Leading Articles in tiih Reviews. 



473 



BERGSON AND BALFOUR. 



The October number of the Hibbert Jounutl Q\icn^ 

 with two papers which are certain to arouse in non- 

 technical circles a profound interest in the latest 

 developments of philosophy. In the tirst, Mr. Balfour 

 criticises M. Bergson, in the second, M. Bergson slates 

 his own position irrespective of Mr. Balfour. \Ve 

 ^hall therefore take the latter first. 



I. — The Author of Creative Evolution. 



M. Henri Bergson treats of " Life and Conscious- 

 ness." He laments that in ihe enormous work done 

 in philosophy from antiquity down to the present 

 time, the problems which are for us the vital problems 

 have seldom been sijuarely faced. He thinks philo- 

 sophy will now give them their rightful place, 'fhere 

 is no absolutely certain principle from which the 

 answers to these questions can be adduced in a 

 mathematical way. But we possess lines of facts, he 

 says, none of which goes far enough, or up to the 

 point that interests us, but each of them, taken apart, 

 will give nothing but a probability, but all together, 

 by converging on the same point, may give an 

 accumulation of probabilities which will gradually 

 approximate scientific certainty. 



CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHOICE. 



The first line of fact is consciousness All con- 

 sciousness is memory, preservation and accumulation 

 of the past in the present. At the same time all con- 

 sciousness is an anticipation of the future. Conscious- 

 ness is above all a hyphen, a tie between past and 

 future. Consciousness is no more limited to creatures 

 possessing a brain than digestion is to creatures pos- 

 sessing a stomach. Digestion exists long before a 

 special stomach has been developed, and conscious- 

 ness may exist long before the brain has been 

 developed. Through the brain, however, conscious- 

 ness works with the greatest precision, and we find 

 that in selecting between the respective responses to 

 given stimula the brain is the organ of choice. It 

 appears therefore as if from the top to the bottom of 

 the animal scale there is present the faculty of choice, 

 and more particularly the choice of action, of com- 

 bined movement-, in response to stimulation arising 

 from without. Yet the function of consciousness has 

 been s.en primarily to retain the past and to antiii- 

 pate the future. That function is natural to choice. 



CONSCIOUSNESS PRESENT IN At.L LIVING .MATIER. 



Does, then, consciousne.ss cover the whole domain 

 of life ? .M. Bergson replies I'- 

 ll seems piobable, Ihi rcforc, ;ind this i,s my last word on the 

 point, Ih.il consciousness is in principle present in .ill livinij 

 matter, but that it is rlormant or atrophied wherever such 

 matter renounces spontaneous activity, and on the contrary that 

 it becomes more intense, more complex, more complete, just 

 where liviny matter trends most in the i!irection of activity and 

 movement. Coniiciousness in each of us, then, seems to express 

 the amount of choice, or, if you will, of creation, at our dis- 

 posal for movements and activity. Analoj;y authorises us to 

 infer that it is the same in the whole of Ihe organised world. 



LIFE USING CONSCIOUSNESS OX .MATTER 



Consciousness and matter appear to be antagonistic 

 forces, which nevertheless come to a mutual under- 

 standing, and manage somehow to get on together. 

 .Matter is theoretically the realm of fatality, while 

 (.onsciousne.ss is essentially that of liberty ; and life, 

 which is nothing but consciousness using matter for 

 its purposes, succeeds in reconciling "them. The 

 essence of life seems to be to secure that matter, by 

 a process necessarily very slow and difficult, should 

 store up energy ready for life afterwards to expend 

 this energy suddenly in free movements. Sensation 

 is the point at which consciousness touches inatter. 

 M. Bergson says : — 



That these two forms of existence, matter and consciousness, 

 have indeed a common origin, seems to me probable. I believe 

 that the first is a reversal of the second, that while conscious- 

 ness is action that conlinually creates and niuItipHes, matter is 

 action which conlinii.iUy unmakes itself and wears out ; ami \ 

 believe also that neither the matter constituting a world 'nor the 

 consciousness which utilises this matter can be explained by 

 themselves, and that there is a common source of both this 

 matter and this consciousness. 



"the impulse TO CLIMB HIGHER." 



M. Bergson then puts the question, Why, if adapta- 

 tion explains verything in evolution, has life gone 

 on complicating itself more and more delicately and 

 dangerously? He answers : — 



Why, if there is not behind life an impulse, an immense 

 impulse to climb higher and higher, to run greater and greater 

 risks in order to arrive at greater and greater efficiency ? 



It seems as if it were a force that contained in itself, 

 at least potential and interfused, the two forms of 

 consciousness that we call instinct and intelli<'ence. 

 The human brain possesses this remarkable feature, 

 a.5 distinguished from that of a highly developed 

 animal, "that it can oppose to every contracted habit 

 another habit, to every kind of automatism another 

 automatism, so that in man liberty succeeds in freeing 

 itself by setting necessity to fight against necessity." 



vital and spiritual. 



The evolution of life makes obvious that there is a 

 vital impulse towards a higher and higher efficiency 

 to transcend itself, in a word, to create. But such a 

 force is precisely what is called a spiritual force. 

 Matter, by the unique nature of the resistance it 

 opposes, and the unique nature of the docility to 

 which it can be brought, plays at one and the same 

 lime the rb/e of obstacle and stimulus, causes us to 

 teel our force and to succeed in intensifying ii. 

 .Nature sets uj) a signal every time we attain the 

 fullest expansion of life. That signal is joy. True 

 joy is always an emphatic signal of the triumph of 

 life :— 



If, then, in every province, the triumph of life is expressed by 

 creation, ought wc not to think that ilic ultiniaie rcasson of 

 hum in life is a creation which, in <listinciion from ihat of the 

 arli-t or man of science, can be pursued at every moment 

 and by all men alike; I mean the creation of self by self the 



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