness and deny it 
 to another. The satisfactoriness and richness of a given mode 
 of consciousness depend no doubt on the constitution of the subject. 
 The validity of consciousness in any mode has nothing to do with 
 such personal idiosyncrasy. 
 
 James is less rigorous concerning the validity of relational 
 knowledge than Bergson. Having found relations in the im- 
 mediate content of conscious data, James cannot deny them an 
 essential constitutiveness in the nature of reality. But such 
 knowledge is "thin" and "poor", in his homely and human 
 phraseology. This is only a more naive and genial expression 
 than Bergson's of the purely eulogistic primacy of quality over 
 relation. Relations are thin and poor aspects of reality, no doubt.
 
 so University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [100 
 
 if you find them so. Otherwise they may be supremely interesting. 
 That depends on your interests, which depend on your consti- 
 tution. In any case, they are the aspect of reality primarily 
 indispensable to reflective thought, which is philosophy. 
 
 The characteristic which is most sedulously imputed by the 
 philosophy of instinct to intellect is usefulness, but this char- 
 acteristic is treated as evidence of cognitive invalidity ! In point 
 of fact, serviceableness to action in no way distinguishes intellect 
 from instinct. Each alike is a reactive state resulting in a new 
 situation, a new arrangement of matter; and the only thing that 
 can give true finality to the intelligent act is the affective value of 
 the conscious state arising out of this new situation. But the 
 same is true of the situation which is the outcome of the instinctive 
 act. 
 
 The distinction sometimes seems to mean that it is only ac- 
 quaintance with objects (intuitive knowledge of them) that has 
 affective value, and that this kind of consciousness is therefore 
 an end in itself in a sense in which intellect is not. For knowledge 
 about the object (intellectual knowledge of it) will then be supposed 
 to have no affective value in itself, but only as it may subserve 
 action upon the object, which action will be accompanied by ac- 
 quaintance with the object. But if knowledge about an object 
 subserves acquaintance with it, the converse is no less true. If 
 knowledge of the location and price of a tennis ball subserves my 
 use of it and acquaintance with it, the latter in turn subserves my 
 knowledge about it in an indefinite number of respects. True, 
 acquaintance wdth an object may not always lead to knowledge 
 about it so obviously as in the case of the tennis ball; but again 
 it is equally true that knowledge about certain things, for instance 
 lines drawn upon the blackboard, has no olnious leading toward 
 utihty; the utility of a certain niathcniaticiil equation may seem 
 quite inscrutable. But how obvious the leading may be, or how 
 interesting the utihty, is nothing to the point. The question 
 whether or not the connection is necessarily there in all cases is 
 answered peremptorily a priori by the polar character of knowledge 
 by virtue of which acquaintance-with is only an asi)ect of knowl- 
 edge-about, and vice versa. 
 
 It is flagrantly untrue, as a fact, that knowledge-about is witli- 
 out affective value in itself. Experience is as emphatic to the
 
 101] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 31 
 
 contrary as reason. If a characteristically intellectual state of 
 mind gives you less satisfaction, or more, than one that is charac- 
 teristically intuitive, the reason is quite personal and accidental 
 in either case. It may just as well give you more as less. Being 
 knowledge in each case, awareness at least, it has its aflFective 
 value in some degree necessarily, of whichever character it may 
 be predominantly. 
 
 Since relation is not divorcible from quality, nor intellect from 
 intuition, it results that, if the artist blunders through critical 
 defect, even better art would, of itself, have saved him in spite of 
 his critical defect. If the mustiness of the philosopher is express- 
 ible as lack of a facile instinct, merely a truer theory of life would 
 have corrected him. No doubt life is too intricate for the most 
 robust capacity for ratiocination. Sanity balances securely be- 
 tween the two biases of consciousness. Art and criticism are 
 equally long, and the middle course a is short-cut and an economy 
 of living. But condemnation of the validity of consciousness 
 in any mode is a theoretical proposition irrelevant to maxims of 
 practical sagacity. And it implies either condemning the validity 
 of all consciousness (if intuition and intellect are aspects of each 
 other) or else it presupposes that reality is not categorical, which 
 Bergson fails to show. On page (24 of the present essay, we have 
 seen that he seems, in an inconsistent way, even to maintain the 
 contradictory thesis. 
 
 In a former paper* I have written as follows: 
 
 "Now, Bergson's idea of the philosopher — an artist in life — is 
 probably no one's else. He is of that opinion, decidedly; a con- 
 siderable part of the book [Creative Evolution] is a demonstration 
 that actual philosophers, from Plato on, are intellectualists all, 
 dissectors, not artists. But if Bergson's enterprise is to be a 
 substitute for philosophy and appropriate its name, we who are 
 much addicted to the old enterprise will be careful to know why 
 it is futile and illusory. " 
 
 Monsieur Bergson comments on this in a private letter from 
 which I translate : 
 
 "It would be so, I recognize, if these intellectualist philosophers 
 had been philosophers only in virtue of their intellectualism. But 
 
 6. Journal of Philosophy. Psychology and Scientific Methods, Volume V, No. 22
 
 S2 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [102 
 
 whereas intelligence pure and simple professes to solve the prob- 
 lems, it is intuition alone that has enabled them to be put. With- 
 out the intuitive feehng of our freedom, there would be no problem 
 of freedom, hence no determinist theory; thus, the different forms 
 of determinism, which are so many forms of intellectualism, owe 
 their very existence to something which could not have been 
 obtained by the intellectualist method. For my part, I find, 
 more or less developed, the seeds of intuit ionism in most of the 
 great philosophic doctrines, although the philosophers have al- 
 ways tried to convert their intuition into dialectic. Yet it is 
 chiefly in the former that they have l)een philosophers. " 
 
 This seems to me an absolute inversion of intuition and intellect. 
 Does intuition 'put problems'? It is, certainly, intuition that 
 gives us the material of our problems. But the formulating of 
 a problem — what can be meant by intuition's ft>rinulating any- 
 thing? Giving forms, I should say, just defines the work of 
 intellect. Intuition gives us our facts, our material. Surely, 
 the putting of problems is an intellectual operation continuous, 
 even identical, strictly, with their solution? A problem well 
 put is rather more than half solved. Certainly the rcmaindt'r 
 of the solution is not a tlitferent order of activity. It carries out 
 the 'putting' in its impUcations. A problem put is only a problem 
 incompletely solved.^ Solving it is putting it with a .satisfactory 
 perspicacity. 
 
 Without the intuitive feeling of our freedom there would be 
 no probleai of freedom, certainly, but you might easily have the 
 intuition without the problem. In the preface to the Essai sur 
 les donnces immSdiates de la conscience, Berg.son insists that it is 
 the aberrations of intellect that give rise to the problems of free- 
 dom. Intellect, then, at any rate, not intuition, puts the problem. 
 
 As correlative modes of consciousness, neither is independent, 
 nor primary, of course. Even in the putting of our problems, 
 intellect is only a co-factor, a coefficient with intuition. And 
 in the most abstract reasoning, the intuitive coefficient of thought 
 is indispensable. So far as intellect is actual, concrete knowledge, 
 it must be intuitively correlated, and so far as intuition is the real 
 intuiting of anything, it must be intelligently correlated. 
 
 In what respect are the philosophers of whom Monsieur Bergson 
 
 7. Cf. the second sentence of the present essay.
 
 103] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 33 
 
 speaks intuitionists? Does this mean anything more than that 
 they are wide-reaching and far-reaching instead of narrow and 
 dull in their apprehension? Is not philosophy interpretation of 
 experience? Is not the philosopher's vision, therefore, always 
 necessarily, just so far as he is a philosopher, a vision of the formal 
 aspect of reality? To be sure, that is just what Monsieur Bergson 
 is denying. But his reason is that reality is pure quality, a 
 proposition whose logical faultiness and temperamental genesis 
 I have sufficiently noted. 
 
 In view of the temperamental basis of the artistic and the 
 philosophical or critical attitudes, it were fatuous for either to 
 propose a reform in the other by way of conformity to a mode 
 distinguished from it thus radically. It is this fatuity which it 
 seems to me Bergson commits in regarding the success of any 
 philosophy as due, by any possibility, to its becoming art instead. 
 As well conceive that the virtue of an artistic product consists 
 in its conformity to critical canons. 
 
 Philosophy that is false to art would therein necessarily be 
 false to philosophy ; and art that is false to philosophy is false to 
 art; but art is not philosophy, nor philosophy art.
 
 I
 
 PART TWO 
 BERGSON'S SYSTEM OF DOCTRINE
 
 Chapter I 
 
 ONTOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY 
 
 My reason for coupling these two subjects in one heading is 
 suggested by the following words quoted from the Introduction 
 to Creative Evolution: "... theory of knowledge and 
 theory of life seem to us inseparable." For Bergson, reality is 
 life; and knowledge, of course, is a function of life. "The funda- 
 mental character of Bergson's philosophy," writes H. Wildon 
 Carr,^ "is ... to emphasize the primary importance of the 
 conception of life as giving the key to the nature of knowledge. " 
 
 All the essential principles of this metaphysics are contained 
 in the first of Bergson's philosophical books. Time and Free Will.^ 
 The two later books. Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution, 
 have not modified it, and have hardly even developed it — in the 
 sense, that is, that no vital corrections or additions to the prin- 
 ciples of the Essai have been made. 
 
 In discussing anti-intellectualistic philosophies, in the first part 
 of the present essay, their suspicion and distrust of intellect was 
 attributed to a logical illusion. The philosopher, finding life pre- 
 eminently satisfactory in an intimate acquaintance with the 
 qualitative aspect of experience, acquires an instinctive faith in 
 the preeminent reality of quality, a faith which is the deepest 
 root of his being. Now, this faith is absolutely justified, of 
 course. It is only necessary that it should be understood. Il- 
 lusion and error enter in with the neglect of the very preeminence 
 of this character of reality. For evidently nothing can be pre- 
 
 8. Henri Bergson: The Philosophy of Change, p. 14. 
 
 9. This title has been given to the English translation of the Essai sur les 
 donnes, etc. 
 
 S7
 
 S8 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [108 
 
 eminently real and at the same time real in any sense for which 
 the adverb "preeminently" is either false or meaningless. The 
 sense of "important" is a well accredited, proper meaning, in our 
 language, of the word "real." But it is a sense perfectly distinct 
 from the metaphysical sense. Teleologically, anything is pre- 
 eminently real according to circumstances. Teleologically, "real" 
 is a synonym of "important," a relative term capable of degree. 
 Metaphysically, circumstances are irrelevant to the realness of 
 anything. This is a different statement from the statement that 
 circumstances are irrelevant to th.^ nature of anything. It nuiy 
 be that there is nothing whose nature can be independent of, 
 wholly undetermined by, circumstances. That is another ques- 
 tion. We have nothing to do with it at present. For in either 
 case, circumstances make it neither more nor less real. Meta- 
 physically, then, "real" is an ab.solute term, incapable of degree, 
 and the adverb "preeminently" has no meaning when appUed 
 to it. The ver>' fitness of the adverb "preeminently" to the 
 intuitionist's meaning of the realness of quality determines this 
 meaning as a teleological eulogism, and the ultimate significance 
 of intuitionism is not the germination of a logical principle, but 
 an instinctive proi)agandism in the direction of a favorite emphasis 
 of living, an enthusiasm which has become involved in a logical 
 illusion concerning its ovra foundation in the nature of things, 
 an illusion which is clearly traceable, on analysis, to this ambiguity 
 in the use of the word " real. " 
 
 Later in this study it will a])pear thai Hergson's interest 
 centers, as the interest of French phiK)soj)hy has centered ever 
 since the Renaissance, in the problem of freedom. No doubt 
 that very enthusiasm which motivates modern anti-intellectual- 
 ism and gives it so positive a character, is a prime factor in its 
 popular success. And in the case of Bergson, both the significance 
 of his philosophy itself and the brilliant vogue it has achieved can 
 be rightly appreciated only in the light of this central passion 
 whose appeal to human nature is so universal and so profound. 
 Anti-intellectualism and anti-determinism are one and the same 
 thmg. It will appear as we go on that a deep-lying tychism, a 
 horror of determinism, is the specific trait of that motive (de- 
 scribed above as a natural affinity for the qualitative asj^ect of 
 reality, as distinguished from its relational aspect) which strenu- 
 ously endeavors, in Bergson, to eliminate relation from reality.
 
 109] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy 39 
 
 judgment from knowledge. He protests that freedom cannot 
 be defined without converting it into necessity; for definition is 
 determination. A would-be indeterminist theory of will is as 
 futile as a determinist theory is false: on any theory, wall is pre- 
 judged in favor of determinisn. The nature of freedom cannot 
 be known independently of the nature of will, and then attributed 
 or denied to will, as one might attribute or deny redness to an 
 apple. To say, Will is free, would he like saying, ^Yill is voluntary, 
 or, Freedom is free — not, indeed, an untruth, but without meaning 
 and hence not a truth, either. 
 
 The one way, then, of getting the true nature of will truly 
 comprehended which is doomed to necessary failure, is to write 
 a p.sychological treatise on the subject. For, since will has no 
 such determinate character as intellect finds in it or gives to it, 
 a treatise conveying the true nature of will would have to be un- 
 intelligible! Now, see in will, as Iveibniz'" and Schopenhauer, as 
 well as Berg.son, have seen in it, the whole of life and of reality, 
 and you see how it is Bergson's tychism that constitutes the 
 specific motive for his anti-intellectualism, and how this so-called 
 method forms, in his j)liilo.soj>hy, the supreme doctrine which is 
 the objective of all his di.scourse. 
 
 Bergson's criticjue of intellectualism proceeds by applying to 
 
 10. Po.sslbly this repre.s«'ntatlon of Leibniz's tliouRht requires a word of ex- 
 planation. Leiijniz oxi>rt\ssfs tlie nature of reality in terms of force, on one hand, 
 and of consriousness on tlu- other. The monad or t^lcmental reality is a unit of 
 perception and also a unit of force. It \a a living unit; as in Bergsonlsm, reality 
 Is life, though life in Leil)niz's philosophy is ultimately plural Instead of a simple 
 impetus. It is true that will is not a cnaracteristic Leibnizian term, but existence 
 Is always. I think, conceived by him very clearly as conation. The self-realization 
 of the monad is at the same time an intensification of its perceptiveness and of 
 its dynamic. Cf. the following passages from Rogers' Student's History of 
 Philosophy, pp. 307-8: "Leibniz was led by various motives to substitute, for 
 extenslf)n. power of resistance, as the essential quality of matter. . . . But 
 when, instead of extension, we characterize matter as force, a means of connection 
 [between matter and mind] is opened up. For force has its analogue in the con- 
 scious life; corresponding to t^ie activity of matter is conscious activity or will. 
 Indeed, are there any positive terms in wliich we can describe the nature of force, 
 unless wo conceive it as identical with that conscious activity which we know 
 directly In ourselves?" This activity, then, "is at bottom, when we interpret 
 It, a spiritual or perceptual activity. " In short, it is will. 
 
 Leibniz Is properly regarded as the first modern spiritualist. Leibnizian matter 
 Is real, if you like, but then it is continuous, and of essentially identical nature, 
 with spirit. Matter is spirit in a low stage of development. Bergson has no 
 such clear and unambiguous conception of matter as this, when you consider the 
 whole of his doctrine: but there are passages in Bergson which might almost have 
 been written by Leibniz himself. For instance: . . . "if, in fact, the humblest 
 fuinction of spirit is to bind together the successive moments of the duration of 
 things, if it Is by this that it comes into contact with matter and by this also that 
 it is first of all distinguished from matter, we can conceive an infinite number of 
 degrees between matter and fully developed spirit — a spirit capable of action 
 which is not only undetermined, but also reasonable and reflective." (Matter 
 and Memory, pp. 295-fi.)
 
 40 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [110 
 
 traditional metaphysics and epistemologj' his purely quahtative 
 criterion of reahty. Whether science, the product of intelligence, 
 is physical, biological, or psychological, it is knowledge-about, 
 and not acquaintance-with ; its object is relation, and not reahty; 
 its objective is action, and not vision; its organ is intelligence, 
 not instinct. But the object of philosophy is reality; its objective 
 is vision; its organ instinct. The timeless, intellectual way in 
 which science knows about, but never knows, is not the way of 
 true philosophy. The philosopher, to know reality, must achieve 
 a vital, sympathetic concurrence with its flow. To be known, 
 reality must be lived, not though*. In Creatire Erolution Bergson 
 traces the genesis of instinct and intelligence to a primitive ten- 
 dency, effort or spring of life (the clan vital) whose path bifurcates 
 indefinitely in the course of its evolution. Those elementary* 
 tendencies, instinct and intelligence, having issued from the same 
 primitive tendency, are both present, at least in rudiment, in all 
 forms of life; and it is the presence, though in a tuppressed sUite, 
 of instinct in man that must save philosophy from the cognitive 
 emptiness of science, and give it a hold on the living fulness of 
 reality. 
 
 In Tiine and Free Will the theorv of "real duration," which 
 is a synonym for intuition, and for life, and for reality, and is the 
 foundation of the Bergsonian pliilosojjhy, is emmciated, and in 
 the light of it intellect is sh()\\ n to falsify the nature of conscious- 
 ness in applying to conscious states such categories as magnitude, 
 plurality, causation. Each of thesr ratcgori<*s, in its traditional 
 application, is a (luantifying and a spatializing (»f consciousness. 
 The intensity of a conscious state is nothing but the state itself; 
 the state is pure (juality or heterogeneity, incapable of measure 
 and degree. The variousness of conscious states has no analogj' 
 with plurality. Plurality is simultaneity and juxtajxjsition; 
 but conscious states jiroiong each other in an interiKMietrating 
 flow. Finally, the organization of conscious states is nothing 
 like the traditional .systematic "coiirdination" of asso<iationistic 
 psychology. It does not lend itself to laws and principles. It 
 cannot l)e adequately expressed by words, nor artificially recon- 
 structed by a juxtaposition of simple states, for it is always an 
 absolutely new and original phase of our duration, and is itself 
 a simple thing. 
 
 The first chapter of Time and Free iVill consists of analvscs of
 
 Ill] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons PJiilosophy J^l 
 
 all sorts of psychological states, in order to justify the above 
 thesis concerning intensity. They are masterly analyses, and 
 their interest for psychology' is great. So far as Bergson's object 
 is concerned, of showing how intellect falsifies the nature of con- 
 sciousness in conceiving of sensations as more or less intense, what 
 the chapter proves is no more than that whenever a conscious 
 state varies — which every conscious state does continuously — it 
 varies qualitatively. Which hardly needed to be proved. For 
 the argument does not show that, along with the qualitative 
 change, a quantitative change may not occur; that is, it does not 
 exclude the proposition which Bergson is trying to refute, namely 
 that there is something in the nature of a conscious state that is 
 capable of increasing and decreasing." 
 
 In saying that conscious states are pure quality, Bergson means 
 that when one compares a sensation, for instance, with another 
 which is regarded as of the same "kind," but of greater or less 
 intensity, both the sameness of kind and the difference of magni- 
 tude are illusions of intellect, due to attributing the category of 
 magnitude, or Cjuantity, to that whose nature admits of no such 
 determination. A so-called more intense odor, say, it is mere 
 nonsense to call same in any sense with another, supposed to be 
 less intense. The two are distinguishable, that is all; they are 
 not comparable, properly speaking. They are comparable in 
 just the sense, ami in no other (it would seem, from Bergson's 
 treatment of the subject, although the statement is not his, ex- 
 plicitly) that either of the odors can be compared with a sound or 
 a taste. The (jitferencc is not one of degree; it is what Bergson 
 calls absolute. 
 
 But what, then, exactly, according to Bergson, do we mean 
 when we compare psychic states as more or less intense? In 
 simple states, he says, magnitude of cause is associated, by a 
 thousand experiences, with a certain quality or shade of effect 
 in consciousness, and ihe former is attributed to the latter. The 
 quantitative .scale rubs off color, so to speak, by the operation 
 of association, from the material cause to the p.sychic effect. In 
 complex states intensity means the amount of our inner life which 
 the state in ciuestion colors with its own quaUty. A passion is 
 deep and intense in the fact that the same objects no longer pro- 
 
 11. There is a good discussion of this point in an article reviewing the Essai, 
 by L. Levy-Bnihl. in the Rrruc Philnsophique, Vol. XXIX (1890), pp. 513-538.
 
 ^S University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [112 
 
 duce the same impression. In this statement of the case of 
 complex states it will be seen that Bergson fails to avoid attributing 
 quantity to the inner Hfe of consciousness, since the intensity of 
 complex states is measured, by liim, by a quantitative standard, 
 the amount of that inner life colored or affected by the quality 
 in question. 
 
 The attempt is equally hopeless whether the state in (juestion 
 be simple or complex. Bergson attempts, but fails,'^ to prove 
 that magnitude is a character peculiar to space, and that homo- 
 geneity and space are two names for the same conception. Two 
 odors, two sounds are mare than one, however; and that homo- 
 geneity in them by virtue of which they arc more, and two, is 
 not space. Bergson would object that number itself, the twoness 
 of the odors or sounds, is indeed a spatial attribute falsely imputed 
 to them. They are not plural, in tluMnsclvcs; it is conceptual- 
 ization that accounts for the phirality imputed to them. One 
 evolves continuously, in the flow of consciousness, out of the other. 
 It would be a sufficient answer that such a dcx-trine contradicts 
 itself in every breath by the terms necessary to any utterance of 
 it, — such terms as sounds, they, tliem, one, the other — all imputing 
 to the objects of discussion the plunility which it tries to deny. 
 And to fall back on the disabilities of language, due to its being 
 the work of intellect, is only to declare one's j)hilosophy ineffable. 
 But not only ineffable — unthinkable. Yes, Bergson wouhl admit, 
 unthinkable in the narrow sense of conceptual thought, but not 
 unknowable to immediate intuition. The final rejoinder, I think, 
 is that immediacy is a vanishing-i)oint, a Hiiiiting conception of 
 the relation between subject and ol)ject, a pliase of consciousness 
 in which to use the mathematical analogy, tiie "coefficient" of 
 consciousness vanishes into zero. We return later in this essay 
 to the amplifying of this point." In brief, if there is no distindiou 
 between subject and object, there is no object (as, likewise, no 
 subject, of course); hence, no truth; and Bergson could not have 
 made these ineffable discoveries about the sounds and odors, for 
 he could not have discovered themselves. 
 
 It is clear enough that nothing needs to occupy space, in order 
 to be a magnitude. A line, which occupies no space, is even a spatial 
 
 12. Cf. below, pp. 57, 58. 
 
 /Pr^i^r,Fpf^f2~' Z?' V^ Profe.ssor Perry's analysis of tlu> ronception of immediacy 
 to the alrne " Tendencies, Chapter X) has a result that Is similar In principle
 
 lis] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsoiis Philosophy ^3 
 
 magnitude, nevertheless. That it is spatial, Bergson would say, is 
 just the fact that it is homogeneous. But is homogeneity the only 
 character of a line, and is its spatiality therefore necessarily the same 
 thing as its homogeneity ? Evidently a line has a quale perfectly 
 distinct from its homogeneity, and essential to its linear nature; 
 that quale is its direction. If an interval of time, then, or a mental 
 state, seems not to be spatial, this does not compel us to deny that 
 there is any homogeneity about it: if the interval or the state of 
 mind lacks the determination — the character of direction — which is 
 indispensable to a line and to spatiality as such, this lack de- 
 termines these objects of thought as non-spatial without the 
 .slightest detriment to their homogeneity. But all the evidence 
 of homogeneity in space applies equally to homogeneity in time 
 and con.sciousness. The evidence is their additiveness : all seem 
 to present numerically distinct cases and quantitative differences. 
 No logical groimd has been indicated, for discrimination, in the 
 validity of this seeming, as a warrant for the homogeneity of space 
 and not of time and con.sciousness. Time and consciousness are 
 homogeneous by the same warrant as space and matter. 
 
 I think it is not irrelevant to Bergson's theory of the associative 
 tran.sfer of quantity in the stinmlus to the sensation, to observe 
 that, in the stinuilus, there is kind as well as amount. If the 
 shade or quality of the sensation corresponds to the degree of 
 the cause, is there no further determination of the sensation dis- 
 tinctively correlative with the kind of the cause? Such correlate 
 seems indispensable to Bergson's, as to any, reactive conception 
 of sensation, but, in Bergson's theory of intensity, it seems to 
 be |)reempted for correlation with the aspect of quantity in the 
 stimulus. 
 
 The case of plural odors and sounds, the case of the line, and an 
 infinity of other cases prove that magnitude is intensive as well 
 as extensive. The contradictor^• thesis, that of Bergson, reduces, 
 at bottom, to the self-contradiction that consciousness discovers 
 what is no object of consciousness. 
 
 In admitting that sensations are comparable in this sense, that 
 two odors, for instance, regarded as of the same kind, can be com- 
 pared with each other in the same way as either can be compared 
 with a sound or a taste, Bergson evidently means that they can 
 be distinguished as different ; and he regards this as implying that
 
 4^ University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [IH 
 
 sensations are absolutely heterogeneous with each other, absolutely 
 different. This phrase, I am sure, conceals a bald contradiction. 
 It seems to mean a relation, namely difference, in which, however, 
 the terms are absolute, that is not in relation. Difference cannot 
 be so conceived. Difference, I submit, cannot be conceived with- 
 out that (common to the differing terms) in respect of which they are 
 different. Monsieur Bergson, therefore, in admitting that sen- 
 sations are comparable in any sense, is still confronted with an 
 element common to all sensations; he has still to eliminate the 
 character of homogeneity from .ensation, by virtue of which 
 a purely subjective evaluation of their relative intensities is 
 possible. 
 
 The root of the difficulty Monsieur Levy-Bruhl has shown'^ 
 to be a reific separation of quantity and quality, which are sep- 
 arable in truth only by abstraction of attention. Real existence 
 in absolute homogeneity or space, as Bergson represents the 
 existence of the external world, is as unthinkable as real existence 
 in absolute heterogeneity, which existence is consciousness or life, 
 for Bergson. External things, he says, which do not lapse ("ne 
 durent pas''), seem to us, nevertheless, to lapse like us because to 
 each instant of our lapsing duration a new collective whole of 
 those simultaneities which we call the universe corresponds. 
 "Does this not imply," writes Ivcvy-liruhl, "a preestablished 
 harmony much more difficult to accept than that of Leibniz? 
 Leibniz supposes a purely ideal concord bet\\cen forces of the 
 same nature. Monsieur Bergson asks us to admit an indefinite 
 series of coincidences, for each instant, between *a real duration, 
 whose heterogeneous moments compenet rate,' and a space which, 
 not lapsing, has no moments at all. Monsieur Bergson really 
 places external reality, which does not lapse, in a sort of eternity. 
 He ingeniously shows that everything in space may be treated 
 as quantity and submitted to mathematics. Now, mathematical 
 verities, expressing only relations between given magnitudes, are 
 abstracted from real lapsing duration. All the laws reduce to 
 analytical formula?. But then they are, according to the saying 
 of Bossuet, eternal verities, and how .shall the real be distinguished 
 from the possible ? " 
 
 This sundering, in Bergson's theory of reality, of what rightly 
 
 14. Op. cit., p. 525.
 
 115] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 45 
 
 is one, is already implied, in his theory of knowledge, in the mutual 
 exclusion of the two cognitive modes, intuition and conception. 
 The predicaments into which philosophy falls in reasoning con- 
 ceptually (and there is no other reasoning) about the subjective 
 "world," are due, Bergson thinks, not to faults in the use of 
 logic, but to an essential incongruity between the matter and the 
 logical mode of being conscious of it. But such an essential in- 
 congruity between any mode of consciousness and what it is aware 
 of would imply that the modes of consciousness, on the one hand, 
 are parts of consciousness, of which accordingly, you can have 
 one without the other (theoretically if not actually) ; and, on the 
 other hand, there is the corresponding implication for ontology, 
 that what consciousness is aware of is also composed of two parts, 
 which match, respectively, the parts of consciousness. Divide 
 consciousness into two parts, then divide what it is aware of into 
 two parts; suppose that each of your parts of consciousness suits 
 one, and not the other, of your two parts of what it is aware of — all 
 this is necessary before there can be any possibility of incongruous 
 mismatching between consciousness and being. Therefore un- 
 easiness about this incongruity, the very motive of intuition- 
 ism, presupposes first the sharpest conceptual treatment of the 
 subjective "world," and then the flagrant reification of the re- 
 sulting abstractions. In other words, the indispensable precon- 
 dition of dialectical defense of intuitionism is an intellectualism 
 of the "vicious" type. 
 
 The first chapter of the Essai having criticized the application 
 of magnitude to consciousness, and found that psychological in- 
 tensity has nothing quantitative about it, the second chapter 
 proceeds with an analogous criticism of number, and finds that 
 psychological variousness has nothing plural about it. The mul- 
 tiplicity of material objects is number or plurality; the various- 
 ness of the facts of mind is nothing of the sort. Numerical 
 multiplicity is distinct and objective, given or thought in space; 
 subjective variousness is indistinct and compenetrating. 
 
 The medium of the facts of consciousness being lapsing dura- 
 tion, and not extension, they are never simultaneous in the same 
 consciousness. But then they cannot be counted; to count is 
 to have things together, simultaneously. That, again, is to have 
 them in space. And that, finally, is to have them as objects.
 
 46 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [116 
 
 Now, the essential nature of psychic facts is to be subjective and 
 not objective. If, therefore, you find yourself counting facts 
 within a consciousness, you are deluded; they cannot be wliat 
 you take them for; they can only be (spatial) objects, symbols by 
 which you are representing facts that are not objective, — because 
 they are subjective! — and not spatial but temporal. 
 
 This statement of the case will satisfy few people as it stands. 
 Professor Bergson is aware of this, and he will grant that such 
 alleged facts of consciousness as you distinguish and count may 
 be set in the medium of time raiher tlian in space, if time, as 
 well as space, is a homogeneous medium; but time so understood, 
 he thinks, turns into space. And time is so understood very 
 generally, without any doubt. When we sjjeak of time, says 
 Bergson, we are usually thinking of space; that is, we are thinking 
 of a homogeneous medium, a medium, therefore, in whicli psychic 
 states are aligned or juxtaposited, as things are in space, forming 
 a distinct multiplicity. 
 
 This is, of course, another aspect of wliat liergson regards as tlic 
 same vice, conceptualism, that is discussed in the first chapter of 
 the Essai. An inten.sive magnitude is a distinct concept, sharply 
 bounded; all within is the concept, all without, its other. But no 
 psychic fact is sharply bounded; it penetrates the whole conscious- 
 ness. The whole consciousness is one with it. We work (juantita- 
 tively with concepts, always, arithmetically and geometrically. 
 But then we work in space, which is enough, .says Berg.son, to show 
 that intensity applied to a psychic fact is not a magnitude, .since 
 psychic facts are not in space. So here, in the second chapter, 
 the elements which one pretends to count and add in time are, in 
 order to be counted and added — in order merely to l)e distinguished 
 — distinct concepts. Then they are not in time but in space. 
 
 The application of intensive magnitude and of numerical multi- 
 plicity to psychic facts is thus the same fallacy in two aspects, 
 the fallacy of conceptualism, the nature of which is to substitute 
 space for time as the form of mental existence. 
 
 But Professor Bergson is not altogether dogmatic in saying 
 that conceptual time is a spatialized .symbol of real time. He 
 goes on now to show how it is that the nature of real lime is 
 nothing like conceptual time. Dune, his name for real time, 
 seems a bad term for such a use; for the essence of Bergson 's 
 **duree" is change, while duration in everv other connection
 
 117] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy ^7 
 
 means just the waiting or standing still of the flow of time. Some 
 term like "lapse" seems nearer the idea. 
 
 The genetic or empirical theory of space perception regards 
 the sensations by which we succeed in forming the notion of space 
 as themselves unextended and purely qualitative; extension re- 
 sults from their synthesis, as water results from the combination 
 of two elements. Bergson remarks that the fact that water is 
 neither oxygen nor hydrogen nor merely both is just the fact 
 that we embrace the nuiltiplicity of atoms in a single appercep- 
 tion. Eliminate the mind which operates this synthesis and you 
 will at the same time annihilate the water qualities so far as they 
 are other than oxygen and hydrogen qualities; you will, that is, 
 annihilate the aspect under which the synthesis of elementary 
 parts is presented to our consciousness. For space to arise from 
 the coexistence of non-spatial qualities, an act of the mind is 
 necessary, embracing them all together and juxtapositing them — 
 an act which is a Kantian a priori form of sensibility. 
 
 This act is the conception of an empty homogeneous medium. 
 It is a principle of differentiation other than qualitative differ- 
 entiation, enabling us to distinguish (lualitatively identical simul- 
 taneous sensations. Without this jirinciple, we should have per- 
 ception of the extended, l)ut we should not have conception of 
 space. That is, simultaneous sensations are never absolutely 
 identical, because the organic elements stimulated are not identi- 
 cal. There are no two points of a homogeneous surface that produce 
 the same impression on sight and touch. So there is a real 
 (jualitative difference between any two simultaneous points. 
 This, Bergson says, is enough to give us perception of the extended. 
 But the conception of space is en outre. The higher one rises in 
 the series of intelligent beings, the more clearly the independent 
 idea of a homogeneous space stands out. Space is not so homo- 
 geneous for the animal as for us. Directions are not purely 
 geometrical; they have their (luaHty. We ourselves distinguish 
 our right and left by a natural feeling. We cannot define them. 
 
 Now, the faculty of conceiving a space without quality is not at 
 all an abstraction; on the contrary, to abstract presupposes the 
 intuition of a homogeneous medium. W^e know two realities of 
 different order, one heterogeneous, that of sensible qualities, the 
 other homogeneous, which is space. The latter enables us to 
 make sharp distinctions, to count, to abstract, perhaps even to
 
 Jk8 
 
 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [118 
 
 speak. Everybody regards time as an indefinite homogeneous 
 medium, and yet everybody regards it as different from space. 
 Is one, then, reducible to the other.^ 
 
 The genetic or empirical school tries to reduce the relations of 
 extension to more or less complex relations of succession in dura- 
 tion. The relations of situation in space are defined as reversible 
 relations of succession in duration. But succession in duration 
 is not reversible. Pure duration is the form of succession of con- 
 scious states when one refrains from reflectively setting up a 
 distinctness between the present state and former states. This 
 does not mean being wholly absorbed in the passing .sensation or 
 idea, nor forgetting former states; but it means organizing them 
 instead of juxtapositing them; they become like the notes of a 
 melody, which, though they succeed each other, are apperceivcd 
 in each other; they interpenetrate like the parts of a living being. 
 Succession, then, can be conceived without distinctness, as a 
 mutual penetration, a solidarity, an intimate organization of 
 elements each of which, representative of the whole, is distinguish- 
 ed and isolated therefrom only for a thought capable of abstraction. 
 We introduce the idea of space into our representation of pure 
 succession; we so juxtaposit our states of consciousness as to 
 perceive them simultaneously, not in, but l)eside each other; we 
 project time upon space, we express duration in terms of extension. 
 Succession then takes the form of a contiiuious line or of a chain, 
 whose parts touch without interpenetration, which ini])lies a sim- 
 ultaneous before and after instead of a successive — that is, a 
 simultaneous succession, which is a contradiction. 
 
 Now, when the genetic school defines the relations of situation 
 in space as reversible relations of succession in duration, it repre- 
 sents succession in duration in this self-contradictory way. You 
 cannot make out an order among terms without distinguishing the 
 terms and comparing the places they occupy, without perceiving 
 them, therefore, as juxtaposited. Then to make out an order in 
 the terms of a succession is to make the succession a sinmltaneity. 
 So this attempt to represent space by means of time presupposes 
 the representation of space. Of space in three dimensions, more- 
 over; for the representation of two dimensions— that is, of a line — 
 implies that of three dimensions: to perceive a line is to place 
 oneself outside it and account for the void surrounding it.
 
 119] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 1^9 
 
 Pure duration is nothing but a succession of qualitative changes 
 fusing, interpenetrating, without outUnes or tendency to ex- 
 ternaUty by interrelation, without any kinship with number. 
 Pure duration is pure heterogeneity. 
 
 No time that can be measured is duration, for heterogeneity 
 is not quantity, not measurable. When we measure a minute 
 we represent a quantity and ipso facto exclude a succession. We 
 represent sixty oscillations of a pendulum, for instance, all to- 
 gether, in one apperception, as we represent sixty points of a line. 
 Now, to represent each ai these oscillations in succession, just 
 as it is produced in space, no recollection of a preceding oscillation 
 can enter the representation of any one, for space has kept no 
 trace of it. One is confined to the present, and there is no more 
 succession, or duration, in such a representation than in that of 
 the group as a whole. A third way of representing these oscilla- 
 tions is conceivable. Like the first, it involves retention of pre- 
 ceding oscillations; but, unlike the first, it retains preceding oscilla- 
 tions in succeeding ones, instead of alongside of them; they inter- 
 penetrate and interorganize, as was just said, like tlie notes of a 
 melody. Like the conceptual representation, the intuitional 
 involves a multij)licity. A conceptual multi{)licity is distinct, 
 homogeneous, (luantitutive, numerical; an intuitive multi[)licity is 
 indistinct, heterogeneous, (jualitative,withoutanalogj' with number. 
 Now, it is the latter that characterizes reality; and the nuiltiplicity 
 that we represent concej)tually is on]\' a .symbol of the reality 
 known to intuition. 
 
 Oscillations of a pendulum measure nothing; they count simul- 
 taneities. Outside of me, in space, there is only a single position 
 of the pendulum; of past positions none remains. Because my 
 duration is an organization and interpenetration of facts, I repre- 
 sent what I call "past" oscillations of the pendulum at the same 
 time that I perceive the actual oscillation. Eliminate the ego, and 
 there is only a single position of the pendulum, and no duration. 
 Eliminate the pendulum, and there is only the heterogeneous dura- 
 tion of the ego. Within the ego is succession without .simultaneity 
 or reciprocal externality: without the ego, reciprocal externality 
 without succession, which can exist only for a conscious spectator 
 who remembers the past, and juxtaposits the symbols of the two 
 oscillations in an auxiliary space. 
 
 Now, between this succession without externality and this
 
 50 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [120 
 
 externality without succession a kind of endosmotic commerce 
 goes on. Although the successive phases of our conscious life 
 interpenetrate, some of them correspond to simultaneous oscilla- 
 tions of the pendulum; and since each oscillation is distinct — that 
 is, one is no more when another is produced — we come to make 
 the same distinctness between the successive moments of our 
 conscious life. The oscillations of the pendulum decomiwse it, 
 as it were, into mutually external jjarts: hence the erroneous idea 
 of an internal homogeneous duration analogous to space, whose 
 identical moments follow each (»thcr without interjienetrating. 
 On the other hand, the pendular oscillations benefit by the in- 
 fluence they have exerted on our conscious life. Thanks to the 
 recollection of their collective whole, which our consciousness 
 has organized, they are preserved and then aligned; in short, we 
 create a fourth dimension of space for them, which wo call homo- 
 geneous time, and which enables the penduhir movement, although 
 produced in a certain spot, to be juxtaiK)site(l with itself in- 
 definitely. 
 
 There is a real space, without duration, l)ut in which phenomena 
 appear and disappear simultaneously with our states of conscious- 
 ness. There is a real duration, wliose heterogeneous moments 
 interpenetrate, but each of which can touch a state of the external 
 world contemporaneous with it, and so be made .separate from 
 other movements. From the comparison of these two realities 
 arises a symbolic represenUition of duration drawn from space. 
 The trait common to these two terras, space and duration, is 
 simultaneity, the intersection of time and space. This is how 
 duration comes to get the illusory appearance of a homogeneous 
 medium. But time is not measurable. 
 
 Neither is motion, the living symbol of time. Like (hiration, 
 motion is heterogeneous and indivisible. Hut it is universally 
 confused with the space through which the movable pas.ses. The 
 succesive positions of the movable are in si)ace, but the motion 
 is not in space. Motion is passing from one i^osition to another, 
 which operation occupies duration and has reality only for a 
 conscious spectator. Things occupy space; processes occupy dur- 
 ation, because they are mental syntheses and are imextended. 
 
 The synthesis which is motion is obviously not a new deploying 
 in another homogeneous medium, of the same positions that have 
 been perceived in space; for if it were such an act. the necessity
 
 121] Mitchell: Studies in BergsorCs Philosophy 51 
 
 for resynthesis would be indefinitely repeated. The synthesis 
 which is motion is a qualitative synthesis, a gradual organization 
 of our successive sensations with each other, a unity analogous 
 to that of a melodic phrase. The space traversed is a quantity, 
 indefinitely divisible; the act by which space is traversed is a 
 quality, and indivisible. Again that endosmotic exchange takes 
 place, as between the melodically organized perception of the 
 series of the pendulum's motions and its distinct objective presence 
 at each instant. That is, we attribute to the motion the divis- 
 ibility of the space traversed; and we j^roject the act upon space, 
 implying that outside as well as inside of consciousness the past 
 coexists with the present. In space are only parts of space. 
 In any point of space where the movable may be considered, 
 there is only a position. You would search space in vain for 
 motion. 
 
 From the fact that motion cannot be in space, Zeno concluded 
 wrongly that motion is imj)()ssible. But those who try to answer 
 his arguments by seeking it also in space, find it no more than he. 
 Achilles overtakes the tortoise because each Achilles step and 
 each tortoise step is not a space but a duration, whose nature is 
 not addible nor divisible, and whose production therefore does 
 not presui)pose productions of j)arts of themselves, ad infinitum. 
 Their development is not construction. They are entire while 
 they are at all, and since the intersections of their terminal 
 moments with space are not at equal distances, these intersections 
 will coincide, or their spatial relations will be inverted, after a 
 certain number of these simultaneities — whether of Achilles' steps 
 or of the tortoise's — with j)oints of the road have been counted; 
 in other words, Achilles will have overtaken or outrun the tortoise 
 after a certain number of steps. 
 
 To measure the velocity of a motion is simply to find a simul- 
 taneity; to introduce this simultaneity into calculation is to use 
 a convenient means of foreseeing a simultaneity. Just as in 
 duration there is nothing homogeneous except w^hat does not 
 lapse, to wit space in which simultaneities are aligned, so the 
 homogeneous element of motion is that which least pertains to 
 it, to wit the space traversed, which is immobility. 
 
 Science can work on time and motion only on condition of first 
 eliminating the essential and qualitative element, duration from 
 time, mobility from motion. Treatises on mechanics never de-
 
 ^2 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [122 
 
 fine duration itself, but call two intervals of time equal when 
 two identical bodies in circumstances identical at the commence- 
 ment of each of these intervals, and subjected to identical actions 
 and influences of every kind, have traversed the same space at 
 the end of these intervals. There is no question, in science, of 
 duration, but only of space and of simultaneities between outer 
 change and certain of our psychic states. That duration does 
 not enter into natural science is seen in the fact that if all the 
 motions of the universe were quicker or slower, then, whereas 
 consciousness would have an indefinal)le and qualitative intuition 
 of this change, no scientific formula' would be modified, since the 
 same number of simultaneities would be produced again in space. 
 Analysis of the idea of velocity proves that mechanics has 
 nothing to do with duration. If, on a trajectory AB, points M, 
 N, P . . . such that AjM^MN=XP . . . arc reached 
 at equal intervals of time, as defined above, and AM etc. are snudler 
 than any assignable quantity, the motion is .said to be uniform. 
 The velocity of a uniform motion is therefore defined without 
 appeal to notions other than tho.se of space and simultaneity. 
 By a somewhat complicated demonstration"' the .same is shown 
 to be true of the velocity of varying motion. Mechanics neces.sa- 
 rily works with equations, and equations always express accom- 
 plished facts. It is of the cs.sence of duration and motion to be 
 in formation, so that while nuithematics can express any moment 
 of duration or any position taken by a movable in space, duration 
 and motion them.selves, l)eing mental .syntheses and not things, 
 necessarily remain outside the calculation. The movable oc- 
 cupies the points of a line in turn, but the motion has nothing 
 in common with this line. The positions occupied by the movable 
 vary with the different moments of duration; indeed, the movable 
 creates distinct moments merely l)y the fact that it occupies 
 different positions; but duration has no identical nor nnitually 
 external moments, being essentially heterogeneous and indis- 
 tinct. 
 
 Only space, then, is homogeneous; only things in space are 
 distinctly multiple. There is no succession in space. So-called 
 "successive" states of the outer world exist each alone. Their 
 multipHcity is real only for a consciousness capable of preserving 
 
 15. Time and Free Will, pp. i ig-l 19.
 
 123] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsoris Philosophy 53 
 
 it and then juxtapositing it with others, thus externalizing them 
 by interrelation. They are preserved by consciousness because 
 they give rise to facts of consciousness which connect past and 
 present by their interpenetrating organization. But one ceases 
 when another appears, and so consciousness perceives them in 
 the form of a distinct multiplicity, which amounts to aligning 
 them in the space where each existed separately. Space used in 
 this way is just what is meant by homogeneous time. 
 
 The spatial and the temporal kind of multiplicity are just as 
 different as space and the real time that lapses. Spatial multi- 
 plicity is always substituted for the temporal kind, in discourse; 
 their distinction cannot be expressed in language, because language 
 is a product of space so that terms are inevitably spatial. Even 
 to speak of "several "conscious states interpenetrating is to charac- 
 terize them numerically, and so interrelate and mutually external- 
 ize or spatialize them.'* On the other hand, we cannot form the 
 idea of a distinct multiplicity without considering, parallel to it, 
 a qualitative nuiltiplicity. Even in counting units on a homo- 
 geneous background, they organize in a dynamic, qualitative 
 way. That is the psychological explanation of the effect of a 
 "marked-down" price. The figures $4.98 have a quality of their 
 own, or rather the price has, that is quite inexpressible by the 
 formula " .$0 minus 2c. " Quantity has its quality. 
 
 In a succession of identical terms, then, each term has two 
 aspects, spatial and temporal, objective and subjective, one always 
 identical with itself, the other sj)ecific because of the unique 
 quality its addition gives the collective whole of the series. Now, 
 motion is just such a "qualifying," the subjective aspect of what, 
 objectively, is a succession of identical terms, to wit the movable 
 in successive positions. It is always the same movable, but in 
 the .synthesis, the images of it that memory calls earlier interpene- 
 trate with the actual image; the synthesis, the interpenetration, 
 is motion. Motion is real, and absolute; it is subjective, however, 
 not objective. To represent motion is to objectify it. That is 
 what Zeno did, and what everyone must do for practical purposes. 
 But Zeno's purpose was speculative, and that. Professor Bergson 
 
 16. But Bergson apparently does not see that even the word "interpenetrate" 
 falls to express anything radically different in temporal "multiplicity" from a 
 certain character of spatial multiplicity. Cf. pp. 62, 101. In this, as in all its 
 argument, intuitlonism arguing is inevitably intuitionism contradicting itself. 
 Itis Ineffable philosophy (see Journal of Philosophy, Psycholoay and Scientific Meth- 
 ods. Vol. IV. p. 123.)
 
 5i University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [12Jt 
 
 thinks, is fatally different. When you objectify motion you deny 
 it, for its essence is subjective. Strictly speaking, Zeno was 
 right in finding motion unthinkable; he was wrong only in sui)posing 
 that what is unthinkable is ipso facto inijwssible. 
 
 Evidently, the ego has these two aspects. The ego touches the 
 external world; and its sensations, though fused in each other, 
 retain something of the reciprocal externality which objectively 
 characterizes their causes. Now, in dreaming, the ego does not 
 touch the external world, and, in dreaming, time is not homo- 
 geneous; we do not measure time, in dreams, but only feel it. 
 For sleep retards the play of organic functions and modifies the 
 surface of communication between the ego and external things. 
 But we need not sleep, to be thus withdrawn from en\ir<)iiment. 
 As I compose this train of thought, the hour strikes. When I 
 notice the striking, I know some strokes have sounded which I 
 did not notice. I know even their number, four. I know it by 
 filling out the "melody," as it were, of which I am now conscious. 
 I found the "four" in a way that was not counting, at all. The 
 number of strokes has its (juality, and anytliing but four fails to 
 suit, differs in quality. A counted four and a felt four are absolute- 
 ly different forms of multiplicity, and each is nmltiplicity. Under 
 the ego of clearly -defined and countable states is the real ego 
 which it symbolizes, in which succession implies fusion and or- 
 ganization. The states of this real ego language cannot seize, 
 for that were to objectify it and fix its mobility. In giving these 
 states the form of those of the symbolic ego, language makes 
 them fall into the common domain of space, where they straight- 
 way become common and impersonal. This common and im- 
 personal ego is the social and practical ego; this is the ego that 
 uses language. 
 
 To language is due the illusion thai (lualities are permanent. 
 But objects change by mere familiarity. We dislike, in manhood, 
 smells and tastes which we call the same as those we liked in 
 childhood. But they are not the same. It is only their causes 
 that remain the same. The interpenetrating elements of con- 
 scious states are already deformed the moment a numerical nud- 
 tiplicity is discovered in the confused mass. Just now it had a 
 subtle and unique coloration borrowed from its organization in 
 developing life; here it is decolored and ready to receive a name. 
 
 This is the error of the nssociationistie school. Psychology
 
 ISfi] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy 55 
 
 cannot reason concerning facts being accomplished, as it may 
 concerning accomplished facts. The accomplishing of a fact can 
 in no wise enter into discourse. It is unthinkable in precisely 
 the .same way as motion; or rather, it is the .same case. Psycho- 
 logj' cannot presentthe living ego as an association of terms mutually 
 distinct and juxtaposited in a homogeneous medium. ^^ And as- 
 sociation is just conceptualism applied to psychology. Its prob- 
 lems of personality have to be absurdly stated, in order to be stated 
 at all. The terms of sucli problems deny what the problem posits, 
 merely by being terms or names; they name the unnamable and 
 define the indefinable. The solution is to cease thinking spatially 
 of that which i> temi>oral, to take the other attitude.'** Or, the 
 author says here, using merely a different phrase, the solution is 
 to substitute the real and concrete ego for its symbolic repre- 
 sentation. 
 
 This .second chapter of Time and Free IVill undertakes to show 
 that the successiveness of conscious states makes them uncount- 
 able. Simultaneity is indispensable to distinctness, and so to 
 number. One can count the spatialized symbols of conscious 
 states because these are not successive, but simultaneous. 
 
 P.sychic multij)licity is non-numerical in the same sense and for 
 the same reason that psychic intensity is non-(juantitative, namely 
 that it is pure heterogeneity and temporality. In the foregoing 
 report, I have .sometimes mitigated the baldness of the paradox 
 as it is stated by Hergson, by substituting the term " variousness " 
 for "nndtiplicity," in speaking of psychic facts. After all, it 
 was a thankless subterfuge — an impertinence, perhaps, since 
 Berg.son himself is frank enough to insist that psychic multiplicity 
 is as genuine multiplicity as the spatial and material sort. The 
 
 17. The living c^o is a fact-in-the-accomplishing. You cannot really discourse 
 about iti If psychology ever seems to manage this (and if this present book of 
 Bergson's seems to manage it), the ego discoursed aliout is, in that fact, proven to 
 be not the concrete and living ego at all, but the impersonal and objective one. 
 
 IS. The attitude, that is, of intuition, which we have called the temporal 
 attitude. The terms "spatial," "logical," "conceptual." applied here .so often 
 to the word "thought," are epithets of thought generally. There is no thought. 
 In any meaning of the word more specific than "consciousness." that is not logical, 
 conceptual and spatial in this Bergsonian sense. 
 
 If we cannot conceptualize our psychic facts, we cannot think them, then — the 
 meaning is the same. But if we say that anything (which we name and, in the 
 saying, define and think) is unnamable. Indefinable and cannot be thought, "we 
 contradict ourselves. The doctrine, if true, must mean something that is not a 
 self-contradiction. Does it mean that what we name and discourse about is only 
 the spatialized symbol of the psychic fact? There can be little doubt, I think, 
 that this is Bergson's meaning: but then the psychic fact is of such a nature as to 
 be symbolized: and the distinction between a symbol and a name, by virtue of 
 which a thing which can be symbolized may not be namable, requires explanation.
 
 56 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [126 
 
 difference is that the former is indistinct and the latter distinct. 
 But this diflference is abysmal — indeed, it is absolute. All the 
 power of Bergson's forceful style is concentrated on it. The point 
 is turned and re-turned in every variety of expression. At the 
 same time, the common multiplicity belonging in both concep- 
 tions is emphasized as much as their difference. The thesis thus 
 reduces to this, that two varieties of the same genus are "abso- 
 lutely different;" for we are explicitly advised, on one hand, 
 that there is a multipUcity which is distinct, and a multiplicity 
 which is indistinct; each is multiplicity. And, on the other hand, 
 one is numerical and the other *'has no analogy with number.''' 
 
 In view of the superior qualities of the mind that is guilty of 
 this unreasonableness, the conviction of sincerity which it carries 
 tortures the conscientious critic. One cannot approve of the 
 intolerant scorn of a certain book, in which Bergson's arguments 
 are vilified as vain display, mere word-play; but patience is over- 
 taxed in finding one's way through the plausibility of this chapter. 
 The thesis, certainly, may be dismissed from any consideration 
 whatever. Because of it, one knows in advance, beyond per- 
 adventure, that there is no validity in any argument in its defense. 
 Yet, in spite of all, the chai)ter oli;»llcnges study; and thorough 
 study of it cannot fail to put tiic truth in clearer light, just because 
 its error is so plausible. 
 
 Counting is synthesis, the argument goes; but a synthesized 
 succession is not a succession, it is a sinmltancity. And sinuil- 
 taneity presupposes spatial determination in the coexistent 
 elements. From Bergson's point of view, it is a radical error, 
 however universal an error, to regard the relation of simultaneity 
 as a temporal determination. In fact, there is no such thing as 
 a temporal determination; and every determination, for Bergson, 
 not only is not temporal, but is spatial. Like the argument 
 about non-quantitative intensity, this argument for non-plural 
 multiplicity (save the mark!) turns on the equation of homo- 
 geneity with space. But the i)resent argument involves its own 
 peculiar fallacy, as well, namely the fallacy which Professor Perry 
 describes'" as confusion of a relation symbolized with the relation 
 between symbols. "It is commonly supposed," Perry writes, 
 "that when a complex is represented by a fornuila, the elements 
 
 19. Present Philosophical Tendencies, pp. 2:12-4.
 
 127] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 57 
 
 of the complex must have the same relation as that which subsists 
 between the parts of the formula ; whereas, as a matter of fact, the 
 formula as a whole represents or describes a complex other than 
 itself. If I describe a as 'to the right of 6,' does any diflBculty 
 arise because in my formula a is to the left of 6? If I speak of a 
 as greater than b, am I to assume that because my symbols are 
 outside one another that a and b must be outside one another? 
 Such a supposition would imply a most naive acceptance of that 
 very * copy theoiy ' of knowledge which pragmatism has so severely 
 condemned. And yet such a supposition seems everywhere to 
 underlie the anti-intellectualist's polemic. The intellect is de- 
 scribed as substituting for the interpenetration of the real terms 
 [in an "indistinct" psychic multiplicity] the juxtaposition of 
 their symbols; as though analysis discovered terms, and then 
 conferred relations of its own. . . Terms are found in relation, 
 and may be thus described without any more artificiality, without 
 any more imposing of the forms of the mind on its subject-matter, 
 than is involved in the bare mention of a single term. 
 
 "... one may mean continuity despite the fact that the 
 symbols and words are discrete. The word 'blue' may mean 
 blue, although the word is not blue. Similarly, continuity may 
 be an arrangement meant by a discontinuous arrangement of 
 words and symbols. " 
 
 So of the simultaneity or coexistence among the conceptual 
 symbols by which successive psychic states are counted: there is 
 nothing in such a relation among the symbols to falsify the process 
 of counting as a cognitive i)rocess whose meaning is a non-simul- 
 taneous relation among the psychic facts symbolized. As was 
 noted above,'^" the quantitative determination of psychic 
 facts depends solely on an aspect of homogeneitj' essential 
 to such facts, for which aspect no better evidence is possible than 
 that other aspect which Bergson attributes to them, of hetero- 
 geneity ; for the two concei)tions, instead of excluding each other, 
 imply each other absolutely. All that is necessary, in order that 
 psychic facts should be countable, is that they should possess an 
 aspect of homogeneity. And for this, spatiality is unnecessary; for 
 spatiality is a conception distinct from homogeneity. 
 
 Bergson's identification of homogeneity with spatiality is a case 
 
 20. Pp. 42. 43. Cf. also below, p. 93.
 
 58 University of Karisas Humanistic Studies [1S8 
 
 of what Professor Perry calls "definition by initial predication. "-' 
 Space is homogeneous; therefore homogeneity is space. As if 
 the fact that homogeneity is a character of space were anything 
 against its being a character also of time or anything else. The 
 following is the justification offered by Bergson for identifying 
 homogeneity with space: "If space is to be defined as the homo- 
 geneous, it seems that inversely every homogeneous and unbound- 
 ed medium will be space. For, homogeneity here consisting in the 
 absence of every quality, it is hard to see how two forms of the 
 homogeneous could be distinguished from one another."" The 
 first clause begs the question by defining space as "the" homo- 
 geneous. Such identification of space and homogeneity is the 
 point to be proved. The second .sentence begs the (juestion again, 
 where homogeneity is supposed "here" (/. e. in the case of space) 
 to consist in the absence of everj' quality. Moreover, as we have 
 noted above (p. 43), s[)ace possesses a very determinate quahty, 
 direction, which differentiates it from other homogeneity. 
 Finally, it can be true that homogeneity is absence of cjuality only 
 on the Bergsonian assumptions tliat (juaHty is exclusively subjec- 
 tive, that homogeneity is exclusively objective, and that only the 
 subjective is positive. Now, if (]uality is not objective, judgments 
 cannot be made concerning it; but Bergson is constantly making 
 such judgments. And to distinguish, in point of homogeneity 
 or of positivity, between "the subjective" and "the ol)jective" 
 is to reify two equally abstract aspects of positive reality. The 
 quality of the homogeneous is doubtless simple, and so indefinable. 
 But Bergson nowhere shows how the honu)geneous is less positive 
 than the heterogeneous, although the thesis is the sum and sub- 
 stance of his philosophy. Lacking further light on the point, one 
 can only invoke such ex])eriences as the simple colors, for instance, 
 — or, for that matter, any simple quaUty — for cases of reality as 
 positive as any heterogeneity, and, obviously, no le.ss qual- 
 ified. And nothing seems easier than the distinction between 
 redness, for instance, and spatiality. Bergson's whole dialectic 
 rests on rerfication of such correlative abstractions as homo- 
 geneity and heterogeneity, tiuality and relation etc. in a 
 "purity" which not only is not concretely experienced, but 
 is not even capable of being conceived, because each con- 
 
 21. Op. cit.. p. 128. 
 
 22. Time avd Free Will. p. 98.
 
 129] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsoris Philosophy 59 
 
 cept drags the other ineluctably into its own definition. If 
 either space or homogeneity were indeed absence of quality, 
 they could not be distinguished from time, nor from heterogene- 
 ity, nor from anything else; in short, they could not be 
 conceived at all. 
 
 The present essay aims to report Bergson's own work with a 
 fair degree of fulness; but it is beyond my plan to follow exposition 
 with criticism point by point in the details, even, in some cases, 
 when the.se are of imp<irtant and wide implication. For discussion 
 of Bergson's contention (based on analysis of the idea of velocity, 
 as outlined above) that mechanics has nothing to do with time, 
 the reader is referred to pages 255-61 of Perry's Present Philosophi- 
 cal Tendencies. Perry shows, in this passage, that such a con- 
 tention, again, depends on "confusing the symbol with what it 
 means. To one who falls into this confusion, it may appear that 
 an equation cannot refer to time because the structure of the 
 equation itself is not temporal; because the symbols are simul- 
 taneously present in the equation. But if / is one of the terms of 
 the equation, and / means time, then the equation means a 
 temi)oral process. Furthermore, an equation may define a 
 relation, such as = , <, or >, between temporal quantities, in which 
 case the full meaning of the equation is still temporal. For 
 changes, events, or even j)ure intervals, may stand in non-temporal 
 relations, such as tho.se above, without its in the least vitiating 
 their temporality. " 
 
 Bergson's .solution of Zeno's paradoxes is another detail of this 
 chapter which is of a good deal of interest; but it applies no new 
 principle to the support of the impossibility of counting psychic 
 facts. Without a clearer conception of the commerce or inter- 
 section between time and space, which he characterizes only by 
 the name of "simultaneity," his reply to Zeno leaves the question 
 of the divisibility of time as problematic as ever. Achilles out- 
 strips the tortoise, he says, "because each of Achilles' steps and 
 each of the tortoise's steps are indivisible acts in so far as they are 
 movements, and are different magnitudes in so far as they are 
 space. "^^ They are indivisible in the same sense in which a 
 living organism is indivisible: if you divide them, no division is a 
 part of that which teas. But the trouble is that they are divisible 
 
 2.3. Time and Free Will, p 11.3.
 
 60 
 
 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [130 
 
 also in the same sense in which the organism is divisible. It is the 
 most extravagant of assumptions that analysis of a living body 
 into right and left etc.— which, to be sure, is serviceable to activity 
 upon it— is, because of its service to action, not a character of the 
 object itself. And of motion the same sort of analysis is a patent 
 fact of experience: there is an earlier, middle and latter phase. 
 The possibility of this patent fact is the crux of the problem. No 
 extant answer to Zeno is satisfactory to everybody. I shall 
 refer the reader to Professor Fullerton's treatment of the para- 
 doxes, in Chapter XI of his System of Metaphysics, iis the solution 
 which seems to me to be at the same time the most closely related 
 of any that I know, to Bergson's, and free of Bergson's error. 
 Bergson's solution has at least this element of truth, that Zeno 
 confuses the space traversed with something else concerned in 
 every case of motion. Fullerton makes a distinction between 
 any actual experience of space or time, and the jK)ssibility of 
 indefinitely magnified substitutes for such exijcrience; and shows 
 a way in which motion can be relegate<l to the former ("apparent " 
 space) and denied to the latter ("real" space) without either 
 denying reality to motion or infinite divisibility to real space and 
 time. 
 
 Bergson's diflferentiation of temporal succession from spatial 
 seriality gets all its cogency from an exclusive attention, when 
 consciousness is concerned, to the aspects of heterogeneity (quality) 
 and compenetration (continuity) which consciousness shows; and, 
 when space is concerned, to its a^spects of homogeneity (quantity) 
 and juxtaposition of parts (discreteness). As always, with correl- 
 ative abstractions, Bergson reifies them: they exclude each other, 
 for him, whereas, in truth, they imply each other, entering into 
 each other's definition so that eadi is unthinkable except by means 
 of the other. Time is continuous, Bergson insists rightly; but 
 jumps to the conclusion that therefore time is not discrete. Time 
 is heterogeneous, therefore not homogeneous. Space is discrete 
 (its parts spread out), therefore not continuous; homogeneous, 
 therefore not heterogeneous. If any demonstration is necessarj' 
 that these terms do imply each other, instead of excluding each 
 other, the case of heterogeneity and homogeneity is only the case 
 of resemblance and difference (cf. page 44). In regard to the 
 heterogeneity of space, its differentiation by way of direction 
 must not be forgotten. As for the other i)air of terms, wntiniiity
 
 131] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 61 
 
 can manifest itself only in extenso, and discreteness requires a 
 separating medium. 
 
 Wherever Bergson objects to expressing time in terms of space, 
 the real objection is to the expression of time in terms of homo- 
 geneity. This he would not only admit, but insist upon. But 
 his demonstration that homogeneity is a character exclusively 
 spatial is a petitio principii.-* Of the attempt to measure a minute, 
 he writes as follows: "I say, e. g., that a minute has just elapsed, 
 and I mean by this that a pendulum, beating the seconds, has 
 completed sixty oscillations. If I picture these sixty oscillations 
 to myself all at once, by a single mental perception, I exclude by 
 hypothesis the idea of a succession. I do not think of sixty strokes 
 which succeed one another, but of sixty points on a fixed line, 
 each one of which symbolizes, so to speak, an oscillation of the 
 pendulum. If, on the other hand, I wish to picture these sixty 
 oscillations in succession, but without altering the way they are 
 produced in space, I shall be compelled to think of each oscillation 
 to the exclusion of the recollection of the preceding one, for space 
 has j)reserved no trace of it; but by doing so I shall condemn 
 myself to remain forever in the present; I shall give up the attempt 
 to think a succession or a duration. " 
 
 Notwithstanding his acutene.ss as a psychologist, Bergson misses 
 the nature of the apperception both of sixty points on a line and of 
 sixty oscillations of a pendulum. And the impossibility of count- 
 ing psychic facts depends on this misapprehension. He misses 
 the fact that an apperception of sixty points on a line includes, 
 as an essential feature, the serial order, the here-and-there deter- 
 mination (a distinctive qualitative determination) of this spatial 
 fact. And he misses the fact that an apperception of a non- 
 spatial rhythm includes, as an essential feature, the successive 
 order, the earlier-and-later determination, of this psychic fact. 
 Now, seriality is not succession, if you like, except in so far as 
 each is order. But this is no more than to say that the two 
 orders, time and space, are distinguishable — are two, in fact. 
 It is not the slightest obstruction to conceiving each as order, and 
 as numerically determined. For there is no evidence except 
 Bergson's fundamental fallacy of "definition by initial predica- 
 tion," to show why homogeneity and order, as such, are exclu- 
 
 24. Cf. above, p. 58.
 
 62 
 
 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [132 
 
 sively spatial. The discreteness of parts of space is thinkable 
 only by the intervening spaces: space is as continuous (as "com- 
 penetrative") as time.^^ On the other hand, the compenetration of 
 time is not only nothing against its divisibility, but divisibility 
 and compenetration (in the only rigorous meaning the word will 
 bear, that is, continuity) are indispensable to each other, inverse 
 aspects of each other. You can divide only what is connected, 
 as you can connect only what is distinct. Time, then, is as 
 discrete as space. 
 
 For every instance of temporal *' compenetration," and "soli- 
 darity," its perfect spatial analogue is plain to the inspection of 
 anyone who will only look that way, to anyone whose attention 
 is not hypnotized by an ulterior purpose to its exclusion.^ Thus 
 the melodic phrase is present in each of its parts as much as, and 
 no more than, the mosaic figure is present in each of its parts. 
 The "felt four" of the clock strokes is felt as four not otherwise, 
 I think, than a four which might figure in the pattern of a frieze. 
 The same limitations, moreover, apply to such felt multiplicity, 
 whether of rhythm or of pattern. It must be a relatively simple 
 complex, to be apperceived, in either case. You could not feel 
 fifty, and the difficulty is the same difficulty in time as in space. 
 One measures a minute or a century just as one measures an inch 
 or the distance from the earth to the sun : the indispensable con- 
 dition is the continuity and homogeneity which belong to l)oth 
 quantities. 
 
 The proposition that oscillations of a i)endulum measure 
 nothing, but count simultaneities apparently means that oscilla- 
 tions, as physical facts, have no duration of their own, and so 
 cannot overlie duration as a unit of measurement. This would 
 at least be an intelligible, even if a false, representation; but, if 
 oscillations cannot measure, how can they count? What is just 
 that difference between counting and measuring, by virtue of 
 which that which can count cannot measure? Simultaneity 
 Bergson defines as the intersection of si)ace and time. Now, 
 counting, as well as measuring, implies a continuum. Measuring, 
 
 25. In order to give any meaning to the term •compenetrating" or "inter- 
 penetration (which I take to be mutually equivalent, in Uergson s use). 1 am 
 compelled to Interpret them as synonymous with the " compactness " of a continuum 
 —as synonymous, in fact, with "continuity." Bergson does not make clear how 
 these terms can mean anything else (cf. below, p. 101 .) 
 
 ^■u^^- Bergson himself, of course, is perfectly aware — in other connections — of 
 the continuity of space !
 
 133] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsoris Philosophy 63 
 
 certainly, if it is theoretically perfect, can apply only to a continu- 
 um; but counting, which obviously presupposes discreteness, 
 then requires also the indispensable condition and correlative of 
 discreteness, which is continuity. The intersection of space and 
 time thus evidently involves equal continuity and discreteness in 
 both; if they can intersect, and their intersections are countable, 
 each is both countable and measurable. The "purely" temporal 
 phenomena of our conscious life, although interpenetrating, 
 "correspond individually" to an oscillation of the pendulum, 
 which, though a "purely" spatial phenomenon, "occurs at the 
 same time with" the former. Such "endosmotic commerce" 
 between psychical and physical events seems to be decisive for a 
 real community of nature between their respective forms, time 
 and space — such, for instance, as common homogeneity and 
 continuity.
 
 Chapter II 
 
 MIND AND MATTER, SPIRIT AND BODY 
 
 Bergson regards knowledge of oneself as the optimal case of 
 knowing; oneself, he thinks, is the sample of reality which best 
 serves for an acquaintance with the nature of reality in general. 
 "The existence of which we are most assured and which we know 
 best is unquestionably our own, for of cverj' other object we have 
 notions which may be considered external and superficial, whereas, 
 of ourselves, our perception is internal and jjrofouiid."-^ It is this 
 perfect or optimal relation of identity or inwardness — which one 
 bears to oneself — that is the condition of true (j. e. intuitive) 
 knowledge. And in this case we find existence to be a i)eri)etual 
 flow of transition. That we think of our states as distinct from 
 each other is due to the fact that reflection on one's own existence 
 is, unlike the flow of that existence itself, necessarily discontinuous. 
 It is only now and then that motives arise which turn the attention 
 to the self as an object, like others, for examination. The flow of 
 change is not uniform, to be sure. It is quite imperceptible to 
 our reflective attention most of the time, but if it ever ceased, we 
 should at that moment cease to exist. Oidy the relatively sudden 
 and interesting periods of transition get our attention. Then we 
 see a new "state of consciousness" which we add to the others 
 that we have mentally strung together in a temjjoral line. So we 
 conceive of our history as the sura of elements as distinct as beads 
 on a string. 
 
 This intellectualistic view of the self eliminates the i)eculiar 
 characteristic of its reality, namely, its duration, or the flow of its 
 change. Like a snowball, accumulating its substance as it rolls, 
 duration goes on preserving itself in incessant change that accumu- 
 
 27. Creatitt Evolution, p. 1. 
 
 6i
 
 135] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy 65 
 
 lates all its past. Time, Bergson says, is the very stuff the psycho- 
 logical life is made of. "There is, moreover, no stuff more resistant 
 nor more substantial. "-'' 
 
 Life and inertia or matter are two antagonistic principles or 
 tendencies. Life is the positive and active principle; reality and 
 duration are predicable only of life. Matter is an "inversion" or 
 "interruption" of life; its value is negative to life and to reality. 
 "All that which .seems positive to the physicist and to the geomet- 
 rician would become, from this new point of view, an interruption 
 or inversion of true positivity, which would have to be defined 
 in psychological terms. "-^ Matter is a determination of reality in 
 much the same sense as that in which the reality of the Platonic 
 idea suffers diminution under the influence of the principle of 
 not-being, resulting in a world of sensiljle experience or of appear- 
 ance. Bergson points out that the real in Plato is the timeless, 
 motionless, definite idea, and the relatively unreal is the ever- 
 changing "infinite" or indefinable datum of experience, to which 
 duration is essential. Bergson reverses the Platonic metaphysics: 
 reality is the ever-changing and indefinable; rather, it is change 
 itself. "There are no things, there are only actions." 
 ". . things and states are only views, taken by our mind, of 
 becoming."'"' Tiie principle antagonistic to reality gives rise to 
 the timeless, definite concept, which is a view or appearance of 
 reality operated by intelligence in the service of action. As our 
 practical interests break up the continuum of time into discrete 
 states, so they break up the continuum of matter into distinct 
 bodies. The active antagonism of time, which is pure quality or 
 heterogeneity, and space, wliich is pure quantity or homogeneity, 
 results in the world of our experience, comprising "states" of 
 consciousness and things or objects. 
 
 The relation between life and matter in the evolution of the 
 world, Bergson represents by the figure of a generation of steam in 
 a boiler. ^^ Life, the positive principle, streams or flows, hke the 
 steam, by the force which is its very nature. In its course, this 
 vital impetus is checked, as a jet of steam is checked, by its con- 
 densation, and falls back upon itself in drops, retarding, but not 
 annihilating, the flow. But we are warned that the figure must be 
 
 28. Ibid., p. 4. 
 
 29. Ibid., p. 208. 
 
 30. Ibid., p. 248 
 
 31. /6((/„p. 247.
 
 66 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [136 
 
 corrected in that the interruption or inversion of the impetus is 
 due to a principle inherent in the impetus itself, not to an external 
 determination. If there were such an external principle, the two 
 would seem coordinate in reality, but the reality of matter is as 
 the reality of rest, which, as the negation of motion, is nothing 
 positive, yet is not a mere naught. 
 
 Sometimes, in reading Bergson, it seems very clear that reality 
 and matter must exclude each other, since one is the negation of 
 the other; and perception and conception, whose object is matter, 
 are not knowledge, because that object is unreal. Moreover, not 
 only is the stuflf of reality that psychic process which is life and 
 lapsing time, but there is no stuff more resistant nor more sub- 
 stantial. And in numerous other ways the mutual exclusion of 
 reality and matter seems quite fundamental to Bergsonisni. One 
 can never remain long in any security about this, however. If 
 Bergsonism is Platonism reversed, it is natural that the iKfuliar- 
 ities of the latter should reap{x?ar in some form. Platonic not- 
 being is much too important and too active to be denied a C(KX|ual 
 positivity with being. Over and above these "worlds, " moreover, 
 there is that one in which we live, with a third status. Perhaps it 
 is this which is most like Bergsonian matter — "nothing iK>sitive, 
 yet not a mere naught"! In tiie letter from which I have already 
 quoted, Monsieur Bergson wrote me, concerning a previous paper 
 of mine:^' "You give me the choice l>etween 'yes' and *no,' 
 whereas I cannot respond with either, but must mix them. In 
 each particular case, the 'yes' and 'no' have to be ap|)ortioned, 
 and this is just why the philosophy I adhere to is susc^eptible of 
 improvement and progress. For instance, you find that my 
 premises lead to this conclusion: 'Matter has no duration; but 
 duration is synonymous with reality; therefore matter is not real. ' 
 But, to my mind, matter has exactly the same reality a.s rest, which 
 exists only as negation of motion, yet is something other than 
 absolute nothingness. All that is positive in my 'vital impetus' 
 is motion; stoppage of this motion constitutes materiality; the 
 latter, therefore, is nothing positive, yet not a mere naught, 
 absolute nothingness being no more stoppage than motion. " 
 
 If one seek (it is not to be found, I think, in Bergson's writings) 
 an explanation of this abatement or diminution of the clan Htal, 
 
 32. Jour. Phil. Psy. and Sci. ^frth.. Vol. V, No. 22.
 
 137] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 67 
 
 this tendency toward rest, the problem turns into the very ancient 
 problem of the polarity of being in subject and object. In Platon- 
 ism, matter arises as product of an eternal antagonism between two 
 coeval principles, the Idea and Xot-being. Not-being is thus 
 something efficient, something that is capable of entering as a 
 factor, together with the Idea, into a product, the Sensible Object. 
 The truth is, therefore, that Not-being is something very real: it 
 is something because it does something. It is as real as the Idea, 
 because it is as efficient as the Idea. And in the Bergsonian 
 creative evolution there often seems just such an antagonism as 
 this, between two coordinate, efficient, and therefore real 
 principles. Thus: "The impetus of life ... is confronted 
 with matter, that is to say, with the movement that is the inverse 
 of its own."'' And: "Life as a whole . . . will appear as 
 a wave which rises, and which is opposed by the descending 
 movement of matter. "-^^ But, as with Plato, so with Bergson, 
 dubbing the hated principle "Not-being" or "Negation of Positive 
 Reality" hardly avails against the soundness of its claim to 
 positivity. And the case is not different if the "elan ritaV* is a 
 self-limited absolute instead of an eternal dualism: the philoso- 
 pher's selection of one of the two coefficients or poles of this self- 
 polarized absolute, rather than the other, to be snubbed, is arbi- 
 trary, instinctive, personal. Witli Plato it is one, with Bergson 
 the other; no logical principle determines it, in either case. 
 
 On no other point, I believe, is criticism of Bergson .so clamorous 
 or so unanimous as on his conception of matter. Without doubt, 
 his conception of matter is obscure. Time and space (terms 
 equivalent for Bergson, to life and matter) being essentially antag- 
 onistic, must essentially imply each other; and if so, do they not 
 stand in the same rank as real existences? In what sense, then, 
 is either real and the other unreal, except by an arbitrary decree? 
 The ontological obscurity has its corresponding epistemological 
 obscurity as to the cognitive status of knowledge of matter, which 
 is the crux of Bergson's philosophy. Instinct is suited to life and 
 fluration; intelligence, to matter and space. Science says many 
 things about time, but affords no acquaintance with time itself. 
 The duration of the unit of time is a matter of indifference to the 
 
 33. Creative Evolution, p. 251 
 
 34. Ibid. p. 269.
 
 68 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [138 
 
 meaning and value of any scientific formula.^ For example, if 
 this unit were made infinity, and the physical process represented 
 by the formula were thus regarded as infinitely quick, i. e. an 
 instantaneous, timeless fact, the instantaneity of the fact would 
 be irrelevant to any truth expressed by the fornuila. The only 
 truth the formula expresses is a system of relations, which remains 
 the same for any unit of time. Science knows no past or future, 
 nothing but an incessantly renewed instantaneous present, without 
 substance. The conclusions of science are given in the premises, 
 mathematically; the world of science is a strict determinism. In 
 the real world of consciousness, on the other hand, — knowledge 
 of which can only be acquaintance with it — the future is essentially 
 contingent and unforseeable, for each new phase is an absolute 
 creation, into which the wlioK- past is incorj>orated without 
 determining it. 
 
 The active principle of life Bergson de.scril>es by the phrase 
 tendency to create. Its movement is a creative evolution. Life 
 flows, or, as we have said, rolls on like a snowball, in an unceasing 
 production of new forms, each of which retains, while it modifies 
 and adds to, all its previous forms. lUit the figure of the snowball 
 soon fails. One of the most significant facts of the creative evolu- 
 tion of life is the division of its primitive path into divergent paths. 
 The primitive clan contains elementary virtualities of tendency 
 which can abide together only up to a certain stage of their devel- 
 opment. It is of the nature of a tendency to break up in 
 divergent elementary tendencies, as a fountain- jet sprays out. 
 As the primitive tendency develops, elements contained in it 
 which were mutually compatible in one and the same primitive 
 organism, being still in an undeveloped stage, become incompatible 
 as they grow. Hence the indefinite liifurcation of the forms of 
 life into realms, phyla, genera, species, individuals. It is a cardinal 
 error, Bergson thinks, to regard vegetative, instinctive and intel- 
 lectual life, in the Aristotelian manner, as successive stages in 
 one and the same line of development. They represent three 
 radically difl'erent lines of evolution, not three stages along the 
 same line. 
 
 A tendency common to all life is to store the constantly diffused 
 
 35. Cf. Perry's comment, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 235.
 
 1S9] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy 69 
 
 solar energy in reservoirs where its equilibrium is unstable. This 
 tendency, of alimentation, is complementary to the tendency to 
 resolve equilibrium of potential energj' by sudden, explosive 
 release of energy- in actions. As the primitive organism developed 
 (undoubtedly an ambiguous form, partaking of the characters of 
 both the animal and the vegetable) these two tendencies became 
 mutually incompatible in one and the same form of life. Those 
 forms which became vegetables owe their diflFerentiation from 
 ancestral forms to a preponderant leaning toward the manufacture 
 of the explosive, as the animal owes its animality to a leaning 
 toward the release of energy in sudden and intermittent actions. 
 
 The vegetable, drawing its nourishment wherever it may find 
 it, from the ground and from the air, has no need of locomotion. 
 The animal, dependent on the vegetable or on other animals for 
 food, nuist go where it may be found. The animal must move. 
 Now, consciousness emerges port passu with the ability to act, 
 and torpor is characteristic of fixity. The humblest organism is 
 conscious to the extent to which it can act freely. Actions may 
 be effective either by virtue of an excellence in the use of instru- 
 ments of action or by virtue of an excellence in adai)ting the 
 instrument to the need. Action may thus assume either of two 
 verj' different characters, the one instinctive, self-adaptive reac- 
 tion, the other intelligent manufacture. The two tendencies have 
 bifurcated within the animal realm. One path reaches its present 
 culmination in certain hymenoptera {e. g. ants, bees, wasps), the 
 other in man. 
 
 Thus the development of instinct in man has become subor- 
 dinate; human consciousness is dominated by intelligence. Hence 
 the universality of the vice of intellectuaHsm in philosophy. Man, 
 because he is dominated by intelligence, supposes intelligence to 
 be coextensive with consciousness, whereas it is only one of the 
 elementary tendencies which consciousness comprises, and the 
 one which is impotent to know the flow of reality. Spencer's 
 evolutionism affords no acquaintance with the reality of life. 
 His so-called evolution starts with the already evolved. Hence 
 all it reaches is the made, the once-for-all, the timeless. It is 
 merely a biological theory, and no advance over positive science. 
 It is not a philosophy. 
 
 Having shown the origin of intelligence in the more extensive 
 principle of life, and limited its sphere of operation to inert matter.
 
 70 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [IJ^O 
 
 the author turns to the nature of instinct. The greater part of 
 the psychic life of Hving beings that are characteristically in- 
 stinctive Bergson believes to be states which he describes as 
 knowledge in which there is no representation.^® " Representation 
 is stopped up by action."" A purely instinctive action would be 
 indistinguishable from a mere vital process. When the chick, 
 for example, breaks the shell, it seems merely to keep up the motion 
 that has carried it through the embryonic life. But neither 
 instinct nor intelligence is ever pure, and we have in ourselves a 
 vague experience of what nnist happen in the consciousness of an 
 animal acting by instinct. We have this experience in phenomena 
 of feeling, in unreflecting sympathies and antii)athies. "Instinct 
 is sympathy. If this sympathy could extend its ol)ject and also 
 reflect upon itself, it would give us the key to vital operations. 
 . . . Intuition, to wit, instinct that has l>ecome disinterested, 
 self-conscious, capal>le of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging 
 it indefinitely, leads us into the very inwardness of life ... It 
 is true that this {esthetic intuition . attains only the 
 
 individual, l)ut we can conceive an in(iuiry turne<l in the same 
 direction as art, which would take life in general for its object. "'* 
 
 In Matter and Memory, mind is repre.sented a.s varying, in its 
 states, between two limits, "pure perception," which is just action, 
 and "dreaming." The limit of action Is where the role of mind 
 ceases, the vanishing-point of knowledge,. But at the other limit, 
 dreaming, mind is in full swing, having freed it.self, by an inner 
 tension, from the obstructive influence of Ixuly. Far fn)m van- 
 ishing at this limit, as at the <»11ut, knowlod^'c is here at its apogee. 
 It is here "pure." 
 
 It is important for Bergson to recogni/e an organic connection 
 (obstructive to mintl, as he i'latonically conceives) between mind 
 and body, in order that he may establish the possibility of the state 
 of "pure perception," in which mind activity coincides with 
 bodily activity by a yielding, relaxed concurrence with the latter's 
 mfluence. Mind is here passive; its role in the life of the organism 
 ceases in this state. But it is eciually important, for the onto- 
 logical independence of mind, that at the "ilreaming" |)ole the 
 
 36. Creative Evolution,^. \~^. 
 
 37. Ihid., p. 144. 
 
 38. Ibiif.. pp. I7fi. 177.
 
 14.1] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosoplnj 71 
 
 tension which is the very constitution of its knowing should free 
 mind from bodily influence. This tension, at its ideal limit, must 
 so disconnect the mind from the body that the former becomes 
 impotent, .as Bergson says, for any efficiency in the physical world. 
 It seems to be, to all intents and purposes, a disembodied state. 
 Knowledge having then no j)ossible end in action is clearly its own 
 end. Intellection is a utility, operating in the world of matter; 
 knowledge is absolute, self-centered identity of subject and object. 
 Such, I suppose, is God's "thought of thought" in Aristotle's 
 conception. 
 
 This fluctuation of the relation between mind and body, from a 
 connection which is vital to absolute di.sconnection, is a reappear- 
 ance of the ambiguity discussed on pages 66-7. At one moment the 
 world seems a Platonic dualism; in the next, a self-limited or 
 polarized absolutism, like Fichte's or Hegel's. Whatever the 
 "ideal limit' of mind's cognitive "tension" may be conceived to 
 be, there ought to be no question of more and less, in the matter 
 of disconnectedness, strictly speaking. We do not understand 
 movement from connection to disconnection, through intermediate 
 stages, as mind is here represented to move, in its states of 
 knowledge. First mind nnist be like a certain part of matter, so 
 that it can rebound by its "tension" from a certain other part; 
 and then, as soon as it has rebounded, what would be true of the 
 thing that could do this must suddenly become untrue of it, pre- 
 sumably because of the rebound, no other reason being assignable 
 to account for the ensuing disconnection with matter. One bit of 
 matter can rebound from another, but it is then as much connected 
 with matter as before. We do not understand how mind, when it 
 has thus rebounded from one particular material attachment 
 thereby becomes materially unattached. 
 
 This is nevertheless a suggestive scheme of relation. It seems 
 to me to be marred with one radical fault : these limits of knowledge 
 are wrongly related. Their negation of each other should be the 
 opposition of antipodes, not of contradictories. The difference is 
 the radical difference between implication and exclusion. They 
 do not exclude each other, but imply each other. Each vanishes 
 without the other. 
 
 In activity, there is externalized motion on one hand and 
 resistance, or virtual reaction, on the other. Action and reaction 
 are cases of polarity ; they are necessary to each other to give each
 
 72 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [142 
 
 other form. In the cognitive subject, reaction that were 
 purely virtual, without externalizing implication, would be inde- 
 terminate dreaming; motion that were purely externalized, 
 without implication of inner virtuality, would be indeterminate 
 activity. Now, anything that is indeterminate or formless simply 
 is not, if being has any significance whatever; for formless sig- 
 nificance is a contradiction; certainly the significance of anything 
 would constitute a formal aspect of it. " Pure " matter or quantity 
 is pure nothing, in the sense that it is quantity of nothing. These 
 "pure" limits thus snuflf themselves out. And variation between 
 them is not a progression from not-])eing to being or rice rersa, not 
 a strengthening or weakening of the variable function's essence. 
 Such a notion depends on the absurdity of a not-being that can do 
 things to being, with fluctuating prei)otency in the struggle! 
 Strengthening and weakening — degree in any guise — has no appli- 
 cation to essence. In any phase, that is. knowledge is itself and 
 nothing else; it cannot be more or less itself. 
 
 That which varies concomitantly with the variations in complex- 
 ion of consciousness, is the dynamic relation V)etween sul)ject and 
 object. It may be expressed as variation of ratio between virtual 
 and real action. At each pole activity vanishes, and con.sciousness 
 w^ith it. At one pole, where the ratio is zero, it vanishes in the 
 direction of "real" or externalized action, which means that the 
 subject meets no opposing negativity, and so no object ; the relation 
 of activity is extinguished through lack of one of its terms. At the 
 other pole, where the ratio is infinity, action vanishes in the direc- 
 tion of "virtuahty." And this means that in the subject there is 
 no positivity, no subjectivity, to ()i)p<)se to universal negativity or 
 objectivity. The result is the .same extinction of the relation 
 through lack of a term. A subject term is lacking in one ca.se, 
 an object in the other. 
 
 Knowledge, for Berg.son, corresponds only to the ratio infinity, 
 of virtual to real action; all other ratios between them are les.s 
 than knowledge. To this I object that infinite virtuality is inde- 
 terminate virtuahty, which is a naught reached in the opix^site 
 way from that naught which is infinite andindeterniinateactuality. 
 Indeterminate action is nothing, and .so is indeterminate knowl- 
 edge. Identification of knowledge with any specific value of the 
 ratio of virtual to real action is not determined by any logical 
 principle. ^Mien a function varies l)etween a positive and a
 
 143] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy 73 
 
 negative pole, neither pole is an apogee where the function is 
 most itself. On the contrary, as in the variation of an including 
 angle, each pole is a limiting position in which the essential 
 nature of the variable is extinguished. Nor is it most itself mid- 
 way between the i)oles, nor at any other privileged position, for 
 it is absolutely and fully itself, and nothing else, in every phase. 
 The genuineness of a state of awareness would then depend also 
 on the genuineness of the reciprocity between the terms of this 
 dynamic ratio. Where they are not distinct, where subject and 
 object are identical, awareness vanishes through lack of a quan- 
 titative coefficient, as it vanishes at each pole through lack of 
 a qualitative coefficient. In other words, knowledge of a thing 
 by itself, like action of a thing on itself, is a cancelation of terms 
 of opposite sign, a contradiction, and the subject and object, ivhether 
 of action or of corisciousness, are essentially external to each other. 
 
 Bergson is treating consciousness as such as if it could be more 
 or less conscious, as, indeed, a conscious subject may be. That is, 
 he is treating consciousness as if it could be of a nature more or 
 less aware or cognitive; he is treating variations of phase as if they 
 were augmentations and diminutions of essence; he is treating 
 quality (piaiititatively, an error which would not have been possible 
 if he had adhered to the j)urely conceptual distinction between 
 quality and (juantity. And he is treating the variations of cog- 
 nitive complexion or phase as if they depended on variations in a 
 certain relation (the mutual externality of subject and object) 
 which is invariable and absolute — incapable, that is, of degree. 
 
 "This book," says the first sentence of Matter and Memory, 
 "aflBrms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter." Lower 
 in the same page, however, it is explained that "Matter, in our 
 view, is an aggregate of ' images. ' And by 'image' we mean a certain 
 existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a repre- 
 sentation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing, — an 
 existence placed half-way between the 'thing' and the 'represen- 
 tation. ' . . . the ol)ject exists in itself, and, on the other hand, 
 the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it; image it is, but 
 a self-existing image (pp. vii, viii). 
 
 " ... memory ... is just the intersection of mind 
 and matter . . . the psychical state seems to us to be . . . 
 immenselv wider than the cerebral state . . . our cerebral
 
 7^ University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [144 
 
 state contains more or less of our mental state in the measure that 
 we reel off our psychic life into action or wind it up into pure 
 knowledge . . . our psychic life nijiy be lived at different 
 heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it" 
 (pp. xii, xiii, xiv). 
 
 The "intersection of mind and matter" suggests a profound 
 dualism, and this Bergson acknowledges to be essential to his 
 theory. It is true that no opportunity is lost, to discount the 
 reality of matter; but the relations which it sus tarns to mind are 
 such as can exist only between terms whose reality is coordinate. 
 Perception is just that biological reactive function of material 
 organism engaged with material stimulus, which every psycholog- 
 ical text-book proclaims it to be. But the actual conscious state 
 always has memory in it, as well as perception; or rather, the state 
 as conscious is nothing but memory; perception itself, "pure" 
 perception, is action pure and simple, and not cognitive at all. 
 
 This is an abuse of the word "i)ercei)tion," but the epistemologj' 
 can show a good deal of reason. After all, our j>crceptions (as we 
 call the states of mind in which we are involved with a material 
 stimulus) mean something, necessarily. They mean i^o met lung, I 
 insist, the strangest of them. We sometimes sjjcak otherwise, 
 saying that an object of perception means nothing to us. But, I 
 submit, this is only a manner of .si)eaking. A state that meant 
 nothing, absolutely, were genuinely hUink, enii)ty, contentless; and 
 there is no difference, I take it, between a state without content and 
 a state that is unconscious. Well, then, meaning .something, as a 
 conscious state must, what does it mean? Bergson, I am sure, is 
 right in holding that to mean is to recognize, to recall, to remember. 
 This makes of every concrete perceptive state, so-called, a rudi- 
 mentary deduction, a genuine syllogism, a work of intellect. The 
 major premise is a memory; the minor is an immediate reactive, 
 sensori-motor datum; the conclusion is the subsumption of the 
 present datum under the memory. Thus: The experience to 
 which I attach the name "orange" has such and such characters 
 (remembered major premi.se); the present reactive state has these 
 characters (perceptive datum, minor premise); therefore this state 
 is a case of the orange experience. The only difficulty is the nature 
 of the process of subsumption of the present datum with the 
 memory. The present datum in its purity as present is a reaction 
 merely, an event in the physical world. Its nature owns nothing
 
 IJ^] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson*s Philosophy 75 
 
 psychical. What commerce, then, can it have with mind? To 
 call its commerce with mind "subsumption" is to give a label to 
 a problem. To call memory the "intersection" of the physical 
 world with mind seems another label, of a metaphorical sort, for 
 the same problem. 
 
 But, for the present, let us hear the doctrine. To my thinking, 
 it is Bergson's best work, and full of illuminating suggestion. To 
 the radical dualist, it should be completely satisfactory. As an 
 adherent of a certain double-aspect conception of the body-mind 
 relation, I shall eventually propose a correction and completion, 
 very radical, certainly, but all that is necessary to make Bergson's 
 treatment of this problem of the highest interest and value to 
 myself. 
 
 The body, then, in Bergson's theory, yes, the brain itself, is no 
 producer, repository nor reproducer of any element of conscious- 
 ness. The body is a center of reaction, and nothing else. "The size, 
 shape, ev'en the color, of external objects is modified according as 
 my body approaches or recedes from them, . . . the strength 
 of an odour, the intensity of a sound, increases or diminishes with 
 distance; finally, . . . this very distance represents, above 
 all, the measure in which surrounding bodies are insured, in some 
 sort, against the immediate action of my body. In the degree 
 that my horizon widens, the images which surround me seem to be 
 painted upon a more uniform background and become to me more 
 indifferent. The more I narrow this horizon, the more the objects 
 which it circumscribes space themselves out distinctly according 
 to the greater or less ease with which my body can touch and move 
 them. They send back, then, to my body, as would a mirror, its 
 eventual influence; they take rank in an order corresponding to the 
 growing or decreasing powers of my body. The objects which sur- 
 round my body reflect its possible action upon them."^^ Cut a 
 sensorj' nerve, and the reactive process is destroyed, and with it, 
 perception. "Change the objects, or modify their relation to my 
 body, and everything is changed in the interior movements of my 
 perceptive centres. But everj'thing is also changed in 'my per- 
 ception.' My perception is, then, a function of these molecular 
 movements; it depends upon them."*° "What then are these 
 movements? . . . they are, within my body, the movements 
 
 39. Matter and Memory, pp. 6. 7. 
 
 40. Ibid., p. 8.
 
 76 University of Kansas Humanistic Studi£s [U6 
 
 intended to prepare, while beginning it, the reaction of my body to 
 the action of external objects . . . they foreshadow at each 
 successive moment its virtual acts. "^' It may seem that my reac- 
 tion to a body is the same whether I perceive it visually or tactually 
 or otherwise. But movements externally identical may difTor 
 internally; there is a different organization of the same gross 
 function with different microscopic functions. The meaning has 
 ultimately an important sameness, since meaning is a function of 
 biological adjustment. But different inner f)rganizations are still 
 the explanation of different ways of perceiving what is, in all 
 biologically important respects, the same object. 
 
 Serious fault has been found^^ with Bergson's attemi)t to estab- 
 lish, by scientific research in the subject of aphasia, the ontological 
 independence of spirit, the .seat of memory, from body. But on 
 other grounds than such scientific investigation the issue of thix 
 attempt appears to me at best a futile achievement; for the result 
 is in any case the reinstatement, untouched, of that problem of all 
 radical dualism, a problem which Bergson solves only by metaph«)r 
 whose brilliance may be luniiuous itself, but has no illumination 
 for the problem, which is how reactive states are also con.scious. 
 
 There is a theory which relates consciousness and matter to each 
 each other as the opposite sides of a surface in relief. The objec- 
 tion to this "double aspect" theory that has weighed most, in 
 criticism, is that the ground of the paralleli->m between coTivexity 
 and concavity — to wit, a logical imj>lication of each other — is obvi- 
 ously absent in the parallelism of con.sciousness and matter. 
 Whatever parallelism exj)erience actually finds between them is not 
 deducible from either concept: there is nothing in the definition of 
 the sensation blue to suggest an afferent nervous current; nothing 
 in the latter to suggest a sensation. They are incommensurate. 
 But when you conceive convexity, in that fact you conceive con- 
 cavity also, and vice versa. They are related as plus and minus. 
 The objection appeals to analysis of the definition of consciousness 
 or of matter, or challenges the advocate of the theon.' to study his 
 sensation or his neural process and see if there be in either of them 
 anything of the other. 
 
 A difficulty which immediately arises when this challenge is 
 
 41. Ibid., p. 10. 
 
 *?:„ .?"^'' ^- ^- Elliots .Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson. 
 pp. 98 ff. ' ^
 
 1J^7] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy 77 
 
 accepted has been understood to be decisive against the theory. It 
 is this: Any definition of consciousness which the advocate of the 
 theory may propose as the concept to be analyzed must, in order to 
 fulfil the first requirement of logical definition, be in terms of that 
 which is not consciousness. And this seems to the critic to beg the 
 question. If you define consciousness so, he objects, you make its 
 definition imply matter; but there is then nothing of consciousness 
 in it; what you have got is only matter. That is to assume an 
 equation between them. You state the value of .r in terms of y, 
 but then you haven't got x, but only y. It is other\vise with terms 
 that really have the correlation you claim for consciousness and 
 matter. Thus you can equate convexity with concavity in terms 
 of either alone, as m = — ( — /«). In this there is no assumption. 
 But what you say of x is that it equals ay, which is something dis- 
 tinguishable from .r and whose equality to x is just the problem. 
 
 But if it be allowed that the disparity between consciousness and 
 matter must be either a distinction between two kinds of reality, or 
 else the distinction between being and not-being, the predicament 
 just described is worse for the critic of the "dou})le aspect" theory 
 than for its advocate. If the distinction is that of being and not- 
 being, whichever is not-being has an internal constitution and 
 structure by virtue of which parts and relations are recognized 
 within it: matter has physical laws and the interaction of bodies; 
 consciousness has interrelated states. Not-being, so interpreted, 
 is hardly distinguished from being. And if the distinction is within 
 being, and exhausts it, either the connotation of consciousness and 
 that of matter are referable to each other — expressible in terms of 
 each other — or el.se the distinction is only denotative, and they are 
 not distinguished as different; for difference is a discursive relation 
 between differents : rfjjfering from each other is a case of referring 
 to each other. 
 
 Exces.sive emphasis on the " ultimateness " and "absoluteness" 
 of the difference between these two concepts is just the inductive 
 cue that results in the " double aspect " theory. No one can regard 
 consciousness as not different from matter — least of all our critic, 
 who finds them incommensurable. Nay, among real things that 
 are other than each other, experience gives us no fellow to such 
 difference; for difference so utter, they that difiPer should coincide. 
 And so, in the fact of aspect, we have, indeed, in a thousand forms, 
 disparity that matches the difference between the concepts now
 
 7^ University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [1^8 
 
 before us: e. g., right, left; up, down; plus, minus; convex, concave. 
 
 We confess three obvious differences between the two equations 
 which we have taken to represent our critic's conception of the 
 relation of convexity to concavity and the relation of consciousness 
 to matter. In equation (1), which is m = — (— m). representing 
 the former relation, the same symbol m stands on both sides; in 
 equation (2) the symbols are different, x on one side, y on the other. 
 In (1) the coefficient also is the same on both sides, namely unity; 
 in (2) the coefficients are different, unity on one side, a on the other. 
 And in (1) the signs are opposite on the two sides, while in (2) the 
 sign is the same on both sides. 
 
 What do these differences mean? To begin with, is (1) mo- 
 nomial and (2) binomial.? No; in spite of the fact that there is only 
 one symbol in (1), this equation is binomial in precisely the same 
 sense as (2) is binomial; for it means that a ccrtiiin attitude toward 
 m, symbolized by the minus sign, transforms m into something dis- 
 tinguishable from m. If efjuation (1) expressed an identity, it 
 would not represent the relation of convexity to concavity, which 
 are not identical but distinguishable. IJut what is thus expressed 
 in (1) by difference of sign is expressed in (2) by difference of co- 
 efficient; for (2) means that a certain attitude toward the entity 
 symbolized by x (an attitude symbolized by the phrase "divide by 
 a") transforms x into y. In short, the connotation differs, on the 
 two sides, iti both equations alike, liut on the other hand, the deno- 
 tation is the same on both sides in each e(iuation, for such is the 
 nature of all equations, whether binomial or any other kind. Thus 
 we have identity of denotation with difference of connotation in 
 each of these equations, and they are so far homogeneous with each 
 other. Now connotation is aspect, which is determined by sub- 
 jective attitude; and attitudes are interrelated in determinate and 
 accurately expressible ways ;as, for instance, by autagonismor mutual 
 exclusion, or by any of an indefinite number of forms of implication. 
 The difference of attitude called antipodal oppositeness, or polarity, 
 is the specific difference expressed in equation (1); whereas the 
 coefficient a, in (2), expresses mere difference of attitude, difference 
 in general, including, therefore, that specific difference which is 
 expressed by opposition of sign. Thus ecjuation (1) is a case of 
 equation (2). 
 
 To sum up: The objection, stated in these algebraic symbols, was 
 this: m implies — m; x does not imply y. Express the fact of relief
 
 149] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 7d 
 
 in terms of m and you have the correlative fact in — m implied in 
 the very definition of m ; while if you express x in terms of y» you 
 have y values, and nothing but y. In short, x and y exclude each 
 other; m and — m imply each other. Our answer is that x implies 
 y just as m implies — m; for ay is an aspect of the same denotation 
 as x; and, since the specificity of every aspect of a given denotation 
 is determinable or definable by relation to all other aspects of the 
 same denotation, any one of such aspects, as x, implies, in its defini- 
 tion, every other, and so y, instead of excluding y. 
 
 Turning from such abstract considerations to empirical study of 
 the sensation, the same sort of difficulty reappears. We think we 
 find a dynamic relationship of organic to extra-organic processes; 
 this relationship presents a material aspect, which we call neural 
 activity, and a formal aspect, which we call blue, for instance. But 
 the critic objects that all this is much more than sensation, and that 
 we have read our hypothesis into our data. We must keep to the 
 pure sensation; in that, there is no neural process. So, even as, 
 before, all our attempts to propose a definition of consciousness for 
 analysis were ruled out as ))egging the question, now every sample 
 of the experience to be observed is rejected as impure. There is no 
 sensation that is pure in such a sense as our critic means, for he 
 means subjectivity that implies no objectivity. If this is more 
 than a word, it is a self-contradiction, since subjectivity is subjec- 
 tivity only in the fact of correlation with objectivity. Indeed, if 
 our critic were to observe convexity as he proposes that we observe 
 sensation, he would find no implication of concavity in it; nor 
 would he find it convex. His observation would be the convexity; 
 the two would coincide, and so would not be two. Convexity in its 
 essence,as convex,would therein no longer be the object of the obser- 
 vation. You have to get outside of your convexity to observe it 
 and its implication of concavity; just so, you have to get outside of 
 your sensation to know it; in it, you know only the object of it. 
 When convexity is said to imply concavity, convexity is just there- 
 in not "pure, "as the sensation is supposed to be. "Pure" con- 
 vexity, analogous to "pure" sensation or subjectivity, would be 
 convexity without implication of concavity. That would be zero 
 convexity, so to speak — a self-contradiction. Just so, the "pure" 
 sensation, without implication of objectivity, is a fact of conscious- 
 ness without the essence of consciousness, which is dynamic related-
 
 80 University of Kansas nu7na7jistic Studies [150 
 
 ness to an object. "Pure" consciousness is consciousness of 
 nothing, or no consciousness. 
 
 If our critic have his way, we have nothing left us to discuss. 
 Let us invite his attention to a discussable phenomenon of our owii 
 designating, and definable in some such way as this: the simultane- 
 ous belonging of an experience to an organism and to another ma- 
 terial fact, say the sky. The two belongings are distinguished by a 
 sui generis difference of direction or relational "sense," which un- 
 ambiguously determines the organism to be the subject of the 
 belonging, the sky the object. We have at least as good a right to 
 call this phenomenon by the name of consciousness, or sensation, 
 as our critic has to name that a sensation which he so defines that 
 its definition is contradicted by the naming. 
 
 Now, experience is essentially dynamic, and, for an organism, to 
 be active is to be functionally ordinatcd or focalized. For exam{)le, 
 the eye and other parts may be subservient, in dilferent ways and 
 degrees, to the hand. Then the organism is focalized into an organ 
 of touch, of striking, or whatever it may be. Kver\' other function 
 contributes as accessory to this primary function, in the organism's 
 present phase. 
 
 We have called consciousness the formal as|)ect of activity, and 
 we mean by "form" applied to activity what we mean elsewhere, 
 determinateness or definablencss. Here, in particular, it is that 
 character which depends on resistance or reactivity. Activity with- 
 out resistance would be without determination; its character or 
 content would have vanished; it would l>e activity upon nothing, 
 which, like consciousness of nothing, is nothing. So the resistance 
 that factors in activity is not extraneous to the essence of activity, 
 and consciousness and material processes imply each other not 
 only with the same logical necessity but with the .same polar 
 oppositeness of mutual relation, as the asj)ects of relief. 
 
 Consciousness is thus the inversion or reciprocal asjHJct of organic 
 activity, virtual, in distinction from externalized or real, activity. 
 Wliere attention is focalized, action is most resisted. As action 
 approaches free vent, consciousness of the object of this free 
 activity becomes more and more evanescent. At the limit where 
 action is unresisted, it and consciousness go out, vanish together, in 
 inverse "sense" or directions. Where action approaches "pure" 
 (i. e., unresisted) activity, pure positivity, pure subjectivity, con- 
 sciousness approaches "pure" (?. e., unreacting) passivity, pure
 
 151] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy 81 
 
 negativity, pure objectivity. And such "pure" action and con- 
 sciousness are pure nothing, action on nothing, sensation of 
 nothing. The vanishing of the two relations together is, in each 
 case, for lack of one of its terms inverse to the term lacking in the 
 other case. 
 
 This mutual symmetry between action and consciousness is an 
 implicate of their identity of denotation and mutual inversion of 
 aspect; and any study of the fluctuations and transitions of con- 
 sciousness, with its modulations of attention and inhibition, is 
 accordingly a study in inverse, a perfect logical function, of corres- 
 ponding modifications of organic activity; for in the play of the 
 organic functions we shall find incessant modulations between 
 their focalization and their dispersion, incessant shifting of their 
 mutual rank and of the position of primacy among them, to cor- 
 respond with the changes between margin and focus that are 
 always going on among the elements of consciousness. 
 
 The organism is structurally and functionally centralized in a 
 sensori-motor system, where the afferent activity is opposed by the 
 efferent, in a common focus, or in coincident foci, in which action 
 and reaction give form to each other. Here organic reaction has its 
 inception in a preformation, schema or design, as Bergson says, of 
 the developed activity. An intricate manifold of functions are 
 organized: interest determines the ascendency or primacy of a cer- 
 tain function, while others are subservient, being inhibited or rein- 
 forced in varying degrees. The whole complex process has this 
 character of focal, unifying organization, a unity expressed in 
 opposite aspects as the simple form of activity, on the one hand, 
 and as the simple object of perceptive consciousness on the other.
 
 Chaptp:r III 
 
 DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM 
 
 The fallacy of conceptualisin, wiiich, as Bergson conceives it, is 
 to substitute space for time as the form of mental existence, has 
 been discussed in the first chapter of Time and Free Will in the 
 aspect of applying intensive magnitude, and in the second chapter, 
 numerical multiplicity, to psychic facts. It is the same fallacy 
 which is discussed in the third chapter, in the aspect of applying to 
 them the conception of determinate, causal organization. The 
 outcome of the book is thus that the problem of freedom is just the 
 problem of conceptualism, a problem of philosophic method. 
 This book. Time and Free Will, is a manual of instruction for know- 
 ing the reality of mental existence; and its object is the practical 
 object of indicating the attitude necessary for that purpose. There 
 are two possible attitudes, that of sj)acc and that of time, or that of 
 conception and that of intuition. Tlie conceptual is the attitude 
 taken by philosophy universally, to be sure; which explains the 
 futility of all extant discussions of the "persistent problems of 
 philosophy." It is clear, for instance, Monsieur Bergson tliinks. 
 that this attitude gives rise, in an automatic and inevitable way, to 
 the problem of freedom — that is, that there would be no such 
 problem but for this false cognitive attitude; — and at the .same 
 time that by originating in this unhappy way the problem is neces- 
 sarily a pseudo-problem, cannot be stated without contradiction. 
 For when you regard mental facts in tlie spatial or conceptual way, 
 the question automatically ari.ses, how are these facts causally 
 related with other spatial facts? It is a contradiction because by 
 "these" facts you mean non-spatial facts, which, in the nature of 
 causation, can not be causally related with spatial facts, but which, 
 the question presupposes, are so related. Such is the real meaning 
 
 8g
 
 163] Mitchell: Studies in BergsorCs Philosophy 83 
 
 of the traditional problem of freedom, The solution, says Berg- 
 son, is to cease thinking spatially of that which is temporal; take 
 the other attitude. Once you have done so, the problem vanishes; 
 the causal relation is by definition a spatial relation, and there are 
 no longer two spatial terms to be related. Such determinism is 
 the associationistic conception of mind as an assemblage of dis- 
 tinct, coexistent elements of which the strongest exerts a pre- 
 ponderant influence on the others. Their organization is a 
 mechanical system, and their operations obey the laws of mechan- 
 ical causation. 
 
 As relative (i. e. quantitative) intensity is to absolute, qualitative 
 intensity, as juxtaposited multiplicity is to interpenetrating mul- 
 tiplicity, so is determinate organization to organization by free 
 evolution. The categories magnitude, number and cause apply to 
 space. The difference, for Bergson, between space and time is, as 
 we have seen, so absolute that it hardly expresses his theory aright 
 to say that to the above three characters of space three temporal 
 characters correspond. Reason seems lacking for any correspond- 
 ence whatever. This is certain, at any rate: that when intellect 
 makes time an object, and sees it greater or less, divisible and 
 regularly consequential, three things are true about the real, non- 
 objective nature of time, each of which truths manifests itself to 
 intellect, but wrongly, erroneously. Moreover, it is plainly by 
 reasoned, analytic discourse that Bergson discovers that the above 
 intellectual manifestations of time's essence are false. One dis- 
 covers, furthermore, by this conceptual process, just how they are 
 false, and corrects them with a result so conceptually precise and 
 intelligible that, instead of these three characters falsely spatial, 
 other three are determined as truly temporal. Instead of mag- 
 nitude, quality has in this way been substituted; instead of mul- 
 tiplicity, indivisible variousness. For cause, the last chapter of 
 the Essai substitutes freedom. 
 
 We should now be well prepared for divining the nature of the 
 freedom which is consciousness, or more generally, life. The 
 organization of the facts of a given consciousness is such that the 
 person is focally entire in any one of them, even as the entire body 
 functions in each of its functions (cf. page 20). The determinate 
 type of organization is analogous to the mechanically actuated 
 manikin, not to the natural man, even though those fragments 
 which build up the structure of the associationist soul are forces;
 
 84- University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [154 
 
 for these forces are mutually distinct parts of the soul, whose 
 union in it, and so whose interaction, depends on some principle 
 extrinsic to any of them and is thus wholly determined from with- 
 out. In the developmental type of organization, on the contrary, 
 the wholeness of action is its freedom, rather than independence of 
 what is not itself. Although such independence seems to belong to 
 it, as well, what Bergson is interested to emphasize about the free- 
 dom of the free action is that it is the expression of the entire 
 person. 
 
 In the domain of life, there is no identity, ft)r there is no per- 
 manence — "the same does not remain the same," as Bergson i)uts 
 it. The ego is not the same ego in any two moments; it is not the 
 same ego that deliberates from moment to moment; and two 
 contradictory feelings that move it are never respectively self- 
 identical in two moments. Indeed, if the case were otherwise.a deci- 
 sion would never be made; the e(juini)rium of the opposing feelings 
 would never be resolved. Merely by the fact that the person has 
 experienced a feeling, he is modified wlien a second feeling comes. 
 The feelings are the continually inodificti ego itself, a dynamic 
 series of states that interpenetrate, reinforce each other and result 
 in a free act by a natural evolution, because it emanates from the 
 entire person. 
 
 Such is the character of the free act, a ver>' intelligible character, 
 it would seem, a character lending itself tractably enough to verbal 
 definition, that is, conceptual definition, as a certain relation of act 
 to agent. Yet it must immediately be added that what .seems so 
 intelligible and so conceptual an explication of this "certain 
 relation" — what is contained in the two paragraphs preceding — is 
 not regarded by the author as a definition of freedom. It .seems 
 that there is a distinction between the formulation of a conception 
 on one hand, and a definition, on the other, though Bergson does 
 not elucidate this distinction explicitly, and I have had to give u|) 
 the attempt. The distinction is evidently of crucial imimrtance. 
 nevertheless. "We can now formulate our conception of free- 
 dom, "says the author, on page '219 of Time and Free Will. 
 "Freedom is the relation of the concrete self to the act which it 
 performs. This relation is indefinable just because we are free. 
 For we can analyze a thing, but not a process; we can break up 
 extensity, but not duration. Or, if we persist in analyzing it, we 
 unconsciously transform the j)rocess into a thing, and duration
 
 155] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 85 
 
 into extensity . , . and, as we have begun by, so to speak, 
 stereotyping tlie activity of the self, we see spontaneity settle down 
 into inertia and freedom into necessity. Thus, any positive 
 definition of freedom will ensure the victory of determinism. " 
 
 The attempt is therefore unwisely made by indeterminists to 
 define freedom by meeting determinists on their own ground when 
 the latter turn the (|uestion of freedom into considerations of the 
 relations of the voluntary act to its antecedents, characterizing 
 voluntary activity as essentially foreseeable before, or apodictically 
 intelligible after the fact. When indeterminists permit themselves 
 to be thus ambushed, they commit themselves to the support of 
 determinism, by accej)ting the deterministic postulate, in the one 
 case that "foreseeable" has intelligible meaning applied to psychic 
 states, which it has not ; or, in the other case, that willed acts are 
 intelligible both before and after the fact. 
 
 The determinist, that is, — to take the second case first — pro- 
 fesses that an act depends in a mechanical way upon certain an- 
 tecedents. The indetorminist contends that the same antecedents 
 could have resulted in cither of several different acts, equally 
 possible. Defenders and opponents of freedom agree in making 
 a kind of mechanical oscillation })etween two points precede the 
 action. 1 choo.se A. The indeterminists say, You have deliber- 
 ated; then B was i>ossible. The determinists reply, I have chosen; 
 therefore I had some rea.son to do so, and when B is declared 
 e(iually i)ossible, this reason is forgotten; one of the conditions of 
 the problem is ignored. Both represent the activitj' by a deliber- 
 ative route which divides. Call the point of the division O; then 
 the divisions of the forked line OA and OB symbohze the two 
 divisions which abstraction distinguishes within the continuous 
 activity, of which A is the termination. But while determinists 
 take account of everything, and find that the route MOA has been 
 traversed, their opponents ignore one of the data with which they 
 have constructed the figure; and, .after tracing the lines OA and OB, 
 which ought to be united if they are to represent the progression 
 of the ego's activity, they make this progression go back to O 
 and begin oscillating again ! 
 
 The trouble with both these solutions, Bergson says, is that they 
 presuppose an achieved deliberation and resolution, representable 
 in space by a geometrical figure. The question. Could the ego, 
 having traversed the route MO and decided on A, have chosen B?
 
 86 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [156 
 
 is nonsense: to put such a question is to aflfirm the possibiHty of 
 adequately representing time by space, succession by simultaneity. 
 It is to attribute to the figure traced the value of an image and not 
 merely of a symbol. Figures represent things, not progressions: 
 how shall a figure furnish the least indication of the concrete 
 motion, of the dynamic progression by which the deliberation 
 results in the act? The defenders of freedom say, The route is not 
 yet traced; therefore one can take any direction. To which we 
 reply, You can speak of a route, in such a connection, only after 
 the action is accomplished, and then it has been traced. The 
 determinists say, The route has been traced thus; therefore its 
 possible direction was only that particular direction. To which 
 we reply, Before the route was traced there was no direction, pos- 
 sible or impossible; there could, as yet, be no question of a route. 
 In its lowest terms this merely means: The act, once accom- 
 plished, is accomplished; and the argument of the determinists: 
 The act, before being accomplished, wa.s not as yet an act. The 
 question of freedom is not touched, because freedom is a shade or 
 quality of the act itself, not a relation of this act with what it is 
 not nor with what it can be. Deliberation is not oscillation in 
 space; it is dynamic progression, in which the ego and the motives 
 are in a continual becoming, as living l)eings. 
 
 Indeterminists, Professor Bergson says, must beware, again, of 
 arguing against the prevision of voluntary' acts. Once more, this 
 is not because prevision of a voluntary act is possible, but because 
 there is no sense in the phrase. If Paul knew all the conditions 
 under which Peter acts, his imagination would relive Peter's 
 history. He must pass through Peter's very own psychic states, 
 to know with precision their intensity and their imi)ortance in 
 relation to his other states. The intensity, in fact, is the peculiar 
 quality of the feeling itself. Now, to know all the antecedents of 
 the act would bring you to the act itself, which is their continua- 
 tion, and not merely their result, and above all in no way separate 
 from them. To reHve Peter's history is just to become Peter — 
 that is the only way Paul could conceivably "know all the ante- 
 cedents" of the act in question. There is no (juestion of predicting 
 the act, but simply of acting. Knowledge of the antecedents of the 
 act without knowledge of the act is an absurdity, a contradiction. 
 The indeterminists can mean nothing, by such a contention as this, 
 but that the act is not an act until it is acted— which is hardly
 
 157] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy 87 
 
 worth meaning; — and the determinists can mean only that the act, 
 once acted, is acted — which is no better. The subject of freedom 
 is beside the point, in such a debate. 
 
 So the question of prevision comes to this : Is time spatial? You 
 drew Peter's states, you perceived his life as a marking in space. 
 You then rubbed out, in thought, the part OA, and asked if, 
 knowing the i)art before O, you could have determined OA before- 
 hand. That is the question you put when you bring in Paul's 
 representation of the conditions (and therefore their materializa- 
 tion) under which Peter shall act. After having identified Paul 
 with Peter, you make Paul take his former point of view, from 
 which he now sees the line MOA complete, having just traced it in 
 the role of Peter. 
 
 Prevision of natural phenomena has not the slightest analogy 
 with that of a voluntary act. Time, in scientific formulae, is 
 always and only a number of simultaneities. The intervals may be 
 of any length ; they have nothing to do ^^^th the calculation. Fore- 
 seeing natural phenomena is making them present, or bringing 
 them at least enormously nearer. It is the intervals, the units 
 themselves — just what the physicist has nothing to do with — that 
 interest the psychologist. A feeling half as long would not be the 
 same feeling. But when one asks if a future action can be foreseen, 
 one identifies physical time, which is a number, with real psycho- 
 logical duration, which has no analogy with number. In the region 
 of psychological states there is no appreciable difference between 
 foreseeing, seeing and acting. 
 
 According to the mechanical law of causation, the same causes 
 always produce the same effects. But, in the region of psychic 
 states, this law is neither true nor false, but meaningless; for in this 
 region there is no "always:" there is only "once." A repeated 
 feeling is a radically different feeling. It retains the same name 
 only because it corresponds to the same external cause, or is out- 
 wardly expressed by analogous signs. It was just said that the 
 ego is not the same in any two moments of its history. It is 
 modified incessantly by the accumulation of its past. One's 
 character at any moment, is the condensation of one's past. Du- 
 ration acts as a cause; but this temporal or psychological causation 
 has no more analogy with what is called causation in nature than 
 temporal variousness has with number, or intensity with magm- 
 tude. A causality which is necessary connection is, at bottom.
 
 88 Univernty of Kansas Humanistic Studies [lOs 
 
 identity; the effect is an expression of the cause, ai> mathematical 
 functions are expressions of eacli other. But no psychic state has 
 this virtual identity with, or mathematical reducibility to, any 
 other with which it would thus be in the ''necessary" kind of 
 causal relation. Such effect is not given in the cause, but is 
 absolutely new. 
 
 Time that has passed is an objective thing, and is representable 
 by space; time passing is a subjective i)rocess, and is tiol represent- 
 able. The free act is the actual passing of time; time in its passing 
 is the very stuff of the existence of freedom. Analyze an act, an<l 
 you make it a thing. Then its spontaneity is altered into inertia, 
 its freedom into necessity. Hence any definition of freedom makes 
 it determinism. But, though the analysis of the act and the 
 definition of freedom are illusory undertakings, the fundamental 
 fact of freedom remains unassailable by any argument. 
 
 Bergson's way of vindicating free<lom is thus to find no case 
 against it. Of the positive sort, the only, and sufficient proof is 
 appeal to consciousness. Freed(»m is an immediate datum of 
 consciousness. 
 
 This is confusing to anyone who cannot follow Berg.son in lii> 
 view that subject and object, in actual intuitive consciousness, are 
 indistinguishable, identical. And this fusion of the i>ole.s of con- 
 sciousness while thenature of consciousness not merely suffers noth- 
 ingbut even attains its aj)ogee tlieroby.needs more justification than 
 Bergson has given it. Freedom is a datum of con.sciousness; but, as 
 undetermined, it nnisl, on Bergson's prin(i|)les, be consciousness it- 
 self — which, indeed, is plainly enough the leaching intended. Free- 
 dom is consciousness, then, purely subjective. In what sen.se is it a 
 datum of consciousness? If it is a datum, is it not an object, of 
 consciousness.^ It seems a case where, in order to see, you musn't 
 look, lest looking make what is purely subjective an object ! This 
 is hardly the case of the fovea and the faint star, where looking 
 loses your object; for here, looking rather produces it where no 
 object belongs, or — perhaps one should say — transforms it. Your 
 look, says Gustave Belot,^' congeals and immobilizes it, denatures 
 it like the Gorgon's stare! It is knowable, says Bergson, only by 
 being lived. It is a feeling we have. But the trouble is that, to be 
 
 43. Une Uicorie twutrllr de la liberie {Lrs donnrrs irumrdiaUs), In tlio Rftuf 
 Phtlosophique, Vol. XXIX (1890). pp. 361-392.
 
 169] Mitchell: Studies in BergsorCs Philosophy 89 
 
 known as undetermined, as freedom, to be even a feeling we have, 
 it is back upon our hands as a datum, as an object. 
 
 Before I comment in my own way on the Bergsonian view of 
 freedom, I wish to call to the attention of Enghsh readers the keen 
 reaction of this French critic of Bergson. Belot objects to the 
 modest-seeming statement that freedom is a feeling we have. 
 Neither psychology, he thinks, nor common sense, approves.*^ 
 They establish, on the contrary, a sensible difference between 
 freedom, whatever it may be, and the feeling we have of it — any 
 feeling we can possibly have. Our feeling of freedom is much less 
 variable than our freedom. " We agree not to attribute a veritable 
 practical freedom to the dreaming man, to the somnambulist, to 
 the man affected with some mental disease. Yet the man who, in 
 dream, sees himself act, sees himself free in his action; the som- 
 nambulist equally feels himself free and attributes to himself, in his 
 dream, a responsibility that we decline to put upon him, and which 
 he will reject, himself, when he wakes** . . . The furious 
 madman must ordinarily feel himself free in the accomplishment of 
 a murder for which a tribunal will not consent to punish him. The 
 fact is, it suffices, in order that we should feel ourselves free, that 
 our acts should be in harmony with our ideas and our feelings. 
 Now, that may very well be, in the cases of the dreamer, the 
 somnambulist, the nuulman. . . . They would therefore 
 feel themselves free. But they are not free; for they only act from 
 an incomplete consciousness; and a great number of elements of 
 their nornud ego, which would permit the revision, the correction, 
 the inhibition, are lacking." A glimmering of the fact of one's 
 madness is a token of the only residimm there is of freedom. "It 
 is to conserve some freedom, to perceive that one no longer is 
 master of oneself. " 
 
 Bergson is alive to all this — sometimes, as when he says that the 
 freedom of a free action is its entirety, its expression of the total 
 personality. But Belot is quite justified in charging him with for- 
 getting it, for only by forgetting it could he conceive of freedom as 
 an immediate datum of consciousness. It is, indeed, far from the 
 case that our freedom is nothing but the feeling we have of it, or 
 that it is proportional to this feeling. What is so altered by the 
 
 44. Op. cit., p. 3G8. 
 
 45. The feeling of guilt, and, bo, of responsibility and freedom, can be crushing 
 in dreams, as anyone knows who is given to appearing in dream public indecently 
 clothed, or not clothed at all. 
 
 .
 
 90 
 
 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [160 
 
 determinist habit of mind, by the conceptual attitude toward will, 
 is not at all one's feehng of freedom, but only one's interpretation 
 of it. An immediate, spontaneous feeling, being prior to theory 
 and analysis, is safe from any influence from them. In the most 
 incorrigible determinist, consciousness of the wish, other things 
 equal, is exactly the same as in the most incorniptible inde- 
 terminist. 
 
 Precise determination of will is not only not contrarj' to freedom 
 but is indispensable to it. Minimizinj,' the value of motive in 
 activity is loss, not gain, to freedom. The motive is what connects 
 our act to our whole j)ersonality, and makes it ours. Without this 
 connection, we are not free; its interrupticm is a limitation, not the 
 condition, of freedom. And indeed freedom is so limited by the 
 mass of our unreflecting impulses. Hergson is right in saying that 
 we are rarely free. IJut therefore he is wrong in saying tlial free- 
 dom is the mere spontaneity of the ego. 
 
 In a certain passage*'' Bergson describes freedom in a w;iy which 
 seems almost explicitly to deny the doctrine that it is tlie entirety 
 of will. Here it is a revolution of one part of the self against tlir 
 rest, far from emanating from the total .self. And such revolution, 
 just so far as it is purely spontaneous, or arbitrary, is irresponsible 
 instead of free. Just so far, on the other hand, as it is not arbitrary, 
 it is determined. In fact, however, appearance of arbitrariness 
 argues nothing about determination except that one is ignorant 
 about it. 
 
 In showing the absurdity of all argumentation for or against the 
 determination of a future voluntary act by present conditions, the 
 considerations offered by IJergson are ahnost perfect proof of such 
 determination. The reason we cannot think anotlier's thought 
 without disfiguring it is just that the conditions of the thought, 
 and .so of the act, are not all reunited. The act, then, is supposed 
 to depend on these conditions. Now, an absolute present is a 
 fiction; each moment of the true duration of consciousness is a 
 commencement and an achievement. Determination is nothing 
 but that intimate connection of events which prevents us from 
 isolatmg an absolute present. The case of Peter and Paul then, 
 proves only that foresight could not be adeipiate to determination, 
 not that determination is absent. The inabilitv of even the author 
 
 46. Time flwd Free W'i». p. 158.
 
 161] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 91 
 
 of an act to foresee it is no criterion of its freedom. Any free acts 
 of our o\NTi that we do foresee, we foresee as connected with our 
 present state, as ours, in fact ; it is that which makes their freedom, 
 but that supposes also their determination. This foresight, it may 
 be said, is always insufficient and imperfect. So much the worse 
 for freedom, not the better. It is thereby limited, not made. 
 There are, indeed, always events outside of us that baffle our cal- 
 culations, as well as unconscious tendencies, unperceived forces 
 within us, indistinctly developing beneath the reflective and clear- 
 seeing ego (Bergson calls this the superficial, Belot the higher ego) 
 which suddenly break out, rout it and upset it. Such civil war is 
 anything but freedom. 
 
 The uniciueness of psychic states, whether free or not, neither 
 exempts them from determination nor even differentiates them 
 from physical states. That a psychic state is not reproducible 
 Bergson shows to be because the past, incessantly accumulating 
 and modifying itself, is never the same in two moments. A clearer 
 statement of the solidarity of past and present — i. e. of determi- 
 nation — could not be made. It may well be true that in the 
 physical as well as in the moral world, every individual is without 
 counterpart; it is none the less a product of nature, for its unique- 
 ness; and, as a product of nature, determined, in its own unique- 
 ness, by nature. Among our most unique acts, the most original 
 are far from being the freest. The eccentricities of the madman 
 are more original than the sober doings of the rational, but not so 
 free. The more enlightened men are, the freer; but the more they 
 do and think the same thing. Their divergences come from their 
 ignorances and their unconsciousness, which are also the limits of 
 their freedom. It is the same with them as with nature: it is 
 when it produces monsters that it is most new, but it is then also 
 that it has been least free, most constrained in its doings. 
 
 Monsieur Bergson has not done away with psychological 
 determinism; but if he had, he would have hindered freedom rather 
 than helped it. But the problem is not purely psychological; it is 
 psycho-physical. We are at once body and consciousness. A 
 freedom which were not exerted in the outer world would be abso- 
 lutely nominal and illusory; and in order to manifest itself therein, 
 it must be accompanied by physical processes. These too, then, 
 if determinism is contrary to freedom, must be exempt from 
 determination.
 
 92 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [162 
 
 Bergson's denial of psycho-physical parallelism*^ is no gain for 
 freedom. If no external effect is essentially involved in a volition, 
 the volition is impotent — which is surely not to be free. Nor 
 would it be characteristic of freedom to have activities going on in 
 the organism without the avowal of consciousness. So far as we 
 do possess such unconscious goings-on, we are absolutely passive to 
 their operation. Psycho-physiological parallelism*^ is a condition 
 of freedom, not its negation. Some sort of correspondence is 
 necessary to the feeling of freedom, and in that case freedom cannot 
 dispense with determinism in nature, at least. One might, per- 
 haps, suppose a preestablished harmony between a contingency 
 (the moral world) and a determinism (the physical); it would be 
 easier to suppose it between two determinisms; but between two 
 contingencies — that is too much to ask ! 
 
 Suppose, then, the ability of mind to produce, veritably cause 
 physical modifications. Suppose an energ>' not subject to calcula- 
 tion. But how shall we ever know such an energy in tlie external 
 world? All that is spatial is calculable, if number is derived from 
 space. How could an energj', then, be manifest in the physical 
 universe, i. e. in space, without being thereby subjected to the 
 same forms of quantity and to the requirements of calculation? 
 
 Bergson's attempt to repudiate the problem of determinism, as 
 a pseudo-problem, results in his vacillation between the two sides 
 of the controversy. Sometimes he accei)ts the solidarity of our 
 acts with the rest of our conscious life, sometimes he denies it; 
 which is to vindicate freedom sometimes by determinism, some- 
 times by indeterminism. In the beginning he founds freedom in 
 the mutual penetration of the states of consciousness; even sensa- 
 tion is a commencement of freedom, because it embraces "the 
 sketching and, as it were, prefiguring of the future automatic 
 movements ;*9 and the free act is defined as that which "springs 
 from the self "^^ without intervention of anything strange. Then, 
 little by little, the contrary thesis takes the upper hand : the act of 
 
 .^^•. ^atter and Memory, p. x; also an article entitled Lr paralogisme paveho- 
 c5k*o?,o^*^^1'" ^^^ Revue de Metaphusique et de Morale. Vol. XI 1 (1904). pp. 
 8a5-yo8. This article is also in the Rapports et comptes rendus du deuxieme congres 
 tnternattonalde philosophic, 1905, Part I. 
 
 „ *^U v,^^'® causal relation between mental and cerebral states — i. e. Interaction — 
 would be aB alternative "condition of freedom;" but this relation is included in 
 iiergson s denial of any sort of correspondence or equivalence (such as the quanti- 
 tative equivalence of causation) between states of brain and states of mind. 
 
 49. Time and Free Will, p. 34. 
 
 50. Ibid., p. 172.
 
 163] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 93 
 
 will becomes a coup d'etat; "the successive moments of real time 
 are not bound up with one another ;^^ the dynamic conception 
 supposes "that the future is not more closely bound up with the 
 present in the external world than it is in our own inner life."^^ 
 Bergson maintains, to be sure, that soUdarity can be admitted 
 between the past and the present and denied between present and 
 future. Once the event happens it is indeed necessary that we 
 should be able to explain it, and we can always do so by plausible 
 reasons. But this connection is established after the fact for the 
 satisfaction of our discursive reason. The past is fixed, it cannot 
 not have been; it has become a thing, under the domain of the under- 
 standing and of analj^sis. Whereas, at the moment of enactment, 
 the activity is a process, and so not capable of analysis. When the 
 route is traced, we can analyze its directions and windings, but it 
 is not traced in advance of being traced ; it is the tracing that makes 
 the route, not the route that determines the tracing. You can 
 explain what is given, but there is no explaining what is not given. 
 Bergson, however, does not keep this point of view. The future, 
 we have just seen, is "prefigured" in the present. Then it is as 
 necessary to the feeling of our freedom to be able to connect our 
 future to our present in our decision, as to be able, once the act is 
 accomplished, to give account of it by reasons drawn from our 
 consciousness. Bergson's thought vacillates this way because he 
 attributes two incompatible characters to the inner life, quaUta- 
 tive heterogeneity and mutual penetration of its states. Grant 
 the heterogeneity and you have an infinitesimal dust, the very 
 denial of connection and penetration. If the states penetrate 
 there are always two near enough to each other in quality to form 
 an identical whole, while they dififer only in degree, as two very 
 near shades of the same color. But then there is a quantitative, 
 and so a homogeneous, aspect of the inner life. 
 
 61. Ibid., p. 208. 
 52, Ibid., p. 215.
 
 Chapter IV 
 
 bergson's abhorrence of determinatexess 
 
 A deep, temperamental abhorrence of determinatcness — that is 
 the motive of ]iergsonism. By admission of Bergson, any object 
 of the mind is determinate. But tlicrcfore a philosoi)hy that 
 repudiates determinatcness in the nature of rcahty is ineffable 
 because it is objectless. It is ineffable also iKH-ause any reason 
 offered for the indeterminateness of reality is determination of if. 
 The dread of determinatcness is the dread of reason, of explana- 
 tion, of interpretation — in a word, of philosojihy. \ consciousness 
 which can 'testify that we arc free' is not an objectless Cf)nscious- 
 ness; and freedom, if consciousness can testify to it, cannot be an 
 indeterminate nor an immediate (j. e. unobjectifietl) datum of 
 consciousness. Bergson's position is that it is essential to the true 
 nature of reality in itself, under whatever aspect — e. g. duration, 
 motion, freedom etc. — to be subjective; and that this is why Zeno 
 is right in finding motion, for instance, unthinkable; for "un- 
 thinkable" properlv means (though it di<l not mean, for Zeno) 
 incapable of l>ecoming objective. This to say, is it not. that the 
 true nature of reality independently of all point of view is to be 
 viewed from a certain point! It comes to this, at Icjust, if to be 
 subjective is compatible with being known in any .sense, with 
 being contained within consciousness at all. Otherwise it comes 
 to the skeptical (and self-contradictory) (hKtrine that it is 
 essential to the true nature of reality to be unknowable in every 
 sense. The former, of cour.se, is Bergson's view regarding subjec- 
 tivity.*^ 
 
 The anti-intellectualist doctrine, however, that data of con- 
 sciousness cannot be understood, conceptualized, defined, or even 
 
 5.3. Time and Free WiU, p. 83. 
 
 9U
 
 165] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy 95 
 
 named — cannot, in short, be objectified — without contradiction is 
 as important for tlie problem of knowledge as it is for the problem 
 of freedom. Professor Perry's analysis of inmiediatism*^ shows the 
 misunderstanding of what it is to conceptualize, which underlies 
 such a doctrine. The anti-intellectualist idea seems to be that the 
 concept is static, and common to more than one consciousness, and 
 universal in its denotation, and sharply discrete; and that for these 
 reasons it could nf)t correspond to what is fluid and private and 
 unicjuely particular and continuous. It is evidently the **copy 
 theory" of knowledge, which unconsciously determines this criti- 
 cism of the concept. Concepts are invalid, applied to life, becmtse 
 they are not like liiing objects! "You cannot make continuous 
 being out of discontinuities," is James's criticism." And Bergson's: 
 "Instead of a flux of fleeting shades merging into each other 
 (intellect I iKTCoives distinct and, so to speak, solid colors, set side 
 by side like the beads of a necklace."-"^ But, as Perry shows, to 
 conceptualize is nothing like this procedure. Conception is suh- 
 stitufion of one object of immediate consciousness which is conven- 
 iently abstract, for another object which is, in the circumstances of 
 the conceiving, inconvenient in its concrete fulness. All that is 
 necessary in order that this substitutional mode of consciousness 
 .should be valid and true knowledge of the object so symbolized, is 
 that the substitute should mean that object. And that it can and 
 does mean if when the object is a subjective state is no more than 
 the fact that, on Bergson's own showing,such states are symbolized. 
 For to mean is essentially to symbolize. Certainly no one concept 
 is a rounded-out exhaustive awareness, so to speak, of the symbol- 
 ized object. But this is no more than to .say that conceiving is a 
 selective and eliminating mode of consciousness — which does not 
 distinguish it from any other mode, the most immediate and 
 intuitive possible state of genuine significant consciousness being 
 essentially as much an elimination as a positing. 
 
 Since, then, a .symbol never has (just by reason of its function as 
 symbol) the same structure as the object symbolized, there is 
 nothing either in the innnobility, or the publicity, or the universal- 
 ity, or the discreteness of any concept, or in its inclusion of all these 
 characters, to prevent its validly meaning the fluid and private 
 
 54. Present Philosophical Tendencirs, Chapter X, section 6. 
 
 55. A Pluralistic Universe, p. 23<>. Quoted from Professor Perry's work, 
 named al>ove. 
 
 56. Creatire Evolution, p. .3.
 
 pg University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [166 
 
 and particular and continuous. And the real must necessarily 
 have the conceptual characters, since the characters correlative to 
 them, alone regarded by Bergson as characters of reality, have no 
 meaning except correlatively to the conceptual characters. Thus 
 "fluidity of nothing" is a phrase without meaning, The some- 
 thing which is fluid, requires, in order that fluidity as such shall be 
 a datum of experience, a coeflScient aspect of immobility. It is 
 not fluidity that flows. The immobile, snajj-shot conceptual form 
 — not only does this belong to the cataract, as the possibility of 
 photographing it proves, but this very form is indispensable to the 
 fact of flow in its genuine concreteness. As for uni(jueness, a fact 
 so unique that it is like nothing else in any respect, could not be 
 discriminated. The bare discernibleness of a datum requires a 
 basis of discrimination which is common to it and to that from 
 which it is discriminated. Continuity is analogous with unity, 
 and has no meaning if there is no asj)ect, in it, of composition, and 
 so of discreteness, as unity is nothing if not union of a plurality. 
 That the real has the aspects eulogistically favored l)y intuitionism 
 is beyond question. That it has not the comi)kMncntary con- 
 ceptual aspects is demonstral)ly false, and is an illusion of "exclu- 
 sive particularity," explainable only by that prej)ossession with a 
 certain abstract view, whose i)sychological origin has been rej)eat- 
 edly noted in this study. 
 
 Is it not truly a paradox to give the unnamable a long list of 
 names — life, consciousness, freedom, duration, intensity, (quality, 
 heterogeneity etc. — and to write a book, whether practical or 
 speculative, concerning that which will not articulate into dis- 
 course, (cf, above, p. 54-5), employing these names on every page; 
 and to conclude with a studied definition of freedom; and to avow 
 that the purpose of it all is to make the fact understood that the 
 subject-matter cannot even be named, still less defined or dis- 
 coursed about or understood? It seems improper to consider that 
 the book is about such a subject, and yet necessary to suppose that 
 it is about some subject, and impossible to assign another. If it is 
 true that, in seeming to name this subject, you are deluded; that, 
 in trying to talk about it, you fail, and name and talk about some- 
 thing else, instead, its spatialized symbol — then the conclusion is 
 perfectly vaUd that such a book is a case of this delusion. And 
 the trouble lies in that reifying of the coefficients of reality and of 
 consciousness which is the condition of a philosophy of "pure"
 
 167] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 97 
 
 intuition (cf. page 29), To suppose that genuine cases of aware- 
 ness can be either pure intuition or pure conception is to reify these 
 coefficient aspects of consciousness, which are as truly both indis- 
 pensable for the genuine concreteness of an actual case of awareness 
 as are the positive sine and cosine for the real acuteness of an angle 
 (i. e. for the angle to enclose acutely space revolved-through). 
 As the zero point of either trigonometric projection is the vanish- 
 ing-point of the entity of whose nature they are coefficient func- 
 tions, so the "purity" of either coefficient function of consciousness 
 is the vanishing of any real awareness. ^^ 
 
 If no logical reason impugns the vahdity of conceptual knowledge 
 of subjective states, no more does the pragmatic test discredit 
 such knowledge. It is as good, genuine knowledge in its satis- 
 faction of vital interest as the sensation, say, which is the object of 
 the state in question. Helen Keller, incapable of the sensation 
 blue, knows the sensation — conceptually alone, of necessity — 
 rather better, even, it may be, than she would ever have known it 
 if her life had been more occupied in the knowing of blue — and 
 other such — things; better, at any rate, certainly, than most 
 people know it. All this knowledge can be is a rationalizing of 
 "blue:" she can name it, define it, understand it, make articulate 
 and significant statements about it. The intellectual mode of 
 knowing blue is thoroughly significant. It finds blue in 
 experience, and enables the conscious subject to identify this object 
 when she comes across it. By this knowledge, blue is part of the 
 currency of Helen Keller's social commerce. It is a factor in her 
 life, with its importance and interest. Obviously, she can have 
 got it only by conceptualizing it. 
 
 Of course the proposition that consciousness is indefinable has 
 the same futility as the proposition that it is unnamable; because, 
 indeed, they have the same meaning. The meaning, we have 
 seen, is that, in trying to name or define what is fluid, private, etc., 
 there is a miscarriage; it is something else that gets named or 
 defined, to wit the representative or symbol of what was aimed at. 
 This symbol, being fixed and public, is able to lend itself to applica- 
 tion of the fixed and public name or concept. But we have also 
 seen that a name is only a symbol; an unnamable thing could not 
 be symbolized. If. by hypothesis, it is symbolized, it is therein 
 namable. 
 
 57. The anaolgy holds even in the oppositness of direction in which the evanish- 
 ment, in the limiting cases, occurs (cf. above, pp. 72, 80).
 
 98 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [168 
 
 But naming a thing is ipso facto relating it, for it is associating it 
 with something else, its name or symbol; in naming the thing you 
 have started upon the process of defining it, which is the infinite 
 process of relating it or understanding it. Exempting things from 
 naming or definition, sequestering them from the rational domain, 
 is like setting a limit to space. Sequestering from the rational 
 domain is relating to it, and that is putting into it. 
 
 If the illusion in trying to name and define mental states is due to 
 their fluidity and i)rivacy, by the same token the same treatment 
 of physical objects, which Bergson regards as valid treatment, is in 
 fact equally illusory. To be sure, physical olijects have not, 
 according to the author, the flow of duration, but they are even 
 less dependable creatures than mental states, for in every new 
 moment they are something absolutely other than anytliing which 
 was in the moment before. Besides which, in spite of this really 
 incessant instantaneity,sometliing, not explained, causes them,u{)on 
 the "intersection" of our duration with them, to appear to us to be 
 self-identical but changed, even as we ourselves. Physical objects 
 are not fixed. One finds no exceptions in nature to the universal 
 law of change; and the state of any physical thing at a given 
 moment is the outcome, in continuity, of its ])revious states, to an 
 indefinite regress. of antecedents, cjuite as the case stands with the 
 ego. In respect to duration, discriminating between physical and 
 mental is not valid. Even between organic and inorganic matter 
 or between conscious and unconscious organisms the difference is 
 only one of degree or tempo of change. But if so, it is arbitrary, if 
 one regards the present state of the conscious organism as emlKxly- 
 ing the whole of its past, to deny this of tlie stick and the stone. 
 Of course mental states are not i>ermanent; subjects, objects — noth- 
 ing is permanent that has existence. Nothing stays as it is. The 
 scope of naming and defining is not limited by pernumencc. 
 Neither, however, is the flux of nature chaos, that it should not be 
 understandable. Change, on the contrary, is the manifestation of 
 law, i n the time of Heraclitus, now, and forever. 
 
 Privacy or uniqueness is no more obstructive to understanding 
 than is change, and, like change, has no peculiar applicability to 
 mental states as matter of knowledge. Privacy or uniqueness 
 applies to physical objects of knowledge in essentially the same 
 way as it applies to mental states. Mere accessibility is, in prin-
 
 169] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 99 
 
 ciple, common for all objects of knowledge, to all subjects." But 
 there is a special reason why the subject of the state is particularly 
 disqualified, as compared with others, for knowing his state 
 immediately, i. e. intuitively; namely, that, at the time of the 
 existence of the state, when, alone, it could be known intuitively, 
 he is mainly occupied with another object of knowledge, the object 
 of the state in question. You do not, then, know a mental state 
 best by living it, or rather in living it; your knowledge of it is just 
 then at its worst, since you are then preoccupied in knowing 
 something else. The state, as an attribute of the subject, is clearly 
 one of the subject's relations, and, so, conceptually distinct from 
 either term. It cannot be at once a knowledge and the object of 
 that same knowledge. Bergson's treatment of the conscious state 
 conceives it in just that way — as if the relation were itself one of 
 its own terms, the object. 
 
 Knowing a mental state can only mean understanding it. It is 
 not a concrete datum, like the sky, but an abstraction from the 
 relationship in which the subject and the sky function as terms. 
 One does not intuitively know the subjective process of blueness, in 
 looking at the sky ; one knows the sky in that sense, but the process 
 only conceptually, by reflection. Is it any less an authentic 
 object of knowledge? Is it not itself — is it any symbol of itself? — 
 which you name and define and talk about and understand? 
 
 The practical significance of saying that one felt and now remem- 
 bers a feeling is not that the feeling is what one ever felt. Feeling 
 Number One is not an object for feeling Number Two, neither 
 during Number One nor afterward, in reminiscent feeling. So far 
 as the reminiscent state is another intuition, its object is the same 
 as that of the intuition remembered — so far. But to be reminis- 
 cent, a conscious state must reflect upon, or refer to, a conscious 
 state distinct from itself. This reflective reference is a conceptual 
 co-element together with the intuitional character of the reminis- 
 cent state. So far as the memory is reflective, consciousness is 
 oriented toward the original state itself as a fact, a process, concep- 
 tually distinguishable from the object of it. It is thus only so far 
 as conceptual that subjective processes can be objects of knowledge, 
 or, in short, be known. But if so, Bergson is wrong in two essential 
 points: in denying that subjectivity can be objectified, and in 
 
 68. Cf. Perry's analysis of subjective privacy, in Chapter XII of Present Phi- 
 losophical Tendencies.
 
 100 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [170 
 
 affirming that knowledge of subjectivity is immediate (i. e. non- 
 conceptual) or intuitive. 
 
 Any reminiscent state, like every other conscious state, undoubt- 
 edly is intuitive in a certain degree. The calmest reflection on an 
 originally affective experience is tinctured v\-ith a rudimentary 
 fluttering of the old feeling; just as, on the other hand, the most 
 violent early repetitions of a tempestuous joy or grief must relate, 
 in order to be reminiscent, to the original experience. Xo one else, 
 it may be said, can appreciate my feeling as I do, myself: this 
 appreciation is no conceptualization of that feeling. This is only 
 to say that the affective as well as the representative aspect of any 
 conscious state is unique for each subjective center of interest. 
 But privacy no more distinguishes subjectivity from objectivity 
 than does change. Every object, being self-identical, is unitjue, its 
 quality private. Inasmuch as each conscious subject is a distinct 
 center of interest as well as a distinct cognitive subject, the affective 
 value of a state of a given subject must also be theoretically unique 
 for that subject. But the state is nevertlieless objective and 
 common as well as subjective and private, since in fact it is an 
 object for understanding. My state of mind is jis accessible to 
 your understanding as your own (it may l>e more so, to be sure). 
 The understanding names the intuitive state — anybody's at all, 
 indifferently, one's own or another's — as truly as it names any 
 other relationship or process, by virtue of its conceptual coefficient; 
 and as truly relates it to the rest of the rational universe, therein 
 understanding and defining it. 
 
 The derivation of the three heterologies elucidated in the three 
 chapters of the Essai, is the inevitable consequence of the funda- 
 mental heterology of an "absolutely" two-fold universe. The 
 intensity of mental states could not be homogeneous, for Bergson, 
 the variousness that belongs to them could not be plural, their 
 organization could not be determinate, because then they would be 
 objective, by his definition of objectivity. But why may a sub- 
 jective state not be an objective state? To the conceptualist, to 
 whom these terms are abstract concepts, points of view, discursive 
 contexts, there is no reason at all. To Professor Bergson, who does 
 what he accuses conceptualism of doing, namely substituting con- 
 cepts for concrete realities, it is a contradiction, for one concrete 
 reality cannot be another. But a concrete reahty which, for a 
 certain purpose and in a certain context, one symbolizes by the
 
 171] Mitchell: Studies in BergsorCs Philosophy 101 
 
 term "subjective state," may very well be the same concrete 
 reality which, for another purpose, one symbolizes by the phrase 
 "objective state. " 
 
 We have seen that intensity which is "pure," pure quaUty, is 
 pure nothing, being quality of nothing; since, if it is quaUty of 
 anything, it has its quantitative coefficient, which destroys its 
 purity. So variousness which is "pure" heterogeneity, is not even 
 various, but "nothing" again. For it is "interpenetrating" 
 instead of "juxtaposited" or impenetrable heterogeneity. But 
 impenetrability is just identity, as Bergson remarks ;^^ it is a logical 
 principle rather than a physical law. That two bodies cannot 
 occupy the same space and time means that they would therein not 
 be two, or coexistent. Now, interpenetration in any rigorous 
 sense, any but the loose colloquial sense of small division and 
 uniform diffusion, is the mere contradiction of impenetrability or 
 identity. It means that two bodies do occupy the same space at 
 the same time. If, then, this law of interpenetration thus means 
 to require (in the subject) the relation of coexistence, and also (in 
 the predicate) to forbid it — in other words, if it is contradictory to 
 itself — mental states can obey it no better than pebbles. And, 
 finally, non-quantitative causality is a third contradiction, since 
 its "pure" heterogeneity destroys its continuity in time as well as 
 in space (cf. above, page 93). 
 
 How can any of these three pairs of heterologous principles of 
 space and time be "absolutely" different if, however different, 
 each pair have such essential community of nature that both must 
 be called by one name and thought under one category, as two 
 species of the same genus? For, in spite of all their differences, 
 they are, throughout the discussion, two kinds of intensity, of 
 multiplicity, of causation. 
 
 59. Time and Free Will, p. 88.
 
 Chaptek V 
 
 THE MYSTICAL YEARNING OF INTUITIONISM 
 
 I will conclude these coninieiils on Professor Bergson's teaching 
 by noting the mystical nature of the central idea of his epistem- 
 ology, the identification of subject and object. The yearning for 
 a more intimate acquaintance with the thing-in-itsclf, for a 
 knowledge truer and more searching than the "practical" and 
 "useful" reactive relations which we bear to our "phenomenal" 
 objects — as if such experience were unworthy the sacred name of 
 knowledge — this, the j)rime aspiration of the intuitional philosophy 
 of Bergson, reduces to a futile, if not a morbid, yearning after 
 self-contradiction. The more you know a thing "in itself," the 
 more you "internalize" your relation to it — in short, the more you 
 identify yourself with it — the less you bear any significant relation 
 to it at all, any relation, obviously, ])ut that of identity; the less, 
 notably, you bear the active and cognitive relations toward it. 
 The indispensable condition of Paul's knowing Peter is that Paul 
 should not become Peter. Things can neither be nor be conceived 
 except in some relations, any more than relations without terms. 
 If you know the thing in its relations, you know the thing as nmch 
 in itself as a thing is capable of being. 
 
 "You show," writes Professor Bergson, in the letter quoted 
 before, "that perfect intuitive knowledge, as I mean it, would 
 consist in coincidence with the object known; but that then there 
 would no longer be knowledge of any object, since only the object 
 remains. — Yet, in the case of an entirely free action, i. e. an act in 
 which the entire jierson takes part, one is altogether in what he is 
 doing; one has, at the same time, consciousness of what he is doing; 
 and yet he is not duplicated in observing his own activity, absorbed 
 as he is in the act itself: here to act and to know (or rather to 
 
 102 
 
 I
 
 173] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy 103 
 
 possess) are one and the same thing. Intelhgence, always outside 
 of what it observes, cannot conceive of knowledge without dis- 
 tinctness of subject and object. It is intelligence that propounds 
 your dilemma: 'Either there is knowledge of the object, hence 
 distinctness of object and subject; or subject coincides with object, 
 and then there is only object : knowledge vanishes. ' — But reality does 
 not accept this dilemma. It presents us, in the case cited, subject 
 and object as a single indivisible reality, action and knowledge of 
 the action as a single indivisible reality, of which intelligence 
 subsequently takes two points of view, that of object and that of 
 subject, that of action without knowledge and that of pure knowl- 
 edge. We have no right to set up these points of view of reality as 
 constitutiie elements of reality itself. " 
 
 The last sentence accuses me of doing what I am most zealous to 
 show is the foundation fallacy of intuitionism! I have been con- 
 tending that, when IMonsieur Bergson says that subjectivity cannot 
 be objectified, he is speaking as if "objectifying," instead of mean- 
 ing to take a point of view, means to alter the reality symbolized 
 l)y the word "subjectivity." (Of course the question concerns 
 concrete cases of subjectivity, the intuitionist contending that a 
 given subjective state cannot be objectified — i. e. named, defined, 
 etc.) Now, this seems to me precisely to "set up a point of view 
 of reality as a constitutive element of reality itself. " But intui- 
 tionism does even wor.se than this. Having set up this point of 
 view of reality, anil treated it in this concrete way, and worshipped 
 it as the Absolute, it snubs that other point of view, which, by the 
 very nature of the genuinelv concrete reality, is coordinate with 
 the deified abstraction, its ])rother and peer. The object has 
 "such reahty as that of rest, which is the negation of motion," 
 the absolute and positive; "yet it is not absolute naught. " 
 
 It .seems to me that Bergson virtually admits the impossibility 
 of the coincidence of subject and object when he says that instinct 
 and intellect are neither possibly pure, which is deeply true. But 
 then an action "comi)letely free" is only a limiting case, is it 
 not? — a case which ^^ould put the action out of relation and so out 
 of activity? In a certain obvious sense "the whole person takes 
 part," perhaps, in any action; but I cannot imagine any action 
 or state that could be other than a relation between object and 
 subject. I cannot see how perfect self-expression in one's act 
 makes in any degree for obliteration of ontological distinctness
 
 lOJf University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [17Jt 
 
 between agent and patient, subject and object. How may action 
 be conceived to dispense with reaction? How deny its relational 
 character, then, without denying its activity — in short, without 
 contradiction? "Perfect self-expression" distinguishes certain 
 acts, no doubt, but the distinction is ethical, denoting a teleo- 
 logical harmony, not a metaphysical identity between subject and 
 object. 
 
 To say that one is completely one's act and yet knows his act 
 again confuses a relation with one of its terms. Is it merely a 
 matter of taste to choose to say that such a state — i. e. perfect 
 absorption in one's act — is not knowledge of the act just in so far as 
 it is the act? Is it not necessary to distinguish betw^een the sub- 
 ject's relation to the act, on one hand, and to those things, on the 
 other (which are neither subject nor act) entering, together with 
 the subject, into the act? Those things, it seems to me, are the 
 object, and the act itself a relation between the subject and them, 
 a relation which wears a conscious as well as an active aspect, and 
 which, as knowledge, is knowledge of the things, not of the act, 
 not of itself.
 
 PART THREE 
 BERGSON'S GENIUS
 
 Bergson's Genius 
 
 Logical soundness is never amiss, and is notably desirable in a 
 philosopher; but Professor Bergson is assuredly right in thinking 
 that it is no measure of a philosopher's genius. One's feehng about 
 the fallacies of Spinoza and Berkeley and Kant may pale almost 
 into indifference, in the enthusiasm of following such heroic feats 
 of insight. 
 
 But then, it would seem, their greatness is their insight, and not 
 their logic, and insight therefore, after all, is philosophical genius. 
 
 \Ye have seen that this is Professor Bergson's conclusion. It 
 can be interpreted in a sense that is valid, of course: all depends on 
 the meaning of "insight." I have insisted sufficiently on the 
 reasons why I cannot think Professor Bergson's interpretation of 
 it is valid. It is a case in which the etymological and the actual 
 meaning of a word, in a certain context, differ and so give rise to 
 ambiguity. The word "intuition," etymologically, means just 
 "insight." But then it means consciousness functioning most 
 completely, least abstractly. Now, Bergsonian "intuition" is a 
 conception so far from concrete completeness that almost the 
 primary object of his philosophy is the demarcation of intuition 
 from any actual state of which consciousness is normally capable. 
 It is true that Bergson insists that consciousness, in a supernormal 
 effort, is capable of the purely intuitive act, and that in the capacity 
 for this feat of knowing lies all the hope of metaphysics. This is 
 the ground principle of Bergsonism, and I have nothing to add 
 here, concerning its merits. In a word, its fallacy is the fallacy of 
 reification. No such feat of consciousness is possible, not because 
 it is more than the limited power of actual mind can compass, but 
 because it is a contradiction, since it is consciousness without 
 object, which is consciousness of nothing. 
 
 107
 
 108 University of Kayisas Humanistic Studies [178 
 
 The Bergsonian will object that, if Bergsonian "intuition" is 
 abstract, no less abstract is intellect; and, if philosophy is insight, — 
 consciousness most complete, — the thesis contrary to intuitionism, 
 that philosophy is intellectual judgment, is a case of the same 
 fallacy that has been charged to intuitionism, and is inconsistent 
 with the admission that philosophy is essentially an insight which 
 involves more than intellect. 
 
 The answer is first, that intellectuulism, unlike intuitionism, 
 regards philosophy as indeed an abstract interest, and for that 
 reason as not separable from the living of a life which sui)ports this 
 interest in a larger total interest; but, also for that reason, as not 
 possibly identical, either with life entire or with any interest, such 
 as the aesthetic, of like abstractness with philosophy. The answer 
 to the second part of the objection is that an insight which is more 
 than intellect is not for that reason without its intellectual asi)ect. 
 Consciousness is always significant, certainly; but if it has any 
 meaning,ifit7ssignificant,itis,in that fact, intellectual. And insight 
 without meaning is a contradiction, antl is assuredly not philosophy. 
 The appearanceofincon.sistency arises from the unconscious identify- 
 ingofinsightwith intuition in the falsely reified sense. Insight in any 
 such sense philosophy certainly is not. .Vnd yet the intellectualist 
 may properly attribute the greatness of a jjliilosophy to its insight 
 rather than to its logical cogency, since cogent logic may be dull 
 and shallow and therefore not great. It is great if it is fiir-.seeing 
 and deep. There is analytic insight, as well as intuitive. 
 
 After all is said, the feeling that even sericnis lapse of logic may 
 not be suflScient to destroy the value of a great philosophy is not 
 the same as the opinion that logic is immaterial to that value. No 
 one, I dare say, — intuitionist, intellectualist or anyone else — ever 
 thought this. The genius of a great philosophy is a sui>erior 
 perspicacity in the recognition of the significance of problems, a 
 superior discernment of the problematic as such. "The earhest 
 philosophers" says Professor James,*°". . . were just men 
 curious beyond immediate practical needs, and no particular 
 problems, but rather the problematic generally, was their spe- 
 cialty." But the perspicacity which sees the meaning and bearings 
 of a problem cannot fail to attack its further interpretation with 
 a superior freshness and originality. And the interpretation of a 
 
 (JO. Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 10.
 
 179] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsoris Philosophy 109 
 
 problem, carried to the end, is its only solution. Genius in phi- 
 losophy thus also turns into superior richness of suggestion in the 
 solutions which it invents. Inasmuch as the problem-putting and 
 the problem-solving processes are continuous with each other, and 
 in this important sense one and the same thing, it should be ex- 
 pected that philosophical genius would possess both virtues, in 
 any actual instance. And no doubt this is the historical fact. On 
 any view it is suggestiveness, fertility, which is the measure of 
 philosophical genius. And it seems to the intellectuahst that the 
 possibility of philosophical fertility depends on a discursive, 
 intellectual co-implication of the parts of the realm of truth. 
 
 But although these two phases of philosophical genius — the 
 problem-putting and the problem-solving phases — have so intimate 
 a relation with each other, they can and do appear in different 
 emphases in different philosophers. The emphasis in any par- 
 ticular case is undoubtedly determined in part from without, 
 notably by the philosopher's epochal relations. Thales is greater, 
 as well as more momentous historically, in his quest of an apxyj than 
 in the consummation of the quest. With Hegel's material to work 
 upon, the emphasis in Thales' genius would have been proportion- 
 ately modified. And if Bergson has not, like Thales, unearthed 
 new problems, that is nothing, for the question of the value of his 
 work. 
 
 Indeed, the historical momentousness of a philosophy is quite 
 largely independent of its intrinsic merit in either of these senses, 
 or in any sense. Conditions which contribute to the vogue and 
 influence of a philosophy are many, some obvious enough, others 
 more recondite. The question of historical momentousness is thus 
 only partly germane to an estimate of a philosophy's own intrinsic 
 worth; and, in the case of a contemporary philosophy, is in the 
 nature of things (while the historj' is yet to be made) an almost 
 unmitigated speculation. Such speculation regarding Bergson is 
 no part of the present purpose. 
 
 One word more — before undertaking to appraise the genius of 
 Bergson — as to the motive of such an undertaking in this particular 
 essay. It is no part of the primary object of the essay. That 
 object is the very impersonal one of understanding his doctrine. 
 If logical fallacies are in any sense or degree irrelevant to the value 
 of a philosophy, it is nevertheless a method of studying a philo- 
 sophical work which is not without its value, to square it with
 
 110 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [180 
 
 logical principles. When the philosophy under criticism is 
 already a classic, the omission of appreciative comment needs no 
 apology, just because the merit of the work is beyond dispute. On 
 Platonism and on Kantism much valuable light has been thrown in 
 this severe way. In studies so occupied, disquisition on the 
 immortal inspiration of the vision bequeathed to mankind in 
 syllogisms which sometimes halt would not have enhanced the 
 value of the study. 
 
 When our philosopher is a contemporary, the case is different in 
 that then personal predilection and prejudice arc without the 
 regulation imposed by historical j)erspective; and injustice, even 
 negative or privative, either to the living philosopher or to his 
 living antagonists, has a certain huniiin imj)(>rt of which the con- 
 ditions are removed with mere temporal remoteness of the subject 
 of study, when history has placed him in a setting which includes 
 an "after" as well as a "before. " 
 
 Professor A. I). Lindsay has pointed out*^' that, in one important 
 respect, Bergson's genius is of the Kantian kind. It is capacity 
 for such interpretation of old problems that they become veritably 
 renewed. "It is a great and essential proof of cleverness or in- 
 sight," said Kant, "to know how to ask reasonable questions." 
 Now, comments Professor Lindsay (without suggesting any com- 
 parison in importance between Kant and Hergson), there is this 
 resemblance between them, that nuich of the interest of Bergson's 
 work, as of Kant's, consists in statement and exposition of anti- 
 nomies in philosoj)hy. Like Kant's, Bergson's philosoi)hy is 
 interesting because it is a new method, and, in the same sense as 
 Kant's, is a critical philosoj)hy, for it consists in finding the main 
 source of previous difficulties in uncriticized false as.sumj)tions. 
 
 Such criticism of the question ("interpretation of the problem " 
 I called it above) is just the i)roper business of the philosopher. 
 For, every question is also an unconditional assertion. Falseness 
 in this implied assertion is a case of the fallacy of "many ques- 
 tions," which, accordingly, may ho regarded as the philosopher's 
 first concern. 
 
 Bergson is a philosopher preeminently in this sense. He is a 
 philosopher also (in spite of the cavalier denial of Sir. E.Ray Lankes- 
 
 61. The PhUosophfi of licrfison, pp. 1 . 2, .i.
 
 181] Mitchell: Studies in Bergson's Philosophy 111 
 
 ter)** in that he is a man with au articulate conviction concerning 
 the nature of being and of knowledge. In the aspersion of Berg- 
 son's thought by the above writer and by Mr. Hugh S. R. Elliot,** 
 there is a rancour which, in spite of much valid criticism in 
 detail, produces an impression of ill-regulated prejudice. 
 
 This impression is no more than fairly counterbalanced by the 
 contrary enthusiasm of such whole-souled votaries of Bergsonism 
 as Edouard LeRoy, William James and H. Wildon Carr. 
 
 "There is a thinker," writes M. LeRoy, "who is deemed by 
 acknowledged philosophers worthy of comparison with the greatest. 
 
 . . . Beyond any doubt, and by common consent, Mr. Henri 
 Bergson's work will a[)pear to future eyes among the most charac- 
 teristic, fertile and glorious of our era. It marks a never-to-be- 
 forgotten date in history; it opens up a phase of metaphysical 
 thought, it lays down a principle of development the limits of which 
 are indeterminable; and it is after cool c<msideration, with full 
 consciousness of the exact value of words, that we are able to 
 pronounce the revolution which it effects equal in importance to 
 that effected by Kant, or even by Socrates. ""^^ It is a "i)rofoundly 
 original doctrine." And of endless fertility: "There is no doc- 
 trine . . which is more open, and none which . . . 
 lends itself to further extension. " Again: "... a doctrine 
 which admits of infinite development ... a work of such 
 profound thought that the least passing example employed takes 
 its place as a particular study. "^•' And so on ad libitum. 
 
 These are the glowing words of an ardent disciple (even though 
 not a pupil) and may be expected to be not, after all, altogether 
 regulated by a "full consciousness of the exact value of words." 
 Such i)hrases as "worthy of comparison with the greatest," 
 "beyond any doubt," "by common consent," are pleasantly 
 vague, and should not offend any judgment that is not literal in 
 season and out of season. As to the Bergsonian "revolution," it 
 should offend no one at all who can put up with an expression of 
 purely speculative relish. So far, on the other hand, as this revo- 
 lution is accomplished fact in the prime of our philosopher's middle 
 age, the mention of Socrates and Kant does savour of the 
 ornate ! 
 
 62. Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson, pp. vii, viii. 
 
 (53. Op. cit., passing. 
 
 64. The New Philosophy of Henri Bergson, pp. 1 and 2. 
 
 05. Ibid., pp. 126. 230.
 
 112 University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [182 
 
 Bergson is at least preeminent over all other living philosophers 
 as the expression of a very revolutionary Zeitgeist. The gener- 
 ation of Taine and Renan (I^Roy goes on to say)was characterized 
 by the positivistic presumption that any object whatever could be 
 'inserted in the thread of one and the same unbroken connection. ' 
 But rationalistic arrogance has never failed to arouse an answer- 
 ing voice of protest and dissent; and of our own generation such 
 anti-intellectualism is one of the controlling ideas. It is primarily 
 the reactionary conviction that the analytic method of philosophy 
 is abstract and empty. It is, says I-eRoy, a demand for "complete 
 experience, anxious to neglect no aspect of being nor any resource 
 of mind. " "Everything is regarded from the point of view of life, 
 and there is a tendency more and more to recognize the primacy of 
 spiritual activity." "That the attitude and fundamenUil pro- 
 cedure of this new spirit are in no way a return to skepticism or a 
 reaction against thought cannot be better demonstrated than by 
 this resurrection of metaphysics, this renaissance of idealism, 
 which is certainly one of the most distinctive features of our 
 epoch." "But . . . we wish to think with the whole of 
 thought, and go to the truth with the whole of our soul . . . 
 And what is that, really, but realism? By realism I mean the gift 
 of ourselves to reality, the work of concrete realization . . 
 to live what we think and think what we live. But that is posi- 
 tivism, you will say; certainly it is positivism. But how changed! 
 For, from considering as positive only that which can be an object 
 of sensation or calculation, we begin by treating the great spiritual 
 realities with this title. " 
 
 "A new philosophy was retjuired to answer this new way of looking 
 at things. Already, in 1867, Ravais.son, in his celebrated Report, 
 wrote these prophetic lines: 'Many signs permit us to forsee in 
 the near future a philosophical epoch of which the general character 
 will be the predominance of what may be called spiritualist realism 
 or positivism, having as generating principle the consciousness 
 which the mind has in itself of an existence recognized as being the 
 source and support of every other existence, being none other 
 than its action. ' 
 
 ". . . What Ravaisson had only anticipated, Mr. Bergson 
 himself accomplishes, with a precision which gives body to the 
 impalpable and floating breath of first inspiration, with a depth 
 which renews both })roof and theses alike, with a creative originality
 
 183] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy 113 
 
 which prevents the critic who is anxious for justice and precision 
 from insisting on any researches estabhshing connection of 
 thought." 
 
 "... Mr. Bergson has contributed more than anyone else 
 to awaken the very tendencies of the milieu in which his new phi- 
 losophy is produced, to determine them and make them become 
 conscious of themselves. "^ 
 
 In the new and significant relation which LeRoy and others find 
 in Bergson to motives of thought so distinct as idealism, reaUsm, 
 and positivism, he is a writer of the fertility of genius; in the skill 
 of his transfusion of these motives into a type of conception under- 
 lying a very deep and widely extended tendency of the age, he is 
 the foremost expression of that tendency. In a very limited way, 
 only, can such enthusiasm as LeRoy 's, in a mind of his excellent 
 discernment, be reasonably discounted. Trimmed of all its 
 abounding fervours its fighting weight is still sufficiently impres- 
 sive: how resonant to motives and convictions of actually con- 
 trolling interest that mind must be which can elicit such response, 
 needs no better proof than the response itself. No one else is 
 so well attuned as Bergson to that demand for complete experience 
 which, if anything, is the spirit of our time. No one else has 
 carried so far in theory the possibilities of an intense instinctive 
 living, as the answer to the riddle of the universe. What can be 
 said for instinct as an organ of philosophy, Bergson has said. 
 
 All philosophers of immediacy hold Bergson as chief. Carr, like 
 LeRoy, thinks Bergson's doctrine as momentously original as 
 those of the greatest classics. "Great scientific discoveries," he 
 writes,*' "are often so simple that the greatest wonder about them 
 is that humanity has had to wait so long for them. " Thus with 
 Berkeley's ''esse est percipi'' and Kant's autonomy of the intel- 
 lectual categories. And equally so with Bergson's interpreta- 
 tion of reality as life, "living creative evolution," as distinct 
 both from solid matter and thinking mind. 
 
 James, while others find quite determinate differences between 
 him and Bergson, was far less cognizant, himself, of differences 
 than of agreement. He was one of the keenest of Bergsonians, 
 and regarded himself, certainly with a great deal of genial modesty, 
 as a follower, a disciple. "... if I had not read Bergson," 
 
 66. Op. ctr.pp. 128 ff. 
 
 67. Henri Bergson: The Philosophy of Change, p. 12.
 
 llJf University of Kansas Humanistic Studies [18j^ 
 
 he says/8 "I should probably still be blackening endless pages of 
 paper privately, in the hope of making ends meet that were never 
 meant to meet . . . It is certain that without the confidence 
 which being able to lean on Bergson's authority gives me, I should 
 never have ventured to urge these particular views of 
 mine ... In my opinion he has killed intellectualism 
 definitively and without hope of recovery. " 
 
 The quantity and quality of the study of Bergson's problems 
 by others, which his own treatment of them has stinmlated, is 
 already an enviable monument to that best quality of philosophic 
 genius in his work, its fertihty of suggestion. Speaking, as the 
 present writer must, from the point of view of critical reaction, 
 the value of Bergson is indeed incalculable. This is no conven- 
 tional phrase. His theoretical opponent is almost inclined to 
 feel that the stimulus which Bergson's lucid exfwsition affords, to 
 a mind of contrary conviction, to understand itself, nmst be a 
 more precious good even than the (juickening which his followers 
 so eloquently confess. 
 
 The fact is that this eloquence is always more than eloquence; 
 it is a fervour almost like religious fervour. Witness the words 
 just (|uoted from James. Ever>' true Bergsonian testifies in the 
 same tone. Thus l^'Roy:*^" "Mr. Bergson's readers will ujidergo 
 at almost every page they read an intense and singular experience. 
 The curtain drawn between ourselves and reality, enveloping 
 everything, including ourselves, in it.s illusive folds, seems of a 
 sudden to fall, dissipated by eucliantment, and display to the mind 
 depths of light till then undreamt, in which reality it.self. contem- 
 plated face to face for the first time, stands fully revealed. The 
 revelation is overpowering, and, once vouch.safed, will never after- 
 wards be forgotten. 
 
 "Nothing can convey to the reader the effects of tliis direct and 
 intimate mental vision. Everything which he thought he knew 
 already finds new birth and vigor in the clear light of morning; on 
 all hands, in the glow of dawn, new intuitions spring up and open 
 out; we feel them big with infinite consequences, heavy and 
 saturated with life. Each of them is no sooner blown than it 
 appears fertile forever. And yet there is nothing paradoxical or 
 
 68. A Pluralistic Uniecrsr. pp. •_M4. lm.'S. 
 (>». Op. f?7., pp. .-?, 4. 5. (i.
 
 ]85] Mitchell: Studies in Bergsons Philosophy 115 
 
 disturbing in the novelty. It is a reply to our expectation, an 
 answer to some dim hope. . . . 
 
 ... whether, in the long run, we each of us give or 
 refuse complete or jjartial adhesion, all of us at least have received 
 a regenerating shock, an internal upheaval . . . henceforth 
 a new leaven works and ferments in us; we shall no longer think as 
 we used to think. " As for the attitude of mind proper to bring to 
 the reading of Bergson, "where the end is to understand rather 
 than to judge, criticism ought to take second place. It is more 
 profitable to attempt to feel oneself into the heart of the teaching, 
 to relive its genesis, to perceive the principle of organic unity, to 
 come at the mainspring. Let our reading be a course of meditation 
 which we live. " 
 
 And Gaston Rageot: "... the reading of a work of 
 Bergson's requires at the very beginning a sort of inner catastrophe; 
 not everyone is capable of such a logical revolution."^" A little 
 further on he speaks of this preparation of the mind to receive the 
 Bergsonian doctrine as " cette volte-face psychologique. " 
 
 Conversion to Bergsonism, indeed, suggests religious conversion. 
 Compare James' words with the above. "... if, as Bergson 
 shows, (the conceptual or discursive form of reality] cannot even 
 pretend to reveal anything of what life's inner nature is or ought 
 to be; why, then we can turn a deaf ear to its accusations. The 
 resolve to turn the deaf ear is the inner crisis or 'catastrophe' of 
 which [M. Rageot] spoke . . . [This] comes very hard. It is 
 putting off our proud maturity of mind and becoming again as 
 foolish little children in the eyes of reason. But difficult as such a 
 revolution is, there is no other way, I believe, to the possession of 
 reality,"^' 
 
 Is not this experience very suggestive of the "regeneration" of 
 Christianity? I think it is, indeed; and I think this fact is sugges- 
 tive of the essential nature of Bergsonism. One may turn a deaf 
 ear to reason, one may execute a volte-face psychologique; but, 
 whatever the rewards, it seems unHkely (to the unregenerate, of 
 course!) that among them will be included a better comprehension 
 of the meaning of reality. 
 
 70. Revue Philosophigue, Ann. .32, Xo. 7 (July 1907). p. 85. 
 
 71. Op. ct7.. pp. 272-3.
 
 ^i