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Bergson's view seems to me truer as it is certainly more agreeable, that we keep stored away somewhere all our memories, the good as well as the evil, the pleasant together with the unpleasant. There may be nightmares down cellar, as we thought as a child, but even in those days we knew how to dodge them when we went after apples; that is, take down a light and slam the door quickly on coming up.
The scientist wants to discover a cause for everything. And there is no cause for the religious impulse. Freud is with the scientists. Jung dodges from his university gown into a priest's surplice till we don't know where we are. We prefer Freud's Sex to Jung's Libido or Bergson's Elan Vital.
Bergson's claim is that if we allow ourselves to attend to the changing fact with which we are actually acquainted we are driven to a theory of reality different from the theory of things and relations accepted by common sense. The two abstractions by means of which he attempts to express this new theory are matter and memory.
Up to this point Bergson's theory of the comic fairly well coincides with that of Freud. The latter author, it is true, summarises his conclusions in different language. But the meaning is not very different.
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 should be noted before closing this section that the religious consciousness is tempted to take Bergson's views on Soul and Body to imply more than they really do. The belief in Immortality which Western religion upholds is not a mere swooning into the being of God, but a perfect realization of our own personalities. It is only this that is an immortality worthy of the name.
Hence Bergson's interpenetration of the present by the past, Hegelian continuity and identity-in-diversity, and a host of other notions which are thought to be profound because they are obscure and confused. The contradictions resulting from confounding image and prototype in memory force us to precision.
Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Leibnitz, Nietzsche, Hume, Bradley, William James had all been rejected and were piled on the floor, but he had hesitated longer over Bergson's Creative Evolution. He really seemed to be giving that some attention, though he read it if he were reading it so fast that the hand which turned the pages hardly rested between each movement.
Just so M. Bergson's proper achievement begins where his science ends, and his philosophy lies entirely beyond the horizon of possible discoveries or empirical probabilities. In essence, it is myth or fable; but in the texture and degree of its fabulousness it differs notably from the performances of previous metaphysicians.
This universal and infinite God-consciousness which Judge Troward postulates as man's sub-consciousness, and from which man was created and is maintained, and of which all physical, mental and spiritual manifestation is a form of expression, appears to be a corollary of Bergson's demonstrated "Universal Livingness."
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