To return more particularly to the question of money, one more point remains to be dealt with, for a phenomenon has appeared in this field which is well worthy of note, and it is this: since money lost all guarantee of a superior order, it has seen its own actual quantitative value, or what is called in the jargon of the economists its ‘purchasing power’, becoming ceaselessly less and less, so that it can be imagined that, when it arrives at a limit that is getting ever nearer, it will have lost every justification for its existence, even all merely ‘practical’ or ‘material’ justification, and that it will disappear of itself, so to speak, from human existence. It will be agreed that here affairs turn back on themselves in a curious way, but the preceding explanations will make the idea quite easy to understand: for since pure quantity is by its nature beneath all existence, when the trend toward it is pressed to its extreme limit, as in the case of money (more striking than any other because the limit has nearly been reached), the end can only be a real dissolution. The case of money alone already shows clearly enough that, as was said above, the security of ‘ordinary life’ is in reality a highly precarious thing, and it will be shown later that it is precarious in many other respects as well; but the positive conclusion that will emerge will be always the same, namely, that the real goal of the tendency that is dragging men and things toward pure quantity can only be the final dissolution of the present world.
17
The Solidification of the World
Let us now return to the explanation of how a world conforming as far as is possible to the materialistic conception has been effectively realized in the modern period. If this is to be understood, it must be remembered above all that, as has been often pointed out, the human order and the cosmic order are not in reality separated, as they are nowadays all too readily imagined to be; they are on the contrary closely bound together, in such a way that each continuously reacts on the other, so that there is always correspondence between their respective states. This correspondence is essentially implied in the whole doctrine of cycles; without it the traditional data with which the said doctrine is concerned would be almost entirely unintelligible; the relationship existing between certain critical phases of human history and certain cataclysms that occur according to a known astronomical periodicity affords perhaps the most striking example, but it is obvious that this is only an extreme case of correspondences of this kind, which in fact subsist continuously, for there is never any break in the correspondence, though this fact is no doubt less apparent when modifications are taking place only gradually and so almost insensibly.
That being the case, it is quite natural that in the course of cyclical development both the cosmic manifestation as a whole and also human mentality, which is of course necessarily included therein, together follow the same descending course, the nature of which has already been specified as consisting in a gradual movement away from the principle, and thus away from the primal spirituality inherent in the essential pole of manifestation. This course can be described in terms of current terminology (thus incidentally bringing out clearly the correlation under consideration), as a sort of progressive ‘materialization’ of the cosmic environment itself, and it is only when this ‘materialization’ has reached a certain stage, by now already very marked, that the materialistic conception can appear in man as its correlative, together with the general attitude that corresponds with it in practice and fits in, as explained, with the picture of ‘ordinary life’; moreover, in the absence of this factual ‘materialization’ there would not be the least semblance of justification for the corresponding theoretical conception, for the surrounding reality would too obviously give the lie to it all the time. The very idea of matter, as understood by the moderns, could certainly not come to birth except in such conditions; what that idea expresses more or less confusedly is in any case no more than a limit, unattainable while the descent of manifestation is still going on, firstly, because matter is regarded as being in itself something purely quantitative, and secondly because it is supposed to be ‘inert’, and a world in which there was anything really ‘inert’ would for that reason forthwith cease to exist; the idea of ‘matter’ is therefore as illusory as it could possibly be, since it corresponds to no reality of any kind, however lowly its position in the hierarchy of manifested existence. In other words it could be said that ‘materialization’ exists as a tendency, but that ‘materiality’, which would be the complete fulfillment of that tendency, is an unrealizable condition. One consequence of this, among others, is that the mechanical laws theoretically formulated by modern science are never susceptible of an exact and rigorous application to the conditions of experience, wherein there always remain elements that are entirely beyond their grasp, even in the phase in which the part played by such elements is in a sense reduced to a minimum. So it is always a case of approximation, and during this phase, leaving out of account cases that will in such times be exceptional, approximation may suffice for immediate practical needs; but a very crude simplification is nevertheless implied, and it deprives the mechanical laws not only of all claim to ‘exactitude’, but even of all value as ‘science’ in the true meaning of the word; it is moreover only through an approximation of the same kind that the sensible world can take on the appearance of a ‘closed system’, either in the eyes of the physicists or in the sequence of the events that constitute ‘ordinary life’.
Instead of speaking as heretofore of ‘materialization’, it would be possible to use the word ‘solidification’ in a sense that is fundamentally the same, and in a manner perhaps more precise and perhaps even more ‘realistic’, for solid bodies, owing to their density and their impenetrability, do in fact give the illusion of ‘materiality’ more strongly than does anything else. At the same time, this recalls how Bergson, as pointed out earlier, speaks of the ‘solid’ as constituting in some way the true domain of reason, and in this he is evidently referring, whether consciously or otherwise (and doubtless not very consciously, for not only is he speaking generally and without making any reservation, but he even thinks it right to speak of ‘intelligence’ in this connection, as he always does when what he is talking about really appertains to reason alone), more particularly to what he sees around him, namely the ‘scientific’ use to which reason is put. Now the actual occurrence of ‘solidification’ is precisely the true reason why modern science ‘succeeds’, certainly not in its theories which remain as false as before, and in any case change all the time, but in its practical applications. In other periods, when ‘solidification’ was not yet so marked, not only could man never have dreamed of industry as we know it today, but any such industry would actually have been completely impossible in its entirety, as would the ‘ordinary life’ in which industry plays so great a part. This, incidentally, is enough to cut short all the fancies of those so-called ‘clairvoyants’ who, imagining the past on the model of the present, attribute to certain ‘prehistoric’ civilizations of a very remote date something quite similar to the contemporary ‘machine civilization’; this is only one of the forms of error that gives rise to the common saying that ‘history repeats itself’, and it implies a total ignorance of what have been called the qualitative determinations of time.