198 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



The Greeks had deep respect for reasoning, and even deeper respect 

 for language; yet language is wholly committed to the statical view 

 of life. The noun implies that a thing is a fixed thing; the adjective 

 implies that qualities are states, instead of cross-sections of change; 

 even the verb is hardly better than an adjective. Yet all the Greek 

 categories depend very directly upon this linguistic epistemology, so 

 partial to intellect and so contrary to real experience. According to 

 language, a child becomes a man; according to duration, or creative 

 evolution, becoming, or the life-force, passes through experiences 

 which may be ticketed for convenience as infant, child, adolescent, 

 man and countless stages of subdivision. 



Here as elsewhere Bergson admits the value of our human intellect, 

 which shows so fully in our language, but he utterly denies that this 

 human specialty is intended or adapted to give us a metaphysics of 

 reality. 



The race has put its whole faith in the intellectual process, and the 

 gain has been enormous, but no one will assert that the result has been 

 the solution of the vital problems. 



The Intellect Acts Like a Cinematograph 



The intellect represents life as a cinematograph represents objects 

 in motion. When it works, it creates an illusion; but even this illu- 

 sion would be impossible in the machine if there were no real life 

 behind it to run the film, and so science at its best simulates reality, 

 chiefly because it is always guided by genius and intuition. 



When Zeno offered his famous puzzles, he really had hit upon the 

 rift between life and science, between experience and words, between 

 movements and trajectories; but he rejected the true and living, and 

 chose the more profitable and practical, and all who followed took the 

 same course. But they left an unconquered fortress in their rear, and 

 it is precisely from that fortress that materialism and mechanism 

 must now be attacked. A single movement is by hypothesis a move- 

 ment between stops, and no matter how many intermediate stops 

 there may be the hypothesis does not represent a single movement. 

 All is obscure and contradictory when we try to build up with states 



