How significant it is that we laugh, usually, when a living thing behaves like matter, like a mechanism; when the clown tumbles about aimlessly, and leans against pillars that are not there; or when our best beloved falls on an icy path, and we are tempted to laugh first and ask questions afterward. That geometrical life which Spinoza almost confused with deity is really a reason for humor and tears; it is ridiculous and shameful that their philosophy should describe them so.
Life has taken three lines in its evolution: in one it relapsed into the almost material torpor of plants, and found there, occasionally, a supine security, and the cowardly tenure of a thousand years; in another avenue its spirit and effort congealed into instinct as in the ants and bees; but in the vertebrates it took the dare of freedom, cast off its ready-made instincts and marched bravely into the endless risks of thought. Instinct still remains the profounder mode of visioning reality and catching the essence of the world; but intelligence grows ever stronger and bolder, and wider in its scope; it is at last in intelligence that life has placed its interests and its hopes.
This persistently creative life, of which every individual and every species is an experiment, is what we mean by God; God and Life are one. But this God is finite, not omnipotent,—limited by matter, and overcoming its inertia painfully, step by step; and not omniscient, but groping gradually towards knowledge and consciousness and “more light.” “God, thus defined, has nothing of the ready-made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely,” when we consciously choose our actions and plot our lives.19 Our struggles and our sufferings, our ambitions and our defeats, our yearnings to be better and stronger than we are, are the voice and current of the Élan Vital in us, that vital urge which makes us grow, and transforms this wandering planet into a theatre of unending creation.
And who knows but that at last life may win the greatest victory of all over its ancient enemy, matter, and learn even to elude mortality? Let us have an open mind, even to our hopes.20 All things are possible to life if time is generous. Consider what life and mind have done in the mere moment of a millennium, with the forests of Europe and America; and then see how foolish it is to put up barriers to life’s achievements. “The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.”21
4. CRITICISM
“I believe,” says Bergson, “that the time given to refutation in philosophy is usually time lost. Of the many attacks directed by the many thinkers against each other, what now remains? Nothing, or assuredly very little. That which counts and endures is the modicum of positive truth which each contributes. The true statement is of itself able to displace the erroneous idea, and becomes, without our having taken the trouble of refuting anyone, the best of refutations.”22 This is the voice of Wisdom herself. When we “prove” or “disprove” a philosophy we are merely offering another one, which, like the first, is a fallible compound of experience and hope. As experience widens and hope changes, we find more “truth” in the “falsehoods” we denounced, and perhaps more falsehood in our youth’s eternal truths. When we are lifted up on the wings of rebellion we like determinism and mechanism, they are so cynical and devilish; but when death looms up suddenly at the foot of the hill we try to see beyond it into another hope. Philosophy is a function of age. Nevertheless . . .
What strikes one first in reading Bergson is the style: brilliant not with the paradox-fireworks of Nietzsche, but with a steady brightness, as of a man who is resolved to live up to the fine traditions of luminous French prose. It is harder to be wrong in French than in some other languages; for the French will not tolerate obscurity, and truth is clearer than fiction. If Bergson is occasionally obscure it is by the squandered wealth of his imagery, his analogies, and his illustrations; he has an almost Semitic passion for metaphor, and is apt at times to substitute ingenious simile for patient proof. We have to be on our guard against this image-maker, as one bewares of a jeweler, or a real-estate poet—while recognizing gratefully, in Creative Evolution, our century’s first philosophic masterpiece.23
Perhaps Bergson would have been wiser to base his criticism of the intellect on the grounds of a broader intelligence, rather than on the ukases of intuition. Introspective intuition is as fallible as external sense; each must be tested and corrected by matter-of-fact experience; and each can be trusted only so far as its findings illumine and advance our action. Bergson presumes too much in supposing that the intellect catches only the states, and not the flux, of reality and life; thought is a stream of transitive ideas, as James had shown before Bergson wrote;24 “ideas” are merely points that memory selects in the flow of thought; and the mental current adequately reflects the continuity of perception and the movement of life.
It was a wholesome thing that this eloquent challenge should check the excesses of intellectualism; but it was as unwise to offer intuition in the place of thought as it would be to correct the fancies of youth with the fairy-tales of childhood. Let us correct our errors forward, not backward. To say that the world suffers from too much intellect would require the courage of a madman. The romantic protest against thinking, from Rousseau and Chateaubriand to Bergson and Nietzsche and James, has done its work; we will agree to dethrone the Goddess of Reason if we are not asked to re-light the candles before the ikon of Intuition. Man exists by instinct, but he progresses by intelligence.
That which is best in Bergson is his attack upon materialist mechanism. Our pundits of the laboratory had become a little too confident of their categories, and thought to squeeze all the cosmos into a test-tube. Materialism is like a grammar that recognizes only nouns; but reality, like language, contains action as well as objects, verbs as well as substantives, life and motion as well as matter. One could understand, perhaps, a merely molecular memory, like the “fatigue” of overburdened steel; but molecular foresight, molecular planning, molecular idealism?—Had Bergson met these new dogmas with a cleansing scepticism he might have been a little less constructive, but he would have left himself less open to reply. His doubts melt away when his system begins to form; he never stops to ask what “matter” is; whether it may not be somewhat less inert than we have thought; whether it may be, not life’s enemy, but life’s willing menial if life but knew its mind. He thinks of the world and the spirit, of body and soul, of matter and life, as hostile to each other; but matter and body and the “world” are merely the materials that wait to be formed by intelligence and will. And who knows that these things too are not forms of life, and auguries of mind? Perhaps here too, as Heraclitus would say, there are gods.
Bergson’s critique of Darwinism issues naturally from his vitalism. He carries on the French tradition established by Lamarck, and sees impulse and desire as active forces in evolution; his spirited temper rejects the Spencerian conception of an evolution engineered entirely by the mechanical integration of matter and dissipation of motion; life is a positive power, an effort that builds its organs through the very persistence of its desires. We must admire the thoroughness of Bergson’s biological preparation, his familiarity with the literature, even with the periodicals in which current science hides itself for a decade of probation. He offers his erudition modestly, never with the elephantine dignity that weighs down the pages of Spencer. All in all, his criticism of Darwin has proved effective; the specifically Darwinian features of the evolution theory are now generally abandoned.25