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Updated: August 9, 2024
We lead the simple life with Swedish matches, Brazilian coffee, Canadian bacon, California canned peaches, magazine rifles, jointed fishing rods, and electric flashlights. We are elaborately clothed and can discuss Bergson's views or D. H. Lawrence's last story.
From all this emerges clearly the idea of a God, creator and free, the generator of both Matter and Life, whose work of creation is continued on the side of Life by the evolution of species and the building up of human personalities. Bergson's God is not the God of pantheism, because, for him, the Deity is immanent in nature, not identifiable with it.
Above all, he is emphasising the still more imperious necessity of regarding each state as a phase in duration; and we are here touching on his principal and leading intuition, the intuition of real duration. Historically this was Mr Bergson's starting-point and the origin of his thought: a criticism of time under the form in which common-sense imagines it, in which science employs it.
We should be led into the very interior of Life by Intuition, that is, by Instinct become disinterested, conscious of itself, capable of reflecting on its object and enlarging it indefinitely. In proclaiming the gospel of Intuition, Bergson's main point is to show that man is capable of an experience and a knowledge deeper than that which the Intellect can possibly give.
I talk about them with others who, I suspect, have not read them either; and we confine ourselves to generalities, with a careful qualification of all expressed opinions, no matter how vague and elusive. For example a safe conversational opening: "Of course there is a great deal to be said in favor of Bergson's general point of view, but to me his reasoning is inconclusive.
At the first reading, M. Bergson's Evolution Créatrice may well dazzle the professional naturalist and seem to him an illuminating confession of the nature and limits of his science; yet a second reading, I have good authority for saying, may as easily reverse that impression.
This view also seems most consonant with M. Bergson's theory of primitive reality, as a flux of fused images, or a mind lost in matter; to this view, too, is attributable his hostility to intelligence, in that it arrests the flux, divides the fused images, and thereby murders and devitalises reality.
The best way of entering into it will be to begin immediately with Bergson's philosophy, since I told you that that was what had led me personally to renounce the intellectualistic method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be. Professor Henri Bergson is a young man, comparatively, as influential philosophers go, having been born at Paris in 1859.
Such at least is the notion which the reader gathers from the prevailing character of M. Bergson's words; but I am not sure that it would be his ultimate conclusion. Perhaps it is to be out of sympathy with his spirit to speak of an ultimate conclusion at all; nothing comes to a conclusion and nothing is ultimate.
Unless your psychological novelist had crammed his memory with pictures of the ways and aspects of men he would have no starting-point for his psychological fictions; he would not be able to render them circumstantial and convincing. Just so M. Bergson's achievements in psychological fiction, to be so brilliantly executed as they are, required all his learning.
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