2 88 PHILOSOPHY 



which were singularly numerous two or three years ago, seems to indicate that in Europe 

 at large "Pragmatism" and its off-shoots, as distinguished from the more general 

 return to Pluralism, is regarded as a movement which has already "done its do," and 

 taken its place side by side with other manifestations of dissatisfaction with a purely 

 intellectualistic attitude in Philosophy. 1 Its former place as the champion of a posi- 

 tively anti-intellectualist interpretation has passed to the doctrine of M. Bergson. 



The outstanding event of recent years, as far as philosophy is concerned, has cer- 

 tainly been the rapid rise of Bergson to a European reputation. Of the three works 

 which constitute together the full exposition of his interpretation of 

 experience, so far as it has yet been carried by the author, Les Donnees 

 Immediate* de la Conscience had been published as long ago as 1889, Matikre et Memoire 

 in 1896, and L* Evolution Creatrice had reached a fourth edition in 1908, but the author's 

 ideas can hardly be said to have attracted universal attention much before 1910. The 

 English translations, Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution 

 all belong to 1910-11. A great amount of work in various European languages has 

 appeared in exposition or criticism of Bergson 's special tenets. Special reference may 

 perhaps be made to H. W. Carr's Henri Bergson, The Philosophy of Change (1911), 

 and J. McNellar Stewart's A Critical Exposition of Bergson's Philosophy (1912). With- 

 out attempting to pronounce on the permanent value of Bergson's ideas, it may at least 

 be said that his works contain the most systematic and brilliant exposition of Irrational- 

 ism since Schopenhauer, and that his presentation has the advantage of exhibiting the 

 irrationalist position unencumbered by the temperamental pessimism with which 

 Schopenhauer entangles it. 



Bergson's main doctrine may perhaps be briefly summarised as follows. The 

 human intellect is itself a product of evolution, a tool fashioned by natural selection 

 .for the purpose of enabling mankind to find their way about among the in- 

 Doctr/ne. S animate bodies which make up their physical surroundings. Hence the 

 crowning achievement of the intellect is the creation of the science of geom- 

 etry, which therefore furnishes the ideal model to which human science in general is 

 everywhere striving to approximate. The aim of all sciences is to become exact sciences, 

 i:e., sciences of number and measure. But the only magnitudes which we can measure 

 directly are straight lines. Consequently all measurement of other magnitudes has to 

 be effected by artifices which enable us to substitute lengths for the various " intensive " 

 magnitudes (lapses of duration, degrees of temperature, electric charges, and the like), 

 which meet us in the "real world" of actual life. In particular, the measurement of 

 time only becomes possible by the artifice of representing the real duration through which 

 we live by the image of a line on which we can measure off different lengths. This 

 device, though indispensable to science, inevitably falsifies the facts of living experience. 

 For it gives rise to the belief in a " Newtonian " time, which is homogeneous, like the 

 straight line, and " flows equably," whereas the " real duration " of experience, which 

 is the very stuff of which our inner life of feeling and conation is made, is non-homogeneous 

 and " flows " with very varying rapidity according as we are well or ill, Interested or 

 bored, pleased or pained, and the like. From the initial substitution of the unreal 

 ".uniform " time of science for the infinitely varying " real duration " out of which the 

 processes of life and consciousness are made further arise all the illusions characteristic 

 of a rriechanical and statical theory of the universe. It is our tendency to envisage time 

 under the form of a line, which leads to the belief in permanent "substances" or things 

 as the bearers or supports of change, and further conducts us to the notion of a rigid 

 determinism by producing the illusion that what happens in the various moments of 

 time is all completely "given" at once, as all the points on a straight line are given 

 simultaneously. This again leads to a radically false conception of " evolution." It 

 creates the belief that nothing radically new is ever produced in the evolutionary process; 



1 For an attempt to write the full history of the conflict between rationalistic and anti- 

 rationalistic types of philosophical thought during the last few years, see A. Aliotta's 

 La Reazione Idealistica contra la Scienza, Palermo, 1912. 



