A Pathetic Philosophy

Julien Benda

… My troubled senses swoon away.

— Mathurin Régnier.

A PATHETIC PHILOSOPHY

We should like to consider now, no longer Bergsonism, but the success of Bergsonism, the embrace given to it by a whole society, and to mark in what way this philosophy does indeed come to answer to certain passions of this age; and likewise we should like, by means of this movement, to make precise the sentiments of this society on certain important points.

I

[marginal: Promise of an absolute. Worldly conceptions of science, of philosophy. Promise of an apprehension of things from within. Contempt for the general, contempt for number.]

One of the evidently most popular articles of Bergsonism is the denunciation it makes of science and of the “old philosophy” in that they give only views of the object, arbitrary conceptions formed of it by the intelligence, and it is the annunciation it makes of giving the object in itself. Now, at once, the extraordinary commotion provoked by this declaration, in particular the veritable raising of bucklers it stirs up against science, prove a thing which many perhaps did not suspect: it is that the present society — the cultivated society — has not ceased to believe that science owes it the absolute. That, let us dare to say it, is one of the harshest lessons the educators have received. For more than fifty years, by every possible means, by the book, by the press, by the spoken word, by the “abridgments of the great masters,” by State teaching, by private initiative, the idea of the relativity of science, of its incompetence in the matter of reality, has been served up to the “general public”; it receives this truth from every quarter, it is wholly bathed in it, it repeats it, it teaches it to its little ones, one might believe that it forms part of its natural consciousness… A fine speaker mounts the pulpit, denounces this relativity; it is a revelation! and science is bludgeoned because it does not give the moon. O perfectibility of the masses! (1)

Thus one saw of old a fine general with a fair beard and a black horse, who had but to appear for the fruit of long years of “republican education” to be annihilated… Did we not fear to wound one or the other of these philosophies, we should say that Bergsonism is an intellectual Boulangism.

It is nonetheless easy to see that the idea of the relativity of science is one of those of which a real possession is necessarily impossible to the general public. Of this idea it is, first of all, the mere conception of it that is well-nigh impossible to the public: it amounts, in sum, to thinking — a thing apparently very simple — that science proceeds by symbols, that is to say by general characters substituted for realities, and that every act of science consists in expressing a thing by its relations to other things and not in what it really is; now this idea can scarcely be

[marginal: Necessary unpopularity of relativism.]

(1) Not without accusing it, naturally, of having promised it (see on this point our pamphlet: Le Bergsonisme ou Une philosophie de la mobilité, Mercure de France, 5th ed., pp. 9–99). — As for this revelation which the relativity of science continues to be for the general public, let one recall again its stupor when Science and Hypothesis appeared (1902).

truly thought — I mean, be inherent in the mind that thinks it — except in those who have to some degree handled science, who have touched it with their finger in this pure function of the creation of relations (2); in others it will always remain a borrowed idea, learned and not understood, which they retain only by effort; the idea that abides at the bottom of their mind is that old religious idea that science is the thing that knows, that is to say, that possesses the real; and then relativity, instead of appearing to them as a direct consequence of the nature of science, better still as that nature itself, appears to them as an adventitious attribute, artificially imposed upon that nature by the effect of an arbitrary decision and to the secret mistrust of their mind. — Let us grant, however, that the idea of relativity is understood. That does not suffice for it to hold strongly to the soul; it must be loved, it must be relished, it must be loved. Now, who will dare maintain that the love of such an idea — that in particular the senti-

(2) And again: on condition that they have the faculty of reflecting upon their acts.

ment of the elegance there is for the mind in knowing its own nature and in itself positing its limit, (3) — is a sentiment to be expected of a general public? The truth is that the idea of the relativity of science, far from being loved, is endured; the general public despises science for its limiting its own powers (as it despises the civil power, and for the same reason), and it is in haste to deprive itself, light-heartedly, of the joy there would be in possessing an absolute. The Bergsonian adventure will therefore always be possible. One may even say, considering the growing contempt the elegant classes have for everything that is restriction, their violent taste for “total” possessions, that the scoffer at relativism will, with these classes, have an ever finer game. (4)

Let us mark, to have done with the Bergsonian passion in its relations with

[marginal: Hatred of science, of the Intelligence.]

(3) See note A at the end of the cahier. (4) The Bergsonian adventure had a famous precedent, the Socratic adventure: on Socrates considered as halting the nascent relativism (Protagoras) and delaying its development by several centuries, see the admirable pages of F.-A. Lange (History of Materialism, French translation, vol. I, p. 60 ff.).

science, the veritable hatred there shown for science — more generally, for the Intelligence which it signifies — the profound desire to humiliate these functions, to debase them to the lowest degrees of the scale of values: it is, at one moment, the extraordinary complaisance with which the Intelligence is confounded with dry and uninventive reasoning, the better to despise it; it is, elsewhere, the joy taken in believing that the great discoveries are made by a function (the “intuition”) which “transcends” the Intelligence; that they are made in the disorder of the mind, outside all logic, by a kind of slap in the face of the scientific spirit (the fact is often true, but what is curious is the joy taken in it) (5); at other times, one is pleased to believe that science is merely a matter of “common sense,” as if it sufficed, once one has a good head, to watch an apple fall in order to discover the laws of Newton; here one stamps with delight to observe of what fragile failures the “bankruptcies” of science consist (one might

(5) Besides the pleasure of scoffing at science, there is in this joy the very romantic repudiation of disorder, the one that makes people say that “the Pensées of Pascal would have been less beautiful had he finished them” (See the manuals).

just as well grieve over them, might one not?); there, one exults to hear that the Intelligence is bound only to our “practical,” “utilitarian” needs, to the “bodily,” to the “inferior”…; that it is adapted — what am I saying? — that it is identical with the inert world, with “matter,” with the dross of the universe, etc… — Moreover, the hatred of the Intelligence is one of the essential characters of our moderns, which manifests itself above all in their aesthetic tastes and doctrines, in their incredible proscription, conscious and systematized, of everything which in art seems to them an intervention of this function. We intend to return in another work to this character of this age, precisely in its aesthetic manifestations, and to seek its causes; let us say at once that one of the principal ones seems to us to be the extraordinary preponderance of women in the modern direction of things of the mind, a preponderance which itself, moreover, calls for explanation. (6)

(6) More exactly, the preponderance of women as women; for, in all ages, in France women have prevailed in the direction of things of the mind; but formerly they sought to be worth something by qualities of a man. “Why do they want to forbid us the use of reasoning?”

[marginal: Necessity of the hatred of science.]

As for what concerns particularly the modern hatred of science, it seems to us that this too was easy to foresee, and that it was an act of candor on the part of our fathers (Renan, Berthelot, H. Spencer) to have believed that science would become the new popular idol, the “religion of high society.” No doubt one has seen elegant societies enamored of science: English society under Charles II, French society under Louis XV; but, without speaking of the share of affectation and of the motives foreign to science which in many entered into this movement (7), it is fitting to observe that the first of these societies was singularly schooled in respect for the mind by the effect of theological discussion, and that the scale of values of the second was such that a

said an elegant lady of the Grands jours d’Auvergne (it is true that she is from the provinces). The worth of woman, even in her own eyes, as woman, is, I believe, instinctivity — etc., seems a thing wholly modern. [OCR corrupted]

(7) Newcastle indeed appears [to have lacked] the movement of English society in 1685 toward the new scientific ideas. As for the extra-intellectual circles, “it was then very perilous to say a word against the fundamental laws of the monarchy; one compensated oneself by denying those of nature; but [these were] all that had been considered until then as the fundamental laws of science.” [OCR corrupted] (History of England, Montégut translation, vol. I, p. 445 ff.).

woman in love there declared: “Ah, my God! how the mind is diminished in loving” (8). But of a democratic world (understand: without culture) which lives and intends to live only by the heart and the senses, was it not certain that on the day when science, in asserting itself, should make precise its character as a passion of the mind, it would become for that world the marked object of its anger and its hatred? The people of Tarentum massacred the Pythagoreans peaceably occupied in their towers in observing the stars; it is the symbol of the natural relations of the secular world with science. (9)

This exasperation of worldly people against the Intelligence which humiliates them in their religion of feeling is an unexpected and considerable support for the parties interested in lowering this function; they have not failed to make use of it

[marginal: Exploitation of these sentiments.]

(8) Lespinasse, letter XIII. She adds: “It is true that the soul loses nothing thereby; but what am I saying? — that is to say, something of a soul within the soul?” [OCR corrupted] If this is the French tradition, M. Barrès is not of it, who […] reciprocally. Others will judge.

(9) It is of course understood that we are here speaking of the secular world called elegant; the popular class does not seem at all touched by the anti-intellectualist doctrines — and is it not so? — To what extent is it not made up exclusively of the religion of grand words and of well-being and of the taste for the marvelous? That is another question.

and to strike up (notably certain men of the Church) all the Bergsonian antiphons against the Intelligence, even though most of them are not, all the same, uncultivated enough to be unaware of their perfect falsity. “His action,” Voltaire says of an agitator, “rested upon equivocations: that is to say that he had on his side the crowd which does not reason and certain clever people who reason very well.” (10)

[marginal: Their conception of philosophy: it must be an immediate apprehension.]

But their anger in this affair is above all against philosophy — the “old” philosophy: it is philosophy above all that has deceived them, that has betrayed its engagement, that deserves all their hatred, in giving only “views of the understanding,” “assemblages of ideas,” “refractions of the real into concepts,” in consisting in speaking about a thing for that reason; it is philosophy that at last returns to its function — what cheers for Him who effects this return! —

(10) For example, we have difficulty in believing that a certain Bergsonian who, nobly versed in mathematics, knows the theory of aggregates and the considerations that created it, is in good faith when he teaches that the Intelligence has none but utilitarian motives.

in offering the absolute, a “direct” contact with things, an “immediate” datum, in making fall at last the “veil interposed between the real and us”!… (11) The philosopher, says a contemporary of Ockham, expressing eminently the idea which the crowd in those days formed of philosophy, “touches the substances”; one sees that this idea has not changed. Besides, it would be rather surprising that natural souls should think the “philosopher’s business is to deny the immediate” (12) or that it is “to integrate the whole of the real into representation” (13).

It is again the same conception they express when they exclaim (see J. Florence, passim) that “philosophy is not to be a chapter of science.” Take it into your head, in fact, to explain to them that philosophy, because it consents to the relative, is nonetheless quite distinct from science; that, for example, it occupies itself with the principles of science, while science occupies itself in making constructions starting from principles which, as

[marginal: What they mean in opposing philosophy to science.]

(11) Ed. Le Roy, Une philosophie nouvelle, p. 5. (12) Hegel. (13) Hamelin.

science, it does not discuss… They do not even listen to you: What is this philosophy which is still only a state of the understanding? Philosophy must break resolutely with this function, must consist in the real, be a “metaphysics,” or else it is not worth the place one gives it. That, however, is what they mean. (14)

[marginal: Confiscation of the word “philosophy.”]

What is remarkable here is their stubbornness in designating this “apprehension of things themselves” by the name of philosophy, whereas, on the one hand, this word for three centuries has designated in a univocal manner a thought about things, and, on the other hand, this “apprehension of things themselves” finds in common usage, to name itself, words perfect-

(14) One could show still other modes of speculation which, although clearly rational, differ profoundly from science and deserve the name of philosophy. Take this thought of Auguste Comte: “This fine problem of the [plurality] of worlds, a problem immense by its own importance, presents a quite particular philosophical interest, in establishing a natural and essential transition from the physics of the sky to that of the earth, by the celestial explanation of a great terrestrial phenomenon.” (Course of Positive Philosophy, 5th lesson.) Who does not feel that this manner of envisaging a problem, though it consists only of points of view on things, is nonetheless of the highest philosophical interest? Need it be said that of that “philosophy” too our people will hear nothing?

ly clear (sentiment, love, mystical communion, etc…). It is because they know what prestige the word philosophy carries today — precisely, moreover, for the sense they reject — and because they intend not to deprive their action of it. It is therefore much to their interest also that they cast doubt on the ascendancy of the words sentiment, love… Moreover, it seems that for a long time the prestige of the word philosophy has been such that everyone wishes to confiscate it in order to name what he prefers: “I will say that the true filosofia,” pronounces a jurist of the sixteenth century, “is comprised in the books of Law, and not in the useless and mute libraries of the filosofi.”

In the same way they confiscate the word “metaphysics.” Need it be recalled that philosophy as defined above (speculation upon principles) deserves this name at least as much, if one is willing to mean by it a mental action which differs from science and “transcends” its object? That the speculations of a Leibniz on the idea of the infinitesimal, of a Hume on the idea of cause, of a Poincaré on entropy, indeed of a Willard Gibbs on chemical equilibria or of an Arrhenius on the constitution of saline solu-

[marginal: of the word “metaphysics.”]

tions, though they have nothing in common with an “apprehension of things,” are nonetheless eminently “metaphysical”? That, in a word, metaphysics is not at all synonymous with mysticism, at least insofar as mysticism means non-conceptual? (15)

A still more curious thing: these declared scorners of the Intelligence wish to confiscate the word “Intelligence”: that knowledge which asks so much of the heart, which wants nothing of the concept, it is the “true Intelligence”! (16) So much does the name of the Intelligence impose upon them all the same!

[marginal: of the word “Intelligence.” Digression on the war of words.]

Let us note, in this connection, the ingenuousness of those authors (Montaigne, Leibniz) who, denouncing equivocation as the sole source of human quarrels, invite men to correct themselves of it, as of a simple fault of the mind. These authors, as good philosophers, take no account whatever

(15) Perhaps it would be convenient, in order to distinguish from the other this metaphysics which consists in an “apprehension of things,” to call it the mystical metaphysics. (Bergsonism calls it the “integral experience.”) On these two “metaphysics” see note B at the end of the cahier.

(16) On the [object,] to seek it, to seek it by an effort of revealing sympathy which is the “true intelligence.” [OCR corrupted] (Ed. Le Roy, op. cit., p. 24; quoted with enthusiasm by Agathon, Les Jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui, p. 89).

of the interest and the passions which, in people of heart, found the slightest acts of the mind. It is evident that if men called, for example, tenderness “tenderness” and sexual desire “sexual desire,” interminable disputes would be avoided; but they wish to call both the one and the other “love,” by reason of the universal religion that attaches to that word. What each one wants in this affair is not at all to understand or to make himself understood (the will of philosophers!), it is to confiscate a sacred word to the profit of the mode he prefers. So that what is called with a smile the war of words is in reality this very serious thing: the war of values for the occupation of those formidable strongholds which are called words. (17)

This will that philosophy give things themselves and not an idea about things amounts again to wanting philosophy to occupy itself only with the inaccessible to

[marginal: Continuation of their conception of philosophy; it must devote itself to the irrational.]

(17) This war is naturally all the more fierce as the words are more powerful and as they are less defined (one does not fight for the word “physics,” whose sense is not vacant). On the other hand, words are the less defined as they are the more powerful, since they are powerful by the great number of sentiments that can be projected into them.

reason, with the Incomprehensible, with the “mysterious.” In this sense F. Brunetière seems to have been the perfect interpreter of this age when he grew indignant (18) against English philosophy, not, as one sometimes believes, because it denies mystery, but because, having posited it (under the name of the Unknowable), it refuses to devote itself to it. One conceives well enough, however, that a philosophy which has decided to say something should desert a subject whose essence is, by the very avowal of those who delight in it, that one will never be able to say anything about it. Nevertheless the true thought of our people on this question is, we believe, that philosophy may very well devote itself to mystery, but that then it is not to pass for the highest activity of the mind (nor, consequently, to keep its name); which implies these two strange beliefs: 1° that attachment to the unknown — not in order to transform it into the known (which is science itself), but in order to be absorbed in it as unknowable — is the highest activity of the mind; or, more

(18) See in particular his preface to the Foundations of Belief by A. J. Balfour.

precisely, that a mental activity is elevated only in the measure in which it turns toward the unknowable; 2° that speculation upon the knowable is by essence incapable of elevation (one knows Brunetière’s constant care to confound it with applied science, but [his] care to repeat that the “invention of electric lamps” or the “progress of steam engines” teaches him nothing about the great problems) (19). In other terms, the will that here appears is that philosophy should be properly that activity commonly called religious (more exactly, mystical) speculation, but that it should be that, however, while benefiting from the renown of free inquiry and of seriousness which the word philosophy today carries: their “philosophical” mind is the religious mind ashamed of itself, at least ashamed of its name.

However, they do indeed intend to find in philosophy a mystery which differs from that of

[marginal: Confusion between philosophy and religion. Philosophy promises a “less coarse” mystery.]

(19) Into this belief that speculation upon the knowable is incapable of elevation there enters also this belief, very sincere, that “knowable” means “easy to know.”

religion — we mean, credible to cultivated people, exempt from those “coarsenesses” which their religion, in its [fine] “modernism,” cannot abolish. How many souls Bergsonism gathers in, souls which, athirst for mystery, can no longer arrange themselves with a “word that is made flesh” or an “unction that teaches us all things.” So came of old to the priestesses of Cybele souls eager for sacred emotion who could no longer be moved by the urn of Minos or by the black frogs of the Styx.

This desire for a confusion in terms between the philosophical activity and the religious activity is moreover a recent thing. The believers of former times would have blushed to make it: “faith,” the History of the Variations says proudly, “takes the place of philosophy for Christians.” It is true that the prestige of philosophy as distinct from religion is also a recent thing.

Let us mark in this connection the unbecoming joy which so many Christians today take in seeing their dogmas supported by philosophies. Let us cite, by way of contrast, this fine pride of a believer of former times: “The distance at which Régis

[marginal: This confusion is recent. Fine pride of an old-time Christian.]

keeps reason and faith does not permit them to unite in those systems which accommodate the ideas of certain dominant philosophers to revelation, or sometimes even revelation to those ideas. He will have neither Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Descartes himself prop up the Gospel.” (Fontenelle, eulogy of Pierre Régis, 1632–1707.)

Finally, at the bottom of this belief that philosophy [owes] “the reality of things,” there is this belief that philosophy is that diabolical thing which finds the Unfindable, touches the Intangible, realizes the Impossible. Here again one sees that the idea the crowd forms of this activity has not [changed] for ten centuries: the philosopher continues to be, for it, the cousin of the alchemist; it continues to have of him that sacred conception which made senseless attempts be called philosophical.

A natural consequence of this conception that philosophy is not to be an idea about things is to think that it is not to be a coherent discourse, that it is not to posit precise definitions, nor to link thoughts correctly. And,

[marginal: “Philosopher” remains synonymous with “sorcerer.” Philosophy is not to be a coherent discourse.]

in fact, an author has been able to declare, to the transports of so-called cultivated persons, that philosophy finds its law in freeing itself from the “silly mania for clear reason,” from correct deductions, from prudent generalizations, in throwing itself headlong into the chaos of the mind, into the contradictory (20); and, symmetrically, one has seen a critic appear in the last degree ridiculous, and be treated accordingly, because he demanded of a system (precisely Bergsonism) some cohesion in the thought, some univocity in the terms. Let us add

(20) Let us be understood here: it is not at all a question of contesting that most thinkers have owed excellent things to the fact that they failed in logic, that they made “their systems crack”; it is a question of pointing out this extraordinary modern will that they should be that and only by that means, this extraordinary application to making of the illogical a value, a method. Besides, one does not at all see that those who, being incoherent, did indeed fine things should have thought, as one would have us believe, that it was that incoherence which made their strength, that they delighted in it, that they were proud of it, that they wished to erect it into a value. One sees just the contrary: “I have not been able to take the following step (namely, to reconcile what I say with a reasonable faith),” says Maxwell humbly in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, so often invoked in favor of our professors of disorder; and Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy, p. 25): “Once again, this book seems to me today an impossible book — I find it badly written, badly balanced, devoid of any effort toward pure logic, very convinced and, on that account, disdainful of furnishing proofs, etc…” It seems indeed that the madmen who have genius do not apply themselves to being mad.

that to see with what naturalness the admirers of this system posited its incoherence as a thing taken for granted, it is evident that this critic was the only one who had taken the system seriously. (21)

In truth, the sentiment of the public on this point — and what shows itself here in the refusal of the rational is not the will to touch an absolute, it is the will to amuse oneself, to repel all austerity — the sentiment of the public is that philosophy is nothing other than a branch of literature, that it

[marginal: Philosophy is not to be serious: philosophical liguorism.]

(21) “Affecting a rigor which would perhaps be in place in a mathematical reasoning but which is altogether out of place in a philosophical discussion” — so was it said to this critic by a brilliant champion of the assailed cause (La Phalange, July 1910). It is true that this champion has since declared that what he meant was that philosophy admits no rigor, but that it admits one specially made for it, which is not that of mathematics. One thinks of that philosopher of whom Chateaubriand speaks who had demonstrated the existence of God almost geometrically. And one is invincibly reminded of those words which make one shudder: “If mathematics ceased to be a truth, […] our moral and religious doctrines would become very serious, several of them would even begin to be sublime.” [OCR corrupted] (Poinsot, cited by J. Bertrand, Éloges académiques, new series, p. 4). And it is […] [OCR corrupted] — philosophy was evidently the “practical” search for moral values, an exercise for which rigor seems to us indeed out of place: we shall examine further on this singular conception of philosophy.

has fulfilled its office when it has aroused emotions, sensations, and that the imprecision of ideas, far from being there an imperfection, on the contrary constitutes there, by the kind of rolling motion it procures to the mind, one more perfection; that, in a word, philosophy must be amusing, moving, suggestive, etc…, that it is not to be serious. Besides, it is precisely this conception which seems to inspire a certain modern philosophical genre (it flourishes in Tuscany) which one could fairly justly name philosophical figarism: a kind of bubbling-up of strident affirmations, as gratuitous as they are peremptory, as false as they are amusing, on the most complex subjects, beaten about by affirmations rigorously contrary but no less amusing, the whole furrowed, as is fitting, with summary executions in three movements of the most considerable theses; (22) works wholly literary, often

(22) Here are a few specimens of these executions: “It is only by a remarkable effect of routine that our professors still persist in commenting upon the antediluvian work of Kant”; — “Renouvier represents perhaps better than any other of our contemporaries the old philosophical rubbish”; — “I quite believe that the whole evolutionism of Spencer is to be explained rather by an emigration of the most vulgar psychology into physics.” (G. Sorel, passim.)

lyrical, in which everything dogmatic disconcerts, but of which a critic seems to have indicated how they ought to be read when he names those authors with whom “consequently,” he says, does not at all signify a real or even intentional consequence but only that the philosophy one has must be a “new impulse” (23); works, for that matter, a thousand times fuller of philosophy than such or such a serious work which contains none at all and to which their eulogists are always careful to refer.

This will to feel emotion through philosophy and not thought expresses itself again by that popular saying that philosophy must be an art; which, with our people, does not at all signify (in which we should all be in agreement) that a philosophical system — like a scientific or historical system — like everything that is an arrangement — implies a subjective element, but rather that a philosophy has worth only by that element, that everything it states objectively has no kind of importance. — Nevertheless this affir-

[marginal: Philosophy “must be an art.”]

(23) Lange (op. cit., vol. II, p. 87), with regard to Feuerbach.

mation that philosophy must be an art envelops yet another idea, equally very modern, and which is worth dwelling upon: it is this idea that art contains within itself a truth — what am I saying? — that it is truth. “If I had to choose,” says a contemporary [whom] the [modern] movement so often admires, “if I had to choose between beauty and truth, it is beauty I would keep, certain that it bears within it a truth higher and deeper than truth itself.” (24) Who does not see the veritable pun that is made here on the word truth? What relation is there between the “truth” that the frieze of the Parthenon or the leg of Phryne can “bear within it” and the “truth” borne within it, for example, by the law of Faraday? Beauty, one will then pronounce, is “an absolute,” an “absolute reality.” Be it so; but no more than ugliness, no more than the hot or the cold, no more than the blue or the red…

(24) Anatole France. — One finds the same thought in minds less brilliantly artistic: “Let us not fear to affirm that a truth which were not beautiful would be only a logical game of our mind (admire that disdain) and that the only solid truth — and one must say so too — is beauty.” (Lachelier; attributed falsely by [Tahitol] to Renouvier in What is Art? — see F. Pillon, L’Année philosophique, 1898, p. 303.)

Finally, why not be content that beauty should be beauty? As if that did not suffice! One catches a glimpse of the day when the scientist will be the only one to appreciate the beautiful for itself; for the artists, the beautiful must always be also the true…

It is again in order to refuse it all objective value that they want philosophy in its nature to “partake of art and of religion.” This formula, which has made its fortune, (25) finds a long development in M. Em. Boutroux (French translation of the Philosophy of the Greeks Considered in its Historical Development by Ed. Zeller, introduction of the translator, p. LXXVII): for M. Boutroux this participation consists in this, that philosophy “disposes, like art and religion, only of a small number of essential forms, applicable moreover to the most different matters.” A singular “participation,” may we dare to remark, which exercises upon anything whatever only a “resemblance.” Ch. Renouvier, who reports this passage in its entirety, makes it followed by reflections which one will permit us to cite

[marginal: Renouvier against M. Boutroux.]

(25) It is generally referred to Hegel. See note C at the end of the cahier.

as seeming to us the topical reply to a doctrine which has taken the force of an axiom: “It is manifestly,” he says, (26) “to make use of improper terms to present philosophy as partaking of art and of religion; for philosophy holds neither of the nature of art nor of the nature of religion, when one considers the characters proper to art or to religion, whether in respect of methods or in respect of works. The critical supremacy and the essential rationality of the forms of philosophy give the lie to this comparison. The true thought is that the real constitution of a philosophical doctrine supposes [what is also supposed by] the conceptions of the artist and the living determinations of religious faith: namely, factors of the passional order, the exercise of a free activity.” The author adds — and this we dare to believe the constitution of a doctrine (as moreover of a work of art) can very well do without — : “and the operation of practical reason.”

(26) Sketch of a Systematic Classification of Philosophical Doctrines, vol. II, p. 140.

Here again are a few interesting forms of this extraordinary will that philosophy should never have worth by what it states: “The talent which a doctrine inspires is in many respects the measure of its truth” (Renan); “A philosophy has worth only by the results it provokes indirectly” (G. Sorel)… The reader will kindly remark that, by the terms of these conceptions, a man who were alone on the earth could never be a great philosopher.

Besides, we gather here the principal grounds by which worldly people [dispute] philosophy of its rational pretension. Everyone will recognize them:

1° all the systems contradict one another; 2° in philosophy, with skill, one can demonstrate anything; 3° no progress: all is said since the Greeks; 4° nothing solid: all the systems collapse one upon another.

Must it be said 1° that the contradiction between systems necessarily exists only between

[marginal: Philosophy never has worth by what it states. Principal worldly arguments against philosophy with rational pretension.]

their points of departure (which are postulates, as being inevitable for any idea about reality) (27); that it is consequently without value against the possibility for any system of holding together with itself, which is the only rationality philosophy aspires to; 2° that those who articulate the second reason have perhaps too much confidence in their sophistical power and in the weakness of their controversialist, [for] one can affirm to them that, certain well-defined premises being posited, there are consequences they will not be able to demonstrate; 3° that there exist philosophical conceptions — very important ones — which the Greeks did not have (for example and at random, the conception of Hume on induction, that of James on the will); 4° that, finally, there exist philosophical conceptions which, far from collapsing, continue to make the foundation of all

(27) At bottom they would like a philosophy without postulate. [OCR corrupted] (28) A learned connoisseur of Greek philosophy (V. Brochard) went so far as to say that to wish to find modern philosophy again in it was an infallible means of understanding nothing either of the one or of the other.

speculation (for example that of Kant on the invalidity of the principles of the mind in the matter of the infinite), and even entire systems (Spinozism, criticism) which continue to satisfy very well-informed men: that, in a word, there are systems which do not hold up and others which do hold up. We do not, however, insist, proposing to ourselves less to refute these worldly clichés than to point out the extraordinary will they express to exterminate philosophy as a serious thing. (29)

But let us return to their will to touch the absolute through philosophy and let us look more closely at this absolute which Bergsonism announces. It is, as has been seen above, [to be] precise, the knowledge of things “from within,” the possession of the “internal principle” of their existence (and no longer the consideration of their “manifesta-

[marginal: Particulars on the Bergsonian absolute: it is a communion with the “internal principle” of things.]

(29) In general, when all his arguments have failed, the worldly man extricates himself by reminding philosophy, not without wagging his head, that it does not attain the great “[Whole]”! “Horatio, there are more things in heaven and on earth than you know of in your philosophy.” Very likely Horatio knew a good deal of them. For a sequel on this subject, see note D at the end of the cahier.

tions”), the penetration into the deepest part of the object, the “sympathizing” with its richest “interior palpitation,” the quintessential, etc., etc… Here Bergsonism provokes in its contemporaries a veritable delirium (see, for example, Ed. Le Roy, op. cit., p. 33): it is that it has come to say to them exactly what they wished to hear, it is that it has come to give expression — and at the same time the air of a philosophical will — to one of their most profound desires: the desire for a perception of things which should be like a kind of sexual invasion of them, of swooning adhesion to the most secret part of their being, of enjoyment of their soul. A pure desire to feel, totally foreign — whatever they may sometimes say of it — to the desire to know (which is always the desire of a relation) (30), full moreover of contempt and of impatience for every state of the mind, and which a poet a hundred years ago expressed in terms which might serve as a warning to a history of the modern soul: “Could I but know what the world contains in its bowels, be present at the spectacle of all activ-

(30) See note E at the end of the cahier.

ity, of fecundation, and no longer carry on a traffic in hollow words” (31). Although this will to a swooning communion with the essence of things has existed in all ages among elegant societies — I mean among those groups of idle and well-fed persons who come to satisfy by the products of the imagination a plethoric need to feel — although it has not been unknown to any of those societies which some imagine wholly enamored of reason (32), one may say nonetheless that it has attained in our day a degree of intensity, of consciousness, of application to satisfying itself, of system, and above all of generality, such as had never yet been seen in it; it is this will which we find in the religious order, where one wishes only to “unite oneself with God,” to enjoy God, in contempt of all theological activity

(31) Faust, I, 1. And above all (ibid.): “What a spectacle! but alas! only a spectacle. Where to grasp it? O infinite Nature!” It is the whole modern hatred of the Intelligence: “We no longer eat the ideas of things, but we want the things themselves.” It is also, at bottom, the hatred of Art, which as such — that is to say, as forms of things — gives never anything but a “spectacle.” Let us cite, by way of contrast with these gluttonies, this thought — and no less poetical — acceptance of the relative: “Into the interior of nature no created spirit penetrates; happy even he to whom she shows her outer rind!” (Albrecht von Haller.) (32) See note F at the end of the cahier.

or reflection upon its nature (the — wholly modern — popularity of Pascal); in the literary order, where the author must “mingle” with the soul he describes as Achilles mingled with Briseis, no longer present a narrative of the soul, nor above all state a judgment; in the plastic art, [where one must] grasp the object itself, in the “infinity” of its characters, and not the views the eye takes of “some” of them. Moreover, all this is only one aspect of a modern will more profound still and curious above all, this one too, by the character of system it assumes: to will a state of the heart or of the senses, to refuse every state of the mind. A singular will, all the same, in face of the works of the mind. (33)

Here again what is curious is to ask this “communion with the essence of things” of philosophy, when it is so properly, by the very avowal of those who demand it, the affair of “poetry.” More generally one may say that the whole modern movement against philosophy (“it does not satisfy the needs of the soul,” “it con-

[marginal: They reproach philosophy with not being poetry.]

(33) On another form of this success of the promiser of the absolute, see note G at the end of the cahier.

tents itself with appearances,” “it does not give full and entire life,” etc…, — the suit has not varied since that of Goethe against d’Holbach), this whole movement amounts to reproaching philosophy with not doing what, in the opinion of everyone, is the office of poetry. (34) Moreover, today poetry is frankly given to philosophy as a model. And then we ask, as always: “Why do you want this activity, perfectly defined, which bears the very clear name of poetry, on which everyone is agreed, to be called philosophy? And why do you want the philosophers, who have another activity, who announce themselves by their name, to set about taking that of the poets, while continuing to call themselves philosophers?” Here is what they would answer if they were sincere: “Because it is the philosophers who today bear the most revered name. We want

(34) Here again Goethe is representative: “If, however, this book (the System of Nature) did us harm, it was in rendering us forever cordially hostile to philosophy and especially to metaphysics; in compensation we threw ourselves all the more vivaciously and passionately upon living science, experience, action, and poetry.” (Truth and Poetry, Book XI.) Action and poetry! that, however, is what he did not forgive philosophy for not giving him.

it to be our activity that is revered under this revered name.” — And likewise this will of the poets that they be confounded with the philosophers dates — like that of the mystics — from the high renown of philosophy: it did not enter Petrarch’s mind to pass off his activity under the name of that of Roger Bacon.

Let us note the extraordinary persistence among our worldly people of this belief that things have “an internal principle” — more precisely, that there exists in the object something other than the object, other than the phenomena that can be distinguished in it, or better still, that things have an existence in relation to themselves, totally distinct from that which they have in relation to us. (35) This existence of things in relation to themselves is, moreover,

[marginal: On this persistent belief that things have an “internal principle.”]

(35) Here, we believe, is the true teaching of Bergsonism: “You see this table,” it says to its disciples: “it is, you say, hard, rectangular, black, shining, etc…; now, it is that for you; but for itself it is nothing of all that; it is nothing of those categories of your mind; exactly as you, for you, are something quite other than this long and broad thing that you are for others. Well, it is into this existence of things by themselves that I wish to lead you.” Here it seems to us that one could do no better, to make understood the mode of knowledge that is to be employed and in what it differs from the ordinary mode, than to transpose [it] to the functional assimilation as opposed to the prehension of food; whereas prehension, one would say, knows only the contours of things, assimilation breaks that

invariably modeled, as soon as it is thought (we shall see this again presently apropos of “duration”), upon the sentiment which we, ourselves, have of our own existence; so that it signifies in the first place, insofar as it signifies anything, an existence in relation to us. But let us pass over this, and see only the persistence of this belief; it is easily explained: besides the desire so natural, and well known, in those who wish to feel, of seeing souls everywhere, one conceives that the image of this principle which solitarily resides at the bottom of things, like Philip II at the bottom of the Escorial, while all around its “manifestations” busy themselves with deceiving whoever wishes to approach it, should be dear to poetical heads.

Bergsonism, we were saying, has come in these articles to say to the present society exactly what it wished to hear. One may say the

[marginal: Profound correspondence between Bergsonism and its public.]

contour, places itself in their internal principle; whereas prehension is a pressure of two surfaces one against the other (a mechanism), assimilation is an interpenetration (a dynamism); the first is in space, the second “transcends” it; the first occupies itself with the wholly made, the second creates, opens [the nutritive] creation; others can take the food for you, others cannot assimilate it for you, etc… But it is perhaps not for us to propose to Bergsonism modes of exposition.

same of all the articles of this philosophy relished by this society — that is to say, of all its articles. Let us note this very particular character of the success of Bergsonism: it is not at all a philosophy which imposes upon the general public ideas foreign to it, it is a philosophy which brings to it ideas which it wished to have; it is not a philosophy which convinces its mind; it is a philosophy which contents its will. Besides, the general public admits it: “M. Bergson,” says one of the young correspondents of Agathon, “explained to us what we were ready to feel” (op. cit., p. 160); and M. Le Roy: “This novelty has nothing paradoxical or disquieting about it. It answers in us to an expectation, fulfills I know not what confused hope. Willingly even, after the fact, one [has] quickly [the] lively impression of truth, one would think one recognized what one discovers, as if one had always obscurely foreseen it, in a mysterious half-light, in the background of consciousness.” (op. cit., p. 5.) Hence this very particular character of spontaneity, of immediacy in the general public’s adhesion to Bergsonism; nothing here of those hesitations,

of those resistances which ordinarily precede those sorts of movements; it is the solitary men who have such resistances; worldly people finish your sentences when you explain Bergsonism to them; it is there, again, since it is themselves they find in it, the profundity and the marvel of the embrace they give to this philosophy (36); — hence, finally, the extraordinary comprehension they have of it, and not of its superficial points, as happened for the other popular philosophies, but of its very essence (37);

(36) That is to say enough that, according to us, Bergsonism is not at all a “fashion,” as say certain optimists who never wish to believe in the sincerity of human folly. Besides, how can one treat as a “fashion” a movement which has lasted for more than ten years, which gathers the totality of the dominant [forces] of the mind, at least of the worldly mind (religion, literature, morals, painting, music…), and that with a fidelity to itself which is not belied for an instant? All this, moreover, is not to say that the Bergsonian movement may not be extinguished one of these days; that one may not see again in good society (it is already taking shape) a violently intellectualist movement. But […] [OCR corrupted]. High society, ever since it has existed and despite a few exceptions, is, less than one believes, cordially Bergsonian. (37) One must not believe, for example, that the worldly Cartesians understood (which is, as is known, the secret of Cartesianism) that only certain of their ideas of things [are objective] (see note F); and one knows how much Goethe and his “Spinozist” friends took from the system [only] a few appearances which suited them.

one is struck, when one reads the accounts that pure men of letters or pure worldly people give of this system, to see how much these so-called frivolous persons have grasped this system in its most intimate will; I have here before my eyes pages of a young poet frankly secular in which one may say that [these young people] reach the soul of Bergsonism — notably in this desire for a knowledge of the object “from within” — with quite another exactitude than many pages of professionals; moreover, one [no longer counts] the worldly people who possess a letter in which the inventor of the “doctrine” [praises their comprehension] in terms which surpass the formulas of convention and breathe good faith. Bergsonism will perhaps have been the only philosophy truly understood by the vulgar. (38)

Willing “reality,” Bergsonism naturally respects only the individual, despises the general. For which our people again acclaim it (Le Roy, op. cit., p. 125). It is that here again it has come only to justify their passions: for a long time they have adored the object

(38) On this correspondence between Bergsonism and its public, see note H at the end of the cahier.

[marginal: Bergsonism celebrates the individual.]

which gives sensations — and despise the genus, which obliges one to think (see, in literature, the religion of the monograph, the contempt for general subjects). Besides, this is a trait of natural souls: children love Médor, who is there, whom they see, whom they touch; the class of mammals does not interest them.

Another form — equally much relished — of this invitation to an “immediate apprehension,” to a penetration “into the interior” of things, is to proscribe knowledge by means of number. Here Bergsonism is rigorously the overturning of the whole Western philosophical will (it is the “inversion of knowledge” so much hailed by the crowd); whereas this will is essentially to substitute for an object of sensation an object of measure — for a state of the senses a state of the mind — whereas a Pythagoras exults to see sounds correspond to lengths of cord, whereas a Descartes contrives to replace the curve by a relation between numbers, whereas a Rankine rejoices that for the sensation of heat the reading of a degree is substituted,

[marginal: It despises number.]

Bergsonism intends to return to heat itself, to the curve itself, to the sound itself, to pure perception, to pure sensation. The reader will kindly decide to which of these two inverse movements the name of progress is suited — notably of moral progress; he will kindly ask himself also which is the rarest among the sons of men — the most “aristocratic” — he who is pleased to learn that the three notes of a sweet chord correspond to numbers sustaining a simple ratio, or he who merely swoons over that chord? Finally, reciprocally, since it is indeed a question of touching the “intimacy” of things, let us recall that the consideration of curves, for example, by means of number has permitted a penetration of these beings “in their intimate structure” of which one may affirm that “sensible intuition” has never been capable: one wonders where is the eye, where is the “feeling for the thing,” that could see between the arc of a circle and the arc of an ellipse (39) the profound difference — of essence, not of

(39) Cf., for example, Hermite, Course of Analysis, edited by M. Andoyer, 3rd lesson.

degree — which analysis has seen there. So pass our mystics by the side of happiness!… But let us return to the “internal principle.”

II

[marginal: Metaphysical religion of movement — of life.]

This “internal principle” of the object, this absolute which the doctrine promises — it is movement. One may believe at first that this is only a metaphor to designate a “principle of existence” upon whose nature one does not pronounce. Error: the things are taken in their proper sense: the absolute is things in their flowing, in their becoming, in their “making themselves” (40); better still, one soon perceives that here things in movement alone are an absolute; that the immobile, the halt, the “wholly made” have none; or rather they have one indeed, but one that is not mysterious,

[marginal: This “internal principle” is movement!]

(40) Besides, all the examples of a thing whose absolute one seeks [are] [sought] [in] things in movement (the “arrow” [plays] a great role). — On the non-metaphorical character of the words “movement,” “life” in the Bergsonian work, see note J at the end of the cahier.

that is not “metaphysical,” in that vulgar knowledge — the Intelligence — suffices to attain it, is even “homogeneous” with it; it is “movingness,” and it is that alone whose essence is inaccessible to reason, demands, in order that it be touched, a state of exception, a “twisting” of ordinary knowledge, an “intuition”… (41) Here again Bergsonism comes to satisfy an affection of this age: the fury of movement. One conceives the joy of a society which admires men and works only according to what they have of “movement,” which wants the plastic arts to give it things “in their movement,” which wants all the arts to imitate music

(41) This extraordinary will to limit the interesting world to the world in movement is found again in the aesthetic doctrines in honor today. [There falls under our eyes] a “futurist” manifesto in which a method is announced for “painting at last things themselves”: “all the […] examples (and certainly the authors do not suspect it, so natural is this mode of thinking to them), all the examples are things in movement; it is a horse running (of which one must paint twenty legs and not four); it is a woman dancing (one must make twenty women); it is a tree shaken by the wind (make twenty trees); it is [a person] […] [seated] […] [OCR corrupted], you make of him [the] turn at once, ten, fifteen, twenty times, etc…” One asks, out of breath: “And the Antique [statue] asleep? And the Galatea of […]?” I believe their reply was all ready: “The immobile is not worth painting.”

because it is “movement” (42), etc…, one conceives its joy when a philosopher comes to tell it that movement is the only real thing.

And this philosopher promises movement itself! Others, he announces, have brought you under the name of movement, under the name of evolution, only very close-set halts, only the elapsed very much divided; I am going to lead you, I, into movement itself, into evolution itself, to make you touch things in process of changing, the grass in process of growing, the child in process of growing up, pure becoming… To touch pure becoming! What a word! What a sensation!… To think that it can last only “a few instants”! (43)

[marginal: Pure becoming is promised.]

(42) More exactly, although they have no full consciousness of it, because it is absence of halt, absence of clear notes, [such as] is the contour of an object. What they seek in movement is not only […] the effusion of soul which the idea of movement pours forth, it is to flee the firmness of soul which the idea of halt imposes. The will to music is the profound signature of the modern soul. (43) It is this sensation, at bottom, that they hope for from that pictorial art which wishes to paint “at once all the aspects of the thing.” Yet each aspect is only a “halt” and the master has taught them that “with halts packed upon halts one would never have movement.” No matter! one tries all the same. — Besides, our futurist manifesto declares: “The gesture which we wish to reproduce on the canvas will no longer be a fixed instant of universal dynamism; it will be quite simply the dynamic sensation itself.”

[marginal: This “internal principle” is also force!]

At the same time as “pure becoming,” this internal principle is a “thrust,” a “tension,” a “spring,” an “élan,” an act and not a thing — in short, a principle of dynamic order. This too is much relished… Nevertheless, the contradiction we have marked between these two simultaneous attributes of the Bergsonian absolute — “pure becoming” and “tension” — is found again in the needs of the soul which come to satisfy themselves in it: against “pure becoming” beats a need for vertigo, for sweet ebriety; on the “internal tension of things” feeds a somber need for contention. Satisfactions both of them, moreover, purely sensual and therefore equally dear to our people, even though they may not be so to the same individual, [nor] […] to the same hours. (44)

(44) We have set forth this contradiction between “pure becoming” and “tension” in our pamphlet (Le Bergsonisme, etc…, p. 13 ff.) and our reply to the defenders of Bergsonism (Mercure de France, 1 July 1913). Here, we believe, is what will make it well understood: Suppose ourselves in an elevator which rises toward […] succeeding clouds, without any friction… [that is] “pure becoming”; […] now […] [it is] exactly the contrary of the feeling of force or of tension that we have, on the contrary […] [it is], in sum, [only] when our elevator passes through a friction, […] through a resistance. (For [a sequel] [to] this illustration, see note K at the end of the cahier.) [OCR corrupted]

Let us observe in all this how much the absolute has changed: static for centuries, here it is today dynamic, at least kinematic: whereas, under the names of “substratum,” of “substance,” of “hypostasis,” it was a thing that reposed at the bottom of the object, it is now something that moves there; (45) whereas it was the reality of the object, it is now the principle of its reality, that is to say a thing in action, in movement; whereas it was a constancy, an adhesion of the object to itself beneath its change, it is now that change; inalterability, repose, which were so long the symbol of eternity, are fallen from their rank; they have become terrestrial; it is movement today that is divine, change, the absence of all fixity; the poet soon will ask of the great All:

Give us back the movement of life [thou hast] troubled…

All this is not without relation to the inven-

[marginal: On the mobilization of the absolute. Man has lost the metaphysical respect for repose.]

(45) One might say that the absolute of former times was that “hard” nucleus which is found at the center of certain colloidal cells; whereas the absolute of today is that “fluid” part which is at the center of a stick of phosphorus.

tion of railways and other engines of movement, and more generally with human life become at all points of view so furiously mobile, at least in the upper classes. For change is the absolute of the great; more properly, of the cities: it is probable that in the country, for him who abides and whose days resemble one another, the absolute is always that which does not change; that for the peasant the profound state of things is always immanence.

This internal principle of the object is not only movement, it is life (always without metaphor) (46); or, more exactly, it is properly living things that have here an absolute, a veritable absolute, which requires, in order that one touch it, a special knowledge; for non-living things (astronomical, physical, chemical) — even in their absolute — banal knowledge (sci-

[marginal: This “internal principle” is life!]

(46) Except the “arrow,” all the examples of a thing whose absolute is sought are, with the Bergsonians, living things: (with M. Wahl, a “character in a novel,” Revue du Mois, August 1912, p. 175; with M. Le Roy, a literary author, op. cit., p. 31; with William James, a crab, Religious Experience, p. 8, etc…).

ence) suffices to attain them… Everyone recognizes the very thesis of Creative Evolution. These extraordinary assertions, they too, make their fortune; it is that they come, they too, to satisfy violent wills: first, that will always valiant, though so old, that all “activity” should be “life,” and, more generally, that “existent” should be synonymous with “living”; then that one — more modern — to make of the vital phenomenon a sacred phenomenon, virgin of all relation with the others: one knows their prior anger against any attempt — of a Berthelot, for example — to reduce life to a particular arrangement of non-living qualities; finally, that will — the same at bottom as the preceding — that life should be a thing of exception before knowledge, more precisely that the forms by which the mind knows the [physical] phenomenon should be totally changed when it is a question of life (47): one knows their irritation each time

[marginal: Will that life should be a thing of exception before knowledge.]

(47) This will has nothing to do with that thought (of Auguste Comte, among others) that to the facts of the living world the mind must add new methods to those which have served it for the material world (for example, the method of comparison; Course of Positive Philosophy, loc. cit.).

that a general form of the mind (for example, the idea of sufficient reason) claims to apply itself to life. Besides, the sentiment of the dignity of the living suffices to explain these wills.

These general forms of the mind, they say in their irritation, are not “adequate to the essence of life.” Be it so; but if they claimed to be! As if, again, they were adequate to the essence of matter! As if, finally, other forms of the mind — those which they are going to “create for life” (see J. Wahl, loc. cit.) — were going, from the instant they shall be forms, to be “adequate to the essence of life”! They believe it, however, and that there can be an identity of nature between forms of the mind and things (for example, between the form of space and material things, between the form of time and living things. It is the whole thesis — very popular, despite its monism — of Matter and Memory). Nevertheless, this indignation that the forms of the mind are not adequate to the essence of life may be explained still better by this other consideration: it is always that will that science give them the absolute, but a will which takes a particular vivacity when it is a question of the science of life.

[marginal: It is the science of life that owes them the absolute.]

Let us observe in this connection how many persons, totally cured of demanding from science the intimate essence of things, take up this will again as soon as it is a question of life: “For nearly a century,” wrote Auguste Comte in 1838 (Id., ibid.), “all good minds are agreed in dispensing physics from penetrating the mystery of gravity, of which it must only unveil the effective laws; but that does not prevent sound physiology from being daily reproached with teaching us nothing about the intimate essence of life, of sentiment and of thought.” So insatiable do the wisest become when it is a question of themselves! The author adds — and this has not ceased to be true — : “It is easy to judge how much this metaphysical tendency must inspire an exaggerated opinion of the real imperfection of present biology.”

Let us note, moreover — it is a large element of its success — the numerous contentment which Bergsonism gives to this will that life should be before the mind a thing wholly of exception: first, we have just seen it, life in this philosophy is that sole thing whose absolute science does not attain

[marginal: Satisfactions which Bergsonism brings to this will that life should be a thing of exception before knowledge.]

(as if, once again, it attained that of heat or of electricity) (48); — next, it is that sole thing which, in its real development, in its “pure becoming,” never passes through two similar states, is an “irreversible” (49) (it is precisely for this reason that that becoming is intangible to science; one is, moreover, not a little surprised to learn that the other becomings are tangible to it, that it can give an account, for example, of a planet in process of forming or of a body of vapors in process of combining); — next, life is again the only domain where the process of becoming [in] its reality is an “indivisible,” where the elements “have no real and separate existence” (50)

(48) One embraces very vivaciously this extraordinary assertion that, in the material world, science can touch the absolute (see Agathon, op. cit., p. 78; Le Roy, op. cit., p. 120). Evidently one thinks that one [attached] […] science to the material world […] [which] prevents any [extension] of it to the living world. Science teaches nothing absolute, [we do not want it] any more for the material world than for the living; [if one wants it,] it is for the one and the other. (49) Nothing of the kind, it appears, for the material world: a […] [system] of (material) elements which has passed through a state can always return to it; this is no longer true for the living. In short, “a material object has no history,” [says] Gillouin, La Philosophie de M. Bergson, p. 118.) Thus the earth has no history… — On this alleged monopoly of living facts, see note L at the end of the cahier. (50) Creative Evolution, p. 31.

(as if they had one in the world of matter, as if the process of a chemical transformation in its reality were not, itself too, indivisible); — it is again (51) that domain of exception where the great discoveries are made outside of reasoning, by “flashes of the mind” (as if that were not so in all domains) (52); — it is finally (53) that singular object for which no preexisting category of the mind can continue to serve, and the only one (54) for which new categories must be created… All these concessions of monopolies to life are vigorously adopted.

Let us not forget the descriptions of certain monopolies which, they, really belong to life (for example, the fact that it presents a unity of end in a plurality of movements, what H. Spencer called the coordination of actions). These descriptions — so new by the love which the author bears in them to his

(51) Id., introduction. (52) See, on this point, our reply to the defenders of Bergsonism, Revue du Mercure de France, second article, 16 July 1913. (53) Creative Evolution, p. 39. (54) See in particular J. Wahl, loc. cit., L. Dauriac, Revue philosophique, April 1913.

subject — are, they too, vivaciously embraced; no more, however, than those which confer upon life particularities which it does not have.

Finally, let us remark this disdain for non-living things, which, they, have need, in order to be attained in the deepest part of themselves, only of “ordinary knowledge”!

In all this we touch with our finger, here again, an important change in the attitude of men in face of nature: whereas, ever since they have existed, their interest seemed to have borne upon nature entire, upon the world entire, living or non-living, upon the “Universe” (if some part occupied them more specially than the others, it was evidently the astronomical world), this interest seems for a hundred years or so to turn singularly away from the total world and to give itself narrowly to life. We have just seen popular religiosity localize in the living world its desire for a sacred ground. Constituted religion undergoes the movement: intractable until these last times on the inter-

[marginal: Decline of the “total world” in philosophical preoccupation.]

pretation of physical things (origin of the cosmos, formation of the worlds, evolution of the earth, etc…), the Church seems today rather indifferent to it and seems to gather all its effort upon the question of the formation of life. (55) Finally philosophy itself visibly forsakes the φύσις of the ancients and interests itself almost exclusively in life: who is not struck, in the modern syntheses, of a Comte, of a H. Spencer, if one compares them with those of an Aristotle, of a Lucretius, of a Descartes, by the lion’s share given there to life? On all sides, the world in its totality is forsaken in favor of the living; one sees dawn the dawn when it is the Father who will moan: “My son, why hast thou forsaken me?”

For this change we see many reasons: first the prodigious victories of man over matter, which put it

[marginal: Reasons for this decline.]

(55) “Before us the religious problem and the scientific problem are but one and the same problem: […] [OCR corrupted] must have its roots in our psychology. And there […] the capital importance […] of the problem of life. It marks, one might say, the dividing line between the things that speak to God and those that speak only to man.” (Gillouin, op. cit., p. 116.) On the […] Catholic Church inherent in these declarations, see note M at the end of the cahier.

in a low posture, push him to despise it: it is true that on this reckoning the animals too ought to be despised, whereas they are far from being so (56); it is that they benefit from the modern religion for sensibility; and there is a second reason: religion for what feels, contempt for what does not feel; finally above all this fact that, the elements being tamed, their cruelty no longer making itself felt (at least in the upper classes), and on the other hand man — by the incredible increase of the life of relations — no longer hearing speak of anything but man, it comes about that he no longer has any occasion to think of matter: one might affirm that today an average man passes whole years without thinking of anything but the living; that facts like the iceberg of the Titanic (which are few) are needed to remind him that the inanimate exists… One would have liked, however, that such reasons for believing

(56) One may say that the animals have never been in a better posture before philosophy, with their pure “will to life,” their pure “vital thrust” exempt from any [conceptual] [dross]: besides, often in Bergsonism, as, for example, Essay on the Immediate Data, p. 105) the consciousness of the animal is proposed as that which must be realized. For M. G. Sorel “the instinct of the animal is divine” (L’Indépendance, 1 May 1911).

[should] not be so for philosophers and that they should not suffice to make them forget that philosophy is the problem of Being before being the problem of Life.

III

[marginal: “Duration.” — Its attractions. — Conclusion.]

Finally this absolute is not only movement, it is not only life, it is consciousness; and it is not the whole of consciousness; it is not that superficial and banal part where one knows oneself by the means of the Intelligence, where one takes of oneself a clear and distinct knowledge; it is that “profound” part, purged of all concept, of all “halt,” pure becoming, pure feeling, pure willing: the “duration.” It is by plunging oneself into this absolute that one attains at last an absolute… Let us stop at this doctrine of “duration,” supreme reality, culminating point of the system and of its fortune, and let us mark the numerous pleasures which it does indeed bring.

It is first the pleasure which most

[marginal: Pleasures which “duration” brings:]

[marginal: pleasure of believing oneself the only existing thing;]

men have of thinking their consciousness — their self — to be reality, the only reality. Descartes had thought of this idea, but it does not seem that he drew pleasure from it; it was for him like a piece of information; one would say even that he was pleased rather, the infidel, with this idea of a whole of which we should form a part. (57) See Nietzsche, on the contrary, a truly human thinker, and [how] it is in a transport of delight that he pronounces these words: “I know only myself, only my passions.”

[marginal: that one is the center of the world;]

It is also the pleasure they have of believing themselves the center of the world (for which evidently the idea of the distinction of the self and the not-self must be abolished; but, when it is necessary, one forgets it). Moreover, this belief that I am the center of the world and that the world is made for me is not, according to Bergsonism, a prejudice, but the very essence of perception (which, as is known, is wholly “utilitarian”). Riquet, of Anatole France, writes M. Le Roy (58), is Bergsonian (understand: perceives according to the Bergsonian theory of perception): “I

(57) Cf. letter XXII (Garnier ed.). (58) Op. cit., p. 29.

am always in the midst of everything, and men, animals, and things are ranged, hostile or favorable, around me.” Were we not right to say that the animals are in a good posture before modern philosophy?

It is again the pleasure of hearing — a thing very sweet to proud souls — that consciousness is an object wholly of exception before knowledge (life was not so because it “resembles consciousness”); that, before this reality (as if that were not the case for any “reality”), analysis has no hold, the attempts at rational explanation are without hope, the generative principles of the mind are without value. (59) Nevertheless it is precisely the sentimental self that possesses this honor, the self that “feels and grows impassioned”; the intellectual self, the one that foresees Neptune or

[marginal: that one is a thing wholly of exception before knowledge.]

(59) The whole Bergsonian theory of liberty, in the feeble measure in which it really treats of liberty, amounts to maintaining that for the futures of consciousness, and for those alone, the principle of contradiction (a thing [will be] or [will] not [be]) does not operate. (It is thus the [ambiguity] of “contingent futures.”) The libertarians, moreover, ever since they have existed, have had no other argument, from Aristotle to Renouvier, by way of Chrysippus, Carneades and Clarke. Nevertheless Renouvier admits that it is there a pure postulate, a pure desire.

forms the “concept” of universal attraction, that one is very well analyzable, the most vulgar methods are good for understanding it… What again are these doctrines, succulent to people of heart, of whom one [likes] to think the world is composed!

The […] sentiment one likes to note on this occasion is a veritable revolt among our moderns at the idea that analysis is going to lay its sacrilegious hand upon their soul, a veritable exasperation at the idea that their joys and their miseries will be spoken of like lines and surfaces (as if, whenever one speaks a little clearly of anything whatever, one did not speak of it like lines and surfaces; but they do not want one to speak of their soul clearly). Here is a manifesto of this Noli me tangere by which the whole modern feeling bristles up against analysis: “Before these pretensions of the Intelligence (to assign material conditions to our sentiments), we feel ourselves shocked, diminished in our intimate life. And I say nothing of the legitimate impatience which the somewhat ridiculous disproportion provokes in us between the program of these authors (Spinoza and Taine) and their execution. Such compari-

[marginal: Revolt of the modern soul against analysis which lays upon it a sacrilegious hand.]

sons (‘vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar’), coldly instituted, are to our souls threats to that which our soul has most precious. It seems that, in explaining the origin of our sentiments, one destroys at the same stroke their value…” (William James, Religious Experience, p. 8.) Who does not feel that, were the explanations of “these authors” better, the author of this passage would be no better contented with them, and that what exasperates him against analysis is not that it explains feeling badly, it is that it claims to explain it? Besides, it seems that, for this strange philosopher, the wound which a method causes him is the proof of its lack of value.

Let us note here that bizarre sentiment which makes one honor a thing in saying it inaccessible to knowledge, in conferring upon it the quality of “mystery.” One knows that one is gallant in affirming to women that they are “mysterious”… This mode of evaluation seems rather modern: with the Greeks, the soul of the goddesses was clear; it was the soul of the little maidservants that was enigmatic.

Need it be recalled that the insurrection against the

[marginal: Will of the modern soul to be “mysterious”; to be outside number.]

[marginal: Pleasure of seeing philosophy reduced to the sole consideration of Man;]

knowledge of things by means of number (see above, p. 51) takes place above all on the occasion of the facts of consciousness. Let one kindly understand us: it is not here a question of denying the failure of “psycho-physics,” it is a question of observing the desire one has for that failure, the pleasure one takes in it, the kind of relief one finds in it. Shall we dare to say that, for ourselves, we should not feel ourselves particularly unhappy if one day some scientist succeeded in making our sentiments correspond to numerical values?… Besides, one always seems to forget that physical facts, they too, are not attained in their reality.

One may say again that the success of Bergsonism in the presentation of this “duration” is that of all the schools which have come to make philosophy consist in the exclusive embrace of Man: one knows the glory of those little Syrians who, in the city of the Euclids and the Ptolemies, came to enclose the mind in a narrow speculation upon man and his duties; one knows above all the glory still wholly living [of] that man of the people who, two thousand years ago, drunk with human pride like

all those of his class, full of contempt like them for all that he was ignorant of (60), arrested the admirable upsurge of the thinkers of his time toward a comprehension of the world, in order to reduce philosophy to the sole occupation of “knowing oneself.” Nevertheless that one at least invited man to know himself, and not to feel himself. (61)

The theory of duration contents in the first place that desire of which we spoke above, of grasping things from within; for, in short, our self — there is at least one thing that we

[marginal: pleasure of an apprehension from within;]

(60) One knows the contempt of Socrates for physics, of which moreover he declares that he hardly has time to be ignorant. He is the patron of the [maniac] “self-taught.” (61) Here are the terms in which a man of […] the first century, whom certainly none of our modern [confrères] would [disavow], mocked the Socratic revolution: “Socrates first, turning away our minds from these coarse […] [OCR corrupted] where all our labors of former times went astray, applied it solely to studying the human heart, to sounding its depths, to scrutinizing in it its most secret affections.” (Valerius Maximus, III, iv.) Those “coarse errors” in which the learned men of that time “went astray” were that […] [worldly] […] to “seek to know the extent of the sun, of the moon and of the other celestial bodies,” to “[embrace] even in their imagination the whole ensemble of the universe…” On the veritable backward step which the advent of Socrates was for philosophy, in that it wishes to be a comprehension of the world, and not of Man — more exactly, [a philosophy] which goes from the world to Man and not from Man to the world — see [the] admirable passage of Francis Bacon (Of Principles and Origins) and above all the fine pages of F.-A. Lange (History of Materialism, French translation, vol. I, ch. III).

can grasp from within! One would only wish it to be understood that there is no other. It is rather amusing to see the Bergsonians give this example of a knowledge from within as one among a thousand they might take. (“Do you want an example? I will take that of the human person…”, Le Roy, op. cit., p. 42.)

[marginal: pleasure of believing that by the “profound self” one touches the essence of the world;]

The theory of duration flatters yet another belief very dear to souls athirst to feel themselves: it is the belief that in the depths of our consciousness we touch the very principle of the world. One knows that duration — in “dilating” itself — becomes the principle: 1° of the living world, 2° of the world. The desire for this belief — which was always very lively among worldly people (it is this that made the [secular] fortune of the Plotinian “ecstasy,” by which the particular soul rejoins the soul of the world, of the “intuition” of the German doctors, [which is the “essence”] and, also, it must be said, of the Cartesian “consciousness,” [though] here it is not the “profound” consciousness, but indeed the whole of consciousness, that is the first principle) — the desire for this belief seems

to have, this too, attained among modern worldly people a point of affirmation never yet seen in it: it is this, notably, that inspires all their lyricism, which has for this reason — so strangely, moreover — been named “pantheism.” (62) One may affirm that today […] Bergsonism has come to say to its age exactly what it wished to hear: one conceives [how she was glad] to learn — from a philosopher — that in its profound states the self is the soul of the world, the young poetess who feels in those states:

The universal sap flow into her hands! (63)

(62) One knows that pantheism, at least with the great [Stoic] representatives, Bruno, Spinoza), far from being the irradiation of the self and of its passion as far as the universe, is on the contrary the negation of the [self in favor] of an impertinent, deaf and impassive whole. Besides, this pantheism has also its lyricism (“She said to me: I am the impassive theater…”); but this lyricism, as such, has nothing popular. (63) And also: But it is then from me that there mounts and springs forth […] more beautiful, more full of thoughts; […] I am the soil, the flame and the orchestration, […], etc… (Les Éblouissements) Let us cite again this: “From all the rungs of the unconscious […] transports us, we take a vaster horizon of the world. There comes the instant when it shall have advanced me so high in the ladder of beings that I shall embrace the universe and shall take consciousness of it. Then I shall have attained that complete self which is my principle and my end, the goal and the impulse of my culture; I shall be [Subconscious], I shall be god.” (Le Jardin de Bérénice.)

[marginal: of believing that the principle of the world is of passional kind.]

The theory of duration, by this idea of a wholly feeling consciousness which becomes the principle of the world, makes still another and profound desire of the popular soul dilate with ease: the desire that the principle of the world should be of the passional kind. The history is worth noting of the contentments which this desire, so legitimate in generous souls, will have received from the philosophers: rather well contented, three thousand years ago, by that philosophy (64) which made the world descend from a conflict of Love and Hate, better contented still, later, by those (65) which drew it from an attraction — become afterward love (66) — of a superior for a humbler being, this desire suddenly and for nearly ten centuries is entirely deceived: men without heart, all of thought, the philosophers of the Middle Ages and of the great century all draw the world from a principle of intellectual order; to fill its need for a passional principle, the crowd has no other resource than to betray their thought; (67) on the other hand, beginning with the nine-

(64) Empedocles. (65) Aristotle, Plotinus, Alexandrian “emanationism.” (66) In the Christian doctrine. (67) One knows, for example, the application of a Goethe to making of a great type of Spinozist explanation a human will: “‘I

teenth century, this desire receives from the philosophers a total contentment: it is that philosophy (68) which creates the world by a will expressly exempt of Intelligence (which was far from being the case for the Alexandrian attraction or for Christian love), it is that one (69) which takes up this will again under the name of the Unconscious, that one which takes it up again today under the name of duration… We believe we see in this history the illustration of a general truth, which is that the philosophical desires of the crowd have had, in order to find full satisfaction, to await the philosophers of the nineteenth century, people who resemble the crowd much more than their predecessors, people who live and who feel at least as much as they think, people of heart rather than people of mind. We shall return further on to this particular character of the modern philosophers. (70)

am that I am,’ he makes the god of the Ethics say; ‘I shall be in all ages what I am.’ […]” (Cited by Lange, op. cit., vol. II, p. 360.) [OCR corrupted] (68) Schopenhauer. (69) Hartmann. (70) Here is again a saying of the historians of philosophy which we like to cite by reason of the […] [profound explanation] of the enthusiasm which welcomes Bergsonism: “Pure passion is far from having obtained in the systems a place comparable to that of the eminently pure.” (Renouvier, Essais de critique générale, IVth essay, p. 160. [See it] for the whole development.)

[marginal: Pleasure of plunging into “pure feeling.”]

But the liveliest popularity here of Bergsonism is the very description of this “duration,” it is the unveiling of that state where all that, in the sentiment which we take of ourselves, is clearness and distinction — that is to say, manners of the Intelligence and consequently a theft from feeling — vanishes to make place for a feeling wholly pure, freed of all clarity, a pure sensation of ourselves as opposed to all idea of ourselves. (71) One may say that the theory of duration: 1° denounces to men that in most of their states of consciousness they merely think themselves; 2° discovers to them a region where they will cease totally to think themselves, where they will do nothing more than feel themselves. One divines the ecstasy of a society of which one of the manifest desires (see its literature) is precisely to touch itself in those exquisite regions. (72) Here, moreover, is a sample of that ecstasy: “Here we are in those

(71) Cf. note N at the end of the cahier. (72) Cf., for example, Mme Delarue-Mardrus, Horizons, p. 177 (“And, amid cannons full of shadow, I grow intoxicated, etc…”); Mme Colette Willy, La Vagabonde, p. 106: “From my lips to my flanks, to my knees, here is reborn [a warmth which] propagates itself, etc…”); Id., Ibid. (“An irresponsible and lazy beast, etc…”), etc., etc…

regions of twilight and of dream where our self is elaborated, where springs the flood that is ourselves, in the warm intimacy of the fecund darkness where our nascent life quivers. The distinctions have fallen. The word is worth nothing more. One hears welling up mysteriously the sources of consciousness, like an invisible shiver of living water through the mossy shadow of the grottoes. I dissolve myself into the joy of becoming. I abandon myself to the delight of being a gushing reality. I no longer know whether I see perfumes, whether I breathe sounds or whether I savor colors. Do I love? Do I think? The question no longer signifies anything for me. I am myself, and wholly, each one of my attitudes, each one of my changes…” (Le Roy, op. cit., p. 68.) One will kindly remark the extraordinary happiness of inhaling oneself which bursts forth in its last lines: M. Le Roy said above that Riquet is Bergsonian; that charming little animal is more Bergsonian still than M. Le Roy believes: he says: “the smell of dogs is delicious!” (73)

(73) For an equivalent of “duration” and of its success in the seventeenth century, see note N at the end of the cahier.

[marginal: Pleasure that this region of the soul is exalted.]

And this state of “pure feeling,” Bergsonism is not content with describing it; it respects it, it exalts it, it makes of it a value (how far above the thinking self!), the highest of values: it is by this state, as has been seen, that one attains the “real”; it is by it again that one “transcends” the human condition; finally — a sign of the supreme values — “most men die without having known it”!… Conceive the delirium here of a society which, wholly female, has religion only for what feels, has only contempt for what thinks, and which, finding a justification for this regime only with men of letters whom it does not take seriously on moral questions, finds one all at once with a “philosopher”!… And certainly all the philosophers for two centuries have recognized the primacy of feeling over thinking in human conduct: Descartes, Spinoza, Comte, Spencer, Ribot; but this observation rather saddened them, and none had made the eulogy of pure feeling. (74)

Let us remark that character which duration has (insofar as it is absence of separation in thought)

(74) Except Schopenhauer, whose popularity is, moreover, great.

of being a mobile state of consciousness. Need it be said whether this character is popular? Whether it makes that society exult which — always wholly female — knows only the change of direction of feeling, repels all organization of the soul and salutes itself in Mélisande, whether it stamps with joy when a philosopher comes to tell it that the instability of consciousness is its superior form?

Here again let us recognize the mobilization of the absolute: the fixity of the soul, which was so long its sacred form, is entirely fallen in the religion of men: “The senseless one!” says Nestor of Gerenia, “he thought to convince Athena; as if the soul of the gods were prompt to change!” (75) One has difficulty in believing that one could have made of the gods a conception so flat.

The “superficial” states of soul which the state of “duration” consists in freeing oneself from, being that in the self which is not properly the self, that which is common to several consciousnesses, that which is social, one sees that what Bergsonism exalts under the name of duration is the self

[marginal: insofar as it is unstable; insofar as it is incommunicable.]

(75) Odyssey, III, 147.

in what it has most narrowly personal, most secret, most incarcerated in itself (this, moreover, is said expressly, Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, p. 126 ff.). Here again this philosophy comes exactly to will in the sense of its age: who will refuse to admit that present-day lyricism — at least the personal secular [lyricism] — is a captation of the self to express itself precisely in that incommunicable region? Let one think, for example, of the lyricism of such an acclaimed poetess of the salons, so profoundly narrow, so warmly egoistic, so extraordinarily incapable of exchange, so dramatically applied to expressing herself, that which can be only herself, and let one compare it with the lyricism of a Musset, for example, so general, so generous.

[marginal: Bergsonism exalts “pure acting.”]

Bergsonism exalts again in “duration,” in that happy region [where] the self does not think, a state of pure willing, of pure acting. We shall not say what is here the transport of a world fanatical for “wholly instinctive” beings, with which it slakes itself in its theater or on the

great days of the assize courts. (76) Let us mark rather the new moral religion which Bergsonism contents here and which the reader has already named: the religion of action, of energy, of the human will… One knows that the youth of the schools learns of nothing but action, and that Minerva is in process of becoming again the goddess of war. Nevertheless, before continuing, and because Bergsonism neglects this distinction, let us recall that the soul as pure willing has nothing to do with the soul as pure becoming which was exalted above, that it is even just the contrary of it, seeing that a willing implies a retention — momentary at least — of a state of the soul with itself, a stability — of an instant at least — in the desire, the very negations of pure becoming; moreover, here again, the client of duration as pure becoming is not he who serves it as pure acting: to figure them to ourselves, let us think of the

(76) “Among all the heroines of my theater, there are three for which I cannot defend myself from a certain predilection: Jeannine of L’Enchantement, Mamma Colibri and Thérésine of La Marche nuptiale. Jeannine perhaps before all the others, because she is instinct pure and unmixed…” (Henry Bataille, preface to his theater, p. xix.)

two consuls whom the demagogue Clodius marched surrounded by: the one, all bathed in perfumes, the hair waved, the other — O Dii boni! quam teter intercedebat! quam truculentus! quam terribilis adspectu!

As for the desire to exalt action, the human will, it seems to us that it envelops, this too, two things profoundly distinct and which one distinguishes too little: at one moment (and this is the case, we are willing to believe, for the present French youth) it is the desire of men harassed by difficulties to exalt the mode proper to making them triumph over them (77); but at another moment also it is the very romantic desire to exalt what can procure emotion and sensation (he who acts is moving), or the desire to evoke moving images (that of man acting upon the external world), or finally quite simply to thwart the intellectual activity which one detests. We defend ourselves ill from attributing these last motives to our little masters of energy, when among them we see so many men of letters

[marginal: Equivocation on the religion of action;]

(77) On a modern form of the moral religions (pragmatism), see note O at the end of the cahier.

who, purveyors of the pathetic, cannot but snatch at doctrines of “energy,” and who, on the other hand, peaceably seated before their table for nearly forty years and for the rest of their days, seem indeed resolved to know, by way of struggle, only those they sustain against their sentences or against their publishers. And certainly Aeschylus, who sang of energy, had been at Marathon.

The same distinction seems to us to impose itself with regard to that other desire, included in the religion of the human will, which comes likewise so strongly to slake itself in Bergsonism: we mean the desire which men have to believe that they are free (we believe we have shown elsewhere that the Bergsonian thesis called of liberty does not at all posit moral liberty, but at any rate they believe it). At one moment it is the attachment, full of grandeur, to a belief which is necessary to them in order that they may demand an account from those [whom] […] [and that] they may oblige themselves to the best of their kind (a thinker, fervent moreover for this belief, has gone so far as to say in magnificent terms that this moral need is at bottom the only force of

[marginal: on the desire to believe oneself free.]

the idea of liberty (78); but at another moment also it is the desire which certain souls have to believe themselves free of all bond and of all relation, it is that passion of children and of women to set themselves outside of all order and of all law. Which of these two ardors inflames our “libertarians”? A profound connoisseur of the souls of their world has been able to answer, who certainly would not have failed to praise them — although a man of the Church — for wishing themselves responsible: “There have appeared, it has been said, libertines, for whom it was an importunate constraint that there should be in heaven a superior force which governed all their movements… They have wished to shake off the yoke of that Providence which watches over us, in order to maintain in independence an

(78) “In spite of so many disadvantages which are found on the side of the defenders of free will, [in] the interminable debate between the two systems, they [will not lack] a force always new and which will never be withdrawn from them, in striking, so to speak, with the foot the ground of practical reason. Well or ill defended, the doctrine of liberty will manifest itself and maintain itself, because the opposite doctrine is unable to assign, in the universal order of things, a moral foundation for moral notions indestructible in the human heart, and because the necessities to which […] [those] [would be] subjected [would be] constrained to apply at every moment in the […] life […] [the] [ambiguity] of contingent futures which their theory makes it a law for them to declare vain and without real object.” (Renouvier, Esquisse d’une classification, vol. I, p. 281.) [OCR corrupted]

undocile liberty, which carries them to live according to their fancy, without fear, without restraint and without discipline.” (79) Let us say, however, to be just, that some twenty years ago the idea of determination, become, with poetical minds, a pious abnegation of the self before its high determinants (M. Barrès), was another enjoyment of the soul.

The exclusive cult of the human will and action leads necessarily to considering as capital for philosophy, and in some sort as unique, the so-called problem of moral values. And, in fact, we see (and we leave aside those whose unique care being to “run a household” and to “bring up children,” it is so natural for them that that alone should be “philosophy” which tells them “what must be done”), we see today all those of the worldly people who give themselves to some general and properly philosophical speculation make the whole of their speculation consist in the “problem of values”; better still, make the whole of philosophy consist in it. It is from this identification — which they

[marginal: Reduction of philosophy to the problem of “moral values”: 1° among worldly people;]

(79) Bossuet, Sermon on Providence.

neglect to announce — that comes our whole disagreement with them upon the “nature” and consequently upon the “method” of this activity: when these men declare that philosophy has nothing to do with the laws of the mind, with “rigor,” with “correct deductions”…, (80) that for it the testimony of the least of humans who has [exercised] life and felt suffering has more value than all the views of the surest thinking, that here ideas are not to be envisaged according as they are true or false but according as they have or have not brought to humans joy and force, we are quite ready to grant them right if philosophy consists in deciding, according to the expression of one of them: “this is what must be felt,” “this is what is human.” But where have they got it that philosophy consists in the search for a viaticum for men? Where have they got it that it is reduced to morals (granting that one calls “morals” a body of wholly empirical recipes)? And why do they not simply call morals “morals,” instead of calling it philosophy and

(80) See above, p. 32.

trying to make their wholly practical efforts be confounded with the highest functions of the mind?… Besides, in this search for “values,” the same distinction imposes itself which we made above: often, no doubt, it is the noble and sincere desire to discover the useful to men; but how many times also it is only the occasion to plunge into the fascinating regions of willing and of acting. Is it not very remarkable that the problem of values, with the men of letters, always and uniquely amounts to the celebration of the pathetic values, properly of heroism?

If this wholly moral conception of philosophy has no reason to astonish among worldly persons, who, by [necessity] one may say, from the instant they think, think of Man, at least one dared believe that it would not [be the case with] those who make a profession of thinking, and that philosophy for them would continue to be a speculation upon the ensemble of the world, Man with his volitions forming only a part of it. It is, however, only too evident that, for a hundred years or so, philosophy in most of its great names

[marginal: 2° among professional philosophers.]

(Fichte, Schopenhauer, Comte, Renouvier, Boutroux) forsakes more and more the great speculations and plunges into the problem of the soul and of its “values.” We are willing to believe with one of these [bewitched men], who, a little confused at this petty philosophy, would like to think that at bottom it is the study of the world, we are willing to believe that “the world in its changes is a function of the human will.” (81) But it is so in the measure in which the transformation of a river into a canal or again the placing of a funicular on the flank of a mountain change the face of the world, that is to say, about as the beating of an insect’s wing changes the atmosphere of Europe. One really cannot believe that it is for this action upon the cosmos that philosophy

(81) Harald Höffding, Human Thought, p. 357. The author has at least the merit of thinking that the moralist philosophy is nothing if it does not attach itself to this cosmic point of view: “All morals,” he says (ibid.), “rests upon a contradiction if the course of the world does not accord, for one part, with the human will.” Nevertheless, a little before, and [he seemed to us] better inspired, he posited a kind of hiatus between speculation upon the world and moralist speculation: “Purely intellectual interest will never lead but to […] the consequence of thought and the exactitude of observation. It is better to […] the point of view […] [and] directly posit the problem of value.” (On this effort to confound morals with intellectual philosophy, see note P at the end of the cahier.)

gives all its attention to the human volitions, without counting that, according to this principle, the will of the animals would have a right to an attention of the same rank, if not of the same degree. No; our philosophers are moralists by taste. For that there are indeed many reasons: first the extraordinary upheaval of the moral passions which, even in the noblest milieus, the Revolution produced; — then a profound change, for a hundred years, in the philosophical personnel: exercised until then by clerks (I call men like Descartes and Spinoza clerks, with their wholly Latin culture, their theological habits of mind), philosophy has, since the Revolution, passed to men of the people, philosophizing as such, deprived of the great disciplines of the mind (82) and devoured, like all men of the people from the moment they are meditative (what is it when they are German!), with religious and moral passion; — it is again, in the personnel, the extraordinary predominance for a hundred years of the Judeo-

[marginal: Causes of this decline of philosophy: 1° the secularization of the philosophers.]

(82) Let one compare from this point of view the culture of a Fichte, of a Schelling, even of a Kant with that of a Descartes: the Bible has replaced the Conciones.

Protestant element, so strangely furious for morals; — add that today most of the philosophers are married, and that many […]; — add that they are now consulted by the crowds (see the newspapers), naturally on moral questions, that they are listened to there, and that some virtue is needed to refuse the first of the things in which one feels oneself influential… Whatever the reasons for it, this wholly moral occupation of philosophy seems to us a great decline: a Greek of the second century compared the eloquence of his time, by relation to that of Isocrates, to a vile courtesan who has driven from the hearth the honest mother of a family; we would willingly compare the philosophy of our own to a harsh matron, uniquely attached to the passions of her children, who has driven from the temple the patrician virgin who honored the gods.

[marginal: Bergsonism exalts the contradictory.]

Another extremely popular character of “duration” is the one it has — always as “profound state” — of escaping definition, of being indeterminable, and therefore of being at the same time things

very different: one knows that duration “cannot enter into the categories of the understanding” (83), that it defies all attempts at definition (at least those of its adversaries), and that it is simultaneity, “interpenetration” of elements which, defined, would exclude one another logically, at once being and knowing, things and an idea of things, etc., etc… (84) One knows, moreover, that all these characters are those of the world in its profound reality — which is only “duration.” Here again Bergsonism has come to gladden a passion of our worldly people: the religion of the contradictory. (85) A religion well congruous with their whole will, and one thinks, on the one hand, what a slap the contradictory is for the Intelligence and, on the other hand, what trouble, what delicious ver-

(83) Into the categories, we thought, of him who [occupies] […] [the] state of “duration” is, by definition, the abolition of thought by categories); but why (this is not said) into those of the author? It [makes us reply] that none of these personages […] [make] but one! [OCR corrupted] (J. Florence, La Phalange, August 1913.) (84) See note Q at the end of the cahier. (85) It appears in all […] the literary doctrines: one knows, for example, the will of the authors that their thought should never freeze into a clear term, that it should balance the elements “of all the affirmations”… (See, Mercure de France, 1 August 1911, an article entitled: André Gide, literary critic.)

[marginal: Alexandrianism in the West.]

tigo the evocation of a thing which is at the same time itself and something other than itself comes to bring to the soul (86).

Here is the place to observe what an extraordinary attraction Alexandrian metaphysics presents for the Western soul, with what […] fury the latter precipitates itself, each time they are offered to it, upon those philtres of the Contradictory, of Emancipation from number, of the Infinite, of the Indeterminate, of the Unconditioned, etc… Need it be said — veritable ancestors of the success of duration — the Western fortune of that Father who is himself and at the same time his son, and of those three persons who are but one, and of the origin of the world thrown back to infinity? Need it be recalled the popularity of a Goethe discovering to the public that infinite Substance with indeterminate contours, with attributes infinite in infinite number (87), and that, twenty years ago, of a French writer revealing to the salons the “indifference” of the different, the “confusion of being and of

(86) Besides the pleasure which the conception of the contradictory brings, there is also the displeasure which the conception of a defined thing brings, which is an effort of bearing, an austerity. (87) That is all the secular people have seen in the metaphysics of Spinoza, from Goethe to M. Paul Bourget: the philosopher, so original, of “particular things” (res singulares) has totally escaped them.

non-being”? (88) One would say that, enclosed by its masters in the hard regime of Number and of the Finite, the Western soul endures it more than it loves it, and that it wants, this too, conceptions of the world moving and sensational… And that leads us to ask in what these conceptions are properly “Alexandrian”; whether they are not so uniquely in this, that the most brilliant of their producers and the first in date appeared on the banks of the Nile? Besides the real spontaneity of the German soul to productions of this kind, who is not struck to see how the Latin peoples, as soon as one of these systems is offered to them, suddenly find [in] the purest part of themselves souls to feel it profoundly and to rethink it properly? (89) Who is not struck to see with what lightning swiftness the entire society sets about feeling in this system, and how can one not remember that if a mass takes hold by the simple presence of a foreign crystal, it is that it is of the same nature as

(88) Let us note the character of panic which accompanies these revelations. Here are two titles of works upon Bergsonism: A New Philosophy; A Revolution in Philosophy. (89) See an example, note R at the end of the cahier.

it? The metaphysics of the Contradictory is much less the property of a race than it is that of that plebs (it is of all races) which demands of ideas that they make it feel shudder and spasm: this is so true that, for the vulgar, metaphysics signifies by definition metaphysics of the infinite and of the contradictory: one would astonish many people — and that in all races — by telling them that there are systems (90) where the metaphysical is of the finite and where it is on the contrary the infinite that is the physical, the bad, the fallen. But we do not insist, [seeming to wish] to deny that there exist races, which is not here the question.

Let us not, however, leave this character of duration without pointing out another — “Alexandrian,” this one too, in the first degree — and also much relished: the communion of souls in a single supreme soul, by the vanishing of each one of them as distinct. One knows that in “duration” is effected the fusion of all the consciousnesses into a single one, each one of them

[marginal: Syncretism: its sweetnesses.]

(90) Heraclitus.

depositing, with its “superficial crust,” the burden of its distinction. A theme profoundly dear to the worldly soul, and one judges of it by the welcome which in all ages it gave to those doctrines where the particular souls come to dissolve their particularity in some “general” one: whether, by “ecstasy,” in the “soul of the world”; or, by “the knowledge of the third kind,” in the “thinking substance”; or, by “love,” in the unique bosom of God… Need it be said what a heady mixture of expansion, of increase and of sweet swooning the idea of that unique and eternal person to which one aggregates oneself in dying to oneself makes the soul feel?

Among those sweet fusions which are made in “duration” with one’s self, let us point out in particular that of all the philosophies in a single one, of all the explanations of the world in a single sentiment (“duration, by the rejection of the dialectic, sole cause of the differences, would not only assure the accord of each one with his own thought, but also that of all the philosophers among themselves,” Creative Evolution, p. 259). This too is a theme agreeable to the world, as has just been proved again by the fortune

of a recent novel (91) in which one visibly prefers to the formulated and diverse religions the religious sentiment in which they all come to melt. Besides the sweet mixture of increase and of swooning which it comes to pour into the soul, besides its substituting for a dogma — that is to say, for an idea which one would have to form and to understand — a pure sentiment which it suffices to feel, besides finally its permitting the sweet action of believing while freeing it from a defined belief, coarse and often heavy to refined souls, and [an] effacement of the differences, this “syncretism” has, with worldly people, the advantage of flattering their laziness: one evidently relishes the idea that “at bottom all the doctrines resemble one another” when one is so lazy that one does not even know how to define the one of which one says one is a follower. And one relishes it again when, instructed in one’s doctrine, one is too much a worldly man, too much a friend of one’s “connections,” to fall out with those who separate themselves from it and even combat it: thus at the Lakes of Egypt two thousand years ago the adherents of a spirit-god, resolved to

(91) La Colline inspirée.

keep their idolatrous friends, whom they saw at the theater, at the waters and at the hunt, must have rejoiced when a Iamblichus came to make them a system in which everything was reconciled.

Finally, a last attraction of duration: this “pure feeling,” this “pure acting,” non-conceptual, non-intellectual — aphasic — it is science, at least the science of life: one knows that duration has only to “relax” itself, to “dilate” itself, in order to become concept, method, “reflection upon itself” and to do the work which Darwin and Spencer missed. (92) Here again Bergsonism flatters a modern passion: the will that sentiment should be science, or more exactly (and it is this, properly, that is modern) the

[marginal: Last attraction of duration: this “pure feeling” is science.]

(92) On the attachment of the Bergsonians to this power of duration, see a reply which we address [to] M. Ed. Le Roy (Revue du Mois, June 1912: A propos of Bergsonian intuition), and also [to] M. Jean Wahl (Id., August 1912, pp. 175–176). One will find a reply to these replies in our second article in the Mercure de France (16 July 1913). Let us note, moreover (Le Roy, p. 75; Agathon, p. 81), the care of the Bergsonians — masters of pure feeling — at once to defend themselves from being pure sentimentalists… Barbari minores.

will that sentiment, by its sole force of sentiment, should bear the same fruits as the long patience of a scientific labor. Of this will the examples abound in the affirmations of those who feel. We shall give but one, which has struck us by its perfection. Proposing to himself to show the moral state of a great artist three centuries ago under the influence of the city where he resided, a man of heart declares: “I shall not try to describe the Toledo which the Greco saw at the end of the sixteenth century… These brilliant evocations, analogous to historical cavalcades, procure for the soul little profit… To render perceptible to us the moral influences which the Greco underwent, I shall attempt, more modestly, to express my sincere love for his city.” (93) Can one say more clearly: “I will do nothing but feel and, by that alone, a whole objective labor, which I quite intend not to do (the search for the influences of Toledo upon the Greco), will be found done”? Can one more properly wish that the sweet action of feeling

(93) El Greco, or the Secret of Toledo, p. 65.

should bear exactly the same fruits as the austere effort of seeking? (94)

At the bottom of such movements lies a great impiety: it is the belief that sentiment does not suffice to its own value and that one raises it by giving it an air of science. (This is the effect of a kind of scholarly respect which modern worldly people all have for science, without any prejudice, moreover, to the hatred of which we speak above.) This impiety

(94) Remark that the author does not at all say: “instead of doing a serious labor, which bores me, which I despise, I am going to do something quite other and of quite another price: I am going to tell my emotions”; he says: “in telling my emotions, I shall have done that labor”; it is not here the contempt of sentiment for scientific research (¹), it is the pretension of sentiment to do the work of that research. Need it be said that one does not at all [see] in what way the impression of a man of the twentieth century is going to “render perceptible to us the moral influences which the Greco underwent”? Besides, it was not at all a question, since one proposed to render perceptible those influences, of telling the Toledo which the Greco saw at the end of the sixteenth century, but of telling the impression produced by that Toledo upon the soul of the Greco, a thing which would [not] have “procured for the soul much profit,” to speak with the savory writer. There was there to be done a labor of reconstitution of soul very difficult, perhaps impossible (although a man of Bourges seems to have succeeded in it for the inhabitants of Port-Royal), but of which one is perhaps more proud to tell the impossibility than to make believe one has done it when one [does] not [do] the same thing at all.

(¹) Although this contempt is there; one feels it extremely […]; [there are] a few figures of it in the inverse movements which the convenience of analysis has made one of the marked traits of the modern soul; [both] the contempt for science, and the “desire […] before [its] time.” Romanticism and pedantry.

appears today on all sides, and one seeks in vain the man of heart who consents to honor his emotion as such; the one, who burns for his king, wishes to give his fire an air of theory; the other, who adores “violence,” exhausts himself in justifying his passion by History; faith is proud to sympathize with science, art with “thought”!… Where is the time when a poet took pride in telling only his ardors and in leaving to others the care of learned things… (95) One sees dawn the day when the scientist will be the only one who will truly feel the value of an “emotion.”

✻ ✻ ✻

[marginal: Conclusion: the philosophy of a democracy.]

Such are the passions of the present society to which Bergsonism brings satisfaction, whether by what it promises, or by what it gives, or by what it decrees. Let us recall the principal ones: to touch an “absolute,” to enjoy the “principle” of things in the vanishing of all reason, to be ignorant of the genus, to know only the object, to despise number, to enjoy “quality”; — to believe in movement alone, to touch

(95) Ovid, The Amours, II, 1.

“pure becoming,” to know only the “living”; — to believe oneself the only existing thing, the only one worthy of interest, wholly of exception before knowledge, the profound essence of the world; — to feel oneself, and to honor oneself, in the deepest part of one’s being, in its most troubled and most troubling part, pure instinct, pure “movingness,” pure “willing,” pure “acting”; — to believe oneself “free”; — to contemplate a contradictory, to melt into the other souls in a single supreme soul… All these passions amount to a single one: to feel a state of the senses or of the heart by philosophical speculation. If one calls, following a denomination evidently abusive but generally received, an aristocracy a society enamored of, or at least reverent of, the sole states of reason, and a democracy a society in quest of feeling alone, which it wants under all its possible forms, which it seeks by the strangest ways and which alone it honors among the states of the soul, one may say that, in the same way as Cartesianism will have been the philosophy of an aristocracy, Bergsonism is rigorously the philosophy of a democracy.

August 1913.

NOTES

Note A (page 17)

… the elegance there is for the mind in knowing its own nature and in itself positing its limit.

A limit in the quality of the things of its domain, not in their quantity. It is there one of the coarsest maneuvers of the irrationalists, to say to science: “By what right do you limit the domain of the mind?”; as if science did not consider as infinite the number of things — finite ones — which it can attain?

One says again, in the same sense (see Brunetière): “in naming it unknowable, you state something of that thing of which you say nothing can be known.” It is exactly as if one said that, after having posited that a number has no measure with unity, one stated a measure of it in saying that it is incommensurable. Need one recall the declarations of Hamilton and of his school: “the unknowable is a name indicating, not an object of

thought or of consciousness, but purely and simply the absence of those conditions under which consciousness is possible”? (1)

(1) One knows the famous reply of Herbert Spencer (First Principles, § 26): “It cannot be denied that [if] we held to the purely logical aspect of the question, the proposition of Hamilton must be accepted in its entirety; but when we examine its more general psychological aspect, we find that this proposition is an imperfect expression of the truth, omitting or rather excluding a fact of great importance. To speak directly: besides the definite consciousness of which formal logic [formulates] the laws, there is also an indefinite consciousness to which no formulas can be given. Beside the complete thoughts, there are thoughts which [one recalls with] less and less completeness, and which are nonetheless real in the sense that they are distinct affections of the intellect.” One sees that philosophy did not wait for M. Bergson to recognize that “indefinite consciousness”; but it did wait for him to sing of it.

Note B (page 26)

… Perhaps it would be convenient, in order to distinguish from the other this metaphysics which consists in a non-conceptual apprehension of things, etc…

A metaphysician philosopher, giving an account of an apologetic book on Bergsonism, has made precise this double sense of the word metaphysics, these two different manners for philosophy of differing from science: “One will permit us,” says M. F. Pillon, “to remark that between this philosophy (Bergsonism) and ours, there is a profound difference and a curious resemblance.

Neo-criticist idealism, such as we understand it, ends like Bergsonism in the opposition of science properly so called and of metaphysics. But the metaphysics which we believe we can oppose to positive science, to the sciences of the physical world, does not proceed from an intuitive thought which claims to dispense with concepts, but from a conceptual thought, from the critical examination of the categories and of their representative value, from the subjectivity of the scientific concepts (space, matter and movement) to which this examination obliges us to conclude.” (F. Pillon, L’Année philosophique, 1912, p. 289.)

Note C (page 37)

… it is generally referred to Hegel.

Here is the true thought of Hegel on the relations of art and of religion with philosophy (Phenomenology, Aesthetics, passim):

The spirit, in its development, passes through three stages:

1°) Art is the first stage of it: it is the spirit penetrating matter and transforming it in its image. There, as everywhere, Hegel finds a rhythm in three movements: at the first degree objective art (architecture, sculpture, painting), where matter still finds itself rebellious, lets itself be only imperfectly penetrated by the idea, by the form; — at the

degree above, subjective art (music), wholly spiritualized, reproducing what there is most intimate in the soul, sentiment; — above, finally, absolute art (poetry), synthesis or conciliation of the material and spiritual arts, where form and idea are inseparably united.

2°) Religion is the antithesis (Entgegensetzung) of Art: whereas art is exterior, religion is interior: the first makes use of material objects in order to make the spirit show through them; the second, on the contrary, strives to separate nature and the divine. — But at the same time art and religion are only two stages in the ascension of thought, two moments which it creates, traverses and surpasses.

In the religious stage, three further degrees: religions of the infinite (such as the oriental religions, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Judaism) which absorb man into God, annihilate the finite before the infinite; — Greco-Roman polytheism which does the contrary, erects man into God; — finally Christianity which by its dogma of the God-man synthesizes the religion of the infinite and that of the finite, and attains the highest expression which religion can give of the fundamental unity of nature and of the divine.

3°) Above Art and Religion, both of them pure symbols issued from imagination and from sentiment, the spirit raises itself finally to the full realization and possession of itself by Science

and its supreme degree, Philosophy. It is there that it attains the consciousness of the absolute, that it recognizes that the absolute is not exterior to it, but that it is itself which is the essence of things.

One sees that Philosophy, according to Hegel, is properly speaking an evasion of Art and of Religion.

Note D (page 41)

… this will to exterminate philosophy as a serious thing…

This contempt of secular people for the philosophical application possesses its parchments. At Rome already, a great poet-philosopher made an allusion to it that has remained famous:

“An old goat, a hairy beast of a centurion, will say to me: ‘I find myself wise enough as I am. I care little to become an Arcesilas or one of those gloomy Solons who go, the head bent, the gaze fixed on the ground, muttering I know not what, who have the air of madmen chewing silence (rabiosa silentia rodunt), who weigh words on their lengthened lip and live meditating dreams of some old sick brain, of this kind: that nothing comes from nothing, that nothing can be reduced to nothing; and it is for that that you grow thin, wretch, and that you deprive yourself of dinner! that is well worth the trouble!’ Thereupon, the people applaud and the great soldiery burst into long fits of laughter.” (1)

(1) Persius, sat. III, 77–87.

Let us listen, nearer to us, to a model “man of the world” of the great century, the educator of a prince:

“Let us come then now to his (the ass’s) principal talent, I mean to the goods of the mind, the superior part in him as well as in us, and by which he can call himself truly an ass, that is to say, an animal discoursing in his species, reasoning in fashion and philosophizing [upon] certain and infallible principles.” (La Mothe Le Vayer, Five Dialogues Made in Imitation of the Ancients: Liège, 1673: Of the rare and eminent qualities of the asses of this time, p. 259.)

Here is a more subtle scorner:

”… The more I study philosophy, the more I find uncertainty in it. The difference between the sects amounts only to some probability more or less… Thus you may tell * * * that I am a philosopher without infatuation, and who regards Aristotle, Epicurus, Descartes, as inventors of conjectures which one follows or which one quits, according as one wishes to seek [truth of] mind or such amusement of mind.” (1)

But the most remarkable in this affair are the professional men of letters — above all contemporary ones; one would say that the pretension to seriousness, in the matters [which they hold to be] theirs, [the literary ones], is for them a personal injury. Some mock gently (Renan and his disciples) (2); others

(1) Bayle, cited by Sainte-Beuve, Portraits littéraires, I, p. 808. (2) One knows how much Renan, so respectful of the character of the philosophers, is disposed to smile at their labors. Moreover, his powerlessness, or rather his laziness, to under-

grow angry (Brunetière, Sainte-Beuve). Here is, of the latter, a page in which many a person, we believe, will have the pleasure of recognizing his own sentiments:

“M. de Rémusat, in the three last chapters of his book, has dwelt upon the philosophical works of his author (Saint Anselm). In the developments which he gives them, he will permit me to regret that there, as it ordinarily happens to him in such matter, he has subjected himself too much to the philosophical forms of the day, and that he, a mind so lively and so French when he wishes it, does not pierce through and through, once for all, those vague and vain expressions, those abstract metaphors which give an air of reality to what is only the subtilized cloud of reasoning. There is a fine saying of the Abbé Sieyès that in the moral sciences ‘our languages are more learned than our ideas,’ that is to say that they make one believe, by a quantity of expressions, in ideas one does not have and upon which great and profound reasoners exhaust themselves. I would wish that M. de Rémusat had in this regard no human respect, and that, instead of [stating clearly] what he thinks of all that, […] [he had] the nobility […] [not to take] dreams of some old sick brain […] [OCR corrupted] lightly.” (Causeries du Lundi, vol. VI, p. 379.)

One might believe that the author wishes ill only to bad philosophy, to those who employ the

stand or appreciate is evident: on the systems of Spinoza, of Kant, of which he speaks so often, he does but reproduce on his own account what drags through the manuals; one may ask whether he has even read them; and one must not have got beyond the first ten pages of the Course of Positive Philosophy to write that Auguste Comte did but reduce to […] what all the scientific [minds], for two hundred years, have seen as clearly as he.” (Recollections of Childhood and Youth, p. 280.)

abstract style for ideas they do not have. One is going to see that he wishes ill no less to those who employ it for ideas they do have:

“He (Huet) thought again that Descartes, that so-called new inventor of the truth…” (Id., vol. II, p. 180.)

And again:

“None in his time refuted Descartes and the Cartesians more wittily than he (La Fontaine) upon the doctrine of beasts, and upon those alleged machines which that philosopher […] knew no more than the man whom he flattered himself with explaining as well.” (Id., vol. VII, p. 527.)

Let us admire, in passing, this peremptory judgment on matters of which one does not know the first word (one may affirm that the degree of value of the Treatise of the Passions was little known to Sainte-Beuve). A writer, not quite exempt himself, moreover, of these manners (although he brings more taste to them), judges us on this subject: “Humility, rare among the learned, is still more so among the ignorant.” (1)

As a reply to this conception of a philosophy exempt from abstractions and wholly “in the French manner,” let one permit us to cite at full length these pages of Ch. Renouvier. As well, we could not better close these considerations than by the declarations of a man who is one of its

(1) Anatole France, Le Jardin d’Épicure, p. 93.

most striking representatives and as such one of the most attacked:

“Another manner (than mine) would consist in departing from rigor in the propositions, in avoiding precision and too special terms, in omitting the parentheses and the reservations, in banishing formal definitions, in relaxing the reasonings, in multiplying the images, in composing one of those systems of assertions at once vague and absolute, which everyone believes he understands without trouble and permits himself to judge in two words. There is no philosophy which has not seen its doctrine undergo a deformation of this kind when it has appeared worthy of being popularized. But let us not require that philosophy popularize itself.

The philosophers lay claim to science, although they rarely attain it. They are either poets or scientists. As poets, they are untranslatable; as scientists, [are we going] to ask Viète or Fermat to put their theorems within the reach of the salon and of conversation? I do not [know] […] [a cause] of science [which] has [not] been able to be carried outside itself, and [moreover], suitably simplified, into the world. But this requires time and intermediaries.

I lay claim to science in my turn, at least under the modest appearance of criticism. I wish therefore to be studied, and [had I] but three readers, I [would like to have] but one, [it is necessary] that I fix [the point of view] [no more, no less], and that I render my thought with the same precision with which I conceive it, and with the abstractions without which there is no possible rigor. [If] I succeed, my method is good. If I fail, it had to be undertaken nonetheless. In all cases, one ought not to reproach me with […] [trying] to satisfy the inevitable conditions of every science which founds itself. Has one then so much esteem for the books of philosophy that read themselves quite fluently? Then

let one pity me the more for it that philosophy, after two thousand years of efforts, has not even succeeded in giving itself existence!

I wish to be studied! No doubt the pretension is great, and perhaps the impertinence, today when time is precious, books numerous and [little] read, authors occupied with themselves, the readers — and even those who call themselves philosophers — little accustomed to surmounting the difficulties of a subject, less disposed still to let themselves be taught, the scientists, finally, plunged, and too justly, in their specialties. Such are the circumstances in which a new author presents himself, and his obscurity is still […] [OCR corrupted] when it has appeared worthy of being popularized. But let us not require that philosophy popularize itself.

The idle or courageous reader will decide whether this obscurity is of those which study augments, or of those which it dissipates. If I had succeeded enough for this book to appear clear to a sustained attention, my thoughts would not be obscure except inasmuch as they are exact and as I have been able to render them abstract; obscure then for those who have need of images, that is to say of snares, of illusions and of dazzlements, for those too who can see nothing but what they have been accustomed to — but much less, to exercised and disinterested eyes, than [are obscure] the […] formulas of current philosophy of which all the concrete proceeds from commonplace and from vulgarity. I shall then have approached the goal, which must be to give to the science of general ideas a scientific character.

Let one not therefore condemn me upon my obscurity, but rather let one [test] it. One will kindly [take account] further of this, that I do not reveal [any] religion, and that I regard as evident only what […] [OCR corrupted] effectively [doubts].

The obscurity so much reproached to the German philosophers is in part of another nature than that of which I justify myself. It holds only to the lack of method and of classification of the matters, or to the imperfect elabo-

ration of the idea, or to that intemperance of imagination which, in the pursuit of the shadows of a nebulous poetry which it takes for profound realities of science, is not stopped by [impossibility] itself […] in the paradox. On the contrary, it happens to Kant to be obscure, and he is so more with impunity, when, after having [made him pass] […], he wishes at all costs to accord what he demonstrates with accredited errors which he obliges himself to respect or to believe. And Hegel is so habitually, because his method condemns him to know everything and to systematize everything.

But who will deliver us from French clarity, if all its merit reduces itself to order, to moderation, to the observance of the conventional and of the conventions! (1) There are published daily books of that clarity, and of a talent brilliant enough, whose authors [follow] the beaten paths, [stray little] from them, [succeed one another] and resemble one another, change nothing, determine nothing, act at most upon the sentiments of a few well-disposed readers. If one must compile psychological and metaphysical repetitions, and find nothing definitively reasoned in them, but only, from afar to afar, occasions for learning by thinking oneself, other literary works offer the same profit with more interest. There are even profound novels of subtle analysis, which make one think more.

(1) Let us recall that the author knew how to render homage to that “clarity” when it seemed to him to illuminate something: “There is more psychology, true and profound, in the Crainquebille affair than in certain treatises of psycho-physiology or of psycho-physics [which] I [have had] the occasion to peruse.” (Last Conversations of Ch. Renouvier, p. 83.) Let us cite again (id., p. 89): “My style is not bad, I avow it; it has neither the grace nor the charm of the style of Anatole France; I regret it more than anyone.” [On how little informed are those who speak of this style with […] Renouvier deployed against those] who […] feel that grace and that charm […] [missing] in him. [OCR corrupted] (J. Florence, La Phalange, August 1913.)

There is another species of clarity, of which France formerly prided itself. It is the clarity of those authors who always understand themselves, [inviting] the public to share thoughts sufficiently matured and exactly communicable. One is never nearer to that quality than when, in the judgment of certain people, one seems to flee it…

I should have a bad grace to wish to depreciate the gifts of mind with which one will find me less than mediocrely endowed. Nevertheless, […] of imagination, I could [bear witness] only […] that study, labor, then the effort to understand myself and to make myself understood, have precisely led me to let […] be obliterated (but is it indeed the word?), to regulate severely what nature could have allotted me of imagination. [Everything] must be in its place; poetry with youth, with mature age reason. But there is [something] for every age, and truth bears within it another poetry, which those poets do not know who wish to be always young and are sometimes only old children. Humanity too, in following its course, passes slowly and painfully from the times of poetry to the times of reason, and the nations remained the youngest are not, I believe, the best. When one accuses the world of becoming prosaic, one flatters it without wishing to; one does not see that it raises itself to the virile poetry.” (Ch. Renouvier, Essais de critique générale, Observations serving as preface to the second essay.)

Note E (page 42)

… A pure desire to feel, totally foreign to the desire to know…

We have recalled elsewhere (op. cit., pp. 63–65; and Revue du Mercure de France, 16 July 1913) the

radical difference there is between that enjoyment of things, a purely affective state, which, by its own avowal, applies itself to being ignorant of every intellectual state, and the enjoyment of the mind in that intellectual state and of analysis, [which] installs itself directly in the interior of its object (which is always a relation and not a thing).

We have shown that the Bergsonian theory called of intuition lives by the confusion of these two “enjoyments,” a confusion which it obtains by feigning to be ignorant that in the expressions “enjoyment of the mind,” “feeling of the mind,” the words enjoyment and feeling [are] pure metaphors and that the “feeling of the mind” has nothing to do with a feeling. We have shown a striking example of this learned confusion in M. Le Roy (in the reply which he made us, Revue du Mois, June 1912).

Note F (page 43)

… Although this will to a swooning communion with the essence of things has not been unknown to any society which some imagine wholly enamored of reason…

On the will of certain worldly people in the seventeenth century, if not precisely to commune

in ecstasy with the essence of things (1), at least to touch things in themselves, let us recall this celebrated letter of a master “honest man,” about 1660; one will see there fully, and already, the eternal will of worldly people to exalt rapid observation at the expense of [composition], of reasoning, of the rules of the mind, to make of it the lot of “half-scholars,” etc… And certainly MM. Mittag-Leffler and Weierstrass, they too, to a certain extent despise those things: but it is finer, as M. Bergeret thought, to despise them while possessing them.

“There remains to you still a habit which you have taken (2) in that science (mathematics), of judging of anything whatever only by your demonstrations, which most often are false (3). Those long reasonings drawn from line to line prevent you from entering at once into higher knowledges which never deceive. I warn you also that you thereby lose a great advantage in the world, for when one has a lively mind and a fine eye, one observes from the mien and the air of the persons one sees a quantity of things which can serve much, and if you asked, according to your custom, of him who knows how to profit by these sorts of observations, upon what principles they are founded, perhaps he would tell you that he knows nothing of it, and that they are

(1) On this precise will, see below note O. (2) The author addresses Pascal. (3) Then, if they were not false, they would not be to be rejected? Here, as has been seen above, [is what these modern irrationalists want]: impossible to know with them whether it is reasoning that is [rejected] or whether it is bad reasoning. [OCR corrupted]

proofs only for him. You believe, moreover, that to have a sound mind and not make a false reasoning, it suffices for you to follow your figures without [seeking] […], to reason only [by] the rules, of which the petty minds and the half-scholars make […] a case. The most difficult and the most necessary for that depends on penetrating in what consist the things that present themselves, whether one wishes to oppose them, or to compare them, or to assemble them, or to separate them, and in discourse to draw from them well-just consequences. Your numbers nor that artificial reasoning do not make one know what things are; one must study them by another way…” (Letter of the Chevalier de Méré to Pascal.)

If one recalls that Cartesianism was then a philosophy “in fashion,” one sees that, inversely to what happens today for Bergsonism (see above, p. 49), this “fashionable” philosophy was not grasped by worldly people in its fundamental thought. (One knows that the fundamental thought of Cartesianism is precisely that we can know only the idea of things, and not what things are.)

Finally, there has been, in all ages, it seems, a snobbery against reason:

“There are people today who believe that it is a mark of wit to declaim against reason and to treat it as an incommodious pedant. I see little booklets, discourses of nothing, which make a glory of it, and I see sometimes very good people [who let themselves be carried along] to such false thoughts…” (Leibniz, cited by M. L. Brunschvicg, Les Étapes de la philosophie mathématique, p. 210.)

Note G (page 44)

On another cause of the success of the modern promiser of the absolute.

Besides this desire, particularly lively, for a swooning communion with the “essence of things,” we believe we see another fact which singularly increases today the chances of success of the charlatan philosopher; it is the wholly passive quality of his audience. A philosopher of the seventeenth century had to deal, under the species of “worldly people” — and among a crowd of “snobs,” who have never been lacking — with a great number of minds formed by the classical discipline, in a word perfectly capable of defending [themselves] against the affirmations served up to them. The case of Madame de Sévigné is certainly not unique, and her letters, from this point of view, are significant. A passage like this one says much about the framework of a mind (and it is the mind of a woman, and one who likes novels): “I will die if I do not love the Jesuits a thousand times better; they are at least all of a piece, uniform in doctrine and in morals. Our brethren speak well and conclude badly…” Her famous criticism of Bajazet is also indeed that of a mind which knows how to defend itself. Here is again a saying of a person to whom one does not tell tales: “We

are finishing the Tasso with pleasure; we find in it beauties which one does not have when one has only a half-science.” Elsewhere (4 August 1680) she scoffs at Père Malebranche “for his contradictions.” Does one see one of our elegant ladies scoffing at a philosopher for such reasons? Another worldly woman, Madame de La Fayette, declares that the philosophy of the [same] Malebranche is unintelligible to her (1). — A modern philosopher, above all one who professes publicly, finds before him: 1° quite young people, who have not had the time to assimilate the methods of the mind, [admitting] that they have been taught to them); 2° elegant ignoramuses “desirous of instructing themselves,” who formerly would have occupied themselves with the hunt or with gallantry, and not with philosophy; 3° men of letters, who seek in philosophy a nourishment for their need of emotion, totally foreign to any method; 4° women, indemnified of any intellectual discipline, whose husbands and lovers do not even know Latin; in short, an ensemble of people without defense, upon whom this philosopher can impose the most frightful sophisms without meeting the shadow of a resistance… And it is understood that in those conditions one triumphs without glory, but at any rate one triumphs.

(1) On the spirit of defense of the seventeenth century in philosophical matter, see M. G. Lanson, Revue des cours et conférences, 1907–1908. And also, taking account of his party spirit, F. Perreau, Les Libertins en France au dix-septième siècle.

Need it be said that all this in no way contests that a modern worldly man knows many more things than his counterpart of three centuries ago?

Note H (page 50)

On the correspondence between Bergsonism and its public.

This extraordinary correspondence between the desires of the present society and the Bergsonian word often makes us think of these lines:

“Let us admire, from his beginnings, the precision of glance and the sureness of calculation of this polytechnician (M. Marcel Prévost). He was of the first, eight or ten years ago, (1) to discern that naturalism was touching its decline, and he was of those [to open themselves of it] to M. Dumas. Whereas neither M. Octave Feuillet nor M. Victor Cherbuliez had ceased to write, he proclaimed that it was urgent to invent the ‘romanesque novel’ and he invented it. ‘That chair was free,’ he says, ‘I took possession of it.’” (Jules Lemaître, Les Contemporains, 6th series, p. 333.)

One is tempted to believe in learned calculations each time one sees an author give to the crowd exactly the base products it demanded (cult of the self, intuitionism, etc…); nevertheless

(1) Written about 1896.

is it not simpler, and therefore more scientific, to think that certain people have only to open their soul in order to give these basenesses?

Note J (page 53)

… the word movement is taken in its proper sense.

It is one of the great uneasinesses which the reading of Bergsonism brings, that the continual employment of those words “movingness,” “life,” in a sense which one lets appear metaphorical when it is real. Take this sentence (Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 29): “Relative is the symbolic knowledge [by] preexisting concepts which goes from the fixed to the moving, but not the intuitive knowledge which installs itself in the moving and adopts the very life of things. This intuition attains the absolute.” “Good,” we think: “the moving,” “life,” are there pure metaphors to designate the absolute: ‘things have no life.’” [But] it suffices to think of the whole of the passage, of the movement of the arrow, of the movement of consciousness which this “symbolic knowledge by preexisting concepts” cannot grasp, and of the vital facts which it can no more [explore in depth] than […] [grasp] [things] [as] material, to be convinced that the words “moving” and “life” retain, under their metaphorical aspect, the pretension to their proper sense. It is there one of those numerous cases where

M. Bergson holds himself in balance upon two distinct slopes, ready to descend into one or the other according to need. We do not know whether M. Bergson is a great writer, but we know well that he is a skillful writer.

Note K (page 56)

… when our elevator passes through a friction.

This ascent in the elevator can continue to be instructive. (As well, one could not better put oneself “into the interior” of movement.) One will be able to remark, for example, in this feeling of […], the feeling of creation, more precisely of power of invention, of power to produce a new quality, we have this feeling only in those moments of friction, inasmuch as we therein transform the halt into movement. In particular, we have it in all plenitude at the moment of starting up. In the ascent without friction, on the contrary — or pure becoming — […] precisely because it is negation of halts and therefore of recommencements of movement, we have in no way the feeling of creation (on the other hand, we have therein the feeling of the eternity of movement). One can therefore verify here — what the theologians like to forget — that the idea of creation is inseparable from that of discontinuity.

Note L (page 62)

On an alleged monopoly of vital facts.

For that distinction which one grants to vital facts of never passing through two similar states, whereas the repetition of similar states would on the contrary be the very essence of physical facts, we believe we have shown (Le Bergsonisme ou Une philosophie de la mobilité, p. 87 ff.) that it holds quite simply to this, that one considers vital facts in their concrete state and physical facts in their abstract state [in which] science [uses] them; that if one takes the latter, them too, in their concrete state, they will [cease], them too, to present ever two identical states. Let us cite, on this subject, this remark of Leibniz: “The parts of time and of place, taken in themselves, are ideal things; thus they resemble one another perfectly, like two abstract unities. But it is not the same with two concrete ones, or two effective times, or two filled spaces, that is to say truly actual ones.” (Collection of Letters between Leibniz and Clarke, Leibniz’s 5th.) Which amounts again to saying that mechanical time (for nothing here implies the “profound” state of time) is just as irreversible as the other, from the instant it is a question of the concrete.

Note M (page 65)

“Before us the religious problem and the problem of life are a single problem.” (A Catholic philosopher); etc…

These declarations do not go without a flagrant heresy if one believes — and it is visibly this that one believes — that in conferring upon the vital fact a character of miracle, one confers it upon the human fact. As if Man drew his quality of miracle from his quality of living thing! As if he were not a miracle, not by resemblance with the other living things, but on the contrary by dissemblance, by discontinuity with them? A miracle among miracles! — These reflections are suggested to us by this fact that, on the one hand, we see the Catholic Bergsonians striving to prove a discontinuity between the material and the living, and that, on the other hand, one does not at all see them prepare to prove a new discontinuity between the living and the human; better still, one sees them adopt [the idea] [that] the human […] “is only a ‘dilation,’ a ‘relaxation’ of the animal instinct”…

Note N (page 78)

… that state where all that, in the sentiment which we take of ourselves, is clearness and distinction vanishes to make place for a feeling wholly pure…

Let us try to realize this consciousness freed of all that in it is distinction, separation, halt. Let us suppose then a man exempt of the senses of sight, of touch — naturally of the Intelligence — and encased in some sort in matter, and from his birth, in such a way as to be ignorant of the least idea of separation between himself and what is not himself. The consciousness of such a man — there, we believe, is “duration.” Such a man has not the sentiment of the self, he has [only] the sentiment of an existence which is referred to nothing precise. He does not think: “I am”; he thinks: “there is existence.” It is a pure flowing of thought, of which no person takes possession. By the terms of [what alone] the world calls consciousness, and of what one believed one relished in duration, a pure nothingness.

Moreover, it is of the best Alexandrian tradition that the soul, by dint of wishing to enjoy itself, comes to deny itself. We do not [deceive ourselves], however, upon this nothingness: “There are two species of Nothing,” says a master in these things: “the Nothing superior to the One, and the Nothing below. If

in expressing ourselves thus we walk in the void, there are two modes of walking in the void: the one which leads to the Ineffable, the other which leads to absolute nothingness.” (1) Need it be said that duration is the walking of the void which leads to the Ineffable?

(1) Damascius the Diadoch, Problems and Solutions Concerning the First Principles, Chaignet trans., vol. I, p. 11.

Note O (page 79)

A Bergsonism in the seventeenth century.

Perhaps it is well to recall to certain people that this taste for a swooning in the vanishing of reason is not so much as they believe the monopoly of the worldly people of today, and that [it is not even] the monopoly of an epoch. Without speaking of quietism, here are a few passages of a work which made a furor (2) in the seventeenth century: the extraordinary identity of the state of soul which one [touches] therein with the state of “duration” will escape no one. One will judge whether we were mistaken in saying that “high society” was always Bergsonian.

Of the virtues, or daughters of charity

“Next, one goes into the chamber of contemplation, where few persons can enter, for there is a

(2) Cf. Michelet, Louis XIV and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, ch. III.

search at the entrance, and [if] they are found charged with some affection or some hatred, or with anything whatever of what is created, and of all that is not God, one does not let them enter. But when one finds those who have entirely stripped themselves of what is not God, having nothing that things may embarrass them with, one lets them enter; and God alone draws them to himself. And he conducts them into that place which is extremely more delicious [than] it is dark. The understanding loses all its lights and remains as though dazed in contemplating its object by the eyes of faith and not by its own, which see nothing more; and is silent, without producing a single reasoning. The imagination reposes and all the thoughts have the wings cut and fly no more.

The will alone acts; and, all blind as it is, it knows well, without the conduct of the understanding, how to find and embrace God who [is] there in the midst of that obscurity. It throws itself into his arms, loving to see […] [so little] [the] infinite, invisible and incomprehensible object. God, at the same time, caresses the soul, of which he is pleased to see the understanding cast down, the imagination asleep and the will alone loving and awake, and he makes the soul taste a thousand sweetnesses by a single regard of his will.

… Finally, from that obscure chamber of contemplation one enters into that of union, which is yet more obscure, because the soul making no more any perceptible act either of understanding or even of will; but being wholly annihilated in itself and wholly absorbed in God, it has no more either movement or regard but of God, and is only as it were dead and [buried] in God; and it lives no more by itself, but it is God who lives in it and operates in it. The soul in that place is made one same spirit with God, is but one with God, [it is to live] the spirit [put] with that of God, as it is said, namely, in the delights of the spirit.” (Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Les Délices de l’esprit, dialogues dedicated to the fine wits of the world, p. 51;

Paris, at Augustin Courbé’s, 1658, with approbation and privilege.)

Besides, the author has discovered the thesis of the Genius of Christianity, of which the timorous still believe [it] an abomination of the so-called romantic times:

Preface to the fine wits of the world

“Since the carnal voluptuaries and the spiritual voluptuaries seek only pleasure, they must have books which attract them by pleasure itself and which convince them by pleasure, in teaching them contentments infinitely greater, more solid and more perfect than those which seem to them so delicious. One must make this delicate, sensual and polished age see, [this age] which seeks beauty in the inventions, the richness of the descriptions, the tenderness of the passions and the delicacy and justness of the figurative expressions, that there is neither novel nor heroic poem whose beauty can be compared with that of the Holy Scriptures, whether in diversity of narration, whether in richness of matters, whether in magnificence of descriptions, whether in amorous passions, whether in abundance, in delicacy, whether in justness of figurative expressions.”

Note P (page 84)

On “pragmatism.”

One knows that the moral religions today take a new form: it consists in embracing a moral idea, not because one believes in it — one declares (and it is there the new fact)

that in these matters everything can be sustained — nor because one loves it, but because one has judged that it is a principle of human force. An attitude to be foreseen of a world a prey to that conflict so dramatic (of which M. Barrès will have been the expression) which is to be ruined of critical spirit and at the same time to wish to act.

We avow we hardly believe in the efficacy of the sentiments one decides to have. Saint Theresa had not decided to be loving, nor Du Guesclin to be brave, nor d’Assas to be devoted, and one imagines ill the ancient Christians suffering martyrdom for a belief which they had only resolved to have, while thinking that the adverse belief could just as well be sustained; their heroism, moreover, would have no [longer any] sense […]. Besides, this attitude seems to us to reveal the last degree of unbelief: must one be certain enough that one does not believe in order to decide that one is going to believe!

On the other hand, this decision to believe seems to us a great promise in the matter of intolerance. The man who believes can at a pinch endure the unbeliever; he ignores him; the man who strives to believe cannot do so; the unbeliever speaks his language, retards his effort, […] if he thinks, moreover, that the unbeliever, the unbeliever is properly the one who prevents him from believing. Intolerance can find there great reinforcements. One imagines very well the religious parties sustained against the critical spirit and with great effort, no

longer because it professes error, but — a position otherwise strong — because it weakens the nation. Nevertheless this position is not, it either, [as solid] as […] [OCR corrupted] the people for it. This idea that an opinion is false but that one must embrace it implies in fact a great education of the mind; the people will never adopt it; it will [exert itself] for an idea only if it believes it true; the “pragmatists” know it well, moreover, who, [for lack of being able to prove] for example the culpability of a former captain, tell the people, not that it must be believed, but indeed that it is true. Then, nothing is changed.

Note Q (page 90)

On the effort to confound morals with intellectual philosophy.

Other philosophers, desirous of confounding the search for morals with high philosophy, set about it otherwise: they strive to find that the activity of the scientist does not differ at bottom from that of the moralist philosopher. Having defined this latter a “moral experience,” which does not content itself with imagining, for such given conditions of existence, a certain rule of conduct, but afterward “tests” this rule, in “confronting it with human life taken in its ensemble,” and declares it good if it introduces into

human life “an order, a harmony, a superior value,” they assimilate this operation to scientific observation in this, that the latter, it too, “never observes without imagining, at the same stroke, some general form or relation,” in this, that it is “a veritable experimentation, which has for goal to see whether nature verifies the idea which, beforehand, the scientist had formed of the manner in which it links the phenomena.” (1) Need one show the wholly factitious character of such a comparison? That there is no kind of true relation between the “linking” — purely logical — which the scientist wishes to see in nature and the “order” — purely felt, wholly subjective — which the moralist wishes to see in the “ensemble of human life”? That above all nothing corresponds, in the idea which the scientist forms of nature, to that concept of “superior value” which is the very essence of moralist speculation?

(1) See M. Émile Boutroux, Le Temps of 9 April 1912, [“Morality and Science,” apropos of] a book by F. Rauh.

Note R (page 95)

… “duration” is at the same time things very different, at once being and knowing, things and an idea of things…

A curious detail: these distinctions, which the Bergsonian refuses to his adversary, are precisely

the very foundation of Bergsonism. “To know is not to live,” “with concepts one will never make a sentiment,” “with points of view one will never make a thing,” “the explanation of a fact is not a thing,” etc…, everyone recognizes there the very premises of Bergsonism; when one comes to tell them afterward that reciprocally to live is not to know, that with sentiment one will never make concepts, that with a thing one will never make points of view, etc…, one is told, not without stupefaction, that one does not wish to understand that in Bergsonism all these things are confounded… In sum, A is different from B, but B is not different from A. We believe we have met elsewhere this state of soul of the irrationalist, in making him say: “the rationalist cannot do my task, but I can do his.”

As for the will to confound the thing and the idea of the thing (1), it is more curious still, when one thinks that the whole criticism of psycho-physical parallelism by M. Bergson [reproaches it with] not [paying] attention enough to distinguishing the realist notation from the idealist notation.

(1) See M. J. Wahl, loc. cit.

Note S (page 95)

… Who is not struck to see how the Latin peoples, as soon as one of these systems is offered to them, suddenly find souls to feel it profoundly, etc…

Here is an example of it. Besides, perhaps certain persons will find a comfort in seeing how the public can welcome a philosopher of whom, fifty years later, it does not even know the name:

“At the origin of things Schelling posits the Absolute. From its dull and obscure depths, [where] a divine expansion and passing by successive evolutions [issue] nature and intelligence, its double manifestation. Identical and inert in the bosom of the Absolute, they depart from it as from a central point in order to deploy themselves with harmony in two different directions. Conserving in their distinct deployments the traces of their primitive union, they resemble one another and reflect one another. (1) In the real world, the idea clothes itself with matter and appears under a visible form; in

(1) “Instinct and Intelligence represent therefore two divergent solutions, equally elegant, of one and the same problem.” (Creative Evolution, p. 156.) Let us say — the reader will draw from it the comparison he will wish — that Schelling, totally forgotten for forty years, […] remains living among the people of the craft for certain modest analyses (for example on sensibility), which moreover were always ignored by the public.

the ideal world, the essence becomes knowledge and takes an intellectual form. The first evolution produces the universe, the second produces knowledge. It is thus that plurality comes from unity, that the infinite penetrates the finite, that identity is conciliated with progress, that nature and intelligence approach and accord with one another, nature in organizing itself by intelligence, intelligence in reflecting itself in nature.

Schelling follows step by step this combination of the spirit originally infinite and of matter primitively unlimited, which determine themselves in moving themselves and proceeding by their opposition as by their accord to the formation of the universe. He describes with profundity and subtlety the progressive organization of nature, shows the two powers of which it is composed passing from sphere to sphere, mounting from degree to degree, brought back each time by the influence of a third to a higher unity from which proceeds a new organization. He develops as ingeniously [as he explains] the gradual transformation of that force, at first mechanical and chemical in the inferior order of inanimate bodies, then vital in the more elevated order of organized beings, finally attaining its highest power and its supreme perfection by the advent of man and the progress of humanity.” (Historical Notice on the Life and Works of M. de Schelling, by M. Mignet, perpetual secretary of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, read at the annual public session of 7 August 1858.) (1)

On the extraordinary popularity of this philo-

(1) Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques, vol. XI.

sopher of whom the public today no longer knows the name, let us cite again this:

“All the newspapers and a great number of writings show that the philosophy of Schelling dominates minds. It does not belong to me to give my opinion on this philosophy, nor to decide whether it is not a pure product of the imagination…; what is certain is that it has found access into the positive sciences, that it is taken there for guide in the researches, and that unless one is initiated into it one understands nothing of the contemporary writings on medicine, physics and natural history; [it is] that it is indispensable to call a professor charged with teaching this system.” (Report of the Minister of Public Instruction Schuckmann to Frederick William III, cited by M. E. Lavisse, Études sur l’Histoire de Prusse, p. 339.)

One sees that the system of Schelling was considered still more than is today Bergsonism: for, in short, a number of people still believe that, at a pinch, they will understand the works of physics and even of biology without having penetrated Creative Evolution.

Note T (page 99)

… that will that sentiment should be science…

Here is a veritable manifesto of that will:

“If now we ask ourselves how the transformation was effected, the book of M. Balfour can again teach it to us. A superfi-

cial psychology had erected scientific or ‘rational’ certitude — for it is here all one — into the model or the absolute type of certitude; and seeing [a] legitimate source of knowledge only in the Intelligence, it had not [said] that there were no others, but it had neglected them. That is what one will henceforth take care not to do, and the century will perhaps end — since, as well, it draws to a close — […] it will not be […] long before it has rendered, among the foundations of belief, their ‘natural’ place to sentiment and to will.” (F. Brunetière, in The Foundations of Belief by A. J. Balfour, p. xxxvii.)

It is evident from the whole passage that, in this last line, the word “belief” means “certitude.” Nevertheless one would have to know ill the habits of the author to believe that it is a lapsus which thus slips a thought more than contestable under the form of another which no man of good sense could contradict.

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[Closing note: The colophon records that the proof was passed for press, after corrections, for two thousand copies of this second cahier and for twenty-five copies on Whatman paper, on Tuesday, 18 November 1913. Manager: Charles Péguy. This cahier was composed and printed by unionized workers — J. Carmeux, printer, 13 and 15 rue Pierre-Dupont, Suresnes.]