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Updated: June 2, 2025
Convention and political motives have done the rest. Bergson says that in the war spirit of Germany one sees matter arrayed against spirit. One can see some truth in this, but spirit and matter are not two armies pitted against one another. Life in its collective form will be abundant, because that is its most fundamental craving.
The essential point about mental life is just the performing of this act of synthesis which makes duration: wherever there is mental life there is duration and so wherever there is mental life the past is preserved. "Above everything," Bergson says, "consciousness signifies memory. At this moment as I discuss with you I pronounce the word "discussion."
The course of lectures planned for the autumn months had to be abandoned. Bergson has not, however, been silent during the conflict, and he has given some inspiring addresses.
For Bergson "spatial" means "logical," and since so much misunderstanding seems to have been caused by his using the word "space" in this peculiar sense we shall perhaps do better in what follows to use the word "logical" instead.
With M. Bergson, life is the flowing metamorphosis of the poets, an unceasing becoming, and evolution is a wave of creative energy overflowing through matter "upon which each visible organism rides during the short interval of time given it to live." In his view, matter is held in the iron grip of necessity, but life is freedom itself.
It is here that the materialistic philosophers, such as Professors Moore and Loeb, differ from the spiritualistic philosophers, such as Bergson, Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor Thompson, and others. Professor Moore has no sympathy with those narrow mechanistic views that see in the life processes "no problems save those of chemistry and physics."
"Life," says Mr Bergson with justice, "is the acceptance from objects of nothing but the useful impression, with the response of the appropriate reactions."
Even our evolutionist philosophy, as Bergson shows, "begins by showing us in the intellect a local effect of evolution, a flame, perhaps accidental, which lights up the coming and going of living things in the narrow passage open to their action; and lo! forgetting what it has just told us, makes of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun which can illuminate the world."
Bergson's account of perception differs from the account ordinarily given in that perception is not described as a relation which is supposed to hold between a subject and an object: for Bergson there is no "I," distinct from what is perceived, standing to it in a relation of perception.
It has motives and moods and products, and it grows in social conditions, that are full of danger for society. Industrialism lacks a soul, as Bergson would say. Yet it is a movement that sweeps on with almost irresistible force. Its most characteristic product is not what it turns out in shops, but city life itself.
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