

APRIL 22, 1915] 

that each event of experience must be. acknow- 
Iédged for what it appears to be, and heard for 
its own claims. To neither doubt nor belief, 
datum nor preference, term nor relation, value 
nor ‘fact, did he concede superiority over’ the 
others. Pure experience knows no favour- 
ites. He admits into reality . . . evil as well as 
good, discontinuities as well as continuities, un- 
human as well as human, plurality as well as 
unity, chance and novelty as well as order and 
law.” ; 
Though between James and Bergson there is 
no little spiritual sympathy, a profound difference 
exists in the methodology of the I!eltanschawung 
of each thinker. ‘Where,’ says Dr. Kallen, 
“Bergson beholds a universe, James sees a multi- 
verse. . James isa democrat in metaphysics. 
Bergson, on the contrary, is a monarchist. For 
him the distinction between appearance and 
reality is aboriginal and final. For James it is 
secondary and functional.” For James, ‘being 
is neutral,” and he ignores, practically, the differ- 
ence between “being” and ‘“‘not being.” Hegel 
laboriously proved them to be the same. James 
deals with reality just as it comes to cognition. 
Reality to him is “alogical,” as Dr. Kallen puts 
it. Kant began the attack on logical meta- 
physics, inventing “epistemology” to assist him 
towards a locus standi. He, no less than any of 
the ancients, would have nothing to do with 
“common-sense reality.” And no one expects 
any philosopher to consider it. But, to return to 
Bergson and his notion of philosophical reality, 
it is remarkable with what élan the French thinker 
embraces his self-found “truth.” It is durée 
réelle (pure duration), a poussée formidable (a 
formidable thrust), the élan vital (the onrush of 
life); but its eternal enemy is matter and space, 
which distort it and by which it is distorted. 
Bergson’s “flux”? is a richer concept than that 
of Heraclitus, but it is of the same order. You 
would expect him to prefer instinct to intellect. 
But no one nowadays would place intellect, reason, 
first in the cosmic hierarchy. Both Bergson and 
James have contributed to this pesult From the 
pragmatist point of view truth is “what we live 
by”; “common-sense, religion, art, and science 
are tools and modes of life, and therefore prag- 
matic.” But, for Bergson, “truth is absolute,” 
and his “truth ’’ is vitalism writ large, after a 
course of Plotinus, Driesch (?), and Darwin. 
(2) It is somewhat stimulating to find a disciple 
of Berkeley crying in the wilderness of to-day. 
Mr. Leonard Hall puts forward a “metaphysical 
theory ” which is “a particular form of psycho- 
physical parallelism, in which it is maintained that 
the physical world is the appearance, or image, 
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201 
of the psychical world, in the distorting mirror of 
perception” (my italics). It is a clever tour de 
force, though it apparently quite serious. 
Granted the major premiss, everything comes out 
satisfactorily. Mr. Hall commences with the old 
antithesis of appearance and reality, and argues 
that “the initiating cause of all perceptions of 
the same material body is, not the body itself, 
but a reality of which the body is the image in 
the distorting mirror of perception.” For 
Berkeley the initiating cause was God; for modern 
science “the initiating cause of all perceptions of 
the same body is the body itself,” which, by the 
way, is not the case; science does not dogmatise 
here. Material bodies are “unreal . they are 
the transfigured appearances, or images, of under- 
lying realities. Further, according to this theory, 
space is unreal, a material body, like the image 
of an object in a mirror, being in unreal space.” 
Mr. Hall concludes that every organism, from 
the protozoa upwards, is a “mind”; that man 
is the super-conglomerate of “minds,” and that 
this hypothesis of summated explains 
evolution and the organic world. 
(3) Prof. Lloyd has written a suggestive little 
book on adaptation. The proposition of the 
selection theory that “competition causes evolu- 
is 
minds 
tion” was made in order to explain adaptation 
and life in general. It regards organisms as 
fitting into something, which is called their en- 
vironment, and that this correspondence was 
brought about by the elimination, from the one 
side; of all that would not fit.” But adaptation, 
according to Prof. Lloyd, does not, any more than 
life, require explanation. It is the teleological 
bias of man, the machine-maker, that institutes 
the wonder which leads to design, purpose, and 
adaptation theories. _But adaptation is ‘its own 
explanation, since an unadapted thing could not 
live.” 
(4) The IWeltanschauung of many philosophers 
has been based on esthetic axioms. And in his 
way the artist is a philosopher; “the marbles of 
Phidias and the philosophy of Plato . . . obey 
the same impulse and express the same will—an 
impulse to make over unsuitable realities into 
satisfactory ideas, a will to remodel discordant 
nature into happy The reminis- 
cences of the Japanese poet, Mr. Yone Noguchi, 
are a case of esthetic pragmatism. “Do you 
know,” he says, “I am a shy, without-knowledge- 
of-the-world poet”? All his experiences have 
been acquired oe the point of view of beauty. 
His description of Chicago is a good example. 
“Smoke means Chicago as flower means Japan; 
money means Chicago as art means Japan.” 
A. E. CRAWLEY. 
civilisation.” 
