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Since the appearance of this book, Bergson's popularity has increased enormously, not only in academic circles, but among the general reading public.
Human personality and its experience must have ample place and recognition in any philosophy put forward in these days. Bergson's work is a magnificent attempt to show us how, in the words of George Meredith: "Men have come out of brutishness."
The acceptance of Bergson's philosophy involves the recognition of a God who is the enduring creative impulse of all Life, more akin perhaps to a Mother-Deity than a Father-Deity. This divine vital impetus manifests itself in continual new creation. We are each part of this great Divine Life, and are both the products and the instruments of its activity.
Let us take the perception of bodies. It is easy to show and I regret that I cannot here reproduce Mr Bergson's masterly demonstration that the division of matter into distinct objects with sharp outlines is produced by a selection of images which is completely relative to our practical needs.
McDougall in his great work Body and Mind says, when speaking of Bergson's doctrine of Evolution: "Its recognition of the continuity of all Life is the great merit of Professor Bergson's theory of Creative Evolution; its failure to give any intelligible account of individuality is its greatest defect.
I confess I am one of these, and I am not inclined, even if I were able, to reproduce M. Bergson's sentiments as he feels them. He is his own perfect expositor. All a critic can aim at is to understand these sentiments as existing facts, and to give them the place that belongs to them in the moral world. To understand, in most cases, is intimacy enough.
The question is only to know whether, as has been claimed, there is incompatibility between Mr Bergson's point of view and the religious or moral point of view; whether the premisses laid down block the road to all future development in the direction before us; or whether, on the contrary, such a development is invited by some parts at least of the previous work.
But it was impossible not to feel the approach of the temptation. Mr Bergson's work is extraordinarily suggestive. His books, so measured in tone, so tranquil in harmony, awaken in us a mystery of presentiment and imagination; they reach the hidden retreats where the springs of consciousness well up.
A recent contemptuous critic of M. Bergson's book, Hugh S. R. Elliot, points out, as if he were triumphantly vindicating the physico-chemical theory of the nature and origin of life, what a complete machine a cabbage is for converting solar energy into chemical and vital energy how it takes up the raw material from the soil by a chemical and mechanical process, how these are brought into contact with the light and air through the leaves, and thus the cabbage is built up.
Condemnation of psychological determinism Room for freedom The self in action Astronomical forecasts Foreseeableness of any human action impossible Human wills centres of indetermination Not all our acts free True freedom, self-determination. Before passing on to an examination of Bergson's treatment of Evolution, we must consider his discussion of the problem of Freedom of the Will.
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