BERGSONISM, the teaching of the French philosopher, Henri Bergson (q.v.). The central idea of this philosophy is Freedom; it is at once an explanation and a refutation of mechanism —a refutation of the claim of mechanical prin ciples and methods to furnish a final explana tion of things, and a demonstration of thc essential use and function of these ideas in human life. The significance of Bergsonism in France consists in its attempt to meet and refute the determination and pessimism of writers who claimed in the name of ((science" to. lay down certain general conclusions regarding man's place in nature. In the first place, the most original feature of this system is that it finds its primary datum and its explanatory principle in life. The classical historical philosophies, realistic and idealistic alike, proceeded on the plane of the intellect. The relation of ideas and objects furnishcs the material for philosophy — the one school explaining ideas as the effects of the movement of material bodies, the other interpreting material things in terms of ideas. For both alike, the relation of man to the world is stated in terms of ideas; both put science or lcnowledge in the first place. But for Bergson life is something deeper and more significant than knowledge. To live is something more fundamental than to know. All the distinctions that we make, such as that between ideas and objects, between inner and outer, fall within the original unity of the life process. They are secondary distinctions which the reflective intelligence introduces for the sake of its own practical purposes into the immediate unity of life as it actually goes on. Life itself is just unceasing change, an integral continuous proc ess, not made up of parts, but something that is one and indivisible throughout. Moreover, it is characteristic of life that its changes can not be predicted; it is in its very essence unde termined spontaneity, free creative energy, which constantly advances to what is genuinely new. This creative vital process is at once the reality and moving principle of individual life and of the cosmos as a whole. We become aware of it directly in ourselves through intuition; and through sympathy, through the power which life everywhere possesses of recognizing life, we divine its presence in objects and in the world as a whole. For we ourselves are part and parcel of the total cosmic movement; all reality is alike a manifestation of the same vital impulse, the elan vital, as Bergson names it. The ultimate principle for this philosophy is accordingly neither conscious mind nor ma terial substance or energy; the ultimate reality does not consist of unchanging elements, whether conceived as material or as "mind stuff"; but it is a moving, creative, living proc ess, in which there is nothing fixed and static, nothing isolated or related only externally to other things and to the whole. It is creative evolution. We become aware of the nature of reality through direct expetience of it, by enter ing into it, forming a part of it, and interpret ing it through sympathy. This direct form of knowing, Bergson names Intuition, and he contrasts it sharply with Logic or Intellect, which he confines to the analytic procedure of the reflective understanding.
Intuition, which is just the immediate aware ness of life by itself, through direct experience and illumined by sympathy, neveals the true nature of reality as a creative indivisible proc ess of change or development. On the other hand, the reflective understanding breaks up this integral process into a world of permanent ob jects existing in apparent isolation, and proceeds to organize them into casual systems and to represent their relations by means of con ceptions which completely exclude freedom. Through this logic of the intellect the stand point of physical science comes into existence. But this Intellectual way of reading reality is only a representation of it in symbolic terms. It does not set before us re_ality as it really is, but is a translation of the real, made in the interest of practical life, into a series of con cepts and symbols. For it is not the function of logic and scientific analysis to reveal to us the nature of the world, but to furnish, through the use of symbols, such a schematized repre sentation of things as will enable us to deal with them in a practical way. Science is an' intellectual procedure, depending on analysis.
But to analyze is to present a thing as a func tion of something else; all analysis is thus a translation, a development into symbols, a representation, it may be from successive points of view in which we note as many resemblances as possible between the object we are study ing and other objects which are taken as already defined. Its results accordingly. are always relative, yielding only a formulation of the thing in terms of sometlung other than itself. But, it may he asked, Is it possible to lcnow a thing except in this relative way? Bergson replies that there is at least one object which we are able to seize from within by direct intuition, and that is our own personality as it appears as a conscious stream m time. This life is not, however, composed of discrete states of con sciousness, as psychology describes it, and as our ordinary thought is accustomed to repre sent it; but it is, as actually lived, a continuous flow, a temporal whole without differentiation into distinct states or parts. The tendency to conceive of the mental life as constituted by the addition of "states of consciousness* rests upon the representation of time in terms of space. It is essential to distinguish between real time or duration (la duree reelle) and the mathe matical view of time whiai is that of an empty homogeneous qualityless medium, which allows us only to distinguish points as external to each other. Bergson uses many figures in order to make clear his view of Duration — the concrete form of the mental life. Perhaps his most illuminating metaphor is that of the way in which a musical phrase is apprehended. The various notes which compose it 'are successive, yet are not apprehended as a mere succession. They interpenetrate: each has its awn place as part of the musical idea, yet each contains within it what has preceded, and prepares for that which is to follow. So inner experience, life, is a whole, not as an aggregation of ex ternal parts or states of consciousness, but in the sense of a movement which sums up the past and presages the future, uniting them both in itself. It is a continuous process of change, which, however, must not be regarded as a passing away of (states° or (moments,* but as a whole which changes and endures while changing. The intelligence, operating by means of logical concepts, cannot enter into the real flovi of time: it can represent movement only by taking cross-sections of the process, and de termining and describing the condition of things at some specified point. When science professes to measure time and motion, what it does is to leave out of account in them what is really characteristic, the duration and mobility, and to measure the correspondence of certain fixed points, or determine the relations of certain elements of the system with which it is dealing, at the end of a longer or shorter period. A favorite figure of Bergson for describing the operation of the intellect is the cinematograph. "The intellect fixes things as an order of exist ing things in space, setting each thing off as something distinct and unchanging. To repre sent change, it is said, we must introduce time. But it is only the fiction of time that the in telligence is able to represent, just as it is only the appearance of movement that thc cinemato graph gives us. In both cases alike; we have presented, not real change, and not motion, bu,t only a succession of fixed states; riot the flow which is the real, but a representation of it tn terms of what is static and unchanging.* The idea of tinie which the sciences employ is there fore not that of real concrete time at all, but of time which has been assimilated to space. Time from this point of view is represented as a line, or as the successive movements of a body over the parts of a line. But, so regarded, it is robbed of its real continuity, and of all that is characteristic of concrete time, being assim ilated to space in two respects. First, It is regarded as something discrete, mad up of parts, of minutes or seconds, or factions of a second. And, secondly, it is reduced to terms of space by being regarded as homogeneous throughout, in short, as having quantity but no quality. But tune is in every respect the an tithesis of space; it is not quantity, but. pure quality. Space is homogeneous and without i quality, it is made up of parts tha are discrete: it is just pure quantity without uality.