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But place yourself at a bound, or d'emblée, as M. Bergson says, inside of the living, moving, active thickness of the real, and all the abstractions and distinctions are given into your hand: you can now make the intellectualist substitutions to your heart's content.
The nervous system is like a tool held in the hand: it is a vehicle for action, we are told, and not a substratum for cognition. I cannot here say with what ingenuity, with what powerful logic, and with what close continuity of ideas M. Bergson develops his system, nor with what address he braves its difficulties.
He is opposed to the work of those individual thinkers who have offered "systems" to the world, rounded and professedly complete constructions, labelled, one might almost say, "the last word in Philosophy." Bergson does not claim that his thought is final.
Yet this is what M. Bergson does in his whole defence of metaphysical vitalism, and especially in the instance of the evolution of eyes by two different methods, which is his palmary argument.
Nothing could better illustrate how deep this cognitive impotence has got into people's bones than the manner in which, in the latest schools of philosophy, it is being disavowed; for unblushing idealism is distinctly out of fashion. M. Bergson tells us he has solved a difficulty that seemed hopeless by avoiding a fallacy common to idealism and realism.
Each soul will tend to devour and to direct exclusively the movement influenced by the other soul. The one that succeeds in ruling that movement will live on; the other, I suppose, will die, although M. Bergson may not like that painful word.
One reason for the popularity today enjoyed by this new philosophy is doubtless to be found in the very tendencies of the milieu in which it is produced and in the aspirations which work it. But, after once remarking these desires, we must further not forget that Mr Bergson has contributed more than anyone else to awaken them, determine them, and make them become conscious of themselves.
Bergson, quoting Fabre, has made play with the supposed extraordinary accuracy of the solitary wasp Ammophila, which lays its eggs in a caterpillar. On this subject I will quote from Drever's "Instinct in Man," p. 92: "According to Fabre's observations, which Bergson accepts, the Ammophila stings its prey EXACTLY and UNERRINGLY in EACH of the nervous centres.
Meanwhile he found time to issue at the request of the Minister of Public Instruction a delightful little summary of French Philosophy. Bergson did a large amount of travelling and lecturing in America during the war. He was there when the French Mission under M. Viviani paid a visit in April and May of 1917, following upon America's entry into the conflict.
Our preoccupation with explaining the facts, then, leads us to treat what we know directly as so much material for abstraction. This intellectual attitude, as Bergson calls it, though practically useful, has, according to him, two grave drawbacks from the point of view of speculation.
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