29 o PHILOSOPHY 



of real duration flow with varying rapidity, seems to imply that these varying rapidities 

 are comparable with one another and consequently that " Newtonian " time has, after 

 all, the significance for real life which Bergson refuses to allow. Thus it can hardly be 

 said that Bergson has been successful in showing that logic and the intellect need to be 

 sacrificed by a Philosophy which recognises the reality of contingency and moral free- 

 dom, and the origination of the genuinely moral in the course of " evolution." . . ,;,-! . ; 



There has been much discussion in philosophical quarters of Bergson ; s place in the 

 classification of philosophers. William James, in his latest works, claimed him as a 

 Pragmatist, and it has been maintained on the Continent of Europe that his doctrine 

 is not only a form, but the one really coherent form of Pragmatism. There is, of course, 

 a real affinity between Bergson and the Pragmatists, which rests on their common 

 distrust of the intellect. On the other hand, whereas Pragmatism, at least in its incep- 

 tion, made it a fundamental point to insist on a pluralistic theory of the world, Bergson's 

 doctrine of the elan vital is definitely singularist. Thus he touches Bradley on one side 

 of his doctrine as closely as he touches James on the other. In fact the complaints which 

 Pragmatists used to make a few years ago of the miraculous feats ascribed by " idealists" 

 to the Absolute might be easily urged totidem verbis against the elan vital. According 

 to another view Bergson is most correctly described as a " mystic," though he can 

 hardly be called so if the word is used with any precision. Mysticism is primarily not 

 a peculiar way of thinking but a peculiar way of being. What the great mystics of the 

 past have aimed at is first and foremost a transformation of human character by which 

 it becomes responsive to stimuli from a " transcendental " world, inaccessible to ordinary 

 perception. Since no such transcendental world is recognised in the Bergsonian 

 scheme, it seems merely misleading to speak of his philosophy as Mysticism. 



A second feature of recent philosophy has been, in Great Britain and America, 

 the rise of the so-called " new realism." This also may be regarded as a conscious re- 

 action against the idealistic doctrines of the last generation which go back 

 Realism? ^ or tne ^ r inspiration to Fichte and Hegel, but it is a reaction which is in 

 many ways the direct antithesis of the movement represented by Bergson. 

 The New Realism, though it manifests itself in a great variety of forms, is in all its vari- 

 ous guises definitely intellectualistic. This is shown by the general dissatisfaction of its 

 representatives with the Kantian strain in-the thought of their older contemporaries. 

 What is particularly objected to, as the source of " idealistic " or " mentalist " fallacies, 

 is the Kantian view that both sense, in virtue of the pure forms of intuition, and thought, 

 in virtue of its scheme of categories, are in part constitutive of the objects they appre- 

 hend. The tendency common to all the writers who may be fairly classed together as 

 typical of the latest forms of realism is to regard both sense and thought as simply appre- 

 hensive of data which do not depend on the percipient mind either for their existence 

 or for their apprehended qualities and relations. The degree of consistency with 

 which this doctrine is held varies with its individual representatives, but, thought out 

 consistently, it plainly tends in the direction of ultra-intellectualism, since it leads to 

 the view that the specific task of philosophy is simply to apprehend as completely as 

 possible objects and relations which exist and have the characters and relations which 

 they are discovered by science to have quite independently of the perceiving or knowing 

 mind. On the psychological side this tendency shows itself in its extreme form in the 

 doctrine that known relations between objects are purely non-mental, but the " work of 

 the mind," as T. H. Green had taught. The function of the intellect is not to create 

 relations between its objects, but simply to discover what the relations between them 

 are. On this point there seems to be general agreement between such writers as Alex- 

 ander, Russell, and Moore in England, Woodbridge and Fullerton in America, and Cou- 

 turat in France. It is a natural development of the same view that the attempt should 

 be made to deny the existence of what are commonly called " presentations," and to hold 

 that in sense perception we have only two distinguishable factors, an extra-mental pre- 

 sented thing and the process of apprehending it. Presentations, i.e. mental contents, 

 which psychologists have usually regarded as immediate objects of cognition from which 



