Bertrand Russell

“ Thus we are condemned, in action, to be the blind slaves of instinct: the life-force pushes us on from behind, restlessly and unceasingly. There is no room in this philosophy for the moment of contemplative insight when, rising above the animal life, we become conscious of the greater ends that redeem man from the life of the brutes. ”

“ If we may be allowed to add another image to the many by which Bergson’s philosophy is illustrated, we may say that the universe is a vast funicular railway, in which life is the train that goes up, and matter is the train that goes down. The intellect consists in watching the descending train as it passes the ascending train in which we are. The obviously nobler faculty which concentrates its attention on our own train, is instinct or intuition. ”

“ M. Bergson’s philosophy, unlike most of the systems of the past, is dualistic: the world, for him, is divided into two disparate portions, on the one hand life, on the other matter, or rather that inert something which the intellect views as matter. The whole universe is the clash and conflict of two opposite motions: life, which climbs upward, and matter, which falls downward. ”

“ As intellect is connected with space, so instinct or intuition is connected with time. It is one of the noteworthy features of Bergson’s philosophy that, unlike most writers, he regards time and space as profoundly dissimilar. Space, the characteristic of matter, arises from a dissection of the flux which is really illusory, useful, up to a certain point, in practice, but utterly misleading in theory. Time, on the contrary, is the essential characteristic of life or mind. ”

“ The two foundations of Bergson’s philosophy, in so far as it is more than an imaginative and poetic view of the world, are his doctrines of space and time. His doctrine of space is required for his condemnation of the intellect, and if he fails in his condemnation of the intellect, the intellect will succeed in its condemnation of him, for between the two it is war to the knife. ”

“ This view of the world, which appears difficult and unnatural to intellect, is easy and natural to intuition. Memory affords an instance of what is meant, for in memory the past lives on into the present and interpenetrates it. Apart from mind, the world would be perpetually dying and being born again; the past would have no reality, and therefore there would be no past. It is memory, with its correlative desire, that makes the past and the future real and therefore creates true duration and true time. ”

“ If you like Bergson’s image better, it is just as legitimate.
The good which Bergson hopes to see realized in the world is action for the sake of action. All pure contemplation he calls “dreaming,” and condemns by a whole series of uncomplimentary epithets: static, Platonic, mathematical, logical, intellectual. Those who desire some prevision of the end which action is to achieve are told that an end foreseen would be nothing new, because desire, like memory, is identified with its object. ”

“ Intuition alone can understand this mingling of past and future: to the intellect they remain external, spatially external as it were, to one another. Under the guidance of intuition, we perceive that “form is only a snapshot view of a transition” (C. E., p. 319) , and the philosopher “will see the material world melt back into a single flux” (C. E., p. 390) .
Closely connected with the merits of intuition is Bergson’s doctrine of freedom and his praise of action. “In reality,” he says, “a living being is a center of action. ”

“ We must now return to the subject of instinct or intuition, as opposed to intellect. It was necessary first to give some account of duration and memory, since Bergson’s theories of duration and memory are presupposed in his account of intuition. In man, as he now exists, intuition is the fringe or penumbra of intellect: it has been thrust out of the center by being less useful in action than intellect, but it has deeper uses which make it desirable to bring it back into greater prominence. ”

“ In reality there are no separate solid things, only an endless stream of becoming, in which nothing becomes and there is nothing that this nothing becomes. But becoming may be a movement up or a movement down: when it is a movement up it is called life, when it is a movement down it is what, as misapprehended by the intellect, is called matter. I suppose the universe is shaped like a cone, with the Absolute at the vertex, for the movement up brings things together, while the movement down separates them, or at least seems to do so. ”

“ And so long as the main object of philosophers is to show that nothing can be learned by patience and detailed thinking, but that we ought rather to worship the prejudices of the ignorant under the title of “reason” if we are Hegelians, or of “intuition” if we are Bergsonians, so long philosophers will take care to remain ignorant of what mathematicians have done to remove the errors by which Hegel profited. ”

“ Among theoretical philosophies we shall place most of the great systems; for though the desire for knowledge is rare, it has been the source of most of what is best in philosophy. Practical philosophies, on the other hand, will be those which regard action as the supreme good, considering happiness an effect and knowledge a mere instrument of successful activity. Philosophies of this type would have been common among Western Europeans if philosophers had been average men; as it is, they have been rare until recent times, in fact their chief representatives are the pragmatists and M. Bergson. ”

“ The account of the doings of intellect is not always easy to follow, but if we are to understand Bergson we must do our best.
Intelligence or intellect, “as it leaves the hands of nature, has for its chief object the inorganic solid” (C. E., p. 162) ; it can only form a clear idea of the discontinuous and the immobile (pp. 163-4) ; its concepts are outside each other like objects in space, and have the same stability (p. 169) . The intellect separates in space and fixes in time; it is not made to think evolution, but represent becoming as a series of states (p. 171) . ”

“ But intellect is not itself a descending motion, it is merely an observation of the descending motion by the ascending motion.
Intellect, which separates things, is, according to Bergson, a kind of dream; it is not active, as all our life ought to be, but purely contemplative. When we dream, he says, our self is scattered, our past is broken into fragments (p. 212) , [2] things which really interpenetrate each other are seen as separate solid units: the extra-spatial degrades itself into spatiality (p. 218) , which is nothing but separateness. ”

“ Mathematics conceives change, even continuous change, as constituted by a series of states; Bergson, on the contrary, contends that no series of states can represent what is continuous, and that in change a thing is never in any state at all. This view that change is constituted by a series of changing states he calls cinematographic; this view, he says, is natural to the intellect, but is radically vicious. True change can only be explained by true duration; it involves an interpenetration of past and present, not a mathematical succession of static states. ”

“ As against both these views, though with more sympathy for teleology than for mechanism, M. Bergson maintains that evolution is truly creative, like the work of an artist. An impulse to action, an undefined want, exists beforehand, but until the want is satisfied it is impossible to know the nature of what will satisfy it. ”

“ All organized beings, from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. ”

“ His imaginative picture of the world, regarded as a poetic effort, is in the main not capable of either proof or disproof. Shakespeare says life’s but a walking shadow, Shelley says it is like a dome of many-colored glass, Bergson says it is a shell which bursts into parts that are again shells. ”

“ Of course, it will be said, the arrow is where it is at one moment, but at another moment it is somewhere else, and this is just what constitutes motion. Certain difficulties, it is true, arise out of the continuity of motion, if we insist upon assuming that motion is also discontinuous. These difficulties, thus obtained, have long been part of the stock-in-trade of philosophers. But if, with the mathematicians, we avoid the assumption that motion is also discontinuous, we shall not fall into the philosopher’s difficulties. ”

“ They are never wholly without each other, but in the main intellect is the misfortune of man, while instinct is seen at its best in ants, bees, and Bergson. The division between intellect and instinct is fundamental in his philosophy, much of which is a kind of Sandford and Merton, with instinct as the good boy and intellect as the bad boy. ”

“ There are, to begin with, two radically different things, both of which are commonly called memory; the clear distinction between these two is one of the best things in Bergson. “The past survives,” he says, “under two distinct forms: first, in motor mechanisms; secondly, in independent recollections” (M. and M., p. 87) . For example, a man is said to remember a poem if he can repeat it by heart, that is to say, if he has acquired a certain habit or mechanism enabling him to repeat a former action. ”

“ Thus all intellect, since it separates, tends to geometry, and logic, which deals with concepts that lie wholly outside each other, is really an outcome of geometry, following the direction of materiality (pages 222-4) . Both deduction and induction require spatial intuition behind them (p. 225) ; “the movement at the end of which is spatiality lays down along its course the faculty of induction, as well as that of deduction, in fact, intellectuality entire.” It creates them in mind, and also the order in things which the intellect finds there (p. 228) . ”

“ Where there seem to be different times outside each other, he says, the times are pictured as spread out in space; in real time, such as is given by memory, different times interpenetrate each other, and cannot be counted because they are not separate. ”

“ His doctrine of time is necessary for his vindication of freedom, for his escape from what William James called a “block universe,” for his doctrine of a perpetual flux in which there is nothing that flows, and for his whole account of the relations between mind and matter. ”

“ Zeno belonged to the Eleatic school, whose object was to prove that there could be no such thing as change. The natural view to take of the world is that there are things which change; for example, there is an arrow which is now here, now there. By bisection of this view, philosophers have developed two paradoxes. The Eleatics said that there were things but no changes; Heraclitus and Bergson said that there were changes but no things. The Eleatics said there was an arrow, but no flight; Heraclitus and Bergson said there was a flight but no arrow. ”

“ Evolution is not primarily explicable by adaptation to environment; adaptation explains only the turns and twists of evolution, like the windings of a road approaching a town through hilly country. But this simile is not quite adequate; there is no town, no definite goal, at the end of the road along which evolution travels. Mechanism and teleology suffer from the same defect: both suppose that there is no essential novelty in the world. Mechanism regards the future as implicit in the past, since it believes the future to be calculable ”

“ But there is another way of classifying philosophies, less precise, but perhaps more helpful to the non-philosophical; in this way, the principle of division is according to the predominant desire which has led the philosopher to philosophize. Thus we shall have philosophies of feeling, inspired by the love of happiness; theoretical philosophies, inspired by the love of knowledge; and practical philosophies, inspired by the love of action. ”

“ It is suggested that in some way everything that has happened to us is remembered, but as a rule, only what is useful comes into consciousness. Apparent failures of memory, it is argued, are not really failures of the mental part of memory, but of the motor mechanism for bringing memory into action. ”

“ But the time here spoken of is not mathematical time, the homogeneous assemblage of mutually external instants. Mathematical time, according to Bergson, is really a form of space; the time which is of the essence of life is what he calls duration. This conception of duration is fundamental in his philosophy ”

“ Life is one great force, one vast vital impulse, given once for all from the beginning of the world, meeting the resistance of matter, struggling to break a way through matter, learning gradually to use matter by means of organization ”

“ The view that all separateness implies space is now supposed established, and is used deductively to prove that space is involved wherever there is obviously separateness, however little other reason there may be for suspecting such a thing. Thus abstract ideas, for example, obviously exclude each other: whiteness is different from blackness, health is different from sickness, folly is different from wisdom. ”

“ For example, we may suppose some vague desire in sightless animals to be able to be aware of objects before they were in contact with them. This led to efforts which finally resulted in the creation of eyes. Sight satisfied the desire, but could not have been imagined beforehand. For this reason, evolution is unpredictable, and determinism cannot refute the advocates of free will. ”

“ An earlier passage on the same page will illustrate the fallacy further. “That which constitutes our pure perception,” he says, “is our dawning action . . . The actuality of our perception thus lies in its activity, in the movements which prolong it, and not in its greater intensity: the past is only idea, the present is ideo-motor” (ib.) . This passage makes it quite clear that, when Bergson speaks of the past, he does not mean the past, but our present memory of the past. The past when it existed was just as active as the present is now ”