That much being established, it still remains to explain why rationalism is linked to the idea of an exclusively quantitative science, or more accurately, why the latter proceeds from the former; and in this connection it must be recognized that there is a considerable element of truth in the analysis which Bergson applies to what he wrongly calls ‘intelligence’, though it is really only reason, or more correctly a particular way of using reason based on the Cartesian conception, there being no doubt that all the forms of modern rationalism arose out of that conception. It may be remarked incidentally that the contentions of philosophers are often much more justifiable when they are arguing against other philosophers than when they pass on to expound their own views, and as each one generally sees fairly clearly the defects of the others, they more or less destroy one another mutually. Thus it is that Bergson, if one takes the trouble to rectify his mistakes in terminology, gives a good demonstration of the faults of rationalism (which, so far from being one with ‘intellectualism’, is on the contrary its negation) and of the insufficiencies of reason, but he is no less wrong in his own turn when, to fill the gap thus created, he probes the ‘infra-rational’ instead of lifting his gaze toward the ‘supra-rational’ (and this is why his philosophy is just as individualistic and ignores the supra-individual order just as completely as that of his rivals). And so, when he reproaches reason, to which it is only necessary here to restore its rightful name, for ‘artificially clipping reality,’ there is no need to adopt his special notion of ‘reality’, even purely hypothetically and provisionally, in order fully to understand his meaning: he is evidently thinking in terms of the reduction of all things to elements supposed to be homogenous or identical one with another, which amounts to nothing but a reduction to the quantitative, for elements of that kind can only be conceived from a quantitative point of view; and the idea of ‘clipping’ itself suggests fairly clearly the efforts that are made to introduce a discontinuity rightly belonging only to pure or numerical quantity, or broadly speaking to the tendency referred to earlier, namely, that of refusing to recognize as ‘scientific’ anything that cannot be ‘put into figures’.[45] In the same way, when he says that reason is not at ease except when it applies itself to something ‘solid’, wherein it finds its own true domain, he seems to be aware of the inevitable tendency of reason, when reduced to itself alone, to ‘materialize’ everything in the ordinary sense of the word, that is, to consider in all things only their grossest modalities, because quality is then at a minimum in relation to quantity; only he seems to be considering the end-point of this tendency rather than its starting-point, which renders him liable to the accusation of exaggeration, for there are evidently degrees of ‘materialization’. Nevertheless, if one looks at the existing state of scientific conceptions (or rather, as will be seen later, at a state already on the way to being past) it is quite certain that they represent as nearly as is possible the last or lowest degree of materialization, the degree in which ‘solidity’ understood in its material sense has reached its maximum, and that in itself is a particularly characteristic mark of the period at which we have arrived. There is evidently no need to suppose that Bergson himself understood these matters in as clear a light as is shed by the above ‘translation’ of his language, indeed it seems very unlikely that he did, considering the multiple confusions he is constantly perpetrating; but it is nonetheless true that these views were in fact suggested to him by his estimation of what present-day science is, and on that account the testimony of a man who is incontestably a representative of the modern spirit cannot be regarded as negligible. As for what his own theories amount to exactly, their significance will be found in another part of this study, and all that can be said about them for the moment is that they correspond to a different aspect and to some extent to a different stage of the deviation which, taken as a whole, itself constitutes the modern world.
To summarize the foregoing, this much can be said: rationalism, being the denial of every principle superior to reason, brings with it as a ‘practical’ consequence the exclusive use of reason, but of reason blinded, so to speak, by the very fact that it has been isolated from the pure and transcendent intellect, of which, normally and legitimately, it can only reflect the light in the individual domain. As soon as it has lost all effective communication with the supra-individual intellect, reason cannot but tend more and more toward the lowest level, toward the inferior pole of existence, plunging ever more deeply into ‘materiality’; as this tendency grows, it gradually loses hold of the very idea of truth, and arrives at the point of seeking no goal other than that of making things as easy as possible for its own limited comprehension, and in this it finds an immediate satisfaction in the very fact that its own downward tendency leads it in the direction of the simplification and uniformization of all things; it submits all the more readily and speedily to this tendency because the results of this submission conform to its desires, and its ever more rapid descent cannot fail to lead at last to what has been called the ‘reign of quantity’.
14
Mechanism and Materialism
The earliest product of rationalism in the so-called ‘scientific’ field was Cartesian mechanism; materialism was not due to appear until later, for as explained elsewhere, the word and the thing itself are not actually met with earlier than the eighteenth century; besides, whatever may have been the intentions of Descartes himself (and it is in fact possible, by pursuing to the end the logical consequences of his ideas, to extract from them theories that are mutually very contradictory), there is nonetheless a direct filiation between mechanism and materialism. In this connection it is useful to recall that, although the ancient atomistic conceptions such as those of Democritus and especially of Epicurus can be qualified as mechanistic, these two being the only ‘precursors’ from the ancient world whom the moderns can with any justification claim as their own in this field, their conceptions are often wrongly looked upon as the earliest form of materialism: for materialism implies above all the modern physicist’s notion of ‘matter’, and at that time this notion was still a long way from having come to birth. The truth is that materialism merely represents one of the two halves of Cartesian dualism, the half to which its author had applied the mechanistic conception; it was sufficient thereafter to ignore or to deny the remaining half, or what comes to the same thing, to claim to bring the whole of reality into the first half, in order to arrive quite naturally at materialism.
45
It can be said in this connection that of all the meanings that were comprised in the Latin word