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metaphysics is simply an unusually 
obstinate desire to see and _ think 
clearly and consistently. And Henri 
Bergson, who is generally conceded 
to be the greatest philosopher today 
living, said of William James, that 
he brought philosophy down from 
heaven to earth. 
Metaphysics takes us into the 
study of the absolute—into the very 
nature of reality. “The old autino- 
mies of the Infinite: were, I im- 
agine,” says James of Bergson, “the 
irritant that first woke his faculties 
from their dogmatic slumber.” This 
is what awakens most of us, if we 
ever awaken at all. But how easy 
it is just to remain asleep—dormant 
—and take things as they are, ard 
let it go at that! Sain ; 
Most of us take our ideas ready 
made instead of carving them out of 
reality to our own order. How shiall 
we do that? one asks. Just find your- 
find yourself in the eternal reality, 
and then to know is to make, to 
cieate. 
And there is only one stuff oul of 
which all ideas are made. That 1s 
mind stuffi—‘the substance of the 
spirit,’ if you like that phraseology 
better. 
To know this is the only reality, 
and to live in it is to be free. “To 
act freely,” says Bergson, “is to re- 
cover possession of one’s self and to 
get back into pure duration. 
Pure duration is but the contin- 
uous flow of this unceasing activity 
that we call life or mind, in which 
there is nothing fixed—no_ carved- 
out things, no states, no artificial di- 
visions of time. All is motion; all 
is change. That is the only reality. 
How get into this state of mind? 
There is only one answer to this 
question. All great philosophers 
have answered it in the same way. 
By purification—mental purification, 
I mean. ‘That was Henri Bergson’s 
real message to this country when 
he came over to lecture in Columbia 
and Harvard last winter. But few 
people seemed to'grasp it, however. 
They were too busy trying to under- 
stand with the intellect what can be 
understood only by the intellect sup- 
plemented by pure intuition, 
The process of mental purification 
is a simple one if one knows just 
what one must do and is willing to 
do it. It means sacrifice and suf- 
fering, however, but it is all worth 
while. The greatest difficulty in the 
way is our inability to get rid of the 
traditional “concepts” of “things.” 
We have all our knowledge packed 
away in boxes and jars and draw- 
ers, labelled “this” and tagged 
“that.” And whenever we are called 
NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
upon to know something new to us, 
we drag out this box or that jar, and 
if we can fit the new into the old, we 
accept it; if we can’t, we don’t, 
James must have meant something 
of this sort when he said: “To think 
of concepts as the merely practical 
things—as Bergson calls them—is 
very hard. It is putting off our 
proud maturity of mind and becom- 
ing again as little children in the 
eyes of reason. But difficult as such 
a revolution is, there is no other way, 
1 believe, to the possession of reai- 
ity.” 
In other words, we see with the 
physical sense, which centers in the 
intellect, and which, as everybody 
knows, is altogether unreliable ex- 
cept as a means of going about and 
in dealing with our fellow men in the 
ordinary, every-day transactions, of 
life. But Bergson says: 
“Let us try to see no longer with 
the intellect alone, which grasps only 
the ready-made and which looks 
from the outside, but with the spirit; 
I mean with the faculty of seeing, 
which is immanent in the faculty of 
acting, and which springs up, some- 
how, by the twisting of the will on 
itself, when action is turned into 
knowledge, like heat, so to say, into 
light.” 
This faculty of acting is the real- 
ity — perpetual motion —life —free- 
dom. This is God—Good—Truth— 
Love. We can’t escape it if we will, 
for it is the inevitable, the eternal. 
We cannot conceive of the time when 
it was not. ‘Therefore, we cannot 
conceive of its having had a begin- 
ning. Neither can we conceive of 
its having an ending. 
It is the “force that launched the 
planets in their orbits and says to 
the mighty wave: “Thus far shalt 
thou go and no farther.’” It is the 
law of gravitation, which is the at- 
traction every idea in the universe 
has for every other idea in the uni- 
verse. We used to be taught that 
gravitation is the attraction that 
every particle of matter has for 
every other particle of matter in the 
universe. But we know better now. 
We know that it is not the mat- 
ter that attracts. It 18; the? force 
within what seems to be matter. The 
physicists themselves virtually agree 
to that. They confess that the frag- 
ment of matter may be resolved into 
the molecule, the atom, the ion or 
elektron, and finally into supposi- 
tional forces floating in an imaginary 
ether. That is all there is to matter, 
even from the materialist’s view- 
point. Bergson probably had this in 
mind when he said: “There are no 
things; there are only actions.” 
Of course, he meant to deny the 
eternal verity of things. 
but they bear the same relation to 
mind that the Spanish verb “estar” 
bears to “ser,” a distinction, by the 
way, that we do not have in English. 
Both mean “to be,” but estar means 
to be in the sense that I am tired or 
I am thirsty—just a temporary state 
or condition. “Ser” means “to be” 
in the sense of permanence, reality, 
like “God is Good,” men are immor- 
tal” (the real man I mean.) 
The man that is visible to the hu- 
man eye is a constantly changing ob- 
ject. This is readily understood 
when we think of birth, growth, ma- 
turity and dissolution. What we see 
at any one moment is but a mean of 
constantly changing forms or essen- 
ces. The reality is change—motion— 
duration, The Futurists try to repre- 
sent this view in art. To show how 
ready people are to see things in this 
way, let us recall the polite epithets 
that have been hurled at their pro-- 
gressive heads. ‘This is the conven- 
tional conservative greeting. - 
“But we must believe what we 
see,’ you say, “just as we know what 
we hear.” 
The anthropologists tell us that 
man (physical man) has been on the 
earth from 50,000 to 500,000 years. 
(That is as near as they agree.) Tak- © 
ing the mean, 275,000, to be true for 
purposes of argument, man saw the 
sun rise in the East and set in the 
West for 274,600 years. Less than 
four hundred years ago did Coper- 
nicus discover that testimony of the 
physical eye to be false. 
Stand with your eyes blindfolded, 
' between two men, one of whom is 
fifty yards ahead of you and the 
other fifty yards behind., Let the 
two men discharge pistols alternate- 
ly, and you can’t tell for the life of 
you whether the pistol is discharged 
in front or behind. 
How many place any reliance on 
the sense of smell, taste or feeling, 
especially when they are not enforc- 
ed by the sense of sight? I do not 
mean that on this account they are 
of no use to us. They are absolutely 
necessary in the performance of our 
daily duties. But as methods of 
knowing the reality they are of little 
service except as they are enforced 
by intuition—that faculty which is 
usually more fully developed in wo- 
men than in men. 
In the words of Bergson again, “It 
is to the very inwardness of life that 
intuition leads us—by intuition I 
mean instinct that has become dis- 
interested, self-conscious, capable of 
reflecting upon its object and of en- 
larging it indefinitely,” 
They exist, 
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