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Updated: June 2, 2025
Imagine a fact directly known, such as we have described in discussing sensible perception, lasting on and on, perpetually taking up new bare sensations and complicating them with meaning which consists of all the past which it already contains so as to make out of this combination of past and present fresh fact, that will give you some idea of the way in which Bergson thinks that mental life is created out of matter by memory.
M. Bergson thus introduces his metaphysical force as a peculiar requirement of biology; he breaks the continuity of nature; he loses the poetic justification of a metaphysical vitalism; he asks us to believe that life is not a natural expression of material being, but an alien and ghostly madness descending into it I say a ghostly madness, for why should disembodied life wish that the body should live?
In my next lecture, using Bergson as my principal topic, I shall enter into more concrete details and try, by giving up intellectualism frankly, to make, if not the world, at least my own general thesis, less unintelligible. I gave you a very stiff lecture last time, and I fear that this one can be little less so.
Of course, this naturalism in letters has its accompanying and interdependent philosophic theory, its intellectual interpretation and defense. As Kant is the noblest of the moralists, so I suppose William James and, still later, Henri Bergson and Croce are the chief protagonists of unrestrained feeling and naturalistic values in the world of thought.
I can remember hearing him singing with the sailors down in the shipyard, when I was no bigger than Stella here," pointing to Annie's younger daughter. Milly and Stella both looked through the door into the sitting-room, where a crayon portrait of John Bergson hung on the wall.
If Bergson is right in claiming that the actual fact is non-logical then obviously all attempts to describe it, since they must be expressed in terms of abstractions, will teem with false implications which must be discounted if the description is to convey the meaning intended.
In his daughter, John Bergson recognized the strength of will, and the simple direct way of thinking things out, that had characterized his father in his better days. He would much rather, of course, have seen this likeness in one of his sons, but it was not a question of choice.
"There are changes, but there are not things that change; change does not need a support. To emphasize and to illustrate this point, so fundamental in his thought, Bergson turns to music. "Let us listen," he says, "to a melody, letting ourselves be swayed by it; do we not have the clear perception of a movement which is not attached to any mobility of a change devoid of anything which changes?
One day Mr Bergson came down into the arena of dialectic, and, talking to his opponents in their own language, pulled their "psycho-physiological paralogism" to pieces before their eyes; it is only by confounding in one and the same argument two systems of incompatible notations, idealism and realism, that we succeed in enunciating the parallelist thesis.
That intricate and ponderously irrefutable argument that Bergson has so patiently built up by deep scientific research and unsurpassed profundity of thought and crystal-clear reason, that leads to the substantial conclusion that man has leapt the barrier of materiality only by the urge of some external pressure superior to himself, but which, by reason of infinite effort, he alone of all terrestrial beings has succeeded in utilizing in a superior manner and to his advantage: this well-rounded and exhaustively demonstrated argument in favour of a super-livingness in the universe, which finds its highest terrestrial expression in man, appears to be the scientific demonstration of Judge Troward's basic principle of the "Universal Sub-conscious Mind."
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