Why is it, nevertheless, that we seem to think of mind and thought in terms of matter and the brain? It is because that part of our minds which we call the “intellect” is a constitutional materialist; it was developed, in the process of evolution, to understand and deal with material, spatial objects; from this field it derives all its concepts and its “laws,” and its notion of a fatalistic and predictable regularity everywhere. “Our intellect, in the narrow sense of the word, is intended to secure the perfect fitting of our body to its environment, to represent the relations of external things among themselves,—in short, to think matter.”7 It is at home with solids, inert things; it sees all becoming as being,8 as a series of states; it misses the connective tissue of things, the flow of duration that constitutes their very life.
Look at the moving-picture; it seems to our tired eyes to be alive with motion and action; here, surely, science and mechanism have caught the continuity of life. On the contrary, it is just here that science and the intellect reveal their limitations. The moving picture does not move, is not a picture of motion; it is only a series of instantaneous photographs, “snap-shots,” taken in such rapid succession that when they are thrown in rapid succession upon the screen, the willing spectator enjoys the illusion of continuity, as he did in his boyhood with thumb-nail movies of his pugilistic heroes. But it is an illusion none the less; and the cinema film is obviously a series of pictures in which everything is as still as if eternally congealed.
And as the “motion”-picture camera divides into static poses the vivid current of reality, so the human intellect catches a series of states, but loses the continuity that weaves them into life. We see matter and we miss energy; we think that we know what matter is; but when at the heart of the atom we find energy, we are bewildered, and our categories melt away. “No doubt, for greater strictness, all considerations of motion may be eliminated from mathematical processes; but the introduction of motion into the genesis of figures is nevertheless the origin of modern mathematics”;9—nearly all the progress of mathematics in the nineteenth century was due to the use of the concepts of time and motion in addition to the traditional geometry of space. All through contemporary science, as one sees in Mach and Pearson and Henri Poincaré, there runs the uncomfortable suspicion that “exact” science is merely an approximation, which catches the inertia of reality better than its life.
But it is our own fault if, by insisting on the application of physical concepts in the field of thought, we end in the impasse of determinism, mechanism, and materialism. The merest moment of reflection might have shown how inappropriate the concepts of physics are in the world of mind: we think as readily of a mile as of half a mile, and one flash of thought can circumnavigate the globe; our ideas elude every effort to picture them as material particles moving in space, or as limited by space in their flight and operation. Life escapes these solid concepts; for life is a matter of time rather than of space, it is not position, it is change; it is not quantity so much as quality; it is not a mere redistribution of matter and motion, it is fluid and persistent creation.
A very small element of a curve is very near to being a straight line. And the smaller it is, the nearer. In the limit it may be termed a part of the straight line, as you please, for in each of its points a curve coincides with its tangent. So, likewise, “vitality” is tangent, at any and every point, to physical and chemical forces; but such points are, in fact, only views taken by a mind which imagines stops at various moments of the movement that generates the curve. In reality, life is no more made-up of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines.10
How then shall we catch the flow and essence of life if not by thinking and the intellect? But is the intellect all? Let us for a while stop thinking, and just gaze upon that inner reality—our selves—which is better known to us than all things else: what do we see? Mind, not matter; time, not space; action, not passivity; choice, not mechanism. We see life in its subtle and penetrating flow, not in its “states of mind,” not in its devitalized and separated parts, as when the zoologist examines a dead frog’s legs, or studies preparations under a microscope, and thinks that he is a biologist studying life! This direct perception, this simple and steady looking-upon (intueor) a thing, is intuition; not any mystic process, but the most direct examination possible to the human mind. Spinoza was right: reflective thought is not by any means the highest form of knowledge; it is better, no doubt, than hearsay; but how weak it is beside the direct perception of the thing itself! “A true empiricism is one that sets itself the task of getting as close as possible to the original, of sounding the depths of life, of feeling the pulse of its spirit by a sort of intellectual auscultation”;11 we “listen in” on the current of life. By direct perception we feel the presence of mind; by intellectual circumlocution we arrive at the notion that thought is a dance of molecules in the brain. Is there any doubt that intuition here beholds more truly the heart of life?
This does not mean that thinking is a disease, as Rousseau held, or that the intellect is a treacherous thing which every decent citizen should forswear. The intellect retains its normal function of dealing with the material and spatial world, and with the material aspects or spatial expressions of life and mind; intuition is limited to the direct feeling of life and mind, not in their external embodiments but in their inner being. “I have never maintained that it was necessary ‘to put something different in the place of intellect,’ or to set instinct above it. I have simply tried to show that when we leave the domain of mathematics and physics to enter that of life and consciousness, we must make our appeal to a certain sense of life which cuts across pure understanding and has its origin in the same vital impulse as instinct—although instinct, properly so-called, is quite a different thing.” Nor do we try “to refute intellect by intellect”; we merely “adopt the language of the understanding, since only the understanding has a language”; we cannot help it if the very words that we use are psychological only by symbolism, and still reek with the material connotations forced upon them by their origin. Spirit means breath, and mind means a measure, and thinking points to a thing; nevertheless these are the crass media through which the soul must express itself. “It will be said that we do not transcend our intellect, for it is still with our intellect, and through our intellect, that we see the other forms of consciousness”; even introspection and intuition are materialist metaphors. And this would be a legitimate objection, “if there did not remain, around our conceptual and logical thought, a vague nebulosity, made of the very substance out of which has been formed the luminous nucleus that we call the intellect.” The new psychology is revealing in us a mental region incomparably wider than the intellect. “To explore the most sacred depths of the unconscious, to labor in the sub-soil of consciousness: that will be the principal task of psychology in the century which is opening. I do not doubt that wonderful discoveries await it there.”12