Edouard Le Roy

“ Again, every science has begun by practical arts. Indeed, our science of today, however disinterested it may have become, remains none the less in close relation with the demands of our action; it permits us to speak of and to handle things rather than to see them in their intimate and profound nature. Analysis, when applied to our operations of knowledge, shows us that our understanding parcels out, arrests, and quantifies, whereas reality, as it appears to immediate intuition, is a moving series, a flux of blended qualities. ”

“ To return to the direct view of things beyond all figurative symbols, to descend into the inmost depths of being, to watch the throbbing life in its pure state, and listen to the secret rhythm of its inmost breath, to measure it, at least so far as measurement is possible, has always been the philosopher's ambition; and the new philosophy has not departed from this ideal. But in what light does it regard its task? That is the first point to clear up. For the problem is complex, and the goal distant.
"We are made as much, and more, for action than for thought," says Mr Bergson ”

“ Conceived as the sole mistress of truth, this science was expected in days to come to fulfil all the needs of man, and unreservedly to take the place of ancient spiritual discipline. Genuine philosophy had had its day: all metaphysics seemed deception and fantasy, a simple play of empty formulae or puerile dreams, a mythical procession of abstraction and phantom; religion itself paled before science, as poetry of the grey morning before the splendour of the rising sun. ”

“ Round intelligence itself exists a halo of instinct. This halo represents the remains of the first nebulous vapour at the expense of which intelligence was constituted like a brilliantly condensed nucleus; and it is still today the atmosphere which gives it life, the fringe of touch, and delicate probing, inspiring contact and divining sympathy, which we see in play in the phenomena of discovery, as also in the acts of that "attention to life," and that "sense of reality" which is the soul of good sense, so widely distinct from common-sense. ”

“ The deep and living aspiration of our day is in everything to seek the soul, the soul which specifies and quickens, seek it by an effort towards the revealing sympathy which is genuine intelligence, seek it in the concrete, without dissolving thought in dreams or language, without losing contact with the body or critical control, seek it, in fine, as the most real and genuine part of being. ”

“ In the depths of ourselves we find liberty; in the depths of universal being we find a demand for creation. Since evolution is creative, each of its moments works for the production of an indeducible and transcendent future. This future must not be regarded as a simple development of the present, a simple expression of germs already given. Consequently we have no authority for saying that there is for ever only one order of life, only one plane of action, only one rhythm of duration, only one perspective of existence. ”

“ Mr Bergson's readers will undergo at almost every page they read an intense and singular experience. The curtain drawn between ourselves and reality, enveloping everything including ourselves in its illusive folds, seems of a sudden to fall, dissipated by enchantment, and display to the mind depths of light till then undreamt, in which reality itself, contemplated face to face for the first time, stands fully revealed. ”

“ But man is not on that account isolated in nature: "As the smallest grain of dust forms part of our entire solar system, and is involved along with it in this undivided downward movement which is materiality itself, so all organised beings from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the times in which we live, and in all places as at all times, do but demonstrate to our eyes a unique impulse contrary to the movement of matter, and, in itself, indivisible. All living beings are connected, and all yield to the same formidable thrust. ”

“ On the contrary, we must represent the state of consciousness to ourselves as variable according to the whole of which it forms a part. Here and there, although it always bears the same name, it is no longer the same thing. "The more the ego becomes itself again, the more also do its states of consciousness, instead of being in juxtaposition, penetrate one another, blend with one another, and tinge one another with the colouring of all the rest. Thus each of us has his manner of loving or hating, and this love or hate reflect our entire personality." ”

“ Change is self-sufficient; it has no need of a support, a moving body, a "thing" in motion. There is no vehicle, no substance, no spatial receptacle, resembling a theatre-scene, no material dummy successively draped in coloured stuffs; on the contrary, it is the body or the atom which should be subordinately defined as symbols of completed becoming.
Of movement thus conceived, indivisible and substantial, what better image can we have than a musical evolution, a phrase in melody? That is how we must work to conceive reality. ”

“ Who has absolute knowledge of a machine, the student who analyses it in mechanical theorems, or the engineer who has lived in comradeship with it, even to sharing the physical sensation of its laboured or easy working, who feels the play of its inner muscles, its likes and dislikes, who notes its movements and the task before it, as the machine itself would do were it conscious, for whom it has become an extension of his own body, a new sensori-motor organ, a group of prearranged gestures and automatic habits? ”

“ What, then, is the original intuition of Mr Bergson's philosophy, the creative intuition whence it comes forth? We cannot hesitate long: it is the intuition of duration. That is the perspective centre to which we must indefatigably return; that is the principle which we must labour to expose in its full light; and that is, finally, the source of light which will illumine us. Now a philosophy is not only an expressed intuition; it is further and above all an acting intuition, gradually determined and realised, and tested by its explanatory works ”

“ Do not conclude, however, that the philosopher's duty is to renounce intelligence, place it under tutelage, or abandon it to the blind suggestions of feeling and will. It has not even the right to do so. Instinct, with us who have evolved along the grooves of intelligence, has remained too weak to be sufficient for us. Besides, intelligence is the only path by which light could dawn in the bosom of primitive darkness. But let us look at present reality in all its complexity, all its wealth. ”

“ Philosophy, on the contrary, desires to be thought about thought, thought retracing its life and work, knowledge labouring to know itself, fact which aspires to fact about itself, mental effort to become free, to become entirely transparent and luminous in its own eyes, and, if need be, to effect self-reform by dissipating its natural illusions. What we have before our eyes then are the initial postulates themselves, the first spontaneous thoughts, the obscure origins of reason; and we are proceeding towards a point of departure rather than arrival. ”

“ No man today would be justified in foreseeing the conclusions to which the doctrine of creative evolution will one day undoubtedly lead on this point. More than any other, I must forget here what I myself may have elsewhere tried to do in this order of ideas. But it was impossible not to feel the approach of the temptation. Mr Bergson's work is extraordinarily suggestive. His books, so measured in tone, so tranquil in harmony, awaken in us a mystery of presentiment and imagination; they reach the hidden retreats where the springs of consciousness well up. ”

“ Art also tends to reveal nature to us, to suggest to us a direct vision of it, to lift the veil of illusion which hides us from ourselves; and aesthetic intuition is, in its own way, perception of immediacy. We revive the feeling of reality obliterated by habit, we summon the deep and penetrating soul of things: the object is the same in both cases; and the means are also the same; images and metaphors. Is Mr Bergson only a poet, and does his work amount to nothing but the introduction of impressionism in metaphysics? ”

“ What, then, will be for us the beginning of philosophy? After taking cognisance of common utilitarianism, and to emerge from the relativity in which it buries us, we seek a departure-point, a criterion, something which decides the raising of inquiry. Where are we to find such a principle, except in the very action of thought; I mean, this time, its action of profound life independent of all practical aim? We shall thus only be imitating the example of Descartes when solving the problem of temporary doubt. ”

“ Let us consider the most external of these planes of life, and one which is in contact with the outer world, the one which receives directly the impressions of external reality. We live as a rule on the surface of ourselves, in the numerical and spatial dispersion of language and gesture. Our deeper ego is covered as it were with a tough crust, hardened in action: it is a skein of motionless and numerable habits, side by side, and of distinct and solid things, with sharp outlines and mechanical relations. ”

“ Analysis cuts the channels; intuition supplies the water. Intuition acquires and analysis expends.
It is not a question of banning analysis; science could not do without it, and philosophy could not do without science. But we must reserve for it its normal place and its just task.
Concepts are the deposited sediment of intuition: intuition produces the concepts, not the concepts intuition. From the heart of intuition you will have no difficulty in seeing how it splits up and analyses into concepts, concepts of such and such a kind or such and such a shade. ”

“ The fountain itself, the reality which is created, is vital activity, of which spiritual activity represents the highest form; and the spray which falls is the creative act which falls, it is reality which is undone, it is matter and inertia. In a word, the supreme law of genesis and fall, the double play of which constitutes the universe, comprises a psychological formula.
Everything begins in the manner of an invention, as the fruit of duration and creative genius, by liberty, by pure mind; then comes habit, a kind of body, as the body is already a group of habits ”

“ Experience has shown where the dream of universal mathematics leads us. Number is driven to the heart of phenomena and nature dissected with this delicate scalpel. Speaking in more general terms, we adopt spatial relation as the perfect example of intelligible relation. I do not wish to deny the use of such a method now and again, the services it may render, or the beauty of construction peculiar to the systems it inspires. But we must see what price we pay for these advantages. Do we choose geometry for an informing and regulating science? ”

“ Evolution in general would take place as far as possible in a straight line; special evolution is a circular advance. Like dust-eddies raised by the passing wind, living bodies are self-pivoted and hung in the full breeze of life." ("Creative Evolution", page 139.) Each species, each individual, each function tends to take itself as its end; mechanism, habit, body, and letter, which are, strictly speaking, pure instruments, actually become principles of death. ”

“ I do not, of course, wish to abuse systems of philosophy. Each of them is an experience of thought, a moment in the life of thought, a method of exploring reality, a reagent which reveals an aspect. Truth undergoes analysis into systems as does light into colours. ”

“ Intuition is a necessary beginning; it is the impulse which sets the analysis in motion, and gives it direction; it is the sounding which brings it to solid bottom; the soul which assures its unity. "I shall never understand how black and white interpenetrate, if I have not seen grey, but I understand without trouble, after once seeing grey, how we can regard it from the double point of view of black and white." ("Introduction to Metaphysics.") ”

“ Is thought only possible under the law of number? Does reality only become an object of knowledge as a system of distinct but regulated factors and moments? Do ideas exist only by their mutual relations, which first of all oppose them and afterwards force intelligence to move endlessly from one term to another? If such were the case, reason would certainly be first, as alone making an intelligible continuity out of discontinuous perception and restoring total unity to each temporary part by a synthetic dialectic. But all this really has meaning only after analysis has taken place. ”

“ Philosophy, in consequence, is no longer anything but the science of problems already solved, the science which is confined to saying why knowledge is knowledge and action action, of such and such a kind, and such and such a quality. And in consequence also reason can no longer appear anything but an original datum postulated as a simple fact, as a complete system come down ready-made from heaven, at bottom a kind of non-temporal essence, definable without respect to duration, evolution, or history, of which all genesis and all progress are absurd. ”

“ We hear the wells of consciousness at their mysterious task like an invisible shiver of running water through the mossy shadow of the caves. I dissolve in the joy of becoming. I abandon myself to the delight of being a pulsing reality. ”

“ Our concept of law, in its classical form, is not general: it represents only the law of co-existence and of mechanism, the static relation between two numerically disconnected terms; and in order to grasp evolution we shall doubtless have to invent a new type of law: law in duration, dynamic relation. For we can, and we must, conceive that there is an evolution of natural laws; that these laws never define anything but a momentary state of things; that they are in reality like streaks determined in the flux of becoming by the meeting of contrary currents. ”