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Updated: June 4, 2025
I recall that Tyndall, who was as much poet as scientist, speaks of life as a wave "which at no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles." In his more sober scientific mood Tyndall would doubtless have rejected M. Bergson's view of life, yet his image of the wave is very Bergsonian.
"And why, if at all, does Bergsonian illusionism differ from pure nothingness?" They both paused. Mr. Overgold had risen. There was great weariness in his manner. "It saddens one, does it not?" he said. He had picked up a bundle of Panama two per cent. gold bonds and was looking at them in contempt. "The emptiness of it all!" he muttered. He extended the bonds to de Vere.
Most of this paragraph is extracted from an address of mine before the American Psychological Association, printed in the Psychological Review, vol. ii, p. 105. I take pleasure in the fact that already in 1895 I was so far advanced towards my present bergsonian position.
Once again, and yet again, many times, he saw the slender fingers of Dar Hyal weaving argument in the air, the black whiskers of Aaron Hancock enunciating Bergsonian dogmas, the frayed coat-cuffs of Terrence McFane articulating thanks to God for the two- legged work-beasties that enabled him to loaf at Dick Forrest's board and under Dick Forrest's madroño trees.
Mechanism and chemism are adequate to account for astronomy and geology, and therefore, he thinks, are sufficient to account for biology, without calling in the aid of any Bergsonian life impulse. Still these forces stand impotent before that microscopic world, the cell, the foundation of all life.
The intellectuals who endeavor to interpret them not always very faithfully represent them as a party of movement and change, following a Bergsonian elan vital, without needing any very clear prevision of the goal to which it is to take them. Nevertheless, the negative part, at any rate, of their objects is sufficiently clear.
So that if we start with the universe, with life, and with this tendency, mechanism will do all the rest. But this is not science, of course, because it is not verifiable; it is practically the philosophy of Bergson. The cast-iron conclusions of physical science do pinch the Harvard professor a bit, and he pads them with a little of the Bergsonian philosophy.
It is certain, at any rate, that without the confidence which being able to lean on Bergson's authority gives me I should never have ventured to urge these particular views of mine upon this ultra-critical audience. I must therefore, in order to make my own views more intelligible, give some preliminary account of the bergsonian philosophy.
But one is apt to forget, in doing this, that there is one thing which we cannot wipe off the slate, namely, ourselves, not taken in the Bergsonian sense alone, but as fully fledged persons, possessed of the very qualities for which we undertake to search, yet without the possession of which the search could not begin.
When I was sixteen I got tired of being a freak; I decided that some one had made a bad mistake. Still as I'd gone that far I concluded to finish it up by taking my degree of Master of Arts. My chief interest in life is the study of modern philosophy. I am a realist of the School of Anton Laurier with Bergsonian trimmings and I'll be eighteen years old in two months. That's all."
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