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Updated: June 9, 2025
The boy who is clever at memorizing a passage from Shakespeare may not have a good memory at all for recalling past events. To understand why this is so we must examine these two forms of Memory more closely and refer to Bergson's own words: "I study a lesson, and in order to learn it by heart I read it a first time, accentuating every line; I then repeat it a certain number of times.
If facts could be produced which one theory could not account for at all, the alternative theory might be said to stand proved. Do such facts exist which tell in favour of M. Bergson's theory as against the other? I believe they do.
To an observer standing outside of its generating causes, novelty can appear only as so much 'chance'; to one who stands inside it is the expression of 'free creative activity. Peirce's 'tychism' is thus practically synonymous with Bergson's 'devenir réel. The common objection to admitting novelties is that by jumping abruptly in, ex nihilo, they shatter the world's rational continuity.
The use of description is not to give us knowledge of the process, that we already have, but only to remind us of what we really knew all along, but had rather lost contact with and misinterpreted because of our preoccupation with describing and explaining it. Bergson's criticism of our intellectual methods turns simply upon a question of fact, to be settled by direct introspection.
The difficulty was that if you started with self-existent matter you could never arrive at mind, and if you started with self-existent mind you could never arrive at matter. The fallacy was that both schools innocently supposed there was an existing world to discover, and each thought it possible that its view should describe that world as it really was. What now is M. Bergson's solution?
The noted expounder of Bergson's philosophy in England, Dr. Wildon Carr, has prepared an English Translation under the title Mind-Energy. The volume opens with the Huxley Memorial Lecture of 1911, Life and Consciousness, in a revised and developed form under the title Consciousness and Life.
But common-sense, being prepossessed in a practical direction, has doubtless subjected these facts to a process of interested alteration, which is artificial in proportion to the labour bestowed. Such is Mr Bergson's fundamental hypothesis, and it is far-reaching.
Zeno's logical dilemma as to how Achilles could ever catch up with the tortoise provided the tortoise was given a start, however small, may be countered by the ingenuity of the mathematicians' infinite series. Bergson's difficulty turns on a question of fact, not of logic, and cannot be so met.
God is pure, creative activity, a flowing rather than a fountain head; a continuity of emanation, not a centre from which things emanate. For Bergson, God is anthropomorphic as He must necessarily be for us all but Bergson's is anthropomorphism of a subtle kind. His God is the duree of our own conscious life, raised to a higher power. Dieu se fait in the evolutionary process.
Bergson's thought, although in many respects it is strikingly original and novel, is, nevertheless, the continuation, if not the culmination, of a movement in French philosophy which we can trace back through Boutroux, Guyau, Lachelier and Ravaisson to Maine de Biran, who died in 1824.
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