AINMHYS BOOK FVND OTHER BOOKS BY DR. FLEWELLING CHRIST AND THE DRAMAS OF DOUBT PERSONALISM AND THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY AND THE WAR Bergson and Personal Realism BY RALPH TYLER FLEWELLING Professor of Philosophy in the University of Southern California THE ABINGDON PRESS NEW YORK CINCINNATI Copyright, 1920, by RALPH TYLER FLEWELLING lU To MY FATHER AND MOTHER 435503 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/bergsonpersonalrOOflewrich CONTENTS PAGE Introduction 21 SECTION I THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE CHAPTER I BERGSON'S DEFINITION OF BEING Uncertainty in the Definition of Matter 32 This uncertainty arises from the use of words with double meaning, from imperfect physical analogies, and from the mystery of life. The confusion arising from the attempt to describe both matter and spirit by the abstract term "perception." The diflSculty attending a description of matter as the inverse of movement. Failure to Note a Real Distinction between Matter and Spirit 36 Again matter and spirit cannot be safely identified under the term "image." If matter is an aggregate of images, and perception is the reference to another "image" which is myself, we remain either in a world which is wholly phenomenal, or we do not reach a realm of thought at all. This fate follows his defi- nition of personality as clearly as it does his definition of body. From this Definition of Matter Arises Contu- sion IN THE Meaning of Self 40 The personal factor cannot be ruled out of per- ception. Perception cannot be fundamental reality. 7 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM The Idea of "Duration" Alone is Insufficient TO Solve the Conflict between Mind and Matter 43 "Duration" in so far as it is a solution is endowed with the unique powers of personality. The Resort to a Theory of Vibration as the Basis of Explanation 45 Metaphysical conclusions drawn from the intro- duction of the vibratory theory are purely materialistic and leave the problem still unsolved. The persistent ghost of exorcised intellectualization. CHAPTER n THE DEFINITION OF MEMORY AND LIFE The Meaning of "Pure" Memory 55 Memory is the intersection of mind and matter; "pure" memory is experience after the event. The failure to complete the connection between matter and spirit. Of the Relation between Perception and Memory 58 We are met by the fact that neither perception nor memory is anything apart from persons in a personal world. Memory must be of concrete experiences by concrete persons. Bergson's "pure" memory must be held practically synonymous with the more common term "personality" if it is to be retained. The Assumed Independence of Memory and Matter is Not Tenable on these Terms. . 64 Independence between thought and thing can be attained only by the assumption of a higher unity. 8 CONTENTS The Metaphysical Bearing of the Things WHICH Escape Our Explanation 66 Dualism that exists by express consent of creative intelligence. The Definition of Life 69 (a) Life as the Intersection of Streams of Reality and as Initial Impulsion. We must, then, explain the creation of these inde- pendent streams, and find that we have but committed ourselves to the infinite regress. If life is to be funda- mental, it must also be self-creative. (6) Life a^ Duration. Bergson here comes to the heart of the problem, but needs to recognize the personal implications of the idea. (c) Life as Vital Impulse. The unforeseen requirements of a vital impulse ade- quate for homogeneity. It must in a real sense be deterministic or it cannot explain the world. (d) Life as the Point of Minimum Cognition. Here the thing to be remembered is that intuition can never in actual perception be entirely clear of intel- lectualization. CHAPTER m INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE It is Necessary to Attain Accuracy in the Use OF THE Term "Intuition" 86 Differences of nature must not be concealed by the use of a general term. Used indiscriminately as a name for the mental process in man, instinct in ani- mals, and cellular attraction in plants. Any real choice is attended by possession of personality. 9 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM The Intellectual Element in All Hxjman In- tuition 90 Human intuition is inseparable from intelligence. Unintelligible intuition would be meaningless on the human plane. Intuition as a Practical Guide in Life 93 We may be able to pronounce it valuable, but hardly superior, and not infallible. It is an inferior guide under new or unusual conditions. Implications of Such a Doctrine as to the Nature OF Truth 96 General truths are an expression of the nature of life, and as such are a part of reality. The Theory of Intuition as an Aid to Religious Ideas 99 It does not provide a solution of the problem of revelation, of miracle, nor of spirituality. In What Sense Can Intuition be Said to Bring Us Nearer Reality? 104 Intuition as acting personality in distinction from reflecting personality. Conscious choice becomes unconscious habit, and, therefore, life itself. CHAPTER IV THE THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME Space as a Qualityless, Homogeneous Medium. . 110 Space gains a universal validity not from its inde- pendent, objective character but because it has meaning for a Supreme Creative Intelligence which wills a world of spatial relations. 10 CONTENTS The Idea of Time as a Form op Space 112 This idea arises from the distinction necessary between time as given by reflection, and the time of successive experiences which is really duration. But I do not relate things and events to myself after the same order. There is a difference between enume- ration of objects and succession of events. Time as Contracted Experience 117 The difference between time and consciousness of time flown. The individual must in the end pay homage to the clock. Time as Duration 120 The conflict between the idea of duration as expe- rience and as applying to matter. Time, materially speaking, derives its meaning from the unfinished character of the world. CHAPTER V FREEDOM AND CAUSATION The Conception of Freedom in the Philosophy OF Change 133 Bergson aims to escape both mechanism and deter- minism by the doctrine of duration, but his unclearness on duration as applied to matter vitiates the result because choice, which is the mark of freedom, is dependent upon personal duration. The Value and Possibility of a Purposeless Freedom 137 A freedom of accident cannot account for a rational world. Such a freedom is valueless for religion. Freedom is inseparable from personality. The highest freedom is consonant with highest intelligence and moral character. Apart from this, skepticism. 11 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Or Causation as Freed from Determinism 142 (a) Duration in Things as Different from Duration in Self. Whatever the "elan" may be, it must act subject to the time order — that is, successively — and with pre- vision for the future if there is to be an evolutionary progress. If this progress is real, duration in things does not differ from duration in us, and the "elan" is purposive. (6) The Only Free Causation is Personal. This is the only ground on which we can maintain the reality of evolution. CHAPTER VI THE NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE The Implications of Impersonausm as to Ground of Being 152 Bergson posits a God subject to matter, and so creatively inadequate. This God is lacking also in moral qualities and hence is inadequate to create a world with moral values. The Meaning of Duration and Change in the Creative Being 156 Duration in the World Ground implies abiding self- consciousness in order to remain creatively active. Such a World Ground must retain unchanging moral and spiritual purpose. It must be not morally subject to the world. It must relate itself to but transcend the temporal order. 12 CONTENTS A True World-Ground Must be Self-Creative. 169 An example of self -creative activity to be found in finite personality. A creative being might through the evolution of the world be realizing himself, which might be the essential definition of a living God. CHAPTER Vn THE FRAGH^E FLOWER OF HUMAN PERSONALITY The Impossibility of an Impersonal Freedom. . 174 Personality the needed element in a philosophy of change. Bergson's Definition of Personality 176 Distinguished by its indefiniteness, in shifting from "body" to "image" to "I." Its unity is phenomenal, a matter of mental concentration. Personality be- comes a thing of degree. Haunted by an insurmount- able dualism. As an impediment to the "elan," per- sonality is reduced to the rank of inert matter. Disappearance of the Ground of Personal Im- mortality 188 While philosophy may not be charged to prove immortality, there is reason to doubt the validity of any system which leaves no room for an instinct so universal and necessary. Thus alone can the creative continuity of the "elan vitale" be maintained. A Doctrine of Personality is Fundamental to Metaphysical Understanding 193 No abiding philosophy can omit the ultimate ex- planation. 13 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM SECTION n PERSONAL REALISM CHAPTER Vm THE AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM Realism in General 197 At its best, realism strives to maintain the obvious, and to stop the analyzing away of the true nature of being. Neo-Realism 198 Neo-realism seeks to escape the unrealities of dia- lectic by affirming independence of the objects of consciousness and the identity of object and percept. In the case of one school this leads to the position that reality is the relation of subject and object in percep- tion, but ignores the self -identifying nature of the sub- ject which makes perception possible. Personal Realism 200 (a) Personal Realism Affirms Indivisibility of Per- sonality. It holds that reality is a connection and a relation indivisible except in abstract analysis. Pluralism is a fact only to the rationalizing nature of man. The only unity is a personal one. There is, strictly speak- ing, no dissociation of personality, but what is so termed is a dissociation of conscious states. (6) Personal Realism Aims an Advance over Ordi- nary f OTTOS of Personal Idealism. Personal idealism posits self-consciousness as fundamental to thought; personal realism affirms per- 14 CONTENTS sonality as the Ground of being and the indivisible real. Personality in the World Ground is limiting only because of uncertain notions of space and time. "Things as they are" must include personality, and because personality includes change and freedom we avoid a static world. (c) Personal Realism Aims through a Doctrine of Personality to Unite the Oppositions Personality presents the common ground of recon- ciliation demanded by modern thought. It presents an unmistakable example of self-causation, and of identity in change. In a world of mystery we must choose the mystery least incompatible with the whole of life. Is it better to be thrust back upon a lawless unintelligible ground of being, or shall we recognize its identity with the supreme mystery of all life, the mystery of personality? This standpoint gives distinct relief in the solution of the deepest problems, which are ultimately those that gather about the meaning of personality. CHAPTER IX THE DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY The Meaning of Personality in a System of Per- sonal Realism 223 Personality as the indivisible unit of reality. It is not a combination of states of consciousness, nor do we consider the brain as the seat of the independent, self-existing soul. It is the essentially real. Some Essential Features of Personality 225 (a) Self-Definition and Recognition of Other Person- alities, 15 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Personal identity differs from numerical identity by relation to the temporal order. The personality realizes itself through personal relations. {b) Duration. (c) Freedom. To deny freedom would be to deny moral account- ability. (d) Carnality. Causality is the unique possession of personality. The Self-Conscious and Self-Creative Elements IN Personality 236 By self-consciousness in man we mean the unique power of conscious self-consciousness through which he judges the motives of his action, and so becomes moral. The self -creative element, a first cause, the operation of which we each experience. Finite causation is limited by the world of relations; infinite cause is limited only by moral nature and purpose. Personality the Fundamental Reality 238 In ultimate analysis, the personality is the one sur- vivor of time and change. CHAPTER X PERSONAL REALISM AND THE TROUBLESOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY The Question of Causal Explanation 240 Any mechanical or impersonal explanation is inconsistent with the maintenance of evolutionary progress. No explanation is to be had apart from purpose. The only self -creativity we know is personal. 16 CONTENTS Vibratory theories only delay the real problem which immediately arises of how differing speeds of vibration are interpreted not as vibrations but as qualities. The hypothetical nature of such theories. Space and Time 247 Emphasis must be put upon the space and time transcending nature of personality. The Dualism of Thought and Thing 250 This dualism is not to be overcome by ignoring either element. The relation of the two orders re- mains the question of philosophy. In making "rela- tion" the real, neo-realism drops into an abstraction akin to that of idealism. The prime reality is not the relation but the relator. The reality is persons in a personal world. The unity of personality is ultimate and less mysterious than philosophical abstraction. Error and Evil 254 Error is not accounted for in the commonly accepted realism of perception. To avoid the issue is to raise too many problems. The idealistic solution of the problem of evil must submit to the test of the concrete instance. The only possible justification of the existence of error and evil is personal. CHAPTER XI PERSONALISM AND THE GROUND OF BEING Personality Assumed or Implied is the Basis of Explanation in Current Theories 261 This is because the law of the sufficient reason demands an intelligent source for an intelligible world. "Unknowables," "monads," "atoms," "vor- 17 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM tices," "electrons," or "elans," in so far as they explain are endowed with causality, freedom, duration, and even self-identity, which are the elements that make up personality. Affirming Personality in the World-Ground is NOT TO Confuse God with His World. . . . 263 God is immanent in his world, as is the artist in his picture. It is the expression of himself, but it is not himself. The demand that matter shall serve as a sort of body for the Deity is due to faulty thinking. A Changing World Implies not a Changing BUT A Living God 265 To live implies an enriching content of experience rather than a changing moral purpose. Personal Realism Provides a Philosophical Basis FOR A Doctrine of Incarnation 270 (o) Impossibley holding a view of God as Static, to show how he covld he in Christ. Questions of human limitations, foreknowledge, omnipotence, etc., no longer haunt us if the chief attributes of God relate to character. They become merely academic questions. (6) Does away with the Question of how God could manifest himself in historic time. Time and space are to him both transcended and real. A Personal World-Ground Provides fob "God, Freedom, and Immortality." 274 An impersonal God or World-Ground is lacking in all qualities which give the idea practical value to man, reelects the system of necessity, and closes the door in 18 CONTENTS the face of humanity's one undying instinct, the hope of personal survival. CHAPTER Xn DfDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM The revival of learning, break-up of feudalism, growth of democracy, new emphasis on science and the liberation of philosophy, all facilitated the growth of individualism. Politically, set forth in the work of Rousseau and Marx; in literature, Groethe, romanticism, realism, Nietzsche; educationally in Rousseau's theory of education; ethically represented in Spinoza; reli^ giously, in the Methodist and kindred movements; scientifically, the dominance of the empirical method, Haeckel and modern science; philosophically, in modem realism, relativism, empiricism, and skepti- cism The CuLTiJRAii Ideai^ of Individualism 282 The perverted and irresponsible view of individual culture which neglects the moral attainments. The Contrastinq Ideals of Personausm 284 Its essential principle the necessity of moral and spiritual values in all true culture of personality. The Present Conflict between Individualism AND Personalism 286 Individualism with its doctrine of Superman devel- oped at the expense of the many and without moral regard is opposing a personalism which contends for the inalienable cultural rights of all men. 19 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM The Cross as the Solution of the Deeper Prob- lems OF Life 287 As the individual reaches his highest personal attainment through sufiFering for righteousness, so the cross becomes the symbol of an uncompleted world in process of perfection. Index 291 20 INTRODUCTION mXRODUCTION The philosophy of change is as old as Hera- clitus, yet it has appeared again and again in the field of the history of philosophy, whenever other systems that have long contested the field have shown signs of weakness, decay, or deadlock. It is a natural compromise between the systems of sheer materialism and sheer idealism. It offers as reality something more tangible than abstract idea, namely, a law of change, and something less objective than the theories of materiahsm. It provides a movement under which the self- creative soul may express itself, and cross the line from subject to object, while it denudes materialism of its static inertia and helplessness, and gives to nature and life a unity. One cannot read the pages of the latest philosopher of change, Mr. Bergson, without being reminded of many names in the history of philosophy which his doctrines suggest. One recalls the impetus which another French philosopher, Descartes, gave to mechano-mate- rialistic speculation, which had its effect in running out to its limit the materiahstic hypoth- 23 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM esis, and making clear the demand for something better. One remembers the relation, or at least the concomitance, of this movement with the movement of realism in letters and in art. And though the term is used in a different way when speaking of realism in philosophy it is not to be forgotten that there is more than a casual connection between them. When one reads the doctrine of intuition, as against intellectualization, one cannot over- look the results of French romanticism with its great emphasis on the value of the psychological reaction of the individual, disclosed in the intuitionalism of Pascal and the surviving individualism in modern life which is known as a doctrine of the superman, which is the haunting spirit of modern literary realism. With the conscious barrenness of idealistic dialectic on the one hand and a sense in many quarters of the breakdown of materiahstic explanation on the other, it is the most natural thing in the world that philosophy of the present hour should witness a new appeal to the things which sense does not reach and which intellect- ualization seems only to obscure. Essentially the Bergsonian system seems to us an attempt to give philosophical expression to a demand of the times; to offset the exclusive claims of materialism for reality; to refute the 24 INTRODUCTION idealistic trust in pure dialectic; to provide a * definition of life which shall transcend those of science and yet leave room for spontaneity, contingency, and life; and, not least of all, to restore philosophy to the popular interest and to the uncritical by simplification. There is no doubt that Bergson has accom- plished many of the items of such a program, whether or not he ever had such a course in mind. He has done work which we believe is of great significance in the clearing of philo- sophical ideals. If at times we seem hyper- critical in our discussion of his teachings, it is that by rather extreme measures we may attract attention to elements of danger which are easily overlooked by reason of the winning charm and contagious enthusiasm of the philos- opher. It seems good to have a really great philoso- pher with so popular an appeal, and no doubt many of the points here complained of will be cleared up by Mr. Bergson himself in subse- quent works. The purpose of this volume is to show that the philosophy of change is not complete so long as it remains upon the abstract and impersonal basis. The difficulty with Bergson's realism, as well as with that of the neo-realists with whom he is often classed, is that in this abstract element they are nearer BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM idealism than they dream. Their need is to bring theory to the test of the concrete instance in life. The concrete instance is based upon the experience of a person in a world of persons. And there is an element in personality which at least since the days of Kant must be recog- nized as existing in its own right. It is this element of personality which we feel is needed to complete and ground a true philosophy of change. Such a system was worked out to great completeness in America by Borden Parker Bowne under the name of Personalism. We have presumed here to call it a system of personal realism. Acknowledgments are due to my colleagues Professors Ulrey, Dixon, and Healey of the University of Southern California, to M. Poin- care, vice-Rector of the Sorbonne, and to Pro- fessor Bergson. It is not pleasant to disagree with one to whom there is a sense of personal obligation linked with so profound an admiration and esteem. These considerations are not offered in a spirit of contention nor as an attempt at finality, but in the humble hope that they may be not altogether without value in that conflict of ideas by which comes the more perfect state- ment of truth. INTRODUCTION Acknowledgment should be made to the following firms for courtesies in connection with the quotations used in this book: Henry Holt & Co., publishers of Creative Evolution, by Henri Bergson. The Macmillan Company for quotations from Bergson's Matter and Memory; and Time and Free Will; also Bo- sanquet's Value and Destiny of the Individual. G. P. PvinaTrCs Sons, New York, for quotations from Bergson's Metaphysics. Charles Scribner*s Sons for quotations from Poincare's Science and Method. Houghton Mifflin Company for Lucy Larcom's poem «A Strip of Blue." The Yale University Press for quotations from Hock- ing's Meaning of God. Lane for Naidu's "Suttee" from the Golden Threshold. Dana^ Estes & Co. for Knowles's "The Tenant" from On Life's Stairway. The University of Chicago Press for quotations from Coe's Psychology of Religion. Alcan, Paris, for quotations from Piat's La Personne Humaine. Open Court Publishing Company for Lane's translation of Herder's poem "Self." Thomas Bird Mosher for the poem "Sometimes," to be found in The Rose Jar, by Thomas S. Jones, Jr. The Author. Paris, April, 1919. «7 SECTION I THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE CHAPTER I BERGSON'S DEFINITION OF BEING In any system of philosophy, the definitions of being, reality, and life are more important than any house of speculation that may be built upon them. The definition is fundamental, and by it the remainder of the system must stand or fall. It is, then, important to any critical review of the Bergsonian philosophy that we should seek the exact definition which is given to being, reality, and life. The foremost clue to this definition will be given us if we can ascertain first of all the aim of the author. Bergson aims in his definition of matter to avoid the chief difficulty which besets materiaHsm. This difficulty is the unavoid- able skepticism which arises from the affirmation of a reality which exists independent of all intelligence, and which ends in the denial of knowledge. This is his endeavor when he presents the definition of matter in this fashion: Matter in our view is an aggregate of images, and by image we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the ideaHst calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing — an existence placed 31 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM half way between the "thing" and the representation. This conception of matter is simply that of common sense. ^ Uncertainty in the Definition of Matter However much we may sympathize with the attempt thus to overcome the age-long dispute in philosophy, one can scarcely feel satisfied with a solution which seems so largely verbal. Though strictly defining the meaning of the term "images," the common connotation of the word is different, and this shadow of meaning creeps into Bergson's discussion. The confusion thus created becomes most apparent when he comes to define the relation of matter to per- sonality or spirit. I call matter the aggregate of images, and perception of matter these same imxiges referred to the eventual action of one particidar imagey my hody.^ Here is a system which I term my perception of the universe, and which may be entirely altered by a very slight change in a certain privileged image — my body. This image occupies the center; by it all the others are conditioned; at each of its movements everything changes, as though by the turn of the kaleidoscope. Here, on the other hand, are the same images, but referred each one to itself; influencing each other no doubt, but in such a man- ner that the effect is always in proportion to the cause: this is what I term the universe.^ 1 Matter and Memory, pp. vii-viii. 2 Ibid., p. 8. 'Ibid., p. 12. DEFINITION OF BEING In this case we have the same term, "image," applied to two systems, to that of perception or thought which later becomes memory or spirit, and to that of matter as independent existence. The question at once arises as to the validity of this double use of the term. Certainly, no questions existed previously which do not remain under the disguise of words. Either self is identical with matter or it is not. As an image in the sense of one body among others it might be, but if we have a mind for that which transcends materiality, we still have two worlds, and have not advanced by our definition. What Bergson seems to have hoped by this device was to obtain a suspension of judgment or truce in hostilities whereby we will accept things as they appear to common sense and not push the remorseless logic of the mind to either the extreme of materialistic agnosticism or idealistic subjectivism. The great question is how can we stop by fiat and be satisfied with the truce of ambiguous terms? In still another passage he defines matter as the inverse of movement, which is fife. As steam from a vessel escapes into the air, the condensed drops of water fall back, opposing themselves to the rising vapor. The drops represent matter and the steam spirit, or life. He says: 33 feERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM In reality, life is a movement, materiality is the inverse movement and each of these two movements is simple, the matter which divides the world being an undivided flux, and undivided also the life that runs through it, cutting out in it living beings along its track. Of these two cur- rents the second runs counter to the first, but the first obtains, all the same, something from the second.* The movement is of the very essence of reality.^ * Creative Evolution, pp. 249, 250. * "If matter so far as extended in space is to be defined (as we believe it must) as a present which is always beginning again, inversely our present is the very materiality of our ex- istence, that is to say, a system of sensations and movements, and nothing else" (Matter and Memory, p. 178). "Each of these qualities resolves itself, on analysis, into an enormous number of elementary movements. Whether we see it in vibrations or whether we represent it in any other way, one fact is certain, it is that every quality is change. In vain, moreover, shall we seek beneath the change the thing which changes: it is always provisionally, and in order to satisfy our imagination, that we attach the move- ment to a mobile. The mobile flies forever before the pur- suit of science, which is concerned with mobility alone. In the smallest discernable fraction of a second, in the almost instantaneous conception of a sensible quality, there may be trillions of oscillations which repeat themselves. The perma- nence of a sensible quality consists in this repetition of move- ments, as the persistence of life consists in a series of palpita- tions. The primal function of perception is precisely to grasp a series of elementary changes under the form of a quality or of a simple state, by a work of condensation. The greater the power of acting bestowed upon an animal species, the more numerous, probably, are the elementary changes that its faculty of perceiving concentrates into one of its instants. And the progress must be continuous in nature, from the beings that vibrate almost in unison with the oscil- 34 DEFINITION OF BEING When we consider still further Bergson's claim that matter is simply "run-down" or exhausted life, we see how great is the need for clarifying definition and analysis, for in Berg- son's scheme of things both matter and life spring from a common creator in which the mechanical order is opposed to the living order, and is likewise produced by it. He says: All our analyses show us in life, an effort to remount the incline that matter descends. In that, they reveal to us the possibility, the necessity even, of a process the inverse of materiality, creative of matter by its interruption alone.' On this basis fife could not create matter until it already had some matter to oppose it. But this shakes our original structure to its founda- tions because it raises the question we presumed settled at the start. Instead of allowing us to assume that motion is original, it forces us to weigh whether it is matter or movement or life that is original. We shall find ourselves philo- sophically in the situation of the man who could find no way out except by lifting himself on his own bootstraps. lations of the ether, up to those that embrace trillions of these oscillations in the shortest of their simple perceptions" (Cre- ative Evolution, p. 301). • Creative Evolution, p. 245. 35 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Failuee to Note a Real Distinction Between Matter and Spirit Any system of philosophy which attempts definitions that shall of themselves reconcile the dualism of spirit and matter is doomed to fall into a similar confusion. For philosophy and for life there is the one great secret, and that secret is beyond intelhgible expression and analysis. The secret of hfe resides measur- ably within the depths of our own personalities. We have there exposed as by a flashhght a small portion of the garment of mystery. How can atoms of energy with their deducible heat units be traced into the purpose and will of the individual .f^ Mr. Bergson recognizes this fact when in the introduction to Matter and Mem- ory^ he denies a parallelism between the two series psychical and physiological. Why not, then, openly admit that in personality itself we chance upon the unexplained mystery of con- nection between the worlds of matter and of spirit? And if perchance we seek the solution of the larger mystery of eflScient causation, it might be that personality in the "elan" would settle problems for which there is promise of settlement by no other conceivable premise. If we frankly recognize the dualism between * Bowne, Metaphysics, p. 17. 36 DEFINITION OF BEING matter and spirit, we can at least say that the mystery of their connection lies in the unsounded depths of personality. We need deny the reality of neither world. Spirit would then be simply that which acts, and matter that which is acted upon.^ Inasmuch as any clear consideration of the questions at issue in metaphysics must recog- nize the existence of the two realms of matter and spirit, it would seem undesirable for us to attempt to cover both by the use of a word constantly confusing. The classing of contra- dictory ideas under identical terms can never lead to clearness nor to the solution of the prpblem. An illustration of this method is to be found in the description of the self in Matter and Memory.^ Here we have the self referred ^Bowne, Metaphysics, p. 17. • "We will assume for the moment that we know nothing of theories of matter and theories of spirit, nothing of the discussions as to the reality or ideality of the external world. Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed. All of these images act and react upon one another in all their elementary parts according to constant laws which I call laws of nature, and . . . th'e future of the images must be contained in their present and will add to them nothing new. "Yet there is one which is distinct from all the others, in that I do not know it only from without by perceptions, but from within by affections: it is my body. I examine the conditions in which these affections are produced:^! find 37 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM to as one image among others, and further as an image that is given us in consciousness. that they always interpose themselves between the excita- tions that I receive from without and the movements which I am about to execute, as though they had some undefined influence on the final issue. I pass in review my diflFerent affections: it seems to me that each of them contains, after its kind, an invitation to act, with at the same time leave to wait and even to do nothing. I look closer: I find movements begun but not executed, the indication of a more or less useful decision, but not that constraint which precludes choice. I call up, I compare my recollections: I remember that every- where in the organic world, I have thought I saw this same sensibility appear at the very moment, when nature having conferred upon the living being the power of mobility in space, gives warning to the species, by means of sensation, of the general dangers which threaten it, leaving to the indi- viduals the precautions necessary for escaping from them. Lastly, I interrogate my consciousness as to the part which it plays in affection: consciousness replies that it is present, indeed, in the form of feeling or of sensation, at all the steps in which I believe I take the initiative, and that it fades and disappears as soon as my activity, by becoming automatic, shows that consciousness is no longer needed. Therefore all these appearances are deceptive, or the act in which the effective state issues is not one of those which might be rig- orously deduced from antecedent phenomena, as a movement from a movement; and hence it really adds something new to the universe and to its history. Let us hold to the ap- pearances; I will formulate purely and simply what I feel and what I see: all seem to take place as if, in this aggregate of images which I call the universe, nothing really new could hap- pen except through the medium of certain particular images, the type of which is furnished me by my body. . . . The afferent nerves are images, the brain is an image, the disturbance traveling through the sensory nerves and propagated in the 38 DEFINITION OF BEING This self is referred to indifferently as "I," "body," "consciousness," and "representation." Following this description of matter as an aggregate of images among which images my body becomes (for me) a center, one feels moved to ask the following questions: If matter is an aggregate of images, and perception is the refer- ence to another image, which is myself, do we not remain in a world which is wholly phenom- enal? If we do not, then we cannot reach a realm of thought at all. brain is an image too. . . . Here are external images, then my body, and lastly, the changes brought about by my body in the surrounding images. I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body: they transmit move- ment to it, and I also see how this body influences external images; it gives back movement to them. My body is then, in the aggregate of the material world, an image which acts like other images, receiving and giving back movement, with, perhaps, this difference only that my body appears to choose within certain limits the manner in which it shall restore what it receives. But how could my body in general and my nervous system in particular beget the whole or a part of my representation of the universe? You may say that my body is matter or that it is an image; the word is of no im- portance. If it is matter, it is a part of the material world, and the material world, consequently, exists around it and without it. If it is an image, that image can give but what has been put into it; and since it is by hypothesis the image of my body only, it would be absurd to expect to get from it that of the whole universe. My body, an object destined to move other objects, is, then, a center of action; it cannot give birth to a representation" (pp. 1-5). BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM As "aggregate of images" cannot tell the whole story of matter with its visible unity, so neither can "perception" account on this basis for the processes of thought, of purpose, of will, which are the finest and most real elements of experience. The moment we strive for a general term which shall represent both matter and spirit we have emptied its meaning to the vanishing point by one of those "efforts at intellectualization" which Bergson so greatly deplores. The actual line of demarcation is pronounced, and the controversy of philosophy must be settled by clear thinking rather than by ambigu- ous terms. The nature of the strife cannot thus be changed any more than could the desperate points at issue in the great American war be lost in the reference to it by a humorous writer as "the late unpleasantness." From this Definition of Matter Arises Confusion in the Meaning of Self Out of this confusion in the definition of being arises a further confusion as to the mean- ing of personality, or self. The self is referred to under the general term "body." Yet we say "my body," and "I," in contrast with my body. This may be a convenient form of expression if we are trying to break down the borders 40 DEFINITION OF BEING between materiality and spirit. The device may enable me to group my body as an image with other bodies that comprise the material world, but the world has long since discarded the crude conception of organs of the body as the seat of the soul. There is great question whether any progress is to be made by recurring to the old expedient. According to Bergson's usage, the self is alternately matter and spirit as best suits the occasion. But he still further differentiates spirit from perception by making it always bound to time flown. He says: *Tt is in very truth within matter that pure per- ception places us, and it is really into spirit that we penetrate by means of memory. ^° Has spirit, then, no "now".^ Does it not take its seat until perception is a thing of the past.f^ Does it not, rather, enter into the bodily channels through which it must reach matter to determine what and how much it shall perceive .f^ It might be conceived a great spiritual and scientific blessing to the world if men could perceive things as they are, but unfortunately the human personality so warps its perception that in many cases the man per- ceives only that which he wishes or expects. In all cases involving exactness of perception, allowance must needs be made for the "personal " Matter and Memory, p. 235. 41 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM equation." In courts of law the prepossessions, expectations, and seK-interests of the individual are recognized as having important bearing on what the witness honestly thinks he saw. Here is a side of perception which may be incon- venient to consider, but which nevertheless must be met if we are to go any distance along the road to the solution of the problems involved. By the Bergsonian method perception is placed in contrast with memory or spirit. From matter identified with perception in such wise as to include spirit we leap to spirit as memory, and memory is considered as the opposite of matter. Perception is supposed to be clear, simple, bearing only truth, being of the nature of reality, very reality itself. No recognition is given to the fact that "pure" perception may be mistaken perception, or at least may become the basis of mistaken intellectualization. Some way must be left in which it is possible to account for the difference of perception between the trained and the untrained mind and eye. The botanist, for instance, perceives a hundred things about the plant he discovers by the way- side which do not appear to the man who is ignorant of botany. The perceptions of the common man not only differ from those of the trained chemist, but they differ in such degree as to make of scant value to the scientific world 42 DEFINITION OF BEING the perception of the untrained. The value of the simplest perception is found to lie in great part in the quality and training of the perceiving mind. No account is taken of the fact that elementary perception must appeal to memory and thought for correction. As a matter of fact, any attempt to divide the two is an illus- tration of vicious "intellectuaUzation." Per- ception is taken as the brighter light; memory is but its inefficient penumbra. Perception is more real as being the very heart of reality; memory, or spirit, is only a picture of what has been. Throughout this play of forces the "I" passes like a shuttle to and fro, becoming alter- nately matter and spirit, but never a self- directing identity above the flux of experience. The Idea of "Duration" Alone is Insufficient to Solve the Conflict BETWEEN Mind and Matter In so far as the philosophy of change has found any solution of the difficulty thus raised it has provided it in its doctrine of duration. Matter is supposed to be in space, spirit to be extra- spatial; there is no possible transition between them. But if, in fact, the humblest function of spirit is to bind together the successive moments of the duration of things, if it is by this that it comes into contact with matter and by this also that it is first of all distinguished from matter, we can conceive an infinite number of degrees between 43 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM matter and fully developed spirit — ^a spirit capable of action which is not only undetermined, but also reasonable and reflective." Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states. For this purpose it may not be entirely absorbed in the passing sensation or idea; for then on the contrary, it would no longer endure. ^^ It will thus be seen that under the term "duration" Bergson implies the self -identifying quahty of human personality. It is distin- guished from matter, it distinguishes itself from matter; it survives the fleeting states of percep- tion and binds the various successions into a harmony of experience. And so far as we can understand his philosophy, this element of duration is the unique possession of the spirit. This may at first glance be questioned but appears more likely upon reflection. When he speaks of duration in matter it seems to have a meaning relative to the self -identifying qualities of the individual rather than to any original or intrinsic power in matter itself. Thus, though he does not perhaps avow it in words, he brings the mysterious relationship between matter and spirit to the only place to which in the end it " Matter and Memory, pp. 295-296. " Time and Free Will, p. 100. 44 DEFINITION OF BEING can be brought, the alembic of human person- ality. The Resort to a Theory of Vibration AS THE Basis of Explanation An account of Bergson's definition of matter would, however, be incomplete without a con- sideration of his doctrine of movement as the basis of reality. ^^ 13 "Analysis resolves it [matter] into elementary vibrations, the shortest of which are of very slight duration, almost vanishing, but not nothing" (Creative Evolution p. 201). "REAL MOVEMENT IS RATHER THE TRANS- FERENCE OF A STATE THAN A THING. . . Now. certainly the difference is irreducible (as we have shown in an earlier work) — [T. & F. W.] between quality on the one hand and pure quantity on the other. But this is just the question: Do real movements present merely differences of quantity or are they not quality itself, vibrating, so to speak, internally, and beating time for its own existence through an often incalculable number of moments? ... If our belief in a more or less homogeneous substratum of sensible quali- ties has any ground, this can only be found in an act which makes us seize or divine, in quality itself, something which goes beyond sensation, as if this sensation itself were preg- nant with details suspected yet unperceived. Its objectivity — that is to say, what it contains over and above what it yields up — must then consist, as we have foreshadowed, precisely in the immense multiplicity of the movement which it executes, so to speak, within itself as a chrysalis. Motion- less on the surface, in its very depths it lives and vibrates" (Matter and Memory, pp. 267-270). "To movement, then, everything will be restored, and into movement everything will be resolved" (Creative Evolution, p. 250). 45 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM By adopting the theory that movement is original the philosophy of change seizes by the horns the ancient dilemma between a self- creating Absolute, and an Unknowable involved in an infinite regress. By assuming that motion is itself never begun but was from eternity we seem to have a suflGicient ground for the world "As a matter of fact, no one represents to himself the relation between quantity and quality in any other way [than as one merely of vibration]. To believe in realities distinct from that which is perceived, is above all to recog- nize that the order of our perceptions depends on them and not on us. There must be, then, within the perceptions which fill a given moment, the reason of what will happen in the following moment. And mechanism only formulates this belief with more precision when it ajflSrms that the states of matter can be deduced one from the other. It is true that this deduction is possible only if we discover, beneath the apparent heterogeneity of sensible qualities, homogeneous elements which lend themselves to calculation. But, on the other hand, if these elements are external to the qualities of which they are meant to explain the regular order, they can no longer render the service demanded of them, because then the qualities must be supposed to come to overlie them by a kind of miracle, and cannot correspond to them unless we bring in some preestablished harmony. So, do what we will, we cannot avoid placing those movements within these quali- ties, in the form of internal vibrations, and then considering the vibrations as less homogeneous, and the qualities as less heterogeneous, than they appear, and, lastly, attributing the difference of aspect in the two terms to the necessity which lies upon what may be called an endless multiplicity of con- tracting into a duration too narrow to admit of a separation of its moments" (Matter and Memory, pp. 270-272). 46 DEFINITION OF BEING of matter which relieves us from the embarrass- ment of the ancient question which remained after assuming that all began with a fire-mist, or a jiggling of atoms, and desired to know who jiggled the atoms and how the first impulse was given. We see at once that on such a theory we begin by investing both matter and motion with eternity. There is strong temptation at this moment to embarrass the situation with dialectic. Doubts will come as to how, if motion has been from all eternity, there can be any progress at all, or how from such a starting point we can obtain the benefits of evolution. If all the motion that now is is the exact equiva- lent of the motion that always has been we have still to account for the increment of evolution. As a matter of fact, transcendence of time can be the possession of personality alone, and not of matter nor of motion, if we are going to retain any such thing as progress or evolution possessing any meaning for thinking and pur- posive beings. Any other course must inevi- tably land us in the darkest materialism. Under this theory that motion is original, the "vital elan," life, the universe, and God are only an intricate system of vibrations. Nor will it serve any useful purpose to disclaim our materialistic conclusion, because when we think of movements or vibrations we are com- 47 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM pelled to think in materialistic terms. Move- ments are movements of something in space, vibrations are vibrations of material atoms. Even if we go farther in our work of idealization and speak instead of "seons," "electrons," or "vortex rings," we shall not escape the materi- alistic implication. We may thereby complete an interesting intellectual exercise, and may be giving wide range to our imaginations, but we shall only deceive ourselves if we think we have dehvered ourselves in any wise from the body of this materialistic death. When we place all our hope forlorn on a matter of vibrations it is not beyond the bounds of reason that we should further demand, "Vibrations of what.'^" Are these vibrations material or spiritual .^^ Are they vibrations of atoms, seons, electrons, or of monads, spiritual influences? Are we witnessing the movement of forces which enter into what we know as matter — that force which is forever blocking and hindering the ascent of life, the conquest of the spirit — or are we actually witnessing magic, a dance of the gods? If it should be the latter, we are all at sea because we have passed beyond the kingdom of science. Whichever horn of the dilemma we choose to take there is nothing to save us from landing in the bald materialism of ancient atomism. In the case of vibrating 48 DEFINITION OF BEING "atoms" or "aeons" the only reason we think we have made progress toward a solution of our difficulty is because we have imaginatively endowed a quaking infinitesimal of matter with all the powers, occult, purposive, and intelligent, which in our scientific enthusiasm we have denied to God. Unless we can identify motion with intelligence we have not been helped along the dusty distances by any assumption of motion as the fundamental reality. It will at once be seen that under this theory not only matter, but perception, mental reac- tion, reflection, the various universe — all become merely a problem in variation of wave-lengths, a difference in speed of vibrations in certain somewhat fictional infinitesimals of matter. Of course, in order to get the desired intelhgible and spiritual results, there must be in these pri- mal or elementary bodies or forces certain intelligent and spiritual elements, but it is not permitted to speak of these, nor to allow them any standing. "No Passing" is written across each one of them. If these needed elements were given a place, they might prove too much and might become embarrassing to our doctrine that movement is original. In keeping with this theory, one speed of vibration gives red, another blue, the absence of vibration gives black, while purple spells confusion. As the 49 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM dance goes faster or slows down we go from light to sound, to taste and smell. In this novel and fascinating arrangement wherein all qualitative changes are reducible to quanti- tative movements, what is to hinder the tracing of those personal qualities which distinguish one man from another to a slightly different period of vibration? The ancient Pythago- rean speculation rises like a ghost out of the dim and distant past. It might be that we each of us possess our "keynote." The long outlawed reflections of astrology might return to the field to convince us that character and destiny, criminality or saintliness are not, as we have thought, a matter of personal praise or blame, but one of sympathetic vibration in accordance with which one moves in keeping with his horoscope to his keynote in the well- timed music of the spheres. All that one seems to need is a touch of imagination — and credu- lity. One specter remains at the feast, however, to disturb our mental harmony: it is the stub- born question. Has intuition, "pure intuition," or perception, which is reality, given us this result, or have we arrived in the quagmire by a process of gross "intellectualization"? This is an uncomfortable thought, for, by the terms of this philosophy, rationalization leads away 50 DEFINITION OF BEING both from life and from reality, and the old problem remains. In spite of the warning that if we are to reach reality it is dangerous to think, or intellectualize, we cannot avoid the abyss of reflection. In our slumbers of vibra- tory self-repose and hypnotic world-satisfac- tion, alas, what dreams may come! This re- flection is forced upon us; in pure perception, or in any other kind of perception, we are not conscious of vibrations at all, but of colors, sights, sounds, and bodies which the moment we perceive them are given an intelligible sig- nificance and a place in our world. It is plain that we arrived at a belief in the vibratory theory, not by that which we have perceived, nor by that which the scientists have perceived, using the term "perception" in the Bergsonian sense. It becomes clear that we have reached our theory by one of those processes of intel- lectualization, concerning which Mr. Bergson has warned us as leading us directly away from the reality. It is very certain that whatever neo-realism or any other kind of realism may be able to do for us^ it cannot by any principles of realistic perception establish for us a world founded on an atomic or vibratory theory. Our choice between them and the absolute ideal- ists (if choose we must) would needs be a choice between idealistic pantheism on the one hand 51 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM and idealistic materialism^'* on the other. Any one having paid the price of admission can attend either show. Neither one promises to give much satisfaction beyond mere passing entertainment. One thing is certain, however much the researches of science may be able to establish the fact of the vibratory changes of matter and their relations to changes in perception of qualities, the question of how these vibrations get into thought as diverse qualities of being has not been touched. We certainly have never yet explained anything by discovering another word with which to describe it. This much must be admitted, though failure to understand it has filled the world with ponderous and tedious volumes which serve no better purpose than "To cramp the student at his desk, And make old bareness picturesque" with the moss of high-sounding opinion. Why do vibrations moving at "m," "n," or **y" feet per second over the same field stir emotions of patriotism that inspire men to press unflinchingly up the slope of death to endure the ultimate sacrifice with glad and " We beg to be forgiven this contradictory term, but can think of none other so expressive of our meaning. 52 DEFINITION OF BEING willing hearts? Why are vibrations say at "n" to be interpreted into the sweetest voice that man ever knows, that which sang above his cradle? Why do certain other vibrations moving at say "y" speed mean to me the dearest face that my eyes look upon? A little reflection, Horatio, will show one things not dreamed of in the vibratory philosophy. This world of personal meaning and interpretation has many realities which can neither be ex- plained by rates of atomic vibration, nor can they find satisfactory ground in any origin which is pure movement. When Bergson hits upon the doctrine of duration to solve this problem he is very near to the truth, but he cannot reap the rich reward of such a theory while he remains in the toils of any abstract or impersonal "duration" whatever. The only way out is to assume duration in the only place where it possesses intelligible meaning, namely, in the relating self. 53 CHAPTER II THE DEFINITION OF MEMORY AND LIFE Let us turn to the discussion of memory and its relation to matter and perception. We are told: If it is memory alone that lends to perception its sub- jective character, the philosophy of matter must aim in the first instance, we said, at eliminating the contributions of memory. We must now add, that as pure perception gives us the whole, or at least the essential part, of matter (since the rest comes from memory and is super-added to matter), it follows that memory must be, in principle, a power absolutely independent of matter. If, then, spirit is a reality, it is here, in the phenomenon of memory, that we may come into touch with it experimentally. And hence any attempt to derive pure memory from an oper- ation of the brain should reveal on analysis a radical illusion.^ Again he says : It is within matter that pure perception places us and it is really into spirit that we penetrate by means of memory.^ * Matter and Memory, p. 81. * Ibid., p. 235. 54 MEMORY AND LIFE The Meaning of "Pure" Memory Let us consider, first of all, the use made of the term "pure" memory and what might possibly be its meaning and connotation for a system of philosophy. Bergson helps to clear the way for us by asserting^ that by this term he does not mean that which the psychologists ordinarily treat as memory. He declares that the meaning ordinarily given to the term concerns only mental habit, and not memory as he wishes to think of it. What then is memory? Memory is the intersection of mind and matter. Though he does not so state it, memory is a person in the act of perceiving. Now, "pure" memory is experience, not in the moment of perception, but experience after the event has been related to the self. At the farthest reach of the self in the direction of matter stands "pure" per- ception which entirely lacks this self-relating element, and cannot be distinguished from matter. At the opposite pole stands "pure" memory, in which the particular event has been related to the self, to the past, and to the universe, in other words, the experience has become a part of personality. Just as "pure" perception stands related to matter, so "piwe" « Matter and Memory, pp. 94-95, passim. $5 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM memory stands related to spirit, that is, it is not to be distinguished from it. If we might be permitted to diagram the situation, it would appear thus: T *PP P u ue e r IT r e' e'c c M e e M M s P P e e p t t m m i i i o o r o o r r i 1 n 1 n 1 y 1 y 1 t 1 It is obvious by the diagram that the final term of connection between matter and spirit is missing. This is because the mistake is made of identifying "pure" memory with spirit and so leaving our conclusion incomplete. "Pure" memory and spirit may be considered as pos- sessing identity analogous to that possessed by "pure" perception and matter; but if they are identical, we make no progress by using varying terms, and are not justified in making distinc- tions without a difference. The instructive part of the diagram is, that all the way from spirit up to and including "pure" perception we have wholly the terms of personal experi- 56 MEMORY AND LIFE ence. So far as there is any movement at all it is on the part of the human subject. The description becomes then but a measure of the degrees by which the person knows his world. The two realities that stand out are the world of matter and the person or spirit. The inter- vening spaces are but the symbols of intellect- ual analysis, the description of a personal realism. For, while "pure" perception may be taken as practically coincident with matter, and "pure" memory as coincident with spirit or personality, yet in concrete experience we know only perception and "pure" memory, memory having slipped out in the shuffle as a meaningless term. In truth, we cannot in practice divide perception from "pure" memory, for the relating faculty is busy in the very midst of perception, and even goes before it. We are conscious of the "I" before we are conscious of material fact, and we perceive the fact in its relation to ourselves. We carry our- self into it, to use a Bergsonian expression. What we are determines in no inconsiderable degree what we shall see, what our perceptions shall be. Without this relating capacity we shall not get a perception at all, for we should then be incapable of any experience of the out- side world. Personality is this mysterious "synthesis of 'pure' memory and *pure' per- 57 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM ception; that is to say, of mind and matter/' and this is what we mean by the term "personal realism." Of the Relation between Perception AND Memory Bergson acknowledges the purely hypotheti- cal nature of "pure" perception in the following terms : Our perception, we said, is originally in things rather than in the mind, without us rather than within. The several kinds of perception correspond to so many direc- tions actually marked out in reality. But, we added, this perception, which coincides with its object, exists rather in theory than in fact; it could only happen if we were shut up within the present moment. In concrete perception memory intervenes, and the subjectivity of sensible qualities is due precisely to the fact that our consciousness, which begins by being only memory, prolonged a plurality of moments into each other, con- tracting them into a single intuition.* We believe that Bergson's definition looks in the right direction, but we do not believe that it is stated with suflScient clearness, nor that it is adequate and satisfying. The average mind will ask certain questions that, unpro- vided for, will be found embarrassing. It is clear that if memory is the intersection of mind and matter, we can from mere intersec- tion, keeping strictly to our figure of speech, * Matter and Memory, pp. 291, 292, 58 MEMORY AND LIFE get nothing as a result that will be of a different order than the two elements already provided. If we are going to use memory as a term in which to express spirit, there is a question as to how it can be the product of mind and matter.^ That is to say, if we are serious in putting for- ward this dictum, our definition acquires standing because we have given to the term "mind" the content of "spirit." We cannot by combining two material things get a third of a higher and spiritual order. Pushing the case a step farther, should we say that memory is the result of the intersection of mind and matter or that it is the remembrance of such intersection, we are met with the problem of what or who does the remembering. Bergson has positively shown us in another^ place that the body can in no sense be considered the storehouse of sensation. We have, then, re- moved the possibility of considering "body" in 8 Our diflSculty here lies in the common meaning of the word "memory." We cannot use the word intelligently without thinking of it as related to something which is past. Bergson uses it in distinction from "pure" memory with the meaning we ordinarily assign to perception. The moment an event is past it has already been related to the self-experience and has thus become "pure" memory. The trouble in terms arises from the attempt to secure a word which will be a general term and which will also express what we mean by person. In the nature of the case such an effort is doomed to confusion. • Matter and Memory, pp. 233, 234; p. 79; pp. 136, 137. 59 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM the loose way in which we have previously hidden the fact of personality. Whither, then, can we fly? When we stop to reflect, we recognize two requirements, the presence of which makes patent and meaningful this term "memory." First, it is evident that memory which is not memory of concrete facts or experiences is memory of nothing. It may be claimed that in making this statement we are going back to the meaning of the term which has been speci- fically repudiated. But this will be not quite the fact. If memory is to be the relating of the past to the present or the future, it must be the relating of specific experiences. The second requirement in memory of which we spoke is this. Memory is nothing apart from a remembering individual or personality. Memories that are only generalities experienced by generalities would convey no definable meaning. It is because memory is the rela- ting of concrete events to a concrete self-iden- tifying unit that it comes to possess an assign- able meaning. When we have come thus far the discovery is forced upon us that what we have been considering under the name of "pure" memory is really expressed under the term "person." To us this term is far more apt and less conducive of confusion. 60 MEMORY AND LIFE That, then, which stands above the inter- section of mind and matter, that which gathers the succession of experiences up into itself, that which Bergson posits under the figure of the rolHng snowball of experience, that which brings to the present every moment of its past, and that which is able to act with reference to an unexperienced future, is what we really mean by the term "person." After telling us repeatedly that perception is the coincidence of the perceiver and the thing perceived; that we attain reality by "putting ourselves in things"; that this relation is the reality, we are hardly prepared to be told that this coincidence is not a fact but, rather, a theory. But this is what seems to accrue and this result must be held to spring from the previous attempt to unite the world of thought and thing under an abstraction. Thought and thing are concretely related only in a thinking subject.^ ^ "Let us, on the contrary, banish all preconceived idea of interpreting or measuring; let us place ourselves face to face with immediate reality; at once we find that there is no impassable barrier, no essential difference, no real distinction, even, between perception and the thing perceived, between quality and movement. Our perception, we said, is originally in things rather than in the mind, without us rather than within. The several kinds of perception correspond to so many directions actually marked out in reality. But, we added, this perception, which coincides with its object, exists 61 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM That the idea of personahty is necessary to bring these definitions of perception and mem- ory out from the region of unclear ideas becomes more apparent as we consider them in contrast and relation. He says: If we take perception in its concrete form, as a synthesis of pure memory and pure perception, that is to say, of mind and matter, we compress within its narrowest limits the problem of the union of soul and body.* It is apparent from this quotation that the term pure perception has no concrete meaning, and like the symbol of an algebraic equation, is used for purposes of argument and analysis. We learn that pure perception, which is indis- tinguishable from matter, which coincides with matter, has only a theoretical value, never existing as a concrete fact. Thus that "pure perception which is not to be distinguished from matter" has vanished into thin air. Would we be justified in saying that with it had gone rather in theory than in fact: it could only happen if we were shut up in the present movement. In concrete perception memory intervenes, and the subjectivity of sensible qualities is due precisely to the fact that our consciousness, which begins by being only memory, prolongs a plurality of movements into each other, contracting them into a simple intuition. Consciousness and matter, body and soul, were thus seen to meet each other in perception" (Matter and Memory, pp. 291, 292). * Matter and Memory, p. 325. MEMORY AND LIFE that material world on which are based so many hopes of explanation? It would seem as if in this apparently innocent statement we had gone the way of all absolute idealism or subject- ivism. We should scarcely fare better with our definition of pure memory did we not in floun- dering about in the metaphysical sea strike our feet on the recognized shore of personality. Here as in Lowell's verses, we "Can but exult to feel beneath our feet. That long stretched vainly down the yielding deeps. The shock and sustenance of solid earth." Pure memory, removed from the event and become merely a relation of experience to experience, would also vanish, leaving no trace bbhind, did we not unconsciously give it a content which the term does not imply. One state of consciousness could take no cognizance of preceding or succeeding states, could have no sense of succession or past, unless it were raised out of the level of successions, where it belongs, into something else. That something else, abiding above the succession of experiences, maintaining its seK-identity in the midst of all changes that can come, is the personality. A state could not relate other states to itself because it could not abide to do the relating, nor could it retain its identity while receiving 63 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM them into itself. There is neither unity nor intelligence without taking the term "pure" memory from its usual and also from its general meaning, and endowing it with the concrete qualities of personality. Bergson gives it these qualities, but does not provide for them in his definition. The Assumed Independence of Memory AND Matter is Not Tenable on THESE Terms Unless we move forward to the assumption of personality as fundamental to experience and life, we cannot abide by the claims which are set forth for memory, as independent of matter.® We cannot by a method of analysis make memory absolutely independent of matter if we begin and end by defining it as the intersec- tion of mind and matter. When we use these terms mind is thought of as spirit or pure memory. Memory is then put as the least possible remove from perception. Pure mem- ory as existing apart from present perception, because it is really independent (in the sense of being not entirely dependent), self -relating unity, might be possible. But memory, as Bergson uses the term, must lie in precise or • Matter and Memory, p. 81. 64 MEMORY AND LIFE concrete experiences. We are forced to explain then how things that are "absolutely inde- pendent" can be said to intersect, find common ground, and pass over into each other. Let it be understood that at this point we have no dispute with the facts of experience. Our quarrel is, rather, with the foregoing definition. Memory as akin to perception does hold a certain dependence upon the material world. So long as we keep our senses we shall not perceive a blank space where there is a stone wall, nor walk upon water as if it were dry land, nor pass through the partition of our house where there is no opening. Memory cannot be defined as the intersection of mind and matter without introducing the entire brood of material- istic conclusions which the philosophy of change sets out to avoid. Memory may spring from the reaction of a personality upon matter, which is a fundamentally different way of put- ting it. We cannot by this expedient of finite person- ality hope to find more than a temporary refuge from the metaphysical storm. If we are to find any basis of intelligibility, something beyond, akin both to matter and to human personality, upon whose intelligent creative will and purpose both mind and matter depend, must be affirmed. 65 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Perhaps the ingenuity of human discovery may some day lay bare within the whirling vortices of atoms powers strangely mysterious to us now,^^ which will make less difficult the leap from what we term matter to that which we term God, but any creative force which is to give adequate explanation of our world cannot leave out intelligence nor the uniqueness of human purpose as it fulfills its desires, and therefore must contain within itself, in larger and more efficient measure, these self-same powers. Only by some such assumption are we per- mitted to arrive at any real independence between thought and thing. It is an independ- ence, not because the two things are of such nature that there are no means of interaction between them, but independent because they are creatively so endowed that personality, even though it be finite, may understand, utilize, and master in some measure the universe of which it is a part. The Metaphysical Bearing of the T/HiNGs which Escape our Explanation One cannot travel far in metaphysical expla- in For Biological Statement of the problem see Wilson, The Cell in Development and Inheritance (1911), pp. 431-434. MEMORY AND LIFE nation without being troubled by insistent doubts and misgivings at the verities which are forever escaping the terms of his philosophy, the inadequacy which human expression always experiences when it attempts the explanation of life. A study of all the philosophies which have existed since the world began would disclose at least this common ground of opin- ion — that the eventual thing cannot be expressed. So far as this fact is concerned, it matters little whether we tie up our mystery in a bundle of words, and, casting it into the abyss, turn our backs, mumbling the equations of science rapidly, as a frightened peasant would tell his beads, or whether we sum up our mystery in the term "forces," or the "Unknowable," we cannot eradicate the fact of the existence of that which passes beyond our power of explanation. When it comes to mysteries, however, there is happily such a thing as choice of mysteries. We may, like Bassanio, choose the casket which shall decide our metaphysical fate. Here too there may not be wanting certain inscriptions by which wit and judgment may be guided in its choice. Personality is the one thing in common experience which baffles all powers of description and explanation. From it comes every event of unique or efficient causation that we can actually trace and identify. Within 67 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM its depths lie hidden the strange mingling of mind with matter which we hope to explain. Bergson has called it the synthesis of pure memory and pure perception. We do not make it any more mysterious when we call it plainly personality. Such being the case, it might be found in the interests of clearness advisable to drop from terms merely technical and abstract to those of concreteness and actuality. Let us name the fundamental mystery of being person- ality. Let us recognize that the terms we use inadequately to describe it are like those of the functional psychologists, abstractions or sym- bols which assist in analyzing and rationalizing the fundamental and indivisible fact. Nor should it be lost from our view that we must assume another fundamental mystery before we can complete our system. That mystery is the existence of a personality behind the world of matter and of personalities. All will be found in the end to resolve itself into this final mystery. If we can assume this, the other mysteries fall marvelously into line. The unsolved dualism of life becomes then not a dualism or conflict between mind and matter, nor is it akin to that pluralism which renders the conflict universal, the hand of each being set against his brother; neither is it the dualism of good and evil, destined to go on forever: MEMORY AND LIFE it is, rather, a dualism of contrasting wills, a dualism which exists with purposive and express consent of the supreme Intelligence whose purpose and aim seems to be the solution of dualism by a progress which gives meaning to all evolution, eventuating in a world of person- alities whose moral outlook and supremacy is like his own. The Definition of Life When we approach the consideration of Bergson's definition of life, we shall find him using several different expressions in which to convey his meaning. We find him thinking of life as the intersection of the two great inde- pendent streams of reality — matter and spirit. We shall find it described as "formidable thrust," or as "pure duration," or as "vital impulse." Life is an order of reality that is original, whereas matter is an order that is derived. ^^ One need not be unappreciative of the great modern debt to Bergson for his attempt scientifically to restate the familiar problems of philosophy, in noting the confusion likely to arise from any impersonal and abstract defi- nition of life, such as he has given us. He frequently describes life as a current " Sc. Wildon Carr, The Philosophy of Change, p. 145. BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM which opposes itself to the stream of matter/^ divided into species and individuals by une- qual stresses of opposition. Again, the two streams of reality are matter and spirit and the very intersection of the two is life itself. In another connection we are told that "Life in general is mobility itself,"^^ which leads us back to a coincidence with spirit. Again, "Regarded in what is its true essence, namely, as a tran- sition from species to species, life is a contin- ually growing action. "^^ Again, life is a stream which in its evolution continues an initial impulsion. ^^ In the interest of clearness we believe that definiteness at this point is of exceeding import- ance. If life is the intersection of spirit and matter, then spirit is really the creator of life, spirit is the abiding some-what from which by reason of its contact with matter individual examples of life repeatedly arise. If, however, life is the initial impulsion continued through evolution, it must be coincident with if not superior to the first stream of reality, which is spirit. If by life we mean a push in the sense of causal activity, we are forced to ask whether 12 Creative Evolution, pp. 268f. 13 Ibid., p. 128. " Ibid., p. 128. 16 Ibid., p. 246. 70 MEMORY AND LIFE it belongs to the order of matter or to the order of spirit, or derives from some source above the two which originated both movements or streams. Just as in the illustration of the steam and the drops of water Bergson assumed the existence of matter as a factor in its own genesis, here he assumes life as its own creator. Thus his dualism amounts to an impasse be- cause he makes both matter and spirit self- generative and independent. We have thus moved about the circle, but we have explained nothing. This destiny must ever follow the attempt to get at the source of the material or spiritual order by any process of impersonalism. We are inevitably committed to the infinite regress unless we assume personality as the ground of being. Life as Duration Nor will the unqualified assumption of "pure" duration as the definition of life yield us ade- quate results. Duration is really the experi- ence of succeeding states of consciousness before they are gathered into the temporal synthesis. Duration is the soul side of per- ception (with reference to the element), and coincides with memory. "Pure" duration is these synthesized and related successions. Just because duration gathers into itself these past 71 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM experiences and brings them to bear upon the present moment, introducing purpose and uniqueness into the moving stream, Bergson defines it as of the essence of Hfe. No fault can be found with such a definition except its indefiniteness. He is by the term "pure dura- tion" implying exactly that which is gathered up in the common term "personality," for a consciousness of duration, that is, of succession in states, is possible only to a unity that abides self-consciously above the flux; that gathers the successive states into relation to itself; which grows by these experiences and yet transcends them in its own self -recognition. The only concrete example of such synthesizing and self- identifying unity which is given us is found in persons. If, then, we remove from the idea of duration those abstractions due to intellect- ualization, we shall find the definition a true one and deeper than we dreamed. The truth might be stated in plain words that life is, in whatever phase we find it, the expression of personality. If it be self-conscious, according to the manner of our own experience, it is human personality; if it be unconscious, speaking after our order, it must be an expression, in some form which we may not determine, of a creative personality. Only thus can we reach that indeterminateness, or freedom, which is the 72 MEMORY AND LIFE promise of Bergson's philosophy, and also avoid the meshes of mechanical causation. Life as Vital Impulse When we come to consider the doctrine of initial "vital impulse" to account for the homo- geneity of the universe, we shall be equally at loss from the impersonal standpoint. We must press on and invest this originative impulse with purposive powers. A homogeneity result- ing from a vital impulse which is a mere push acquires its homogeneity from the absolute equation of cause and effect, the law of the sufficient reason. It matters little what term we apply to that original creative impulse, it must contain within itself a power sufficient to account for that which it has created. It must be something more than a blind stumble in the dark, which fortuitously set in motion powers far beyond its own ken or reckoning. Either that homogeneity of which we speak springs from an adequate creative purpose (in which we seem to wed ourselves to the system of abso- lute idealism), or, if no adequate creative purpose were present, we are inevitably tied to a system of mechanical causation, bound to find every effect potentially (which means actually) present within its cause. The latter conclusion renders evolution impossible, just 73 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM as the former creates a system of determinism. Now, the avowed object of the philosophy of change is to avoid this conclusion. A vital impulse which was an initial accident, an upset of static forces and nothing more, can never, to logical minds, give adequate explanation of anything but a world of accident and disorder. It can never account for a world of order, or of personalities, to say nothing of a world of free- dom. We are beset with parallel difficulties when we think of the original impulse as purposive and personal, adequate for the creation of a world of persons, but moving only through an initial impulsion. Here, again, we happen upon that world of grim determinism which Berg- son has discovered to be the nightmare of Absolutism. It appears that just as we resort to a personal realism to express for ourselves the relation of the individual to his world, assuming as our fundamental proposition the reality of the person and the reality of his correspondences, so if we would keep freedom or uniqueness anywhere, we must assume a funda- mental Personality to express the relation be- tween first cause and the world that springs therefrom. Moreover, this relation must be not past. It must not be the beginning of a long and exhaustless succession, but an ever- 74 MEMORY AND LIFE present, ever-continuing relationship, without which the whole order of matter and spirit, exist- ing in time and space, would be nonexistent or would pass away. Only thus can we have a unity which is other than a tedious and unchang- ing identity. The old recourse to potential- ities has been exploded times enough, so that it is unnecessary to recall it here, but it may be well to recall that in a system of mechanical causation where the effect is contained in the cause we can have no progress at all. This fact bears the test of actual experience. No progress is made in society, not an invention enters in to lift heavy burdens from the backs of men, no discovery, no new thought is possible according to the law of mechanical causation. It is because life in its uniqueness is forever trampling under foot this law of effect wholly contained in its mechanical or phenomenal cause; because it is ever transcending the limits laid down in the mechanistic scheme, that there remains a hope that in civilization, in arts, in knowledge, to-morrow shall be better than to- day, or to-day be anything more than parallel with all the days that have gone before. Thus also we must conclude that the evolution of a world of life, with its varying species and its growing adaptabilities, is dependent at every step upon the entrance of a unique creative 75 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM energy which acts m its realm after the manner of that creative energy which in us binds our world to new purposes, new thoughts, and new ideals. If unity is to mean anythmg, it must be something more than a form of words. Homo- geneity in the universe means a continually active, living creative power, or else we have but the homogeneity of determinism and death. Life as the Point of Minimum Cognition Can we, then, agree with the assumption that we get closest to life in the moment of pure perception, that intuitional moment when, as Bergson expresses it, we "put ourselves in things".^ Yes, and no. Yes, if we give full force to that term which Bergson so apparently neglects, namely, "ourselves." No, if we mean that perception devoid to the greatest degree of mental and experiential content gives the truest picture of life. If this last assumption were true, if truest perception were innocent of all intellectualizing; if it were greatest and nearest life in the measure of its freedom from all relation to past experiences which make up our personality, then the only course left the true philosopher would be to seek with all his powers the Nirvana of minimum cognition. 76 MEMORY AND LIFE If we are to assume the realistic view of per- ception as the act of "putting ourselves into things," we ought in all fairness to define the meaning we intend to include in the term "ourselves." It might be we should thus introduce in an apparently innocent term assumptions that have an unconsciously pro- found bearing on all that follows. We are convinced that this is true in the present case. We cannot even in the "purest" perception rid ourselves of the distinction fundamental to all perception, the distinction between the "me" and the "not me." Any process which removes from perception that rationalizing element which the perceiving person inevitably brings with him has also removed perception. We cannot have perception that possesses any meaning unless it bears some relation to an individual. The meaning of any particular perception or intui- tion is made in considerable part by what the individual himself actually is. The only seem- ing exception to this would be in the infant just born, who is following an intuition for the first time, as, for instance, that of food. Even here it is clear that a second experience would not be a "pure" intuition or perception but a following of habit already laid down by previous experience. My own feeling is that the first act should not be called an act of intuition just 77 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM because it is devoid of experience, and so of mental content. If we were to grant, for pur- poses of argument, that the following of this first instinct for food is an intuition, we must remember that this intuition is already laid down according to the laws of the child's being. That is to say, the child brings a child nature to the act of intuition, and that first act is at some distance removed from the intuition of a simple cell by reason of the mental machinery attend- ant upon it and prepared to act. In other words, the intuition is intelligent, filled with conclusions of relationship between the indi- vidual and his world, though the individual himself has not created them nor set them up. If intuition or perception were to be "pure" as being devoid of all such intelligible meaning, it would be nothing at all, perception of nothing by nothing. In other words, the process of perception is a fundamental and indivisible realism, which in concrete cases must be as- sumed, and which can be analyzed and divided only in abstract thought, in the same manner in which we use the term of x" in mathematics. When we "put ourselves in things" we must remember that the "ourselves" part of the equation is quite as important as the "thing." If we remove the "ourselves," we have no equation left. 78 MEMORY AND LIFE Nowhere does a realism of the personal type become more apparently necessary than at this point, that is, in the mysterious relation that exists between mind and matter in the act of perception. If in this act brain can pass over into mind, or soul into body, we have not two orders of reality — matter and spirit — but one. If brain becomes mind we have, of course, materialism. Nor can we gain eventual peace by flying to a doctrine of psychic parallelism, for that too lands us in an abyss, and an abyss of worse choosing, for we have then an irre- concilable dualism that vitiates the possibihty of knowledge. Inasmuch as we must assume some mystery somewhere, it is best to assume it where it is actually seen to exist, in the actual relation between the individual and his world, and to assume it in such wise that neither the individual nor his world will become unreal. We assume, then, that personality is the ulti- mate fact, the primal and independent mystery. And though it be more or less a temperament of mind what one shall choose, it may be worth while to ask if this will not be as good a choice as that realism which makes all reality only a relation (and in this is perilously close to idealism without its strength), or that older realism which attempted to avoid mystery by doing away with spirit. It might be as good a choice 79 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM as that idealism which banishes matter to the ghostly realm of ideas, or that empiricism which was satisfied because it had lost all power of thought in an Unknowable which was really but an infinite regress. It might be found on examination that realism of the personal type will not yield more difficulties but less in an attempt to comprehend the meaning of the world. At any rate, if we assume our mystery to be hidden in personality we possess a concrete fact for analysis and study that may ultimately yield more of its secret. This gives us better promise of light than that which may be wrung from invisible aeons. Absolutes or Unknow- ables. There is no promise that by them we can ever bring our judgments to the concrete tests of life and experience. That certain rationalizing which man in distinction from the animals carries into his very intuitions is not only his glory but is the secret of his understanding of the world. The ignorant man, not having access to much of reason, may depend more upon his intuitions than does the scholar, and his intuitions may, acting more quickly, lead him more safely than the scholar's reasoning. We ought, however, to remember that in the one case the quickness may be due to the fact that the whole life has not gone beyond the practical interest of food 80 MEMORY AND LIFE and self-preservation. Even our intuitional man is safest in those intuitions that have been affected by long years of habit and many expe- riences. It is the experienced guide that I choose to pole my canoe down the rapids, not the most elemental one, because the experienced man faced suddenly by a new situation which may mean drowning, will be more likely to act wisely than the greenhorn who depends on intuition rather than upon experience and training. Moreover, in sensing of hidden rocks and treacherous currents and those elements by which the individual enters into the world around him it is evident that experience and rationalizing bear a practical power which one cannot afford to despise, inasmuch as they transcend what either man or animal can do by mere intuition. This view is borne out by the decreasing death-rate of civilization and the thousand ameliorative results of intellectuali- zation brought to bear on the simplest and most elemental relationships of life. 81 CHAPTER III INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE The philosophy of change includes under the single term "instinct," or "intuition," all the general activities of the world which fall under the reign of uniformity or law.^ The term is ^ "It has been asked how far instinct is conscious. Our reply is that there are a vast number of differences and degrees, that instinct is more or less conscious in certain cases, uncon- scious in others. The plant, as we shall see, has instincts; it is not likely that these are accompanied by feeling. Even in the animal there is hardly any complex instinct which is not unconscious in some part at least of its exercise. But here we must point out a difference, not often noticed, between two kinds of unconsciousness, namely, that in which consciousness is absent and that in which consciousness is nullified. Both are equal to zero, but in one case the zero expresses the fact that there is nothing, in the other that we have two equal quantities of opposite sign which compensate and neutralize each other. The unconsciousness of a falling stone is of the former kind: the stone has no feeling of its fall. Is it the same with the unconsciousness of instinct, in the extreme cases in which instinct is unconscious? When we mechanically perform an habitual action, when the somnambulist automatically acts his dream, unconsciousness may be absolute; but this is merely due to the fact that the representation of the act is held in check by the performance of the act itself, which resembles the idea so perfectly and fits it so exactly that consciousness is unable to find room between them. Repre- ss INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE taken as applying to inanimate and animate objects alike. Stones, plants, animals, and sentation is stopped up by action. The proof of this is, that if the accomplishment of the act is arrested or thwarted by an obstacle, consciousness may reappear. It was there but neutralized by the action which fulfilled and thereby filled the representation. The obstacle creates nothing positive, it simply makes a void, removes a stopper. This inadequacy of act to representation is precisely what we here call con- sciousness. "If we examine this point more clearly, we shall find that consciousness is the light that plays around the zone of possible actions or potential activity which surrounds the action really performed by the living being. It signifies hesitation or choice. Where many equally possible actions are indicated without there being any real action (as in delib- eration that has not come to an end), consciousness is intense. Where the action performed is the only action possible (as in the activity of the somnambulistic or more generally auto- matic kind), consciousness is reduced to nothing. "Representation and knowledge exist none the less in the case if we find a whole series of systematized movements, the last of which is already prefigured in the first, and if, besides, consciousness can flash out of them at the shock of an obstacle. From this point of view the consciousness of a living being may be defined as an arithmetical difference between potential and real activity. It measures the interval between representation and action" (Creative Evolution, pp. 143, 144). "Now, in both cases, in the instinct of the animal and in the vital properties of the cell, the same knowledge and the same ignorance are shown. All goes on as if the cell knew, of the other cells, what concerns itself; as if the animal knew, of the other animals, what it can utilize — all else remaining in shade. It seems as if life as soon as it has become bound up in a species is cut off from the rest of its own work, save at one or two points that are of vital concern to the species just 83 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM man are all said to possess instinct. The same term covers the action of gravity in a falling stone, the affinity of chemical substances, the torsion of a plant's tendrils, automatic action in animals and man. As is always true in such an attempt at generalization, many pitfalls lie in the way. We are forced to make distinctions arisen. Is it not plain that life goes to work here exactly like consciousness, exactly like memory? We trail behind us, unawares, the whole of our past; but our memory puts into our present only the odd recollection or two that in some way complete our present situation. Thus the instinctive knowledge which one species possesses of another on a certain particular point has its root in the very unity of life, which is, to use the expression of an ancient philosopher, 'a whole sympathetic to itself.* It is impossible to consider some of the special instincts of the animal and of the plant, evidently arisen in extraordinary circumstances, without relating them to those recollections seemingly forgotten, which spring up suddenly under the pressure of an urgent need" (Creative Evolution, p. 167). "Though the plant is distinguished from the animals by fixity and insensibility, movement and consciousness sleep in it as recollections which may waken" (Creative Evolution, p. 119). "Even if we could refer the instincts of animals to habits intelligently acquired and hereditarily transmitted, it is not clear how this sort of explanation could be extended to the vegetable world, where effort is never intelligent, even sup- posing it is sometimes conscious. And yet, when we see with what sureness and precision climbing plants use their tendrils, what marvelously combined maneuvers the orchids perform to secure their fertilization by means of insects, how can we help thinking that these are so many instincts.'*" (Creative Evolution, p. 170.) 84 INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE between the various kinds of instincts, dis- tinctions which to many will seem too contrast- ing to be included under a single term. Bergson distinguishes between the instinct which is attended by consciousness and instinct where consciousness is absent. Consciousness, he tells us, is not present in the instinct of inanimate objects. A falling stone has no feeling of its fall. Even the animal is at the most only partially conscious of its instinct. In man instinct is conscious, but the consciousness of instinct is nullified when action has become wholly automatic, as in bicycle riding or in the action of a sleep-walker. Consciousness is really the sign of the presence of intelligence and signifies hesitation or choice. The instinct of plant or animal in matters of vital interest wherein it touches some other species seems to Bergson to imply recollection of the past, trans- mitted from parent to offspring. It might not be amiss to call attention in passing to the purely verbal and imaginary character of such trans- mission. The idea is as figurative as Spencer's doctrine of transmitted "race experience." But to Bergson it is a reality springing from the unity of life. He turns from the idea that instinct is laid down in animals by intelligently formed habit because that would not enable him to account for such examples of instinct 85 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM as are shown by the tropisms of plants and the efforts of the orchids at cross-fertiliza- tion. It is Necessary to Attain Accuracy in the Use of the Term "Intuition" We do not intend in these pages to contradict the idea that intuition gets closer to life than intelligence. What we propose is to show that the term "intuition" must be more closely defined, and that in using it we must never lose sight of the inseparable intellectual elements which it contains. That the intuition, at least in man, contains inseparable intellectual ele- ments is a fact of which Bergson is himself quite aware, and which no one familiar with Kant's great contribution to thought can over- look. It seems to us, however, that the whole doctrine of the philosophy of change as it relates to theory of thought is weakened by failure to make the distinction which Bergson recognizes a basic and established part of his system. We may seem to acquire a certain unity by the use of general terms, but when those general terms conceal differences of nature, as well as of degree, their seeming unity is a deception. This always will be true unless, indeed, we take the general term to mean no more than the least common denominator. Assuming a least 86 INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE common denominator and then taking the highest factor of our highest quantity as if it were the least common denominator is a fallacy common to philosophy. In mathematics, which depend upon the concrete symbol, the fallacy is easily detected; in metaphysics or episto- mology, where one must use the inaccurate symbols of language, one may easily be uncon- scious of vitiating fallacies. Let us look for a moment at the use which is made in the philosophy of change, of the word "intuition." We shall find that while it is the highest factor of one of the elements of our generalization, it is also frequently used as if it were the lowest common denominator of them all. For example, this term is used to describe not only the instinct which is exempli- fied in the conscious life and activities of the animals, and that higher and unique possession of creative and intelligent action of the thinking man; it is likewise used of mere cellular attrac- tion and the chemical affinity of unconscious life. The reaching out of a simple cell toward food or light, or its response to chemical change, wonderful as those responses of the cell to its environment may be, should not be identified with the intuition of a thinking being. For instance, he says of certain plants: When we see with what sureness and precision climbing 87 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM plants use their tendrils, what marvelously combined maneuvers the orchids perform to secure their fertiliza- tion by means of insects, how can we help thinking of these as so many instincts?^ We have a right to inquire here whether by instinct he means unconscious automatic reac- tion to stimulus. If so, that is one thing; but if he means to imply conscious, intelligent, or psy- chical effort, that is quite another matter. If he does not mean to imply this latter suppo- sition, he has chosen an unfortunate "metamor- phizing" form of words, and instinct is surely not the most appropriate term to use. There may be fundamental qualities in the cell, or the cell may be so constituted that by its nature it reaches after the thing that will enter into its structure to build it up. It may likewise avoid elements that are destructive, but when in this connection we speak of the choice of the cell, we are not using that word in the sense in which we would use it of a human being. We might recall the rejection by mole- cules of water of molecules of oil. The refusal of the water to amalgamate with oil is not, strictly speaking, a matter of choice on the part of the water. It is a matter inherent in the na- ture of two contrasting elements. I may use the word "choice" to express the fact that the two ' Cited above, Creative Evolution, p. 170. 88 INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE cannot combine, but it is obvious that in apply- ing it I have been using a figure of speech. If I lose sight of the fact under cover of the word in which I have expressed it and then go on "anthropomorphizing" my drop of water, I can easily make it account for everything in heaven and earth, and there is no limit except the limit of my imagination. This is exactly what is done times without number by the uncritical. We cannot use the term "intuition" or "instinct" as applicable in the same sense to tropisms in the simplest forms of life, to instinct in animals and to intuition in man. The incon- sistency is apparent to us if we give the term "intuition" its lowest instead of its highest possible meaning. If we should make intuition consonant merely with cellular attraction, and then try to make it the basis of explanation of all conscious and intelligent life, we should see this. Such a proposition is immediately absurd except to the blindest and most thoroughgoing materialist who does not believe in purpose, or will, or moral responsibility, but only in piti- lessly driving forces. Hence, when we use the terms "choice," "purpose," "consciousness," "perception," and "intuition," we must use them with minute discrimination or we must suffer the misfortune of being continually misled in our conclusions. Cellular aflSnity may be BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM wholly elemental and mechanical, instinct in animals may be an unconscious response to the demands of habit and life, but intuition in man is a psychological fact. No one should attempt to unite the truths and processes of chemistry, biology, and psychology under a common term which would assume all three to be identical. The Intellectual Element in all Human Intuition Following along the lines already laid down, it will be seen that we must not only rec- ognize the fact that all human intuition is shot through with intelligence, with intellect- ualization, but we must use our term as if this, and not something else, were the fact. The acknowledgment of error or of sin is of no practical value if one continues repeating the offense. The recognition of the right and the true brings no profit to me until I act as if the right and the true were a desirable part of action. So in philosophy one has not done his full duty when he has said "Good morning" to a funda- mental principle, if thereafter he proceed to act as if that fundamental principle did not hold. Consequently, any doctrine of intuition must reckon with the fact that intuition in a human being is inseparable from intelligence. That which the individual brings to the act of intui- 90 INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE tion, though it be no conscious part of the act because it is the acting self, is nevertheless present, and cannot be eliminated without destroying or nullifying the act. There can be no human intuition in the strict sense of the term without intelligence. The dependence of intuition upon intelli- gence is thus set forth by Henri Poincare: The majority of men do not like thinking, and this is perhaps a good thing, since instinct guides them, and very often better than reason would guide a pure intelligence, at least when they are pursuing an end that is imme- diate and always the same. But instinct is routine, and if it were not fertilized by thought, it would advance no further with man than with the bee and the ant.' The discrepancy becomes further apparent when we try to think what intuition would mean apart from intelligence. What would be the nature of any knowledge of the outside world which was not intelligible? Begging the indulgence of the reader for mentioning any- thing so simple, it would appear that unintel- ligible intuition in a human being would possess no meaning at all. How the mind could grasp knowledge which is other than intelligence, and what sort of mental possession it would be when grasped, is a deeper mystery than all the sciences and philosophies would seem adequate to ex- » Science and Method, pp. 16, 17. 91 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM plain. The reason would be that in dealing with that particular kind of intuition we should be beyond the realm of thought and intelligence altogether. Bergson himself states the fact no less plainly when he says, "All concrete instinct is mingled with intelligence, as all real intelligence is penetrated by instinct."^ The difficulty here lies in the conclusion. It is one thing to announce that the two means of knowledge, instinct and intelligence, can never be separated; it is quite another thing to draw conclusions which are dependent upon their contrast and isolation, as, for instance, that their isolation has led to the contrasting evolution of man, the animals and the plants, and that one (intelligence) is inferior to the other in all vital or practical matters. A careful examination will impress the reader with the fact that instinct in the philosophy of change does service by reason of its identity with intel- ligence. But while we may make intelligence the inseparable companion of instinct, we pro- ceed with rashness when we ascribe intelligence to the so-called instinct of plants. The discussion has, we believe, been suffi- ciently extended to show that instinct in plants, and even in animals, possesses a different content * Creative Evolution, p. 137. 9S INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE from instinct in man. This separating gulf cannot be spanned with a word without giving it two distinct meanings. So far as we can know, instinct in man is inseparable from intelligence, while so far as the plants are con- cerned, if they have instinct, it cannot be attended by intelligence in them. The only intelligence which could be posited would lie outside the plant. It is not instinct which leads the blackberry to cross-breed with the raspberry to produce the loganberry, but the external determining intelligence of a Burbank. What passes for instinct in plants might be the sign of a supreme directing Intelligence, but such a suggestion will be a scandal to many philosophers. Intuition as a Practical Guide in Life Like considerations will appear as necessary limitations to the theory that intuition unaided by intelligence is a sure or a superior guide in the practical affairs of life. We are told that "Intuition ... is a lamp almost extinguished, which only glimmers now and then, for a few moments at most. But it glimmers wherever a vital interest is at stake. On our personality, on our liberty, on the place we occupy in the whole of nature, on our origin 93 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM and perhaps also on our destiny, it throws a light feeble and vacillating but which none the less pierces the darkness of the night in which the intellect leaves us."^ The cases of intuition which are cited in the Creative Evolution^ while much disputed seem on reflection to display an ineptness for fur- thering the claim of superiority of intuition over intelligence. The action of the Sitaris and of the Sphex, as a recent writer has pointed out^, is wonderful only as the highest reach of unreasoning instinct. Considered as the best that might be done by a surgeon, the bungling and ofttimes unsuccessful attempt to paralyze the nerves of its victim by the Sphex would be a poor performance indeed. Wonder is created not that instinct is a surer guide than intelli- gence, but that in such matters it is any guide at all. When we come to a knowledge of vital action in other forms of life, it is not intuition which tells us the most, but hard, patient, and scientific analysis. We have, then, to admit that the rendering of the verdict for intuition as a superior guide where matters of vital 6 Creative Evolution, pp. 267, 268. 6 Ibid., pp. 146, 147; p. 172. ' McKellar Stewart, A Critical Exposition of Bergson's Philosophy, pp. 181, 182. 94 INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE interest were at stake calls for further exami- nation. The moth, following the instinct of habit, flies directly into the flame of the candle and perishes. Here it must be admitted there is "a vital interest at stake," and we also think that power to reason would have been a valu- able asset in arriving at the nature of things. In fact, lack of intelligence will in this case be seen to limit rather than increase the surviving powers. Instinct may prove very good for a static world of routine and habit, but certainly will be found a poor substitute for intelligence in a world of change. Intelligence has an adaptability to new forms of environment upon which instinct breaks the individual as ruth- lessly as rocks dash to foam the waves of the sea. The animal world shows a lack of adaptability under new conditions, such as an unseasonable snowstorm, the coming of unaccustomed con- ditions of cold or heat, which is characterized chiefly by its helplessness. If the condition be unusual and suddenly brought on, animals perish hopelessly in sight of shelter. The sheep in the storm knows the habitual refuge of the nightly fold, but his instinct does not lead him to find an unaccustomed refuge. The power of adaptability in instinct is very, very small, and largely dependent upon habit. 95 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Mr. Bergson seems to have this deeper inter- pretation of instinct in mind when he says; "It is to the very inwardness of life that intui- tion leads us — by intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capa- ble of reflecting on its object and of enlarging upon it indefinitely."^ But it is necessary only to call attention to the fact that instinct which has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflection, and of indefinite enlargement of its knowledge is exactly intuition as Mr. Bergson primarily defines it, with this addition, that it is infilled with intelligence. This, as we have pointed out, is the fundamental condition of the appearance of intuition in a human being. The only critical difference that we can see between this definition of intuition and the definition of intelligence is that the one is knowl- edge in the moment of action and the other is knowledge in the moment of reflection. Implications of Such a Doctrine as to THE Nature of Truth It is important that we should in any such doctrine of intuition consider its implication regarding the nature of truth. Apparently, if intelligence cannot give us a true report of real- ity, and intuition can, truth must be intuitional « Creative Evolution, p. 176. 96 INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE rather than conceptual or rational. Now, if we mean by this that pragmatic nature which implies that truth must ever be brought from the realm of reflection to the realm of action, it will be easy to concede the point. Such an assumption will not raise further difficulties. But if we mean to vitiate the reality and force of those general conceptions which bear a scien- tific, a logical, or a moral mandate, for all time, we pay too great a price. We must not ignore the fact of general truths in the realm of morals which spring out of the very nature of man as a moral being, and which will be binding and real so long as man and society remain what they are. In a like manner there are logical truths which are innate in the mental constitution of man, whose force and reality not only cannot be denied but contrary to which one cannot go and gain credence among men. In the physical world there are courses of action, relations between things, that exist in their very nature, which are true forever in a world as at present constituted. These uniformities have an inexorableness and a finality utterly disregardful of individual preferences, and we call them laws. Why, when we bring the experience of the passing moment into relation with these wider realities, we should consider ourselves getting away from 97 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM reality is hard for some of us to see. Unless those rationalizations or intellectualizations do give us some knowledge of reality, no credible science is possible. We ought, therefore, if we are to hold a distinction between intuition and intelligence, to recognize the inseparable factors in the case, and to move forward to a ground that would not invalidate the one at the expense of the other. On the basis taken in the philosophy of change it seems difficult for intuition to enter the field of knowledge at all, for knowledge that cannot be mentally grasped, knowledge that cannot be thought, scarcely deserves the name. The modern teacher even assumes that the pupil does not really know, until he is able to express that which he knows. Unless we can establish some general ground on which truth can have a common validity for all normal minds, we fall into a fatal solip- sism which haunts us at every step of the way. The perception of the moment being the only glimpse of reality, the past becomes but a shadow of the real, in spite of the theory of duration put forward to sustain it. Only that will be strictly true which I am experienc- ing at the present moment, and it will be true only for me. I have nothing to bind the fleeting experiences of my own life into the unity of 98 INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE reality. And, if change itself is the real, there is no certainty whatever that any truth of to- day will be true to-morrow, nor that any reality is more than the passing phantasm of an indi- vidual experience. The weakness in such a standpoint lies in its inability to pass from the validity of individual experience to the validity of the common- to-all. Even this consideration will prove insufficient for any system which does not assume a back-lying Creative Intelligence according to which all things move in a world of reality, and which makes this reality true and binding upon all the members of the system. The Theory of Intuition as an Aid TO Religious Ideas Because the philosophy of change has seemed to lend itself in an unusual way to the support of familiar religious ideas, and because an uncritical acceptance of such support may be attended by disastrous consequences, it is desir- able that we should consider the possible bear- ing of the doctrine of intuition upon religious problems. At first glance one is quite likely to jump to the conclusion that here is an easy solution of the difficulties that surround the problem of revelation. If intuition is in closest touch with reality, it appears quite foolish to waste much 99 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM time in intellectualizing, as that is sure to land one in the ditch of unreaHty. One needs only to listen to the "inner voice." Hence it becomes easy to accoimt for those strange abnormalities of genius, the Shakespeares, the Beethovens, and others, who from no adequate foundation either of birth or of culture became the world's prophets and seers, writing literature and har- monies which transcend the accomplishments of their own age and are eternally commanding. The idea is most fascinating, one must admit, and thoroughly in keeping with the prevailing realism and romanticism of the age. Espe- cially does it seem to commend itself to the explanation of religious genius, springing at times in ignorant unlettered men. Before we give complete place to our impulse we ought, however, to ask after the meaning and tests of inspiration and revelation. What is the test of revelation? Is it declared by the abnormality of its appearance? It is often so conceived. Abnormality is to some the very mark of revelation. Is the strange and inexplicable character of its coming a part of the proof of its genuineness and of its inspi- ration? It is certain that if in the end we depend upon such tests, anything inexplicable, claiming to be revelation, must be accepted, and we are forced to inherit a great brood of 100 INTUITION AND INTEM:,IiGEN.CE-;, superstitions. Unless the test of revelation is in the end a moral one it will follow that reve- lation has no moral or spiritual value. In such a case nothing can save us from theological shipwreck. We must, then, in order to give moral validity to revelation, judge it, not by its appearance in the unlettered, nor by its intuitional character, but by its ability to stand the concrete tests of experience and life. Reve- lation is disclosed not by any fortuitous circum- stances in which it comes clothed, nor by the claims it advances for itself, but, rather, in its power to make men better, to enlarge the spiritual and moral horizons, to exalt the stand- ards and ideals of actual life, and to make a universal appeal to the moral and spiritual nature of man everywhere. The theory of the superiority of intuition to grasp the realities of religion moves upon the assumption that it is easier for God to reveal himseK through the impulses than through the intelligence. Entirely aside from the dis- credit which such a theory throws upon a crea- tive Wisdom which is as responsible for mental as for intuitional powers, such a condition of things does not appear in the ordinary phases of life. The great prophets and spiritual leaders of the world have not been in any case notably ignorant. Sometimes untrained in the for- 101 ftEtfG^SON AND PERSONAL REALISM malities of the schools they have been, but with a keenness of intellectual grasp which has gone to the fundamentals of the problems with which they have dealt. And this fact too is a reason- able one, because the lower and wider appeal must fail if it is out of line with man's intel- ligence. Intuition and intelligence are not, then, to be separated in normal personalities. Intuition without intelligence is no more than the mean- ingless or equivocal raging of the sibyl. Intel- ligence without some measure of intuition is impossible. Neither should we unthinkingly assume that the philosophy of change by its denial of purpose makes way for the acceptance of the miracu- lous without an act of faith. The apparent freedom of the philosophy of change is won not only by the negation of determinism, but while it is expelling the demon of materialism it is allowed to banish also an angel of light by the further negation of purposive determination. In this scheme, in which change is original, the fundamentally real, if there were to be a God at all, he could neither know nor determine what would happen the next minute, being himself as blind and helpless as the blinding storm of atoms which he also is. This being the case, it occurs to us to ask what would be the 102 INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE value of a purposeless miracle if we had one? It would obviously possess no value. If a miracle does not indicate a divine purpose; if it is simply the blind drive of an unrestrained, undirected freedom, it is no miracle but only an accident. Once allow miracle to be true to its nature as an evidence of Divine Personal direction, and you erect that very determinism which it is Bergson's purpose to avoid. What bearing might the doctrine of intuition as closest to reality have upon the question of the essence of religion.? Are not the intuitive feelings in religion the safest to follow? Is it not true that intellectualism is the bane of reh- gion, and has there not existed between them the distrust of long ages? It is certain that much of popular feeling is in strict accord with this idea. Intellectualism has many times been set forth as the foe of religion. Do not such popular convictions usually find a basis in psy- chological reality? We cannot approach the solution of this problem directly, but here again we must begin by laying down a propo- sition and asking a question. If intuition gets closest to reality in religion, then the more intuitional religion becomes, the purer and truer it should be. How does this proposition test out in life? The most intuitive religions we have are those of savage tribes. In utter 103 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM and unreflecting devotion to religious intui- tions they cannot be surpassed. Are they not the most religious of all people? It is not necessary to answer the question. The reason the savage is not the most religious man is because religion runs deepest, strikes longest roots into reality, when it adds intelligence to intuition. No ignorant and unconsidering cre- dulity can ever represent the highest type of religion. High intelligence linked with faith, intuition tested by reason and life — this repre- sents the best that we know. The highest type of saint is also the highest type of man. In What Sense can Intuition be Said TO Bring Us Nearer Reality .^^ Attention already has been called to the fact that however simple may have been the defi- nition of intuition when it is convenient to use that term of plants and animals, when we come to apply it to man we bring into it an altogether new content, the element of intellectual judg- ment which is inseparable from the human per- sonality. If, now, we will proceed on this understanding and assume that intuition is the personality in action, while intelligence is the personality in the act of reflection, we shall come upon what I deem the deep truth and purpose of Bergson's doctrine. Intuition does 104 INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE partake of this inseparable intellectual element, but frequent repetition of an act serves to put the intellectual element in the background and to make the action as we say instinctive and automatic. The place for intellectualization in riding a bicycle is when one is first learning. Soon the movements become automatic and unconscious so that without anxious thought one meets the various crises of riding. This is the kind of intuition which can be truly said to be nearest life, for it is at the point where the personality does lay closest hold on the external world. It comes, however, not before but after intellect has done its work, and reason and choice have settled into unconscious habit. Let us consider the bearing of this truth in the realm of religious ideas. Here, as elsewhere, action has not come to represent the most inti- mate life until it has passed out of the region of willed action into that of instinctive action. Just as the artist has not become really creative until the manipulation of brush and color has become unconscious, and as the musician cannot really enter into the expression of music so long as he must think about the manipulation of the keys of his instrument, so there is a sense in which religion becomes the deepest expression of character only when by long habit and many repetitions the moral and religious action has 105 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM become mstinetive. But it must ever be remembered that this does not take place, these habits are not laid down without effort or thought in the beginning. Moral intuitions depend on formed habits, training, and dis- cipline, and our consciences are far more under the mastery of the usual way of looking at things, the things that we have been taught, than we would ordinarily be willing to admit. In religious living what one does with effort counts, but those courses of action that have so written themselves into life that one does the good unconsciously, indicate far more than the occasional action the moving forces of life. It is equally possible for the individual to school himself in irreligion and evil so that his instinc- tive action becomes evil. This existence of good and bad motives arises from the struggle of elements that have been given place in the per- sonality by free choices, will, and action. Do these contrasting intuitions spring in common from the "vital elan," or from the Divine Per- sonality? They are, rather, the condition under which voluntary goodness or character can be attained, and they go no farther back than the choosing individual. The individual must come to that point of choosing the good which characterizes the Eternal Goodness, and this victory can be won only when habitual 106 INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE willing has made goodness and righteousness intuitive and unconscious. Some one may take issue with this view of the origin of evil. If so, it is a comfort to remember that the origin of evil is not so important a matter as its presence. The origin of evil may be an interesting ethical problem, but the prac- tical problem is concerned with the presence of evil in our world and the steps that may be taken for its banishment. It is not necessary to load the presence of evil upon the Divine Being or to make him responsible for its exist- ence. The assumption that evil came into the world as some independent absolute entity is quite unnecessary. The possibility of evil lies in the nature of free will in process of devel- opment. The future of evil is determined not by the Divine Being but by the moral agents he has created for this task. It has no external permanence apart from the willing of individuals and will disappear from the universal scheme as soon as all moral beings come to an intuitional or rational obedience to the divine will. It is our task as moral beings to banish evil from our own hearts, and also, in so far as we can, from our world. 107 CHAPTER IV THE THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME Bergson holds to the homogeneity of space^ because thereby he feels able to harmonize the ' "Suppose that homogeneous space concerns our action and only our action, being like an infinitely fine network which we stretch beneath material continuity in order to make ourselves masters of it, to decompose it according to the plan of our activities and our needs. Then not only has our hypothesis the advantage of bringing us into harmony with science, which shows us each thing exercising an influ- ence on all the others and consequently occupying, in a certain sense, the whole of the extended. . . . Not only has it the advantage, in metaphysic, of suppressing or lessening the contradictions raised by divisibility in space, contradictions which always arise, as we have shown, from our failure to dissociate the two points of view, that of action from that of knowledge. It has, above all, the advantage of overthrowing the insurmountable barriers raised by realism between the extended world and our perception of it. For, whereas this doctrine assumes on the one hand an external reality which is multiplied and divided, and on the other sensations alien from extensity and without possible contact with it, we find that concrete extensity is not divided any more than immediate perception is in truth unextended. Starting from realism we come back to the point to which idealism had led us; we replace perception in things. And we see realism and idealism ready to come to an understanding when we set aside the postulate, uncritically accepted by both, which served them as a common frontier" (Matter and Memory, pp. 308, 309). 108 THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME conflict raised by science against idealism. Space being homogeneous, anything may be assumed to occupy, so far as its influence goes, the whole of the extended world ajud our per- ception of it. When this boundary is set aside realism and idealism are prepared to come together. Space, he declares, is that which enables us to distinguish identical and simultaneous sen- sations from one another.^ Space, being homo- geneous, discretion is had by a process of unfold- ing in space, so there is in space neither dura- tion nor succession. Experiences which reach us under the form of time are distinguished from each other by setting them out one by one under the form of space. Thus space becomes identical with homogeneous time or time may be called a bastard form of space.^ 2 "Space is what enables us to distinguish a number of identical and simultaneous sensations from one another; it is thus a principle of differentiation other than that of quali- tative differentiation, and consequently it is a reality with no quality" (Time and Free Will, p. 95). 3 "Space alone is homogeneous, that objects in space form a discreet multiplicity is got by a process of unfolding in space. It also follows that there is neither duration nor even suc- cession in space, if we give to these words the meaning in which the consciousness takes them: each of the so-called successive states exists alone; their multiplicity is real only for a consciousness that can first retain them and then set them side by side by externalizing them in relation to one 109 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM In this scheme perception and matter tend to become identical^ as we divest ourselves of the prejudices of action. Thus Bergson hopes to solve the ancient difficulties that hover over the definitions of time and space. Space as a Qualityless, Homogeneous Medium With the term "homogeneous," which, in the philosophy of change, is applied to space, and by means of which the transition is made to time, there is sure to be objection because a quality- less, homogeneous space could have no "here" another. If it retains them, it is because these distinct states of the external world give rise to states of consciousness which permeate one another, imperceptibly organize themselves into a whole, and bind the past to the present by this very process of connection. If it externalizes them in relation to one another, the reason is, that thinking of their radical distinctness (the one having ceased to be when the other arrives on the scene), it perceives them under the form of a discreet multiplicity, which amounts to setting them out in line, in the space in which each of them existed separately. The space employed for this purpose is just that which is called homogeneous time" (Time and Free Will, p. 121). * "These two terms, 'perception* and 'matter,' approach each other in the measure that we divest ourselves of what may be called the prejudices of action: sensation recovers extensity, the concrete extended recovers its natural conti- nuity and indivisibility, and homogeneous space, which stood between the two terms like an insurmountable barrier, is then seen to have no other reality than that of a diagram or a symbol" (Matter and Memory, p. 293). 110 THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME nor "there," no independent existence; in fact, no existence apart from individual perception. A study of this attempt to avoid the pitfalls of the realism which, on the one hand, erects space into an independent reality, and the idealism which on the other would make it wholly subjective, reveals the fact that what Bergson arrives at is really the existence of space and time as means by which the per- ceiving subject relates simultaneously existing things and successive events to himself. This fundamentally correct attitude regarding the nature of space furnishes the ground of recon- ciliation in the long dispute between realism and idealism. To make it effective it needs to be safeguarded by further affirmations. It will never do to make space or time the possession of the individual alone. Some basis must be laid for a common order of time. Space is not sufficiently removed from the realm of abstract ideas by affirming that it exists only in the concrete act of perception. Even having come thus far from the absolutist conception of space, we should have space as a solipsistic experience, whereas it possesses much the same content and reahty for all of us. My space is practically your space, and the miles that stretch between friends have a similarity for both that is not altogether made by their desire to be together 111 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM but has a validity for all men as well as for them. In order to reach this common validity and to escape the realm of subjectivism, we must assume that space as well as time has some meaning for the creative power behind all. And, because they are a portion of the mental equipment of man they are as much a part of reality as any other of his possessions. Space has a reality for animals, and even for plants, though neither are conscious of it. The Idea of Time as a Form of Space Such an assumption in regard to the nature of space would make unnecessary the definition of time as "bastard space," and would save considerable confusion, as we do not in our thought ordinarily identify the relating of the two systems to ourselves, the one of things which may be simultaneous, the other of events which are successive. Bergson's idea seems to be that successions of events which do not enter into individual experience and thus become a part of "pure" memory exist only in a time whose homogeneity is in nowise distinct from the homogeneity of space. The one instance in which time is not homogeneous is when we consider it under the form of duration. Duration is just the successive experiences which have made the individual experience, in THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME and which the individual in time-transcending way always brings to bear upon the present moment of experience. Time flown is homo- geneous with space, but not time flowing.^ Thus Bergson lays a foundation for freedom. This time-experience that he knows first hand is a part of him, is his life, and so, strictly speak- ing, is duration. That other time-experience by which he thinks over the events of his own past, reflecting, rationalizing, and relating them to each other and to the present self, that process by which he relates the events of history to his present situation in the world of time, is a purely conceptual quality which we must call homogeneous. We set the events of history or of past life out in their order as a succession of relations. This act we believe Mr. Bergson would say is in no way different from the act by which we posit things as existing in relation to each other in homogeneous space. Outside of the concrete act of individual experience, time is but a bastard space, a device for dividing, classifying, and relating events. This view, which would be obnoxious to some because of its divergence from the popular view of common sense, is chargeable with a real difficulty. I do not think of space between yesterday and to- day in th e same sense as that which I use in ' Time and Free Will, p. 221; also ibid., pp. vii-viii. 113 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM thinking of the distance that separates me from my home. This distinction is a fundamental one for thought and cannot be overcome. In spite of any attempt to evade the issue, time is the form under which one relates events to himself. Realism notwithstanding, the two orders are not absolutely coincident and never can be. This fact compels the philosophy of change to attempt its salvation by a doctrine of duration. In speaking of the child's acquirement of mathematics by passing from the pictured barlls in his arithmetic to abstract number, Bergson says: As soon as we wish to picture number to ourselves, and not merely figures or words, we are compelled to have recourse to an extended image. What leads to misunder- standing on this point seems to be the habit we have fallen into of counting in time rather than in space. In order to imagine the number 50, for example, we repeat all the numbers starting from unity, and when we have arrived at the fiftieth, we believe we have built up the number in duration and in duration only. And there is no doubt that in this way we have counted moments in duration rather than points in space; but the question is whether we have not counted the moments of duration by means of points in space. It is certainly possible to perceive in time, and in time only, a succession which is nothing but a succession, but not an addition, i. e., a succession which culminates in a sum. For though we reach a sum by taking into account a succession of different 114 THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME terms, yet it is necessary that each of these terms should remain when we pass to the following, and should wait, so to speak, to be added to the others: how could it wait if it were nothing but an instant of duration? And where could it wait if we did not localize it in space? We invol- untarily fix at a point in space each of the moments which we count, and it is only on this condition that the abstract units come to form a sum.^ If we reflect on these words, two things will become apparent. First, we shall see, relative to the thinking of number, that it is a law of the mind that it cannot think of the existence of objective things without thinking of them in spatial relations. Second, it appears to make a difference whether I aim thinking in the general terms of abstract number or of specific objects. It makes a difference whether my "fifty" is a mathematical symbol representing fifty units, or whether I am thinking of fifty sheep, for instance. In the latter case I must spatialize; in the former case there is nothing to spatialize, I only enumerate. This contra- diction springs from a question which appears in the quotation last cited, when, after affirming that the terms of enumeration must wait about until the enumeration is finished, he asks, "Where could it wait if we did not locaHze it in space .'^" The assumption would seem to be « Time and Free Will, pp. 78. 79. 115 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM that ideas need to have space in which to wait around, whereas it is merely a question of how much the mind is able to grasp at the same time. The real reason for the appearance of illustrations in the child's arithmetic is to teach him the difficult art of abstraction, that is, to pass from the concrete instances to the symbol under which a thousand diverse things may be generalized. Why should we be compelled to assume spatiality as necessary to abstract number .^^ Is not such assumption due to the fact that for a moment I have forgotten what is the nature of space? Is not spatiality the assign- ment of concrete things to their true relation- ship of distance from each other and from my- self.'^ One does not think of the units of an abstract number in terms of space so much as in terms of distinctness, of individuality. In this sense one's own thoughts might be numbered, not by distance but by distinctness. It is their distinctness and independence of each other that enables me to number them. The idea of infinite divisibility, even, is limited in its apphcation by the idea of essential unity. A horse cut into a thousand pieces does not become thereby a thousand horses but only a thousand pieces of horse flesh. That I can think of a thousand shreds of horse flesh does 116 THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME not imply a space to put them in, but that there is a law of the mind by which I cannot think of separate units as identical, or as occupying identical space at the same time. In other words, I cannot think in contradictory terms. Time as Contracted Experience In addition to the thought of time as a sort of "bastard" space, the philosophy of change sets forward a theory of time as contracted experience. Would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution? In short, then, to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more diflferentiated moments of an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very long history.^ This brilliant idea is introduced as the sequel to a consideration of the movements of the slowest rays of light, the vibrations of which for one second would require at the highest point at which the human being is conscious of vibration, twenty-five thousand years to count. Thus, to a being with a higher rate of percep- tion, time would slip away into infinitesimal reaches beyond our comprehension. As form- ' Matter and Memory, p. 275. 117 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM ing an illustration of what might be the meaning to a Divine Mind of time, which to us would have the meaning of infinity because of our limited human comprehension, the suggestion is startling and fascinating. Applied to finite and human conditions it has no such wings with which to fly, but is set about by mysteries and diflSculties. Time viewed as contracted experience would vary for different individuals according to the intensity of their lives. Of course there is a sense in which the measure of time is arbitrary and artificial. The moments of intense mental occupation leave one with no sense of time flown, so that one is surprised at the story which the clock records. Moments spent in the communion of friendship and of joy seem not to need the arbitrary strokes of the bell to measure them. Hours sometimes concentrate in power and meaning more than years. Periods of difficulty, labor, anguish and waiting, though short by the clock, drag out to a seeming eternity. But these are the exceptional moments of life when time seems to fluctuate, either because our minds are removed from a consideration of its passage or in unusual meas- ure bent upon it. In the end we have to adapt ourselves to the clock, and only by thus adapting ourselves can we manage to get along in a world of men. Moreover, these clock hours, in spite of 118 THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME any mental preoccupation whatever, write their inevitable trail across both bodies and minds. The hours of life may be so intense that our three score years and ten seem as a day to that consciousness of time through which some unfortunate, invalided, or suffering brother creeps from the cradle to the grave. But that fact does not extend the hours of human life. His days and ours are eventually measured by the clock. It is evident, then, that there is a common element of validity in our idea of time, which is not accounted for by explaining it as contracted experience. Time, with all its arbi- trariness and in spite of seeming caprice, has been written into the nature of mundane things. However it might be with an Infinite Being, it surely needs some further definition when we speak of it as applied to the finite individual. Here too it might be that a creative power which is itself above time has been willing to set a period to human sorrows and labors. It must be something better than the average of our human weakness. It is a law of our thought but it is also fundamental to the constitution of things as we are able to know them. It is not merely subjective but has within it a reality that permeates our world with a common validity. The question remains as to which is the 119 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM important matter here, time, its contraction, the experience of time, or the contractor of time.^ Bergson argues that time is reahzed only by holding two points, the "before" and the "after,'* simultaneously, and thus that the injection of the space idea is artificial and unreal. How, then, would this be in actually consider- ing space? Because I think of two points, one where I am and the other a thousand miles away, do I behold them simultaneously? Is it not, rather, a matter of relativity in both cases? I apprehend the extent of years by the expe- riences intervening. Some experiences are more remote than others, and this interval is what I think of in affirming lapse of time, just as my thought of space is a relating of objects to each other or to myself. In what true sense may experiences be said to coexist? While one is now being experienced, another is known only through memory as having existed. They certainly exist nowhere outside of personal consciousness either human or infinite. Time as Duration Thus are we brought to a consideration of Bergson's doctrine of duration. He touches upon the real difficulty when he tells us that it is difficult to think of duration in its original 8 Matter and Memory, p. 281. 120 THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME purity because duration applies not only to ourselves but to things.^ Yet duration in things and in consciousness, seeming to be homogeneous and measurable, is not. Time, he says, is a relative matter^^ coinciding with * "We find it extraordinarily diflScuIt to think of duration in its original purity; this is due, no doubt, to the fact that we do not endure alone; external objects, it seems, endure as we do, and time regarded from this point of view has every appearance of a homogeneous medium. Not only do the moments of this duration seem to be external to one another, like bodies in space, but the movement perceived by our senses is the, so to speak, palpable sign of a homogeneous and measurable duration. Nay, more — time enters into the formulae of mechanics, into the calculations of the astronomer, and even of the physicist, under the form of a quantity. . . . Granted that inner duration, perceived by consciousness, is nothing else but the melting of states of consciousness into one another, and the gradual growth of the ego, it will be said, notwithstanding, that the time which the astronomer intro- duces into his formulae, the time which our clocks divide into equal portions — this time, at least, is something different: it must be a measurable and therefore a homogeneous mag- nitude. It is nothing of the sort, however, and a close exam- ination will dispel the illusion" (Time and Free Will, p. 107). 10 "Succession is an undeniable fact, even in the material world. Though our reasoning on isolated systems may imply that their history, past, present, and future, might be instan- taneously unfurled like a fan, this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied a duration like our own. If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy-nilly, wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is big with meaning. For here the time I have to wait is not that mathematical time which would apply equally well to tb§ entire history of the material world, even if that history 121 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM my impatience while I wait for the sugar to melt in my glass. Time is a completion of the uncompleted. Over the body there is an arbitrary time with which the soul does not reckon. ^^ "Wher- ever anything lives, there is open somewhere a register in which time is being inscribed." The inorganic world, on the other hand, he concludes, is incapable of duration. It is some- thing which dies and is reborn at every instant; were spread out instantaneously in space. It coincides with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is something lived. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute. . . . The universe endures. The more we study the nature of time, the more ws shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new" (Creative Evolution, pp. 9-11). " "Like the universe as a whole, like each conscious being taken separately, the organism which lives is a thing that endures. Its past, in its entirety, is prolonged into its present and abides there actual and acting. How otherwise could we understand that it passes through distinct and well-marked phases, that it changes its age — in short, that it has a history? If I consider my body in particular, I find that, like my consciousness, it matures little by little from infancy to old age; like myself, it grows old. Indeed, maturity and old age are, properly speaking, attributes only of my body; it is only metaphysically that I apply the same names to the corre- sponding changes of my conscious self. . . . Wherever anything lives, there is open somewhere a register in which time is be^ ing inscribed" (Creative Evolution, pp. 15» 16). 122 THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME but all life, like conscious activity, shares in duration.^2 When duration is looked upon as a succession of states in consciousness it may be termed "pure" duration. ^^ Duration may also be re- garded from the standpoint of succession in phenomena. ^^ This distinction enables us to ^ "In short, the world that the mathematician deals with is a world that dies and is reborn at every instant — the world which Descartes was thinking of when he spoke of continued creation. But in time thus conceived, how could evolution, which is the very essence of life, ever take place? Evolution implies a real existence of the past in the present, a duration which is, as it were, a hyphen, a connecting link. In other words, to know a living being or natural system is to get at the very interval of duration. . . . "Continuity of change, preservation of the past in the present, real duration — the living being seems, then, to share these attributes with consciousness. Can we go further and say that life, like conscious activity, is invention, is unceasing creation?" (Creative Evolution, pp. 15-16.) 13 "Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states" (Creative Evolution, pp. 22-23). 1* "The principle of causality involves two contradictory conceptions of duration, two mutually exclusive ways of prefiguring the future in ]the present. Sometimes all phenom- ena, physical or psychical, are pictured as enduring in the same way, and therefore in the way that we do: in this case the future will exist in the present only as an idea, and the passing from the present to the future will take the form of an effort which does not always lead to the realization of the idea conceived. Sometimes, on the other hand, duration is regarded as the characteristic form of conscious states; in 123 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM look upon the self as free. Thus Bergson intro- duces the needed time-transcending element into personality. He arrives at the conclusion that succession is a reality only for intelligence.^^ In life, he declares, duration seems to act like a cause, that is, it possesses a validity which goes outside of the individual experience. We this case things are no longer supposed to endure as we do, and a mathematical preexistence of their future in their present is admitted. Now, each of these two hypotheses, when taken by itself, safeguards human freedom; for the first would lead to the result that even the phenomena of nature were contingent, and the second by attributing the necessary determination of the phenomena to the fact that things do not endure as we do, invites us to regard the self which is subject to duration as a free force" (Time and Free Will, pp. 215, 216). " "What duration is there existing outside us? The present only, or, if we prefer the expression, simultaneity. No doubt external things change, but their moments do not succeed one another, if we retain the ordinary meaning of the word, except for a consciousness which keeps them in mind. We observe outside us at a given moment a whole system of simultaneous positions; of the simultaneities which have preceded them nothing remains. To put duration in space is really to contradict one's self and place succession within simultaneity. Hence we must not say that external things endure, but rather that there is in them some inexpressible reason in virtue of which we cannot examine them at successive moments of their own duration without observing that they have changed. But this change does not involve succession unless the word is taken in a new meaning: on this point we have noted the agreement of science and common sense." Time and Free Will, p. 227. 124 THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME cannot reverse the order of time flown to bring back the state or condition that has been borne away.^^ These words (Time and Free Will, quoted above, pp. 215, 216, 227) indicate two points of difficulty in the doctrine of duration, for which the philosophy of change oiffers no adequate solution. The first difficulty connects itself with the relation to time of the material world, the other with duration as the source of causal efficiency. We may, with Bergson, confine our definition of duration to the human or conscious experience of succession in events. Duration is that mysterious gathering of all the past of an individual and its concentration on the point of the present with a view to the -8 "Here [in life as contrasted with matter] duration certainly seems to act like a cause, and the idea of putting things back in their place at the end of a certain time involves a kind of absurdity, since such a turning backward has never been accomplished in the case of a living being. ... In short, while the material point, as mechanics understands it, remains in an eternal present, the past is a reality perhaps for living bodies, and certainly for conscious beings. While past time is neither a gain nor a loss for a system assumed to be conserv- ative, it may be a gain for a living being, and it is indisputably one for the conscious being. Such being the case, is there not much to be said for the hypothesis of a conscious force or free will, which, subject to the action of time and storing up duration, may thereby escape the law of the conservation of energy?" (Time and Free Will, pp. 153, 154.) 125 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM future. It is obvious, then, that by duration we refer to what we ordinarily term self-con- sciousness. Duration is thus bound up with concrete experiences and action, and so is kept from flying off into the abstractions of absolute idealism. This is an end devoutly to be desired. But duration left as a concrete individual experience becomes solipsistic and subjective. It will not do to neglect or leave out of consider- ation this which Bergson mentions as the "seeming" duration of material things. Though matter be but a constantly repeated movement, and without duration in the psychological sense we have employed, it does have some relation to time which passes out beyond the experience of individuals. The waters run to the sea, and their rise in the hills is not simultaneous with their absorption in the vastness of the deep. Even the mountains depart, as under the in- fluence of innumerable frosts, seasons, freshets, they take their places in the lowliness of the plain, or contribute of their substance to the treacherous sand-bar which prevents the des- perate sailor from reaching his harbor when the storm is on the sea. We cannot assume duration in the mountains because we cannot think of them as conscious of purpose in sinking to the level of the plain, or in contributing to the shallowness of the sea. But it is certain 126 THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME that we see here the existence of a temporal reaHty which does not depend upon us nor upon our perception of it. Lucy Larcom, the Lowell mill-girl, had but a glimpse of the sea through her attic window, but it was her one hold upon the reality of a world that stretched out far beyond her knowledge, and mingled in her dreams. Yet her "strip of blue" was enough, for in it she found God's sweeping garment- fold. "The sails, like flakes of roseate pearl. Float in upon the mist; The waves are broken precious stones — Sapphire and amethyst Washed from celestial basement walls, By suns unsetting kissed. Out through the utmost gates of space. Past where the gray stars drift. To the widening Infinite, my soul Glides on, a vessel swift. Yet loses not her anchorage In yonder azure drift." Because this temporal mark upon the world goes out beyond us we must argue that it has some meaning for a creative intelligence which persists behind it all. Until we reach up to a conclusion of this order we shall be at loss to explain the seeming duration of the physical world. We shall find, in the last analysis, as suggested by a well-known 127 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM thinker,^^ that both time and freedom derive their meaning from the unfinished character of the world. However, this world must have an identity which the work of finishing does not destroy or efface. "Unlimited cooperation with God in world-making we have; not, however, in ultimate God-making. The reli- gious object offers that identity without which creative freedom itself would lack for us all meaning. ^^ Which is to say that if there be such a thing as progress or evolution, an unfinished world in state of completion, there must be some abiding identity. If the only abiding identity be the material world, all thinking and philoso- phizing collapses as unimportant. If this is so, matter is the only eternal and worth while. We can save ourselves only by passing through a pantheistic immanence to a controlling, creative personality which is the uncaused Cause. Familiarity with the fact of uncaused causation in our own experience ought to pre- pare us for its acceptance in a supreme creative power. It is no such preposterous jump as some would have us believe. It may be an analogy, but it is an analogy with every evidence of fact, " Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. xvi. " Ibid., p. xvii. 1^8 THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME and surely as sound as any of the analogies upon which science acts. Let us turn our attention to the other diflScul- ty, duration as the source of causal eflSciency. Duration is ultimately the only causal eflSciency with which we are acquainted that escapes the meshes of necessity woven by the law of the conservation of energy. In this admission or discovery we have come upon a fact of far- reaching importance for our philosophy. Un- heralded by trumpets, and unannounced, it is in reality the high point of attainment in the philosophy of change. In it we have a means of escape from mechanism on the one hand, and perhaps from determinism on the other. In plain words, it means that personality con- tains the only grounds we know of unique eflficient cause or of uncaused causality. The mechanists have been laboring for years to determine the exact correspondence between calories of food and expended energy of thought, without a sufficient sense of humor to under- stand that they were not touching the question of how food energy could become thought energy, and that the very crux of their problem lay not in showing how the heat calories in the philosopher's cabbage correspond with energy units spent in the philosopher's brain, but, rather in that strange transmutation by which 129 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM cabbage energy becomes thought energy. What we have here in Bergson is the recognition of the transcendence of mechanistic law by the human personality. It is not what the artist eats that determines the worth of his picture. The number of calories of food does not fix the profundity nor beauty of the musician's score. The prophets and thinkers of the world, the children of light, have accomplished more on a diet of crusts than the children of this world who have fared sumptuously every day. Man's greatest glory is his power to originate action, to be himself a creator, and if we are to escape the pitiless and relentless tyrannies of mechanism, we cannot do it by pursuing a dance of atoms far beyond powers of human investigation and experience in an Unknow- able. We can at least have the comfort of analogy which in any other scheme is entirely wanting. We can assume that personality is the one source of unique action in the universe, the uncaused cause, and we cannot be contro- verted by any known facts. Objections to this conclusion will be raised because we often so unthinkingly assume the correctness of the perfectly wooden hypothesis of personal automatism. According to this hypothesis, we are what we are by the trans- mission of hereditary traits, and whatever is 130 THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME in us can be traced back to sufficient and well- defined causes. Yet no genius has written himself upon the pages of history who could by any possibility be altogether accounted for by parentage, training, or the influences of the age. Who wrote the sonatas in Beethoven's souLf* or what human parents gave to Dante the voice of "ten silent centuries"? or what age is able to account for the undying insight into character and the amazing power of literary expression to be found in Shakespeare? All creative work in the world is exactly of this inexplicable character. It is the distinctive mark of personality. We have within our- selves the key to the mystery of life. Viewed in this light, the doctrine of duration can be considered the high point in the philos- ophy of change, and the one destined to cast a flood of light upon the deepest problems of thought. 131 CHAPTER V FREEDOM AND CAUSATION Let us come to a consideration of the doc- trine of freedom and causation as set forth in the philosophy of change. We find freedom of personal choice described in these words : All seems to take place as if in this aggregate of images which I call the universe nothing new could really happen except through the medium of certain particular images, the type of which is furnished me by my body.^ Bergson declares that freedom is the relation of the concrete self to its acts. It is an unde- finable relation because to describe it is to turn it into something past, no longer contingent, or else to make it determined and so not free.^ 1 Matter and Memory, p. 3. * "We can now formulate our conception of freedom. Freedom is the relation of the concrete self to the act which it performs. This relation is indefinable just because we are free, for we can analyze a thing, but not a process; we can break up extensity, but not duration. Or, if we persist in analyzing it, we unconsciously transform the process into a thing and duration into extensity. By the very fact of breaking up concrete time we set out its moments in homo- geneous space; in place of the doing we put the already done; 132 FREEDOM AND CAUSATION So every problem of freedom comes back eventually to a matter of definition or descrip- tion. But freedom has no past; it is something only in the moment of action.^ The Conception of Freedom in the Philosophy of Change We have seen at different times during the discussion the anxiety which Bergson has shown to escape the necessity of mechanical causation. Here he sees clearly that such necessity not only removes the possibility of freedom, but the possibility of explanation as well and lands one in the infinite regress. He is equally determined to escape from the meshes and as we have begun by, so to speak, stereotyping the activity of the self we see spontaneity settle down into inertia, and freedom into necessity. Thus any positive definition of free- dom will insure the victory of determinism" (Time and Free Will, pp. 219-220). 3 "To sum up, every demand for freedom comes back, without our suspecting it, to the following question: *Can time be adequately represented by space?' To which we answer. Yes, if you are dealing with time flown; No, if you speak of time flowing. Now, the free act takes place in time which is flowing and not in time which has already flown. Freedom is therefore a fact, and among the facts which we observe there is none clearer. All the difficulties of the prob- lem and the problem itself arise from the desire to endow du- ration with the same attributes as extensity, to interpret a succession by a simultaneity, and to express the idea of free- dom in a language into which it is obviously untranslatable" (Time and Free Will, p. 221). BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM of an absolutist determinism, wherein all things appear by the fiat of an Absolute will which becomes so identified with its world that the possibility of moral action is removed from man along with the desired freedom. Bergson sees that one of the things of which we may be most certain is the fact of freedom in human experience. This we cannot deny without upsetting all codes both intellectual and moral. He comes at the point desired by setting forth his doctrine of duration. As we have seen above, "pure" duration is identical with the self. Self gathers up all its past, is all its past focused on the one point of the present with a view to possible future action. Because this freedom is real and not seeming, the self can choose between courses of action. Bergson is right when he confines the only element of freedom we know in the universe to a connection with personality. This per- sonality, acting and choosing, is plainly the very essence of pure duration. It is easy to follow this definition where it applies to rational beings; it is quite inadequate, considered from the standpoint of the ongoing of the nonrational and material world; for the duration which we have in things is not only of another order, as Bergson himself declares, but the difference between it and the defined duration of person- 134 FREEDOM AND CAUSATION ality is so great that such duration as we can find in material things of and from themselves is utterly incapable of explaining freedom. While stating the impossibility of pure duration in things, he does yet unconsciously carry over into the changes of the material world the same idea that he applies to duration in persons. The material world is assumed to gather up its past into its present, and though this memory is unconscious, t is supposed as somehow writ- ten into the living organism so that the uncon- scious, or unrationalizing cell of the lowest order of plant or animal life is reckoned as making a free choice, as if it did decide between possible courses of action. The plausibility of such a conception is quite evident as are the troubling questions of science and metaphysics which it seems to meet, and the apparent foolishness of any effort to refute it. Somewhere we are told of the exercise of this freedom by the ten- drils of living vines which reach out toward supports and which climb toward the sun. Now the only difficulty here is the discrepancy between the facts and the existence of freedom. If we call such action freedom, we must call choice as it appears in rationalizing beings some- thing vastly more than freedom, for the action in the two cases is not analogous. It may, indeed, be true that the reaching of the tendrils 135 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM is due to the presence of light or warmth, or the presence of possible support, and that the organism responds to such presence. Where freedom escapes us in the case is that we cannot find any instances where the plant has made any choice at all between possibilities; for instance, between the possibility of growing toward or away from the sun. It has in every case responded to the law of its nature, and it apparently has no power to act in any other way. Changes of structure and adaptation may come about through climatic or other catastrophe. The potato growing in the dark- ness of the cellar may seem quite other than the one planted in the field, but that is due not to its own choice but to a determined environment. If this be dignified with the name of freedom, the only kinship with it in the rationalizing human being is to be found in the merely physical processes which are quite beyond our power of determination. It is like the freedom we might be assumed as exercising when we are born, or when our hearts beat, or our lungs expand to the inrushing air, or the choice of starving when there is no food and none to be obtained. Surely, freedom in the real meaning of the term is not exercised in the ongoing of such physical activities. Instead, then, of the solution of the problem in unconscious action, 136 FREEDOM AND CAUSATION we have been led only into ever-deepening difficulties. The reason is clearly because the existence of purpose in a creative being seems (and quite unnecessarily) to imply an estab- lished determinism in the world outside of man. The Value and Possibility of a Purposeless Freedom If pure duration is necessary to freedom, and if pure duration is wanting from all life, except from rationalizing, and strictly speak- ing, freely choosing life, the only kind of free- dom left in the ongoing of a changing and evolving physical world is a lawless kind of freedom which is not a matter of choice, but a mere possibility of being one thing or some- thing else. If we no longer have a freedom of purpose — and that is denied by our previous assumption — we are shut up to a freedom of accident. In a world of such a freedom any- thing might happen, and foreseeability on the part of man in the chemical, physical, or bio- logical worlds would be absolutely impossible. One might plant potatoes and get grapes, or the vineyard might overnight have decided to produce thistles. One might extend indefi- nitely examples to show the preposterous nature of any claim to rule purpose out of the freedom of the material world. A purposeless 137 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM world would be an entirely unintelligible world. It is not hard to believe that things do happen as if there were a purpose acting somewhere, and yet if we look ever so hard we cannot discover purpose being exercised within the realm of unconscious hfe. Such choice or freedom as there may seem to be is merely the choice of responding to conditions after certain fixed laws, or of ceasing to live. It is evident that unless we introduce some more efficient term into our definition it is impossible to speak in an intelligent way of freedom in the world outside of man. This problem we must leave for later consideration. But before leav- ing the matter under discussion it will be well to consider a related matter. Some of the theologians believe that in this doctrine of a purposeless freedom there has been brought to their aid a new and astounding confirmation of the doctrine of miracles. Such help, we will be compelled by reflection to de- cide, is more apparent than real. It is argued that in such a world of freedom, in which even God cannot know what is about to happen, reserving all his consciousness to the present moment (because foreknowledge and purpose would reintroduce that reign of determinism from which we are escaping), anything might happen. If anything can happen irrespective 138 FREEDOM AND CAUSATION of natural laws, then there is place for miracle. When this "anything" happens in contradic- tion to common expectations or the ordinary course of events, we have a miracle. Such a confirmation of the doctrine of miracles is too easy to be satisfying or adequate. The slightest reflection upon the nature of miracle shows us that a miracle which was not the result of di- vine foreknowledge, purpose, or determination, would be nothing more than an accident. So far as its being a revelation of any connection in relationship between God and man, it would be valueless. Thus it appears that in the realm of religious faith, as well as in the realm of science, a lawless, accidental, or purposeless order of freedom raises many more difficulties than it can settle. Let us go back now to the thought to which we were led in the beginning of this section, which is that freedom apart from "pure" dura- tion is meaningless. Let us inquire what the true implications of such a theory might be. We have abundant evidence that up to this point we are at one with the philosophy of change.^ We believe it is clear that we cannot stop here and find any adequate solution of the problem of freedom. As we have already pointed out, "pure" duration is merely the 4 Time and Free Will, pp. 216, 217. 139 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM term which Bergson chooses to name that which we ordinarily understand as personaHty, or self. If this is true, and if it further be true that "pure" duration cannot be posited of uncon- scious life (as we believe it cannot be), it follows that freedom is inseparable from personality. If we are to achieve any evolution or progress in the material world, any uniqueness, any going beyond the rigid system of necessity to obtain new genera or types, we must assume purpose and personality in the creative "elan," or power. In spite of this fact, which is tre- mendous with meaning, there are passages in the Creative Evolution which seem to imply that the animal and the plant, acting by pure intuition, and thus being nearer the center of life, are freer than man, who is forever intro- ducing his wearisome slavery to ideas, which in rationalizing divorce him from life, freedom, and reality. It is worth our while to consider for a moment the aspects of such an intuitional freedom. Looked into deeply, it appears that with growing powers of reflection come growing powers of choice. Improved powers of rationalization bring improved powers of self-determination. In fact, investigation makes clear that the more intuitive and unconscious a;n act is, even in man, the less likely is it to represent anything 140 FREEDOM AND CAUSATION of what we mean by choice, leaving out of account those actions which conscious willing and repetition have hardened into habit. Our direct impulses are less likely to spring from choosing than they are to be unconscious, and therefore physically determined response to external stimuli. Freedom appears in greatest measure, not in those primal and intuitive moments when our action is most unconscious, but in those moments when both intelligence and rationalizing are at the greatest swing of the arc. The larger our knowledge of the situation, of the attendant and hidden circum- stances, of the laws of action and reaction, of the possible choices of action, the greater seems to be our freedom. The only example of perfect freedom, then, would be found not in the least rationalizing, and least conscious living being, but in the most conscious and most rationalizing being. If the Creative Being be assumed as the most intelligent, then to him it is both reasonable and scientific to accord the only example of perfect freedom. This fact is not only in line with the deepest religious intuitions of man, it is also in keeping with his highest intelligence, and with his most scientific knowledge. When Saint Augustine uttered that prayer which still stirs the heart of men across the ages, bespeaking a "service 141 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM which alone is perfect freedom," he was true to philosophy, to science, and to life. The most perfect freedom comes with the most intelli- gent devotion of the full powers of manhood to the noblest ideals, and not with a devotion which is the most impulsive and unthinking. We must remember, however, that it is to no such conclusion that the philosophy of change has led us. Such conclusions are sure to be vitiated by any faulty or incomplete definition of the self. When the self is depersonalized into a bundle of conscious states, and "pure" duration as a sort of impersonal momentum which of itself does the choosing, apart from an abiding and unchanging self-identity, we are on the high road to skepticism. A human self which is mostly a collection of conscious states, and a creative "elan," which impersonally mixes "in Being's flood and Action's storm," weaving at the garment of God, may be splen- didly poetic in conception, but as touching the fundamentals of concrete living, it will be found as abstract as it is untrue. Of Causation as Freed from Deter- minism It remains briefly to consider the merits of a causation thus freed from the limits of deter- minism by assuming that duration in things is 142 FREEDOM AND CAUSATION different from duration in ourselves, and a theory which fails to make the necessary distinction between phenomenal and efficient causation. Bergson declares that causation cannot take the form of a necessary principle as binding the future to the present. Seeing this, Descartes attributed the regularity of physical phenomena to the constantly renewed grace of Providence and thus built up a sort of instantaneous meta- physics. For Spinoza the apparent relation of causahty between phenomena melted away into a relation of identity in the Absolute.^ Bergson's position relative to causation in ^ **The principle of causality, in so far as it is supposed to bind the future to the present, could never take the form of a necessary principle; for the successive moments of real time are not bound up with one another, and no effort of logic will succeed in proving that what has been will be, or will continue to be, that the same antecedents will always give rise to identical consequents. Descartes understood this so well that he attributed the regularity of the physical world and the continuation of the same effects to the constantly renewed giace of Providence: he built up as it were an instantaneous physics, intended for a universe, the whole duration of which might as well be confined to the present moment. And Spinoza maintained that the indefinite series of phenomena which takes for us the form of a succession in time, was equivalent in the absolute to the divine unity: he thus assumed, on the one hand, that the apparent relation of causality between phenomena melted away into a relation of identity in the absolute, and, on the other hand, that the indefinite duration of things was all contained in a single moment, which is eternity" (Time and Free Will, p. 208). 143 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM things seems in many points analogous to that of Descartes. Its vulnerability lies in its failure to trace succession in phenomena to personal causation. Bergson attributes the distinction in causation to the existence of two types of causality, personal, or efficient, and phenomenal, which is the ordered succession in phenomena; that is, causation in ourselves is different from causation in things. Let us reflect if this assumption alone is a sufficient safeguard of freedom or adequate explanation of causati on.^ • "It follows . . . that the principle of causality involves two contrary conceptions of duration, two mutually exclusive ways of prefiguring the future in the present. Sometimes all phenomena, physical or psychical, are pictured as enduring in the same way and therefore in the way that we do: in this case the future will exist in the present only as an idea, and the passing from the present to the future will take the form of an effort which does not always lead to the realization of the idea conceived. Sometimes, on the other hand, duration is regarded as the characteristic form of conscious states; in this case things are no longer supposed to endure as we do, and a mathematical preexistence of their future in the present is admitted. Now, each of these two hypotheses, when taken by itself, safeguards human freedom; for the first would lead to the result that even the phenomena of nature were contin gent, and the second, by attributing the necessary deter- mination of physical phenomena to the fact that things do not endure as we do, invites us to regard the self which is subject to duration as a free force. Therefore, every clear conception of causality, wiiere we know our own meaning, leads to the idea of human freedom as a natural consequence" (Time and Free Will, pp. 215, 216). 144 FREEDOM AND CAUSATION (a) Duration in Things as Different from Dura^ tion in Self. The whole doctrine of freedom in the philoso- phy of change is made to hinge upon the doctrine of pure duration, and yet there must be a sense in which duration in things must find perfect agreement with duration in persons, if the sys- tem of freedom is to be extended to the uncon- scious and material worlds. Whether it is possible to maintain two orders of duration, without similarity of meaning, and still to keep freedom as we are compelled to think, and to define it, is the question which next claims our attention. If duration in things is essentially different from duration in ourselves, we must try to determine what this difference would be. If we find entering into it exactly the same elements of which we are aware in personal duration, we may have to acknowledge a rela- tionship between the two which is not ade- quately represented by merely saying that they are different. Let us assume, now, that the "elan" as creative activity is in being, in contrast to the creative activity of the self. One of the most obvious elements of personal crea- tive activity is the element of time. While there is a sense in which the self is timeless as retaining its unity through the succession of 145 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM events, yet, it will be found acting according to a well-defined order of succession, that is, of time. In this order effect follows cause, and it is unthinkable that the order should be reversed. But might not this description be equally well applied to the "elan vitale"? So far as we have any means of knowing, the "elan" acts according to the order of succession, that is, progressively and not simultaneously. If it did not, the term "evolution" would have no meaning in reality, but would be a mere panoramic ap- pearance spread out before us to deceive us. It is clear that the "elan," whatever it may be taken to be, acts in accordance with a time order. To deny this is to deny the possibility of knowledge. Furthermore, if there is to be real progress or evolution, the "elan" must, like the creative energy in ourselves, act not only in accordance with its past, but with prevision for the future. Of course this means to introduce that element of purpose in evolution which has already been drummed out of camp; but if we are to save ourselves to ways of intelligence, we must get it back even if it be under disguise. If the "elan" has no prevision for the future, if it acts only in accordance with the past, then, in spite of ourselves, we are committed to the ways of necessity. In such a case we have in the past 146 FREEDOM AND CAUSATION of the "elan" only what there always has been, and we cannot drag forth that uniqueness of creative energy which is necessary to intelligible progress, or evolution, and is not a series of unrelated accidents. We are thus brought to the crossing of the ways. Either this evolution of which we talk is merely phenomenal, exists as a mere mental state, and so vanishes from reality, or it is a correct description of something that actually takes place in the material world. If the first consideration be a true one, evolution is a mere phenomenalism about which it is futile to talk or conjecture. But if it does represent a reality, then duration in things, in so far as purpose and prevision are necessary to their orderly existence, is in no sense that we can determine radically different from duration in ourselves. In fact, this whole argument for the "elan vitale" gets its power by the importation into it of those forces of which we are aware in our own creative willing and choosing. (6) The Only Free Causation is Personal. We are thus naturally led to what seems, so far as human knowledge can go, a fundamental assumption that all free causation is personal and all evolution is in some manner purposive. The reason for the apparent impasse between 147 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM duration in things and duration in ourselves springs from the failure to discriminate between efficient and phenomenal causation. If we make this distinction, the contradiction is ended. So far as our personal experience is concerned, we have abundant knowledge of efficient cau- sation in ourselves. In the external world we reason not by knowledge but by analogy. We witness an order of succession in phenomena. The earlier term of the succession we name cause and the succeeding term we call the effect. If this were the whole of the reality, we should have a closed system, an interminable series of infinite regress, the future wholly contained in the present, and therefore not distinguishable from it. All evolution would be at an end. Likewise, all freedom would vanish save that of the individual. We should arrive at a philos- ophy which was not in keeping with the facts. The trouble is thatwe cannot, except by analogy, go outside of our personal world to watch the creative process. We can only partially discern it in ourselves. But it is there, and we are conscious of the exercise of freedom, those choices by which we are building our world into something better and greater, and distinctly different from that of the present. In our- selves we know it as efficient causality. In others we behold it as a succession of events, 148 FREEDOM AND CAUSATION and, reasoning by analogy, we assume that they possess the same creative efficiency and freedom that we do. But the argument does not stop here. We trace the acts of our fellow men to free choices, and account for the appearance of the unique by the action of their purpose; so when in the world around us we witness effects that are not commensurate with their apparent causes we have a right to assume that here too an intelligent purpose is the active energy introducing the elements of progress. Such a conclusion, though profound for religion, is not essentially a religious conclusion. It is as necessary for philosophy as it is for theology. Without it we can make no progress in the explanation of the relation of God to his world, and without it all scientific explanation of evo- lution is impossible. All free causation is personal, and if there be such a thing as evolution, it must be that there stands behind the shadows of this mortal life and this limiting order of time One who keepeth watch over a world which in its essential features is his own. 149 CHAPTER VI THE NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE In speaking of the nature of reality or being, Bergson describes it as the center from which things are shooting out. This center is not a thing but an activity which he seems to identify with God. The analogue of this creative ac- tivity we experience in ourselves in every free action. The explanation of each increment of progress in evolution is beyond our power, but we cannot deny that this increment is a fact.^ 1 "It is natural for our intellect, whose function is essen- tially practical, made to present to us things and states rather than changes and acts. But things and states are only- views taken by our mind, of becoming. There are no things, there are only actions. ... If the same kind of action is going on everywhere, whether it is that which is unmaking itself or whether it is that which is striving to remake itself, I simply express this probable similitude when I speak of a center from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fireworks display — provided, however, that I do not present this center as a thing, but as a continuity of shooting out. God, thus defined, has nothing of the already made; he is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation so conceived is not a mystery; we experience it ourselves when we act freely. That new things can join things already existing is absurd, no doubt, 150 NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING He declares that if philosophy yields to the metaphysics of science, that is the law of mech- anistic cause and effect alone, it can end only in metaphysical skepticism. Perhaps he had in mind at this point such a skepticism as that in which Spencer landed by his doctrine that in its essence first cause is Unknowable. Pan- theistic deity, eternal matter or a pure Form or Absolute, end in the same result, he says, treat- ing the living and the inert on the same basis. That which we would desire at this point would be the recognition of the strangely unaccount- able force in which action arises, and which in ultimate analysis must be a concrete intelligent purpose.^ since the thing results from a solidification performed by our understanding, and there are never any things other than those that the understanding has thus constituted. To speak of things creating themselves would therefore amount to saying that the understanding presents to itself more than it presents to itself — a self contradictory aflSrmation, an empty and vain idea. But that action increases as it goes on, that it creates in the measure of its advance, is what each of us finds when he watches himself act" (Creative Evolution, pp. 248, 249). 2 "What must the result be if it (philosophy) leave bio- logical and psychological facts to science alone, as it has left, and rightly left, physical facts? It will accept a priori a mechanistic conception of all nature, a conception unreflected, and even unconscious, the outcome of the material need. It will a priori accept the doctrine of the simple unity of knowledge and of the abstract unity of nature, 151 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Of Kant he says: True, when he speaks of the human intellect, he means neither yours nor mine: the unity of nature comes indeed from the human understanding that unifies, but the uni- fying function that operates here is impersonal. It imparts itself to our individual consciousness, but it tran- scends them. It is much less than a substantial God; it is, however, a little more than the isolated work of a man, or even the collective work of humanity. It does not exactly lie within man; rather man lies within it, as within an atmosphere of intellectuality which his consciousness breathes.' The Implications of Impersonalism as TO Ground of Being In his just criticism of Kant's doctrine of "The moment it does so its fate is sealed. The philosopher has no longer any choice, save between a metaphysical dogma- tism and a metaphysical skepticism, both of which rest at bottom on the same postulate, and neither of which adds anything to positive science. He may hypostasize the unity of nature, or, what comes to the same thing, the unity of science, in a being who is nothing since he does nothing, an ineffectual God who simply sums up in himself all the given; or in an eternal Matter from whose womb have been poured out the properties of things and the laws of nature; or, again, in a pure form which endeavors to seize an unseizable multi- plicity, and which is as we will, the form of nature or the form of thought. All these philosophies tell us, in their different languages, that science is right to treat the living as the inert, and that there is no difference of value, no distinc- tion to be made between the results which intellect arrives at in applying its categories, whether it rests on inert matter or attecks life" (Creative Evolution, 196, 197). * Creative Evolution, p. 357. 152 NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING God, Bergson attacks a point at which his own system is open to criticism, namely, where it touches upon the nature of the World-Ground. It is evident that he recognizes the untena- bility of any system which regards the World- Ground as impersonal. One would hardly be justified in criticizing a man for not adding the arts of the theologian to those of the philoso- pher, and yet this element of which he speaks is of such importance to an enduring meta- physics that it demands further development than he has seen fit to give it. There are passages in the Creative Evolution and in the Metaphysics in which this fundamental appears to have been forgotten. When we further find statements depending for their plausibility upon the impersonal standpoint we can of right require that the whole matter be clearly defined. A case in point will be noted when we consider the definition of God as activity, change, and with it the statement that change is original. This definition is characterized by the utmost vagueness of impersonality and does service by reason of its indefiniteness. The trouble comes with the previous definitions. We have al- ready been told that life is the coming together of two independent streams of reality, matter and spirit. It is clear, then, that we have a double meaning for the term "life," and cannot 153 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM use it as synonymous with the term "God," or "activity," unless, in the first place our con- ception of God is the impersonal one, or, in the second place, we make God dependent upon matter. If "God," being synonymous with life, is the result of the intersection of the two streams, it is evident that were the two streams not to coincide, or were matter absent, there would be no God. The very existence of God becomes thus dependent upon matter. If matter were to dissolve, the Divine Being would have to go too. We find ourselves caught inextricably in the toils of materialism. Neither would the result be more happy if we should consider God in an impersonal way as the pure spirit which is continually opposing itseK to matter, out of which opposition rises life. Such a scheme introduces that ceaseless conflict of dualism which makes God not supreme in his world, but only able to carry on an indecisive conflict with matter and with evil — in which case we should be, like Christophorus, so beset with the rival claims of good and evil that it would behoove us to set out in search of another and mightier God, one who would be more worthy of our devotion. An added argument against an impersonal character for the Divine Being remains in the fact that such a Being would be wanting in all 154 NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING moral characteristics. This might not, at first glance, seem a serious matter for philos- ophy. But if we are to assume that we live in a moral universe, or that morality is a vital element in the interpretation of life, we shall see that any impersonal assumption regarding God makes impossible the maintenance of a con- sistent doctrine of the World-Ground. It is quite true that by ignoring the fact of personal- ity in the Creative Being we can rid ourselves at a stroke of a whole brood of troublesome questions that cluster about the problems of evil and error. But by so doing we admit other questions of far graver import. In a moral universe to remove from the conception of God the presumption of all moral qualities is to get rid of the conception of God and to leave all to a blind, unthinking demiurge. We shall have lost our metaphysical loaf of bread, and in its place shall have been given a stone, for, after all, the highest distinction in man is not intelligence — though many would have it that way — but morality. Evidences abound that man does not rise to the supreme heights of his nature, the climax of his being, until he has morally attained. If moral achieve- ment is the highest point of life in man, it is inconceivable that the Creative Life itself from which all life flows should be so much less than 155 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM its creation as to be without all moral qualities. If there be no morality in God, then man be- comes the highest God we know, a creator beside whom a mere demiurge, vital "elan," or what not, becomes relatively unimportant and outclassed. The greatest creations which the world has to show are not those of blind forces, but of moral, spiritual, and aesthetic excellence, than which nothing earthly can be greater. The Meaning of Duration and Change IN THE Creative Being Perhaps the need for definition of the relation of the supreme creative activity to a changing world has already been made sufficiently clear. But let us inquire into the necessary character of that relationship. We have seen how great a place Bergson makes for his doctrine of duration as the founda- tion stone of freedom. If there is to be freedom in the original creative process, it is evident that there must be duration there also. In- asmuch as there cannot be duration in things in the sense of creative freedom, it follows that we must posit duration in the Creative Being, or God. If, now, change is original, and the "elan vitale" is the continuously acting "push" on which all life depends, it is obvious that, 156 NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING whatever we name it, it must include a back- lying, intelligent purpose. The reason for this is that neither change nor impulse can continue to exist and to act as an abstraction. Is change a law? Then it must spring from the unwritten constitution of the forces of nature, and there must lie back of them some force sufficient to do the in-writing. Otherwise these multi- plied forces and atoms must themselves contain the purpose, in which the wonder is their unity and cooperation in a pluralistic world. Or do we have in the "elan" simply an original impulse? Then we must account for its continuance as such. In order to have it hold for the present it must have been not a single impulse, but a continuous succession of impulses. If we are to hold to the continued identity of the original impulse, we simply reerect the materialistic system of necessity. "Vital impulse" cannot possess duration in the sense in which Bergson intends that we shall understand it, unless it possesses consciousness, and, in the moment of action at least, intelligent purpose. Thus, if we affirm "change" or "vital impulse" as origi- nal, we are driven to go behind them to that intelligent and enduring unity which abides through all processes of change. Just as in the human example of duration, there can be no "pure" duration, apart from the self-identi- 157 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM fying personality, so also it is impossible to affirm duration in the "elan" without similar assumptions of selfconsciousness. Must we, then, affirm change in the Divine Being? It is evident that we must do so or else break completely with the philosophy of change. This is where many an earnest soul and many a clear thinker will find it impossible to remain longer in Bergson's following. Never- theless, before making the final break, it may not be unprofitable to inquire how far the necessities of the system demand us to insist upon change as one of the divine attributes. One thing is clear: that if this philosophy requires absolute change in the Divine Being, it must break of its own weight. Every philos- ophy of change, if it is to account for progress and assume the truth of evolution, must for the sake of its own salvation assume somewhere a self-identity, abiding above change, in order to make possible any assertion of progress what- ever. The successive states of change cannot themselves be aware of succession unless they contain some element of identity that survives the change. It is evident that a mere vital "elan" which changes altogether from moment to moment could in no sense be said to endure, nor continuously to repeat itself according to Bergson's law of duration as applied to things. 158 NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING A vital "elan," original change, or formidable thrust, which is to account for the continuance and ongoing of the world and yet escape both the mechanism of materialism and the deter- minism of idealism, cannot be held as altogether subject to change. This view of change involves also the doctrine of duration as applied to finite personalities. Any view of change which overlooks the enduring element in personality defeats its own object. It is this abiding self-identity which makes possible the summoning of all the past to bear its weight upon the decision of the present moment, and which has a mind to what its existence may be in the moments to follow. This self-identity lies at the heart of the problem of freedom. Without it both freedom and personality are meaningless. We have seen how, in order to hold to the reality of human personality, we must aflSrm in it an abiding element not subject to change. However subject to change it may be, it cannot be held to change through and through. Its existence as personality is due to the unchanging elements in it, its triumph over time, its survival of successive states of consciousness, in a world of change. In the same manner, any God, "vitale elan," duration, or push which did not consciously survive the succession of its states 159 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM could in no sense creatively account for the on- going of the world. If we are to follow the philosophy of change, what ideas of God might be consistently allowed or retained ! It will pay to tread softly and to walk humbly at this point, realizing that the relation of the Creative Being to the spatial and temporal order is the great mystery. We cannot start into such a problem with the hope of solving offhand that which has for ages been the despair of philosophers. If we think to do it, we shall but give another exhibition of that vanity which goes before a fall. It may be permissible, however, to offer some suggestions that will make our position more endurable, and which may indicate the possible directions of the solu- tion of the problem raised by the thought of the relation of God to a changing world. It will appear at the very beginning impos- sible to describe the multitude of acts, dispo- sitions, moods, choices, and tempers of the most earthly of human beings, except in the most general terms. We may call him rich, or happy, and these may be predominating characteristics of his life. But in most lives these would be found to be relative terms, which do not shut out the possibility of moments of sorrow, nor make unnecessary the definition. We do not know much about the individual until we 160 NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING know the instances of his reaction upon Hfe. Just as it is impossible to arrive at the estimate of a living person except in most general terms, so likewise it will surely be not less difficult to speak of a Divine Personality except in the most general way. First of all, if the idea of God is to retain any meaning, it must include as a foremost affir- mation the abiding unity of self-consciousness. This is the heart of what the Christian means when he declares that God does not change, but abides the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. If we cannot hold to this, we cannot retain the idea of God in any vital way. The changelessness of the divine self-identity is the bed rock of any true conception of the divine. Any Being which cannot erect itself above the flux of succession and change would become only an element in the process, destined to pass away. Any system which fails to note this fact of identity in change is destined to confusion. As previously noted, "duration," in the sense in which Bergson uses that term, would be possible only to such self-conscious and abiding Being. Perfect self-consciousness would then be the foremost affirmation concerning the Divine Being that we would need to make. But this affirmation instead of being contrary to a tenable philosophy of change, would be 161 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM necessary to it if we are to assume the possibility of evolution or progress. If the philosophy of change denies this, it denies the foundations of its own theories, because change which changes everything completely cannot be con- scious of change. The affirmation of change is impossible unless something is assumed to abide. In the second place, if we are to move out from analogies in finite personal experience we find that it is possible not only for a finite self-consciousness to survive the flux of time and change, but that it is possible for it to retain certain fundamentals of moral and spiritual purpose unchanged by the lapse of time. The love of a mother is not of a different nature, nor is it less perfect when her child is a babe than when he is a grown-up man. The content of her love may be richer through experience; change has entered into it, and yet it has continued changeless. So also it may be with other moral and spiritual qualities. A man may be perfectly honest to-day, and yet in the breadth of its exercise that term may to-morrow imply in his case a much richer content of experience. The honesty of to-day may never have had opportunities of deep testing, while to-morrow he will have come to the setting of the sun equally honest but mean- time tried by the hot fires of experience. Yet 162 NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING he cannot be said to be less honest at one time than at the other. To be honest or faithful in a few things (if they be all that is given) does not differ in perfection from being honest or faithful in many things. If we think of God as a living, conscious Being, it might be that the divine perfection is of some such order, forever perfect in self-consciousness, in moral purpose and attainment, and yet possessing a constantly enriching experience through the contribution of the temporal order. God must find new occasion for the exercise of his faculties in the ongoing of the world if you and I as individuals are to mean anything particular or personal to him. The voices of two parties are sure to be heard at this point, and we must turn aside to listen to that which they have to say. One will protest that such a God could not be a changing God. The other will say that such a God becomes subject to the temporal order, and therefore is no God. The difficulties in answering these two objec- tions are very great and may indeed be insur- mountable. Nevertheless, let us go on in our reflection as far as we can. The first party must be warned to retrace his steps a little in order to consider the following facts: that the only example of identity in 163 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISK change of which we know anything is in self- conscious personahty; that in the human per- sonaHty we do have a first-hand example of the possibility of identity in change, both changing and transcending change. If, therefore, we are to have anything but unmeaning and unin- telligible flux which bears away upon its surface all identity and all permanence, we must posit a Creative Being or Process with at least that amount of identity and permanence. The second party presents the greater prob- lem. In our theistic thinking we first of all demand a God who cannot be made by his world, and we know this to be a fundamental necessity. Some have gone farther and demand a God whose life is not influenced by his creation, or whose creation is no part of his life. The first half of this demand is important and needful, for otherwise God becomes subject to his world, and the "go" of all things is nothing better than senseless matter. That way we cannot escape a gross materialism and an event- ual skepticism. The second half of this demand compels further study. If God is to be held to take an interest in the moral affairs of man, if there is truth in the doctrine of a human incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ, if the moral and spiritual achievements of man are 164 NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING to be felt by the Divine Life so that they are of any real moment to him, then he must be something more than an eternally static God, self-contained and self-contemplative. If it be true that the Divine does note the fall of a spar- row, there must be avenues of sympathy and contingency which would make the conduct of the world a thing of vital interest. The burden of proof is certainly upon this second party to maintain what would be the meaning of human life to an absolutely changeless Absolute, to whom there is no contingency of human action but only an eternal now. It will be found that if we decide to grant the claim of the second party to this controversy we shall have to deny that any real relation exists between God and his world, and that an incar- nation is no more than a play of words, a dumb drama set upon the stage of life, but without vital meaning. If we are to keep to a God to whom this changing world is of living interest he must be a God whose experience is taking on ever-growing and enriching content from his experiences with his creation, and at the same time he must be held as changeless in his moral perfection and purpose. But another question even more troublesome than this confronts us, which is the possibility of any real relation of the Divine Being to the 165 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM temporal order. If we could settle this, the previous questions would vanish of themselves. Here we must be satisfied to walk rather by faith than by sight, because in matters relating to the Divine Personality it is unreasonable to expect fullness of understanding, and we must be content to abide by some darkness of mys- tery. Just what may be the relation of the Divine Being to the temporal order, who can announce himself competent to declare? It appears, however, that the creation is subject to a time order and something of what that order means to us we can tell. What it would mean to him we have no means of knowing. If, however, he is thought of as transcending the order of time, the questions that have vexed us in regard to the content of the divine experience would vanish. The problem of a growing or changing God would then be seen to hinge upon the meaning and reality of this time experience. It has meaning for us; we believe that it must have some meaning for him, because it is a part of his order, but we are unable to declare just what the meaning of time might be to an Infinite Being. If we fall exhausted on the altar stairs of such reflections, it is because we have reached the point where reflection must give way to faith. The problem of the transcendence of time 166 NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING may become less harassing if we turn our atten- tion to the fact of the practical transcendence of time to be witnessed in the creative action of finite personality. The individual, it is true, is not freed from obedience to the temporal order, but in all purposive and creative action he must rise measurably above the temporal order. Just as abiding self -identity is necessary to give consciousness of change, so the timeless element in personality is necessary to give consciousness of succession. By reason of this transcendence the person is enabled to gather his past into the moment of action, and to foresee the result of his willing. In a very real sense his act is timeless, or time transcend- ing, for past, present, and future are seen as one. In so far also as the individual acts upon that which is out of sight, as a state or condition across seas, or at the receiving end of a wireless station, he is transcending the spatial order as well. We have, then, in finite personality an example in limited scale of a time and space-transcending being, acting after a temporal and spatial order. This furnishes a suggestion — though it is not more than a sug- gestion — of the possibility of a Creative Being, who, timeless and spaceless,^ in the sense of not * Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, pp. 394, 395. 167 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM being dependent upon the temporal and spatial order, for either self -identity or moral perfection, might find a reality, a purpose and a pleasure in the creations of such an order. Especially might this hold true if space and time were necessary to such individual self-consciousness as is demanded for the creation of moral and spiritual beings of his own order. It is plain that, however much of pain there may have been in the process, some definition of God that will leave him something else than forever static, forever self-contained, at infinite remove from the actualities of his world, is necessary to a very living and practical belief in him. We might by psychological analysis determine the general terms under which to describe God. We might decide on these neces- sary general attributes, and yet it is apparent that we should be no farther toward the posses- sion of him in fact. For he must be held as something more than a succession or even a combination of psychical states if he is to be thought of as possessing personality, or entering with any reality into our earthly and changing lives. The conception presented here may when developed be not altogether inadequate for faith, because out demand for changelessness in the Divine Being depends, not upon a hving 168 NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING experience in him, but, rather, in those moral verities that do not pass nor change. At this point such a demand is just, for a God whose purpose, whose morahty, or whose self-identity was subject to change would be entirely in- adequate for the religious needs of men. The philosophy of change has not, however, cleared our way to this happy conclusion and never can so long as it erects change, the process, into the place which can rightly be taken only by creative personality, the Ground of all Being. A True World-Ground Must be Self- Creative It should have been made clear by the fore- going discussion that if we are to apply the doctrine of duration to the world outside the narrow limits of human action, we must think of the Divine Being or "vital" impulse as self- creative. Unless we do so we become involved in the infinite regress of the mechanist and there is no place to stop short of the shadowy vague- ness of the Unknowable. This might not be so dire a catastrophe if we could comfortably rest in such a skepticism. Even if we were to assume an Unknowable, it would become necessary for us, as it was for Spencer, to bring forward abundant assertions of knowledge to 169 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM meet the simplest explanations of metaphysics. Arguing on the empirical plane of cause and effect, it will appear impossible to understand the possibility of self-creation in God or in anything else. At any rate, we could suffer no more distressing fate at the hands of any theory than that which has come upon us by following the ways of empiricism. Bergson was very conscious of this fact when he criticized the Spencerian method of cutting reality up into little bits like the parts of a picture puzzle, in order that one might have the pleasure of setting them together again in their due order and then fondly dreaming that he had accounted for all progress. But if the idea of self -creativity be difficult here, let us go again to the one immediate example of creative activity which we have in human personality. We find the individual not only producing that which cannot be accounted for on any rigid system of material cause and effect, but we find that in such creative activity he is bringing into being new powers within himself. It is possible for a man, acting in line with pre- conceived purpose, to increase mental and phy- sical powers so that he does actually become a new man in relation to his world. The exercise of his creative activity not only brings to pass new things in the world around him; there is a 170 NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING sense in which the greater and more mysterious result is not without him but within. This power is the peculiar possession of personality. If, then, we can find a real sense in which human personality is self-creative, it is not so difiicult to see that the Creative Being might through the very changes which he brings to pass in a changing world be realizing his own personality. He might be creating himself endlessly and yet transcending that world of change through which he realizes himself. In such a case it might appear that a changing world is necessary to a conception of a living, self-realizing God. Instead of needing to affirm a God of Change, in order to meet the serious problems of meta- physics, we really need no more radical affir- mation than that of the ancient Hebrews who conceived of God as a living God. The more we analyze this conception of a living God the more are we likely to be impressed with its adequateness and satisfactoriness. Reflection as well as revelation may show, too, that such a living and self-realizing God is necessary as a fundamental assumption of any philosophy of change that shall be able to survive. Such a conclusion would be of a startling and profound importance in the bearing it would have upon the possibility of a Divine incarna- tion. It would go far toward revolutionizing 171 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM many current theories regarding the relation of God to the world. We trust that some future day or some future work may see this truth scientifically drawn out and developed. It might then be seen that the idea of a growing God, instead of being repugnant to the religious sense, might become the greatest aid to faith and theism. It might be seen that the richness and content of the divine life demands for its increase and fulfillment a revelation and a realization of its relationship to its creation which could be expressed only in an incarna- tion. Thus might be abolished at a stroke objections to the incarnation which on the old basis are difficult of solution. If we stop to consider the commonly assigned attributes of the Divine Being, we shall find them falling into two general groups. The first are those that spring out of moral character, and the second are those that spring out of the relation of an Infinite God to a temporal and spatial world. It is unnecessary to do more than briefly mention them. In the first group are the metaphysical and moral qualities, first cause, holiness, personality. In the second group are omnipresence, omniscience, and omnip- otence, which wholly concern the relation which God must bear to the temporal and spatial order. They are, in short, the necessary 17^ NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING affirmations that a man must make that his God is not subject to the spatial and temporal relations to which he finds himself subject, that he is a time- transcending Being who exer- cises power and knowledge, free from the limitations of human beings. If we are to press these general terms as if they themselves represent the fullness of the Divine character, we shall be as wrong in our estimate of God as the functional psychologists are in their estimate of man. We cannot possibly by pro- ducing these terms produce the Divine Person- ality. These are but the beggarly definitions by which we attempt to set off and visualize for human understanding that which is invisible and unthinkable. For that very reason we should hold more to the fundamental moral qualities without which God is unthinkable. It may be found in the end sufficient for faith if we hold to the fact of his moral personality, his continuous and self-creative power by which he is realizing himself in some manner through the change and progress of the world of men and things. 173 CHAPTER VII THE FRAGILE FLOWER OF HUMAN PERSONALITY The Impossibility of an Impersonal Freedom H. WiLDON Carr, one of the most sympa- thetic and clear-visioned exponents of the philosophy of change, closes a chapter entitled "God, Freedom, and Immortality" with the statement that so far as the question of per- sonality in God, which is no affair of philosophy, is concerned, the system has no contribution to make; and that as to what lies beyond us in the unseen world it has no clear and confident note, but that it is reassuring on the supreme value, which is freedom. This result will hardly prove satisfying, because if metaphysics can find no ground for personality, for that unique creative power which is manifested in personality, about which the philosophy of change is so largely written, unless the ultimate creative activity is endowed with self-creative powers, we have only taken another turn at the weary treadmill of dialectic. It is because the philosophy of change does not end at this 174 HUMAN PERSONALITY point that it gives encouragement to think that another great step has been taken in philosophy. In so far as we are given the means to escape this ignoble result, so far does the philosophy of change achieve success. For it is readily seen that, apart from personality, freedom can possess no meaning. In order to lift itself above the drift of atoms, and to become anything more than meaningless and accidental concur- rence of atoms which possess no power of self- direction, freedom must have both a forward and a backward look, and be the result of intel- ligent choice. Otherwise things, persons, and events are the mere play of driving forces behind and around them, absolutely predeter- mined. Intelligent choice is a necessary ele- ment in all freedom, and freedom cannot be maintained nor made intelligible without it. The minute we assume impersonality in the ground of being, that minute we deny any freedom outside of human action, and the freedom that we posit in the material world becomes but the phantom and shadow cast by the human mind. Thus it will appear that when Carr admits that the philosophy of change has nothing to give us at this point he is indi- cating the element of greatest weakness in the system. If personality cannot be metaphy- sically maintained in conjunction with the 175 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM common postulates of the philosophy of change, the system must be allowed to negate itself. Bergson's Definition of Personality It is not at all surprising that so close a critic has reached this conclusion, for in his definition of personality Bergson has at no point appeared to strive for exactness. In the early pages of Matter and Memory it is assumed that person- ality is identical with "my body," which is a center of action, one in the midst of the many images that make up the material world. ^ In this shifting of the center of interest from "image among other images" to "my body," and in the undiscriminating reference to the personality, as "image" and as "body" belong- ing to "me," he has opened a whole world of misunderstanding in regard to the meaning of personality. The point may be raised that the meaning of personality is one of the darkest of all mysteries, and it must be admitted that such is the fact. Nevertheless, if we can pre- 1 "My body is then, in the aggregate of the material world, an image which acts like other images, receiving and giving back movement, with perhaps this difference only, that my body appears to choose within certain limits the manner in which it shall restore what it receives. . . . My body, an object destined to move other objects, is, then, a center of action; it cannot give birth to a representation" (Matter and Memory, pp. 4. 6). 176 HUMAN PERSONALITY serve a greater measure of clearness by keeping to well-defined terms, we shall have made advance over a method which hides inconsis- tencies under a shuffling of words not synony- mous. In the above reference we have the personality referred to as an "image," a "body," an "object," and an "I." It is exactly this indefiniteness which puts an unendurable burden on clear thinking. In fact, the whole realm of metaphysics is involved in the assumptions of this seemingly innocent paragraph. Questions will arise whether the self is more than an "image"; what are the possible implications arising out of the definitions of the world as an "aggregate of images" of which the personality is one. The basic meaning of the word "image" gives us an indefiniteness sug- gestive of phenomenality and subjectiveness. Or, if we are to prefer the terms "body" and "object" as the sources of unique personal energy, we must ask whether the motions originate in the muscular portions of the body, whether decisions are made by the lobes of the brain, or whether behind all there is a regnant spirit of which the body is but the tool or instrument of action. If the former be true, we are landed in a materialism from which not all the king's horses and all the king's men can rescue us. If the latter be true, it is not ade- 177 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM quate to speak of my body, which is only the seat of my personahty, as if it were "I." To do so is to confuse the carpenter with his plane, or the artist with his brush, or the engineer with his engine. True it is that the dullness or perfection of these instruments will make pro- found difference with the work accomplished. They may have a reflex action on the creative- ness of spirit in him who uses them, but none but the stupid would dream that he could insert the terms "plane," "brush," and "engine" indifferently as exact synonyms for "carpenter," "artist," and "engineer." If some one objects that in the matter of personality this is insisting upon an exactness which in the nature of the case is impossible, we should reply that a mystery assumed as such is quite endurable and often necessary, but that a mystery which makes pretension to scientific analysis and intel- ligibility under equivocal terms is impossible. Nor is Bergson more clear in his description of the self -identifying unity of personality. Here the unity would seem to be altogether a matter of mental concentration. He declares that two views are possible regarding the unity or manifoldness of personality. If I declare self -consciousness one, many inner voices, sensa- tions, feelings, and ideas protest. If I declare it manifold, my own consciousness rebels, 178 HUMAN PERSONALITY saying that these sensations, feelings, and ideas are but effects or states of the undivided self. In fact, the manifoldness is the effect of the impact of the self on life.^ The point that seems to escape us in this 2 "Is my own person, at a given moment, one or manifold? If I declare it one, inner voices arise and protest — those of the sensations, feeling, ideas among which my individuality is distributed. But, if I make it distinctly manifold, my consciousness rebels quite as strongly; it affirms that my sensations, my feeling, my thoughts, are abstractions, which I effect on my self, and that each of my states implies all the others. I am then (all must adopt the language of under- standing, since only the understanding has a language) as unity that is multiple and a multiplicity that is one; but unity and multiplicity are only views of my personality taken by an understanding that directs its categories at me; I enter neither into the one nor into the other, nor into both at once, although both, united, may give a fair imitation of mutual interpenetration and continuity that I find at the base of my own self. Such is my inner life, and such also is life in general. While, in its contact with matter, life is comparable to an impulsion or an impetus, regarded in itself, it is an immensity of potentiality, a mutual encroachment of thousands and thousands of tendencies, which nevertheless are 'thousands and thousands' only when once regarded as outside of each other, that is, when spatialized. Contact with matter is what determines this dissociation. Matter divides actually what was but potentially manifold; and, in this sense, indi- viduation is in part the work of matter, in part the result of life's own inclination. Thus, a distinct sentiment, which bursts into verses, lines, and words, may be said to have already contained this multiplicity of individuated elements, and yet, in fact, it is the materiality of language that creates it" (Matter and Memory, pp. 257, 258). 179 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM discussion is the one that is of the most import- ance. While we are analyzing the personality as a multiplicity of states, sensations, feelings, and ideas, the really important party to the transaction is the indivisible *'me" that does the analyzing. It is always there, abiding above and beyond all analysis, and forever refusing to be caught up in the multiplicity of which it thinks. It is this unanalyzable self that is the reality, and we must be satisfied to accept this element of personal realism and accept the "self" at its face value. That this fact is, under better auspices, apparent to Bergson himself is to be gleaned from his Introduction to Meta- physics, in which he represents personality as both multiplicity and unity. The important question for philosophy is to determine wherein the uniqueness of this unity in multiplicity lies. It is something more than a sum of sensations, feelings, and ideas.^ 3 "That personality as unity cannot be denied; but such an affirmation teaches one nothing about the extraordinary nature of the particular unity presented by personality. That our self is multiple, I also agree, but then it must be understood that it is a multiplicity which has nothing in common with any other multiplicity. What really is import- ant for philosophy is to know exactly what unity, what multiplicity, and what reality, superior both to abstract unity and multiplicity, the multiple unity of the self actually is. Now, philosophy will know this only when it recovers pos- session of the simple intuition of the self by the self. Then, 180 HUMAN PERSONALITY Inasmuch as analysis cannot give us "anything that at all resembles the self," it would seem that the ultimate mystery, behind which we cannot go, is personality itself. The conscious- ness of personality seems to be gained by simple intuition and not by analysis. This interior reality is something enduring through time and surviving the multiplied states of consciousness. This enduring consciousness is memory with something additional, for it is conscious of the present moment and brings all the past to the point of action.^ according to the direction it chooses for its descent from this summit, it will arrive at unity or multiplicity, or at any one of the concepts by which we try to define the moving life of the self. But no mingling of these concepts would give any- thing which at all resembles the self that endures" (Intro- duction to Metaphysics, pp. 38, 39). * "There is one reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our own personality in its flowing through time — our self which endures. . . . When I direct my attention inward to contem- plate my own self (supposed for the moment to be inactive), I perceive, at first, as a crust solidified on the surface, all the perceptions which come to it from the material world. . . . Next, I notice the memories which more or less adhere to these perceptions, and which serve to interpret them. These memories have been detached, as it were, from the depth of my personality, drawn to the surface by the perceptions that resemble them; they rest on the surface of my mind without being absolutely myself. Lastly, I feel the stir of tendencies and motor habits — a crowd of virtual actions more or less firmly bound to these perceptions and memories. All these 181 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM If the impossibility of pushing personahty to the final analysis is recognized, it seems hardly necessary to maintain that it is a matter clearly defined elements appear more distinct from me, the more distinct they are from each other. Radiating as they do from within outward, they form, collectively, the surface of a sphere which tends to grow larger and lose itself in the exterior world. But if I draw myself in from the periphery toward the center, if I search in the depths of my being that which is not uniformly, most consistently, and most enduringly myself, I find an altogether different thing. "There is beneath these sharply cut crystals and this frozen surface a continuous flux which is not comparable to any flux I have ever seen. There is a succession of states, each of which announces that which follows, and contains that which precedes it ... . This inner life may be compared to the unrolling of a coil, for there is no living being who does not feel himself coming gradually to the end of the role; and to live is to grow old. But it may just as well be compared to a continual rolling up, like that of a thread on a ball, for our past follows us, it swells incessantly with the present which it picks up on its way; and consciousness means memory. "But actually, it is neither an unrolling nor a rolling up, for these two similes evoke the idea of lines and surfaces whose parts are homogeneous and superposable on one another. Now, there are no two identical moments in the life of the same conscious being. Take the simplest sensa- tion, suppose it constant, absorb in it the entire personality; the consciousness which will accompany this sensation cannot remain identical with itself for two consecutive moments, because the second moment always contains, over and above the first, the memory that the first has bequeathed to it. A consciousness which could experience two identical moments would be a consciousness without memory. It would die and be born again continually" (An Introduction to Meta- physics, pp. 11, 13). 182 HUMAN PERSONALITY of degree, as Bergson does when he speaks of it as a complete organism more easily distinguished as such than animals and plants. This ascend- ing ease of distinction, he thinks, is due to ascending degrees in individuality.^ The root meaning of the term "individuality" is what the term implies, its distinction from other individuals. We certainly should make no progress in number did we not assume the integers of our computation to be distinct in their own right. There would be nothing but confusion in attempting to count two units as if they were one or as if they were partially identical. We could not speak of the first unit as being a unity only in degree without at least falling into the abstractions of theoretical math- 5 "While the subdivision of matter into separate bodies is relative to our perception, while the building up of closed-off systems of material points is relative to our science, the living body has been separated and closed off by nature herself. It is composed of unlike parts that complete each other. It performs diverse functions that involve each other. It is an individual, and of no other object, not even of the crystal, can this be said, for a crystal has neither difference of parts nor diversity of functions. No doubt it is hard even to decide in the organized world what is individual and what is not. The difficulty is great even in the animal kingdom; with plants it is almost insurmountable. This difficulty is, more- over, due to profound causes, on which we shall dwell later. We shall see that individuality admits of any number of degrees and that it is not fully realized anywhere, even in man" (Creative Evolution, p. 12). 183 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM ematics. In other words, there must be estab- lished meanings to the terms we use. If we intend to use the term "individuaUty" or "personaHty" with a definiteness that will enable us to make progress, we must retain the meaning as we have defined it at least until the equation has been worked out. It will not do to change the quantity of the unknown symbol in the process of finding its value. Out of the discussion we find emerging two ideas of the self; one, the seK of intuition, of action; the other, the self of intelligence, of rationalization. What the self of action and intuition would be apart from intelligence it is impossible to determine. One great object of the philosophy of change is to end the warfare between the conflicting ideas of mind as matter and mind as spirit. It understands very clearly the impossibility of explaining the facts either by materialism alone or by idealism alone. It sees that realism must issue in denying the reality of matter, and materialism must end in phenomenalism. What it fails to see is that the rift it makes in personality by the division into intuition and intelligence is a gulf as impossible to bridge as was that of the older dualism. If there is one thing above another that distin- guishes personality, that makes it what it is, it is the indivisible presence of intelligence in 184 HUMAN PERSONALITY intuition. It may do for the sake of analysis to speak as if at one end of a line it were possible to set a mark which is pure perception, not dis- tinguishable from matter, and at the other end a mark which will represent pure memory, indis- tinguishable from spirit, but in actual life these points are inseparable. If we are to get at the concrete facts, we must reach them by a certain personal realism which includes all. We be- lieve that there are many evidences that this is the goal after which Bergson is striving. It is no help toward that goal, it is introducing only confusion and unclearness, to speak of the self as if there were on the one hand a self of action, and on the other a self of intelligence. Whatever intelligence the self has is brought to bear from moment to moment, is a part of action, of experience of duration, because any concrete or real intelligence is related to the self at the moment of action and unrelated intel- ligence is impossible. We have in the setting forth of this order of dualism a situation analo- gous to that against which Bergson contends. This is the situation of the sensationalists who regard ideas as if they could exist apart from life and action, stored in the brain as in a ware- house, filed and ticketed and ready to come forth on demand. While such an explanation of the relation may give great comfort to the 185 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM imagination, may lead to a semblance of prog- ress, and may promise the solution of the deepest mysteries of the self, it will be found on examina- tion one of those solutions which consist in taking out what one has already put in. One writer^ has correctly called attention to the fact appearing in this connection, that individuation, or personality arising from im- pediments in the way of the "elan," furnishes souls that differ only as they mutilate the mes- sage which all alike are trying to repeat. The justice of this criticism will appear to us the moment we consider the definition of funda- mental reality under the figure of the rising stream which continually resists the condensing and falling drops of water which itself creates, and which correspond to matter. Having mentioned it in another connection, we waive here the right to the criticism that this assump- tion places matter as an element in its own genesis, and the attendant question of how we came by the "original" matter which was before creative spirit began to resist it. Let us come directly to the consideration of personality as one of the products thrown off by the unceasing stream of spirit in its eternal contest. We ought not perhaps to dwell much on the startling analogy which the illustration furnishes of an * Santayana, Winds of Doctrine, p. 104. 186 HUMAN PERSONALITY identity in definition of personality and matter, though we cannot prevent this ghost from rising to disturb our speculation. The question which really annoys is a deeper one, and on it hang greater issues. If this is a true description of personality, we inquire whether the dis- tinguishing feature of personality be matter or spirit. If akinness to matter is the mark of personality, whence that unique creative energy which we behold in persons .^^ Instead of re- ducing personality to the lower rank of matter, might it not be quite as reasonable to posit it as the rising tide of spirit which lifts matter with it from the lower to the higher order? Is per- sonality an impediment in the way of the free activity of the vital "elan," or is it not, rather, the expression of that "elan" in its rising and successful conflict with matter .^^ One thing is certain, at this point we stand at the very crossroads. It may seem unimportant which way we take. The signs on the guidepost may not indicate the deeper significance in the goals to which they lead. But one way leads directly to the assumption of the triumph of materialism, and the eventual conclusion that matter is the fundamental reality against which the tides of spirit exhaust themselves in vain. Along this road, all that we discover leads us to find reality in the running down of spirit. We pass through 187 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM a grand continuous graveyard in which we can see nothing until after it is dead. If this be the case, it is quite foolish to speak of evolution, for all change must be toward devolution. To use an Irishism, our only progress is a retreat. On such a basis we can never know anything about the "elan" except to witness the melan- choly evidences of its failure before the more powerful influences of matter. This way we have not "elan vitale," but the deadness of inertia. This blind alley will always misguide us so long as we consider matter the fundamental reality, or so long as we think of matter and spirit as two independent streams of reality, or so long as we adopt the standpoint of imper- sonalism. It is only as personality becomes the source of all things and all lesser person- alities are measurably superior to matter, that we can escape the impasse and breathe again the air of freedom. Disappearance of the Ground of Per- sonal Immortality Another factor in the treatment of the problem of personality by the philosophy of change needs now to be mentioned. In the definition of personality just considered there is no ground for the positing of immortality. 188 HUMAN PERSONALITY This will to some minds seem quite unimportant, to others it will appear a grave defect in any system of philosophy. Our own feeling is that, aside from the demands of religious faith, there is a certain pragmatic demand which insists that philosophy shall at least not be inimical to the claims for personal immortality. Usually, that which is a universal demand of the human spirit will be found to reach root deeply into reality and life. This demand will increase if we assume that personality is necessary to all duration. If there be no personality in the creative "elan," we can have neither progress nor intelligibility in the universe, and it might be that the preservation of those person- alities which are the feebler and lesser lights of itself would be the supreme demand in its experience of duration. If human personality has any light to throw upon the problem it is all in this direction. The supreme interests of our own duration cluster about other person- alities which are bound to us by one tie or another. Certain it is that when these rela- tions are broken we are filled with a sense of the futility and emptiness of life. The inten- sity of this feeling has been profoundly expressed in the poem of an Indian woman.^ ' Sarojini Naidu, in "The Golden Threshold," p. 46. 189 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM "Lamp of my life, the lips of Death Have blown thee out with their sudden breath; Naught shall revive thy vanished spark .... Love, must I dwell in the living dark? "Tree of my life. Death's cruel foot Hath crushed thee down to thy hidden root; Naught shall restore thy glory fled .... Shall the blossom live when the soul is dead? "Life of my life. Death's bitter sword Hath severed us like a broken word. Rent us in twain who are but one .... Shall the flesh survive when the soul is gone?" If our human lives were to be deprived of all interest in other personalities, it is difficult to tell what worth, beauty, or inspiration would be left to us. Our religion takes form and becomes of vital value and comfort only as it centers around personality. Not only is it difficult to extract much of value from the worship of a Deity who is an abstract force, but as we are constituted it is impossible. The anthropomorphizing tendency in man, though it is often abused, is also often misunderstood and slandered. The creative energy possesses meaning for us only as it is akin to ourselves. This demand is as deep and insistent as our nature and cannot be denied. The demand for an incarnation is not an insistence on low- ering God to our limited human state, but is, 190 HUMAN PERSONALITY rather, the insistence that the best that is in us is identical with and bears kinship to that Goodness which we conceive to He at the heart of Deity. Some day men of greatly diverse beliefs will recognize this as the common ground of a larger faith. Returning to the argument, there is this to be considered. The corollary of personality in the creative "elan" is the continuance of personality or immor- tality in lesser intelligences. If we are to consider the interests that would attract the mind of such creative personality, it would evidently not be the lesser and material crea- tions which formed the steps of evolution, but personality itself. If the scientist loves to declare the indestructibility of matter, it is quite as reasonable to believe in the indestruct- ibility of that which is the culmination of the creative process. If any portion of the creative energy springs from an endeavor to find itseK, to realize larger aspirations and purposes, we are forced to believe that these interests will be centered in those creations which are most like itself, and which represent its highest attain- ment. It certainly would be false to all that we know of human nature to cast to the void the self-conscious products of one's own love and care. Such action becomes self -destructive. To acknowledge the reality of the soul and of the 191 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM supreme human interests involves the logical belief in immortality. For him who denies these higher realities we have no argument. To one who has deeply considered life or who has entered profoundly into its experiences it is impossible to take the trivial and fantastic view assumed by some commentators on Bergson. Immortality is a metaphysical question because it is linked indissolubly with one's conception of the World-Ground. It is of the very essence of personality to resent such a conclusion because of the indignity cast upon the highest human values. Not only in moments of deepest intuition, but likewise in moments of deepest insight and intelligence we feel the deeper truth that personality lives beyond the fickle and passing environments which close it in, and we catch the truth of the picture drawn by Frederic Lawrence Knowles in "The Tenant:"^ "This body is my house — it is not I: Herein I sojourn till in some far sky, I lease a fairer dwelling, fit to last Till all the carpentry of time is past. When from my high place viewing this lone star. What shall I care where these poor timbers are? What though the crumbling walls turn dust and loam — I shall have left them for a larger home. What though the rafters break, the stanchions rot. ' Love Triumphant, p. 192. 192 HUMAN PERSONALITY When earth has dwindled to a glimmering spot! When thou, clay cottage, fallest, I'll immerse My long cramp't spirit in the universe. Through uncomputed silences of space I shall yearn upward to the leaning Face. The ancient heavens will roll aside for me. As Moses monarched the dividing sea. This body is my house, it is not I, Triumphant in this faith I live and die." A Doctrine of Personality is Funda- mental TO Metaphysical Under- standing It has become a truism in philosophy that the reality of personality is fundamental to intelli- gence; that if we cannot believe in our own reality, we cannot be sure of any knowledge whatever. What is not so generally recognized is the fact that personality is a metaphysical as well as an epistemological necessity. If the second demand be conceded, the first also must be granted. Understanding implies not only an intelligent personality, it implies also an intelligible world. An intelligible world can proceed only from an intelligence which in some way measures up to the meaning of per- sonality. That there should be some mystery about this creative personality is not to be wondered at, since the mystery of our own creative wills is the despair of philosophy. 103 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM The universe can be seen and understood only from this personalistic standpoint. Whatever vaticinations we indulge we inevitably circle round to this necessary affirmation, and it is the fundamental one in life. Any philosophy, therefore, which hopes to get along without accounting for the deepest fact in life can never permanently satisfy the mind nor fulfill the demand that intelligence is sure to make. Just as power in the state is measured by its accord with truth, righteousness, and honor, and just as failure at this point introduces principles of ruin to the state; just as a structure is no stronger than the foundations on which it is built, or an army is powerful only in keeping with its food supply, so any system of philosophy which does not answer to the deepest needs and instincts of the human spirit cannot survive. Any theory which seeks to omit the ultimate explanation is no explanation at all. It may be a valuable exercise in dialectic, or an exhila- rating run about a circle, but there has been no progress and no gain. So any philosophy which is unclear in its definition of personality and its relation to fundamental being is unclear in all. It furnishes an illustration in philosophy of an analogous truth oft quoted in another realm, that he who is guilty of the breach of one com- mandment is guilty of all. 194 SECTION n PERSONAL REALISM CHAPTER Vin THE AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM Realism in General Mr. Bertrand Russell/ referring to the paradoxes of Zeno, points out that in the case of Hercules overtaking the tortoise, and in the case of the flying arrow at rest during each moment of flight, realism considers the reality as a continuum rather than as an infinite series of jumps. This reference illustrates the aim of most modern realism which wearies of an unending dialectic that loses itself and its reality in the infinite series of mathematical calculation. Realism has done this service for the world, that it persists in clinging to the most obvious, whatever else it may have to relinquish. Just because life itself is some- thing more than definition or idea, because at no point can we seize upon it in our most vivid intellectualizations, realism is given its great opportunity in the history of speculation. Seen at its highest and best, it is the formal effort ' Monist, 1913, p. 484. For more complete discussion see Russell, Scientific Method in Philosophy. 197 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM to stop analyzing away the true nature of being. In so far as it is a protest against the madness of a dry scholasticism, it is of unreck- oned value. Neo-Realism Neo-realism aims to perform this service for thought by putting forward two funda- mental propositions. The first is that the object of perception is absolutely independent of consciousness. The second is the identity of the real object with the actual percept, which in the case of one school of neo-realism, leads to the position that the reality is in the relation between subject and object. Now, if an older form of realism failed by ignoring the mental and spiritual facts in the problem of life, making matter the only inde- pendent reality, and if idealism, coming from an opposite direction, failed because it ignored the reality which exists independent of the individual experience, it will in like manner probably be true that neo-realism, seeking a unity independent of personality, must also fail. Our only hope can be in some system which, whatever its troubles, will not overlook any essential feature of the problem. Neither he who considers thing at the expense of 198 AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM thought, nor he who considers thought at the expense of thing, nor he who considers thought and thing under the form of abstract relation as the fundamental reality, has the elements of the equation necessary for a solution of the problem. There is another entity more abiding than the fleeting world, itself transcending the passing perception, more than thought or any mental content, specifically but perilously ig- nored, and it is the self -identifying person. The unity gained by idealism is a false unity, rest- ing on a partial world; the unity gained by realism is gained by assuming a partial world; the unity gained by neo-realism arises through an arbitrary attempt to make one by fiat the sundered sides of consciousness. But there is a unity which is neither the result of crude and unconsidered sense-thinking, nor of the strained effort of abstraction, nor of a philosophizing into unity that which men separate in thinking, namely, subject and object. This indivisible unity which none can doubt nor dissever is the unity which abides in per- sonality itself. Take, for instance, the matter of perception. Upon reflection it will be seen that the crux of the problem of perception lies in self-identification and not in the absence of self-defining qualities. I do not know things because in some Nirvanal trance my perceptions 199 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM become identical with objects, nor because objects become "me," nor because I become objects, "entering into them," as Bergson declares. It is the self-defining quality of the human understanding that makes perception possible. Unless I can relate a thing to myself in the spatial or temporal order it is impossible for me to perceive it at all. This self or personality is no mere product of the juxtaposition of mind and matter, but is self-directive. It can per- ceive what it will, and can measurably neglect to perceive what it will. It is greater than its surroundings, for it has power to transcend or to overcome all of a lesser order than itself. When it comes to other personalities, if person- ality be the fundamental reality, it finds itself working within the orderly limits set by a supreme personality which upholds the world and all lesser personalities to its own transcending purpose. The lesser personality finds itself compelled to limits of a certain moral and physical order. This is the point at which the individual personality finds itself impotent against the general good which is written into the constitution of existing things. Personal Realism It is to be noted that personal realism differs 200 AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM sharply from neo-realism in this, that neo-real- ism assumes relation as the fundamental reality. Not mind alone, as in idealism, nor matter alone, as in materialism, but the actual relation of mind and matter as joined in the act of per- ception is the neo-realistic claim for the funda- mental reality. It will be easily seen that neo-realism thus leaves no provision for con- necting these varied and multiform perceptions into any series or unity. Each is reality itself in the moment of being. Each reality arises like a bubble on the waters of life and is immediately lost as its place is taken by other perceptions. There could be no life, no self- identification, for all would rise and pass away in the act of perceiving. (a) Personal Realism Affirms Indivisibility of Personality. Personal realism, on the other hand, con- tends for the indivisibility of personality rather than for that of relation. It holds that the relator rather than the relation is the finality. This claim for indivisible and unanalyzable consciousness in perception, which is personality, constitutes the realistic element. The question may be asked, "Why call it realism at all.^" The answer must be the obvious kinship with the prevailing modern 201 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM type of realism. Personal realism will be found, first of all, holding to the fact that reality is a connection and a relation which is indivisible, except in the abstract analysis of the psychologist, an analysis which never can be identified with the fact, but can only sym- bolize it in order to understand it. So far, the theory is in strict agreement with both Bergson and the neo-realists. But personal realism holds that we cannot stop here without imminent peril to our philosophy. Reality never exists in the abstract, but only in the concrete instance. The relation of mind and matter, then, to be rigorously realistic, exists only in the specific, concrete cases in which personality is involved. The essential reality is in the relator and not in the relation. To hold the relation as fundamental is to drop into the dijQSculties of idealism, if one is to pursue to the end a course of logical consistency. A system of relations built of disconnected perceptions could yield nothing of knowledge or intelligibility. We should have a world of relations with no power of interpretation. The experiences of the individual would not hold together from moment to moment, and science would be impossible. It is only because of the survival of a self-identifying element which does the relating, that either the indi- 202 AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM vidual or the changing world possesses meaning or value. What, then, is the indivisibihty in the act of perception or in the act of life, if you will, which stolidly refuses to be caught up and fully expressed by any rationalization, or analysis which the mind may bend upon it? This indi- visible unity is a personality, the seK-identi- fying unit in the act of perception. We believe that in this position we come nearest the heart of a consistent realism. The moment we assume relation as the fundamental reality, that moment we have begun that process of intellectualization against which Bergson protests as leading away from actual expe- rience. We cannot get to relation until we have gotten away from the primary act, which is life, to an analysis of it, which is idealism.^ ^ "Ce j'y decouvre, c'est une iudividualite concrete et vivante, une source permanente d'energie. Sans doute je generalise mon moi, comme tout le reste; je le depouille aussi, par une analyse mentale, de ses modes et de ses attributs: je le mets a part et rensois de cette maniere a le convertir en une forme dessechee, indeterminee, impersonelle, qui ne vit ni ne sent. Mes se produit Incolore de ma raison, cet etat derive du moi n'est pas plus le moi dont j'ai conscience qu'un squelette n'est un homme ou qu'un mappemonde n'est la terre. Le moi, pris dans son etat naturel et sur le vif, c'est cette energie toujours en travail, qui per9oit et s'aperyoit, qui induit et deduit, qui jouit et souffre, qui se passionne de haine et d'amour, qui delibere, veut et meut. Le moi reel, c'est une force sans cesse agissante et reagissante et de mille manieres k la fois. Rien, evidemment, ne ressemble moins 203 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM In this neo-realism is nearer, much nearer, to ideaHsm than either the neo-reahst or the ideaHst would be wiUing to admit. But when the neo-reahsts ask us to consider the act of perception as a "putting of ourselves in things" they are certainly asking after a rationalization, a transcendentalization, if you please, which is nothing more than a figure of speech. The primary fact of perception is a person who relates the world to himself. For instance. Perry claims to avoid the dual- ism of realism by substituting the idea of rela- tion for that of substance.^ But, with Perry, perception is a relation of conscious subject to environment. They are not separated into two spheres. Their relation is the fad. He hopes thus to get over the duahsm between subject and object. Error, he declares, is due to subjectivity. This can mean simply that whatever does the relating relates wrongly, draws the wrong conclusion. So at a stroke is reerected the dualism of which he had dis- posed. He declares the cardinal principle of neo-realism to be the "independence of the k ces symboles amortis et inertes que rentendement se fait des choses et qui n'ont d' existence que pour lui et par lui: rien ne ressemble moins a un etre logique que le moi" (Piat, La Personne Humaine, p. 381). ' Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 308. S04 AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM imminent."'* He maintains the independence of external objects, he now seems to maintain the independence of ideas, because the idea is not the product of immediate perception but of perceptions worked upon by something which holds supervisory and dictatorial powers, i. e., by the human personaHty. Thus his impersonal realism vanishes.^ I am quite aware that the assumption that the primary fact of perception is a person who relates the world to himself does not settle the question of metaphysics. The difficulty arising from this postulate by a demand for person- ality in the Supreme Being will be discussed in another connection. But this simple assump- tion concerning perception will at least avoid the issues which pluralism immediately thrusts upon neo-realism at this point. Here it seems strange that there should have been no deeper searching of heart, because, in the very nature of the case, the pluralism which necessarily follows the usual affirmations of neo- realism not only negates the reality of knowl- edge of the world, it denies to personality any place in its system. The first point is disclosed in this: that a consistently pluralistic universe could be only an inexplicable accident. * Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 313. '^ Compare Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 326. 205 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM For any progress or any understanding there must be a certain unity of cooperation. A strictly pluralistic universe is a contradiction of terms. If there is coordination between its various elements, if there is to be any understanding, there must be some unity or coherence in the understanding subject. At least it must be granted that if the subject of experience is altogether involved in the universal flux, a passing mood of psychical states and varying consciousnesses, all dissolves as surely into nothing as if we were to lose ourselves in the Absolute of extreme idealism. To repeat what has already been said, the two systems are closer than their advocates think. The only unity, then, is not a unity of things, of absolutes, nor of relations considered apart from appearance in concrete personalities. The unity is in personality itself. The only charter which we possess for community of under- standing and interpretation of our world lies in personality, finite and supreme. Unless we reach this standpoint the explanation of science, of mathematics, of sociology, of language itself casts upon us an intolerable burden. We do perceive the world after an unaccountable similitude; the procession of cause and effect does bear to ignorant and learned, to good, bad, and indifferent, very identical meanings; quan- 206 AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM tity and division in mathematics speak with certain inevitable exactnesses which the wildest philosophy cannot ignore or abrogate. To attempt it would land the victim in the psycho- pathic ward of the hospital. There are social relationships which bind all men of good will with unbroken bonds, and men of ill will with an inexorable imperative. The individual cannot decide to have a language of his own, insisting on his own peculiar meanings for the sounds of speech without danger to life and limb on the crowded streets of our cities. The cry of "Wolf," once infilled with a meaning strange to the generality of men, may prove embar- rassing to the man who insists on so using the term. It ought not to be difficult to see in the face of multiplying instances that this unity, upon which thought, science, institutions, and action in the world are founded, is a unity that grows out of the nature of personality. If it be asked, further, how a world of matter can correspond to a world of intelligences, it needs only to affirm that the source of things and intelligences is a common one; that both systems exist by virtue of a supreme personality which unceasingly wills both into being. In such a case the problem springs not from the strange yet familiar coordination, the wonder arises from any gaps or failure in coordination. As 207 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM a matter of fact, the most perplexing questions of life do spring exactly from these sources. The world is brought into unity, not because the diverse streams of reality spring from a common, far-off push, but because they exist in time as a part of the continually exercised creative will. And here at last is freedom, for a world of new relations and truths might at any time come to birth through the moral growth of man and a new mastery of nature granted by a Divine Will. When we look at life, existence, perception, in this light, we see that in the fact of personality perception and reality coincide. This is what we mean by personal realism.^ Perhaps the most serious objection to be raised against this conclusion will come from the realm of abnormal psychology. It will be held as an argument against the indivisibility of personality that there are abnormal instances of so-called dissociations of personality. In this case we should point to the necessity of carefully guarding our definitions. We need to distinguish between the dissociation of • In speaking of the realism of thought, Hocking shows the necessity of changing "cogito ergo sum" to the simple *I am/ and contends for the reality of ideas, because my world, myself, and my ideas are constituent parts or phases of the same reality. (See Philosophical Review, 1910, pp. 316-317, article entitled "How Ideas Reach Reality.") 208 AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM psychic states which is possible, and of which we have numerous instances, and that impos- sibiHty which would be unplied in the term dissociation of personality. Dissociation of personality would, if we use the term "per- sonality" in the present sense, mean the destruc- tion of personality. We feel that the strictly correct term to apply to this phenomenon of abnormal psychology is not dissociation of personality, but dissociation of conscious states. A victim of abnormal psychology does not con- sider himself two identities at the same moment, for purposes of willing, or creative causation. If one studies carefully the celebrated case of Miss Beauchamp,^ one discovers that the source of her recovery was the existence of a self -identifying unit which survived the various moods and states under which she at times was held subject. A mood or a set of experiences might for a time occupy dominantly the land- scape of active consciousness, but above this was the still higher consciousness that she ought not to allow "Sally" or any other "self" to control her. Because she kept to this true identity, because her personality was funda- mentally indivisible, she was able in the end to command the moods that had held her and 7 Compare Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Person- ality. 209 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM recover the normal and rational consciousness of self. By keeping in mind the abiding element in self -consciousness we escape the impasse which these instances of the abnormal raise for any theory to which the relation rather than the relator is fundamental. The tendency to exag- gerate this theoretical dissociation is discussed by a modern psychologist^^in the^f olio wing terms: The facts of multiple personality do strongly suggest a detached subconsciousness. Yet even here there is no such complete break as is popularly supposed. The sec- ondary personality depends upon and uses the mental acquisitions of the primary — uses its language, has its understanding of common sights and sounds, has its memories as its own. Hence even if the primary person- ality were totally unable to recall experiences of the sec- ondary, nevertheless the usual sort of psychic individuality is here in large measure. But inability to recall the sec- ondary has been exaggerated. There are apparently all degrees of memory lapse, not just one characteristic and complete sort. The popular notion that hypnotized sub- jects upon being wakened have no memory of what has occurred during hypnosis is erroneous. Sometimes there is full recall, sometimes partial recall, sometimes appar- ently complete amnesia. Even a subject who declares that he cannot recall anything is sometimes, at least, mistaken. The sundering, in short, is best interpreted as a phenomenon of attention and memory. It is a dis- sociated individual consciousness with which we are dealing, not two individual consciousnesses related by a subconscious bond." 8 Coe, The Psychology of Religion, pp. 210, 211. 210 AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM If we apply Miss Beauchamp's case to the theory of neo-realism, each of the passing moods which ruled her experience must be held of equal reality and validity with her normal selfhood. In such a case an insane moment is charged with the same reality, with the same place and value with the sane. The whole system of ethical and moral values goes top- pling before the simple questions raised in abnormal psychology. It is the aim of personal realism to retain the unity which is the very essence of life, which springs from the indi- visibility of personality, and to keep it from vanishing in the abstract. (6) Personal Realism Aims an Advance Over Ordinary Forms of Personal Idealism. With personal idealism the self-conscious- ness is fundamental to all thinking. Any system which would explain the world without reference to the thinker upon whose symbols and terms knowledge depends would be considered by the idealist as unworthy of notice. To the personal idealist, any theory which would take account of the world of life and thought must keep in mind its supreme fact, the nature of personality itself. When personal idealism draws reality down out of the clouds of abstraction by insisting 211 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM that ideas, perception, and logic derive their strength from a concrete existence in individual persons rather than from some vague generali- / zation existing apart from life and experience, it does well. With this view personal realism is in entire agreement. Remembering the impossibility of marking an exact cleavage between individual adherents of the schools, the points of advance in general are these: personal realism adds to the thought of personality as fundamental to understanding the thought that it is fundamental to all being. It claims that the unity which exists in per- ception is due not only to the common origin of dual realms of reality but to a continually exercised and purposive intelligence which from moment to moment maintains all orders of reality. This supreme power is not assumed as an abstraction, unable to identify itself with the world of its creation, nor as an immanent power pantheistically working through atoms in such a way as to be involved in its own processes, but a person to whom the universe responds in a perfect and infinite way as it does in imperfect and finite measure to human per- sonality. The act of perception yields reality because in the moment of perceiving the personality experiences and relates. This experience and 212 AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM relation is indivisible, and in essence, unanalyza- ble, the very essence of life. Personality is something more than the source and ground of knowledge; it is the ground of being, and the primal source from which all things flow. The objection to the affirmation of personality in the World-Ground comes largely from the sense of limitation to which it seems to submit the supreme creative power. Yet this objection somewhat loses its force when we contemplate that any creative energy which is assumed as the source of life commits itself to the dictation of a world system, to a uniform succession of cause and effect, to a temporal and spatial order — becomes, in a sense, limited in its operation. It is no more limiting to think of personality in the Creative Being purposely lending himself to the working out of a world of human and physical relations than to think of an original creative impulse yielding itself to the rigorous limitations of physical law, or of a pantheistic creator shut up to the movement of molecular action. If the World-Ground be impersonal, it is impossible to explain the order of progress in evolution. Impersonalism on any plane, whether of materialism or idealism, yields equivalent results. One is stranded on the Scylla of mechanism or wrecked on the Charyb- dis of determinism. The highest creative en- 213 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM ergy of which we could have any account, if either theory be assumed, would be that unique and self -creative power which is the limited pos- session of human personality and which molds a world of things to its own purposes. In the final analysis the sense of the limiting character of personality in a World-Ground will be seen to spring from the uncertain notions of time and space as they might affect such a being. Here lies the distinctive difference between divine and human personality. The one must be freed from the spatial and temporal order that it may fulfill the requirements of our thought; the other we think of as altogether the slave of time and space. The breach between the two seems impassable until we consider the relative nature of the temporal and spatial order. We discover a sense in which human personality, though working under the limita- tion of time and space, is able to transcend them. The abiding personality does not pass away with the order to which it is in such large measure subject. Its highest and most dis- tinctive victories are won in the very measure in which it is able to transcend time and space, to bring the distant into the plan of the present, and to insure the far-off harvests of its present will and action. So it will be seen that the perfection of personality might involve a 214 AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM complete transcendence of space and time, and personality thus transcendent would be freed from those limitations with which it is commonly thought connected. The essence of personality is neither time nor space, but creative activity. Creative activity in order to possess purpose, meaning, or to ground evolutionary progress, must possess the essential elements of person- ality. Thus personality takes on an inalienable metaphysical meaning. It is the only World- Ground, or creative energy, we can affirm without becoming lost in the agnostic mazes of the infinite regress, or in an immoral pantheism and determinism. It is the only basis on which we can maintain any order of freedom. Speaking in the language of the old realism of "things as they are," perception must be taken to include not a part but all of the factors. "Things as they are" must mean not only the things of the material world which can be acted upon. They must include the perceiving mind, and the self -identifying subject himself must be included as a part of realism. This offers the only way of escape from a static world. Because in our realism we include personality, a place is left for change and freedom. We need to dwell upon the meaning of this implication. The ex- perience of change is absolutely impossible to any consciousness, activity, or force which is unable 215 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM to survive the change. Anything changing abso- lutely from moment to moment cannot keep any identity nor be aware of change. Neither could the onlooker be aware of change, for he would witness only an unceasing and unrelated crea- tion. Even the customary relation of cause and effect would be barred out. Any philoso- phy of change, then, that ignores the unchang- ing is contributing to its own destruction. The second consideration upon the implica- tions of which we should dwell is that, apart from personality, freedom in the creative energy or in the world is impossible. Much may be urged against the static systems of the past which with rigorous logic denied the existence of freedom, and bound the simplest acts of men to a materialistic mechanism, pretending to check up loves and hates, thought energy and purpose, by equivalents of food and drink. With all its impossibiHties and lack of insight such a view possessed the virtue of consistency. But when we endeavor to get a world of freedom from an impersonal source, even the philosophic child should see that impersonal freedom, seeing neither before nor behind, conscious only of the present and having no conscious power of choice and no purpose, would be only an acci- dent. Such a world could have neither order nor meaning to a being like man, who has con- 216 AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM sciousness of purpose, choice, and freedom. So far as our realism is shot through with person- alism we are freed from the trammels of a static world. "Things as they are,'* including person- ality, provide for both freedom and change. (c) Personal Realism Aims through a Doctrine of Personality to Unite the Oppositions, Whatever one's philosophical opinions may be, there are but two attitudes which can be taken toward the perplexing problems of phi- losophy. One can decide to ignore altogether one side of the contradiction, or one can set out boldly to transcend the contradiction by seeking some higher basis where the apparent contra- dictions will appear as complementary parts of a higher unity. Both materialism and idealism present examples of the first attitude. Modern philosophy as a whole seeks the common ground of mediation. In the end, the contradiction between matter and spirit, cause and effect, thing and thought, comes to the metaphysical question of first cause. Here the ancient sys- tems lead us only to an ultimate mystery. Fol- lowing the way of materialism through the suc- cession of effects and causes, we assume at last a cause so abstract that it does not connect with the facts of life, or from sheer exhaustion we deny the possibihty of knowledge. If we take the 217 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM higher road of idealism, we again land in abstrac- tion, finding the swamps of phenomenalism little better than the quagmire of agnosticism. Be- cause of our naturalistic ways of thinking we continue to be perplexed by the demand for a creative energy which is itself uncaused. For the child of the Dragon's tooth uncaused cause is unthinkable, and he feels it better to die in the desert than in daring hope to go on toward a promised land. But the moment we look into the mystery of personality we dis- cover the groundlessness of certain fears, and are encouraged to believe that others may disappear under the light of larger knowledge. The reason for this hope is that we discover in our own exercised power of choice and purpose the very element which we considered unthink- able. We have within us the power of uncaused causation. We may choose to remove moun- tains and cast them into the depths of the sea, or we may choose to desist. In this primary act of choice we can locate nothing at all com- mensurate or equivalent to the effect produced. An impulse of personal ambition, a dream of the night, the scourging of the mind to inventive action by the sheer power of the willing person- ality changes the face of the earth and imlocks material laws and forces of which to that moment the scientist had been ignorant or 218 AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM skeptical. How much of the scientific stock in trade is the merest formula for getting at facts rather than a fundamental metaphysical condition of things is shown with great clearness and cogency by Bergson in discussing the scientific overestimate of the doctrine of the conservation of energy.^ If from the fulcrum of a limited contact such as the human body gives to the human spirit personality can create its own internal powers and then turn them to the mastery of its world, why should it seem incredible as the attribute of a Supreme Creative Person? The reason for our blindness at this point has been perhaps our insistence upon the existence of matter first, and then upon spirit as secondary. But science shows us spirit or life in the very act of creating the material fulcrum from which it enlarges its powers and contacts. Whatever of truth there be in evo- lution is in this power of life to lay hold upon matter and to bend it to new purposes. In other words, the purpose, desire, or will is able measurably to create the organs through which life functions. Organism may be looked upon as constructing itself by functioning, so that structure cannot be said to precede life. The individual creates the structure by functioning. ^•^ » Time and Free Will, pp. 150f. ^ Compare C. M. Child, Individuality in Organism, pp. 16f . 219 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM The story of progressing life is the story of uncaused cause, and its opposite is death. In personaHty, then, we find the key to metaphy- sics, a doctrine surely as old as Augustine, but too much neglected by an age to which the great appeal has been one-sidedly naturalistic. The objection may be made that we lock our problem up in the mysterious deeps of person- ality which, in the nature of the case, is unana- lyzable and indivisible. If such an objection be raised, we are not without certain consola- tions. The objection is not so serious as it seems, for it amounts simply to this, that life is greater than any explanation of it. Our best symbols fail to grasp its essence, just as the fact of a falling body is something more than the equation in which physics represents it. If the inadequacy of language continues to dull our joy or to prevent "a shining morning face," we may benefit by the reflection that though we cannot adequately describe person- ality and life, we can experience it, which is better. As for the objection that personality itself is a mystery, we can be comforted with the thought that since we must rest upon mystery in any case, the mystery of personality may possess some superiority to the mysteries pre- sented in the fundamental reality by materialism and idealism. Some mysteries assumed at 220 AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM least do not continue to raise difficulties ad infinitum and with such persistent frequency as to raise the query in honest minds whether the system has not left the rails of consistency to bump along on the cross-ties of facts with which it is in disagreement. Thoughts will come that the consequent bumping springs from going in a direction at right angles with the facts. If one is to be thrust on mystery anyway, it seems well to choose the mystery least incongruous with the facts of experience, and giving greatest hope of future elucidation. Our choice lies between an incoherent purposeless accident, demanding an infinite regress, and therefore unknowable, or an inaccessible pantheistic cause wherein matter is wholly phenomenal; or we may choose a seK-creative personality as the ground of being, sustaining itseK according to general uniformities discoverable in limited and partial ways within ourselves. If we choose personality as the ultimate mystery, there is hope that we may discover some things about it now, and there is a yet higher hope of that which may be revealed by its own self- mastery as it mounts to the freedom of the sons of God, when, released from limitations of the spatial and temporal order, it knows no longer in part nor after a given order of succession, but as it also is known. This investigation and this 221 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM hope we cannot entertain if the fundamental mystery Hes in an invisible aeon or in the ineffable Absolute. If personality be the supreme mys- tery, as it is already the undying interest of life, we have something suflSciently concrete to be studied in its laws and manifestations. Though it be a great mystery and we grow impatient with the inadequacy of the solutions offered, we have something which we can at least experience, instead of a mystery whose doors are forever locked and barred with the sign of unreality which reads, "Unknowable," or "Absolute." S2S CHAPTER IX THE DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY It may be desirable before precipitating a discussion of the meaning of personality to indicate in a prefatory way the line of the discussion. The Meaning of Personality in a System OF Personal Realism It is only fair to state at the beginning that the position which a doctrine of personal realism will take must be that personality is the fun- damental and indivisible unit of reality. We shall assume that it is something more than states of consciousness, which apart from the abiding nature of personality would be but disconnected flashes of intelligence. As an attempt to reach the realities of life these flashes of consciousness by themselves alone would be more confusing than the intermittent glare of lightning to the eyes of the belated traveler on a trackless moor. If personality is that which can be divided up into passing "states"; if it can be adequately defined or understood by naming the results of its activity, as "sensibility," "willing," etc., then it is the BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM prey of eacli passing "state," and there can be neither freedom nor choice. Personality is likewise more than a combination of any number of "states" that might be taken as com- posing it. If personality is constituted by a federation of states, it becomes less than they, and there can be no such thing as purposive and efficient causation. Neither does the personal realist when he uses the term "personality" mean to refer to the brain as the seat of the independent, self- existing soul, nor to the mind as conscious merely of its own organic activity. In the words of one writer, personality "is nothing other than the permanence of the active principle which constitutes us."^ This idea is not novel in the history of philo- sophy, nor is it out of keeping with modern tendencies in widely divergent systems. Applying this fact to neo-realism, it would seem possible to recognize the personal element in consciousness, for we find Perry seemingly admitting that "the so-called" relational theory of consciousness "has emphasized this fact that mental content is distinguished, not by the stuff or elements of which it is composed but by the 1 Piat, La Personne Humaine, p. 69. In this connection and also on page 28 and elsewhere Piat discusses this general problem in an interesting way. 9,U DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY way in which these elements are composed."^ Such an admission makes clear that it is not less the mental content than the willing person- ality that determines the mental possession. The way in which the elements of mental con- sciousness are composed makes the part of the composer a most important one. This is our old friend personality, brought into the field again though thinly disguised by an alias. The neo-realist claim for the immediacy of per- ception, that is, the impossibility of representing perception by analysis into subject and object, and the contrasting forms of mind and matter, is paralleled in personal realism by the claim that it is personality which defies analysis. When one has analyzed it into functions and states and laid the contrast between one and the other he has really missed its reality. The reason for this is plain. It is the profound truth which Bergson sets forth in his contrast between intuition and intelligence, or rationalization, as a means to knowledge. Words can never adequately describe the fact of life. Some Essential Features of Personality (a) Self-Definition and Recognition of Other Per- sonalities. The first essential to be named in personality 2 Compare Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 277. 225 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM is the self-defining element of self-identity. In the discovery of its differentiation from sur- rounding objects comes the dawning of person- ality. Whatever else personality may mean, it must mean this — ^that some unit of feeling becomes self-conscious through its reactions. The immediate corollary of this truth is the existence of other objects and the recognition of other personalities. Bertrand Russell lends an interest to the present discussion when, speaking of the inde- finability of wholes,^ he declares that a unity cannot be broken up into its terms except for purposes of analysis. It is obvious upon re- flection that personal identity is of quite another order than mathematical identity. I am not the same to-day that I was yesterday, for, under the impact of experience and life, I possess different qualities of mind and spirit, new attitudes and moods toward life. I have changed, and yet I have maintained my iden- tity. This would have been impossible in the rigid realm of mathematics and of logic, for here the entering in of new qualities into the defined whole^ would mean the passing of the old and the arrival at a new identity. The difference » Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, pp. 11 If. * Ibid., pp. 96f. 9M DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY then between identity in numbers or in material objects of any kind and identity in finite persons is one of relation to the temporal order. The person survives the time order as does nothing else. The opposing thought which at once arises to the mind is the remembrance of the duration of material objects around us. Not only do animals seem to possess the same element of duration over time, holding for long periods a certain identity, but we seem able also to affirm such enduring identity of trees, houses, moun- tains, and other natural objects. A little con- sideration, however, discloses in such claims a largely subjective element. Such identity could be really true only as the product of thinking intelligence, on the part of the perceiver, or to some supreme intelligence to whom the duration of things possessed a meaning, or as trees, mountains, and animals were themselves con- scious of time. Personality as the differentiation of self- consciousness from external objects is plain enough; as including a world of other person- alities it is not so clear. Nevertheless, we can- not pass over the part played in personality by the existence of the social relation. If there were no other personalities, human or divine, the whole problem of explanation would break down. A solipsistic world could not find nor 227 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM would it need explanation. All could be taken as a unity of experience, a part of the individual. The perception theory of neo-realism would hold for such a world as well as any. If the recognition of other personalities were not demanded, abstract idealism would do as well, for this personal world is exactly what neither of the parties can provide for. Any creative being which is Absolute or pantheistic must be impersonal. A philosophy of the Absolute would quickly come to an end if it did not unconsciously assume personality in an Absolute which is by definition incapable of it. We can make no progress in the definition of personality unless, first of all, we describe it as self-defining, differentiating itself from all other selves and objects. This characteristic is as necessary to the aflBrmation of divine personality as it is to the human. This element will be treated in a later chapter. That the recognition of other personalities is necessary to a definition of personality is clear when we come to consider the possibility of common ideas which ground the world of rela- tion. We approximate each other's thought not only by reason of similarity of mental function, not only because the material world is what it is, with but one story to tell to all, but more than all else because the world of matter and intelli- ^28 DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY gence is maintained and upheld by a personal World-Ground. In no other way is it possible to account for a common order of intelligence. There is no other way to meet the problems thrust upon us by any realistic attempt to define the relation of mind to other minds and to the world. We turn to Perry for illustration.^ How can we come to a common possession of ideas? The element of personality so tinges all ideas that I cannot be certain that my friend gets my exact meaning. Into his notion enter the elements of his own experience, rendering his thought more or less different from mine. We can come only to a reasonable degree of coincidence of ideas. Here the realistic diffi- culty comes from distinguishing mind as a bundle of nervous reactions, distinct from my "me" or personality. It is the fallacy of analy- sis applied to personality, and corresponds to the idealistic fallacy which by analysis breaks up reality into subject and object in perception. What are we perceiving when we perceive the mind of another .f^ Have we not merely changed our self-conscious introspection for another's, put into the inadequate form of such human expression, verbal or otherwise, as we are able to command? However realistic I may be, I cannot be sure, from the realistic stand- * Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 288 et passim. 229 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM point even, that his nervous reactions called thought have equivalence to mine, nor can I look into his brain and see his ideas. You tell me of your visit to London,^ but my ideas (on the realistic basis) will scarcely correspond to yours if the only aggregation of houses I have ever seen is that at Hickory Corners. My interpretation of your ideas will depend about as much upon my personal mental content as upon your description. The more nearly our experiences agree, the more nearly will our ideas approximate. (6) Duration. Any definition of personality would be incom- plete which did not recognize duration as an essential element. We here use the term in the Bergsonian sense. This follows closely on the assertion of self -identity. As we saw above, personal self-identity has a meaning quite different from that which holds in the world of matter, or mathematics or logic. In the realm of personality we have an identity sur- viving change and not altogether subject to the temporal order. The temporal order influences it profoundly but does not conquer it. The personality brings its past with it at every moment; it relates that past to the present « Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 296. 230 DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY moment, and both to a possible future, thus transcending and outstripping the temporal order. Its power to do this differentiates per- sonality forever from the world about it. Per- sonality alone gathers and masters an accumu- lating experience.^ Fite likewise calls atten- tion to the truth that human consciousness or personality is an indefinitely graduated scale of being. It is only when our action springs out of a consideration of the whole of life's interest that we can be said to be fully con- scious. The creature of mere habit then, can be said scarcely to have lived at all.* (c) Freedom. The possession by personality of duration is necessary if we are to have the further essential qualities of freedom. Only that being who is in possession of past, present, and future can be capable of any free act of choice or purpose, or can be charged with any duty of moral responsibility. To deny freedom in person- ality is to remove at a stroke its chief glory, moral and spiritual accountability. {d) Causality But the unique element of personality is the power of purposive, efficient causation. Using ^ Compare Haldane, Mechanism, Life and Personality, pp. 114-5. * Fite, Individualism, pp. 66-67. ^1 y BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM its power of choice, it can bring to pass that which is physically undetermined. It can so bring under subjection its own mental powers and processes as to create for itself new powers of expression. Thus transcending itself, it takes flight to new discoveries, and moves to new masteries of the physical world. Bergson in a beautiful passage has noted this unique element in personality. He says: The finished portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the nature of the artist, by the colors spread out on the palette; but, even with the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not even the artist, could have fore- seen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict it would have been to produce it before it was produced, an absurd hypothesis which is its own refutation. Even so with regard to the moments of our life, of which we are the artisans. Each of them is a kind of creation. And just as the talent of the painter is formed or deformed — in any case, is modified — under the very influence of the works he produces, so each of our states at the moment of its issue modifies our personality, being, indeed, the new form that we are just assuming. It is, then, right to say that what we do depends on what we are; but it is necessary to add also that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and that we are creating ourselves continu- ally. This creation of self by self is the more complete the more one reasons on what one does .... We find that for a conscious being to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. Should the same be said of existence in general.'^' • Creative Evolution, pp. 6-7. 232 DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY We feel that Bergson should have gone on to make the aflSrmation of efficient causality in general, for wherever we discover any unique- ness in the process, the emergence of new and materially uncaused elements, any evolutionary progress, the element of personal causation is a factor. The only efficient and unique causa- tion of which we have any knowledge is personal. So when he says, "The evolution of life really continues, as we have shown, an initial impul- sion,"^^ it is possible the initial impulsion of which he speaks, in so far as it is now efficient above the passage of time, is but a manifestation of that willing efficiency which, so far as man can rightly judge, is the unique characteristic of a person, in this case, of course, a Supreme Person. It is not strange that man, finding himself possessor of such uniqueness of causal efficiency, should refer it to a power outside himself. Investigation discloses that all evolutionary progress of which we can really find illustration or take account is personal. At this point we should keep scientific analogy close to the limits of experience. If science had always done this, she would not have cast upon the world so many groundless metaphysical conclusions. It may be thrilling to draw the ideal of evolutionary progress so that by a system of abstraction '0 Ibid., p. 246. BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM which accounts for nothing we seem to have explained the heavens above and the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth. But science needs at this point some of the soberness of judgment that she urges upon enthusiastic theists. So far as we know, intellectual devel- opment comes actually through the purposive will of the subject. Animal strains are im- proved not usually by fortuitous accident but by purposive breeding. New fruits do not spring forth haphazard, but a Burbank perfects them into being as the result of purposive and inten- sive willing. The science of eugenics seeks to apply this law of personal purpose in evolution to the well-being of society. Wherever in this day we can lay our finger upon any orderly or continuous progress or evolution we shall find be- hind it, if we look, a self -identifying and intelli- gent purpose. An unintelligent evolution would be an unintelligible one. Progress, being read only in the light of intelligence, demands an intelligent source. EflScient causation, then, so far as we have any data by which to go, is the unique possession of personality in time, and it would not seem too much to assume that it is the possession of personality anywhere. How this can be may appear a very great mystery, but we cannot deny the element of efficient causation in ourselves without denying 234 DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY the world of intelligence and moral responsi- bility. So also with every new idea, with every product of inspiration: those to whom at first and rarely such inbursts of reflexive insight come with definiteness and power could not have done otherwise than refer them to a supernatural source. Moments of deep thought and inten- ser fancy, distinguished above the commonplace of exist- ence, moments of imagination and invention — these moments have in all ages struck upon the mind as from a world beyond that of the visible career." Is this more than a recognition of the fact that unique causation, when it appears, is spontaneously viewed as the product of per- sonality? As an uncaused and efficient cause, the finite personality is limited to a world of relation. The Infinite or Supreme Personality would be limited only by his moral desire. All of these definitions gathered up into that strange reflective self-possession which achieves is what we mean by personality. In the words of Herder's "Self": **Not what thou seest (animals observe) ; Not what thou hearest (brutes can likewise hear) ; Not what thou learnest (ravens also learn) ; But what, perceiving, thou dost understand; The power that in thee works, the inner seer " Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 9. 235 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Who from the past divineth what shall be; The organizer who from chaos spins The pattern of the raveling universe Into the tapestries of mind and sense. This art thou, even as 'tis likewise God."^' The Self-Conscious and Self-Creative Elements in Personality At least two other elements must be intro- duced into any adequate definition of person- ality. These are self -consciousness and self- creativity, and they are applicable alone to human personality and by analogy to the Supreme Personality. By self -consciousness now we mean something more than self-identi- fication and separation from other individuals. The lower form of self-consciousness is in some measure the possession of animals. The self- consciousness of the person is of a higher order, for man is not only self-conscious. He is con- scious of his states of consciousness. He not only acts from motives, but he is able also to weigh and judge those motives, approving or condemning them. And this power does not wait upon the passage of time. It is not dependent upon memory, for it is possible for man to judge of his states of consciousness in the very moment of action. This power of the personality brings moral responsibility in « Trans, by C. A. Lane, Monist, 1911, p. 105. 236 DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY its train, enters intimately into his possession of freedom, and endows all the other qualities of individuality with a new meaning and signifi- cance. Thus endowed with the possibility of free moral choices, he needs only to be empow- ered with the further unique gift of self-crea- tivity. This self -creative power is peculiar to person- ality. The appearance of the new in intel- lectual grasp, in knowledge, in insight, in reve- lation of unusual truths, or in unique expressions of truth, the genius of Beethoven, the insight of Shakespeare, the moral and spiritual suprem- acy of Jesus — these are but parts of the self- creative mystery of personality. They are parts of the Ultimate Mystery, but they are no harder of solution than the mystery that gathers about Bergson's vital "elan," or any other impersonal explanation of first cause. In personality we have a first cause of whose operation we are conscious, even though we are unable to define or analyze it. It may be the part of sense and sound judgment to con- clude to the personality of the ultimate self- creative First Cause. We do this because the only appearance of self -creative energy we can know is inextricably bound up with personality. At any rate this conclusion cannot be less scientific than one which drives the question 237 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM back into an atomistic or ideal realm where we are forbidden ever to observe it. The only example of purposive, self-creative activity of which we cannot escape the knowledge is in the human personality itself. Personality the Fundamental Reality Haldane, quoting Hegel,^^ calls attention to the fact, that Kant's categories can be com- pleted only by adding the category of life to that of substance as one of the fundamental or initial ideas, and declares that this would end the difficulties of the mechanistic theory of life. He likewise adds in another place, "Philosophy leads us up to personality as the great central fact of the universe."^'* We would add that personality is the fundamentally real. We have noticed the self -identifying, other-identifying quality of personality, its enriching content of experience in the survival of time, its freedom in choice and purpose, making place for moral responsibility, its unique power of uncaused causation, its conscious self-consciousness and its self-creativity, but even the completest analysis of function and activity are no more it than the description of a horse is a horse. Primarily, each of these functions pivots upon " Mechanism, Life and Personality, p. 76. " Ibid., p. 1S3. 238 DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY the self -identifying unit of being which in itself is not subject to change. This unchanging factor is primary and real. It is given in the simplest perception, and is not dependent upon intellectualization. It is the ultimate content of consciousness. It is simpler than "I think, therefore I am"; it is prior to "I perceive, therefore I am," for the moment the fact has passed into syllogism it has passed out of life into symbol. Differing from the starting-point of idealism, it avoids ascribing a transcendental nature to reality. Personality is the reality, and the system which sets it forth might well be called either personalism or personal realism. £39 CHAPTER X PERSONAL REALISM AND THE TROUBLESOME PROBLEMS OF PHH^OSOPHY Though much of the ground has already been covered, it may not be unprofitable to gather up in summary the relation which a personal realism must bear to the ever-recurring problems of philosophy. These problems are such as causation, space and time, the dualism of thought and thing, and the problems of error and evil. It is the more necessary to make this relation unmistakable, for the reason that the whole system, as, indeed, all systems of thought, must be ultimately judged upon these grounds. If a system of personal realism is to stand, it must prove its practical worth in the way it answers the troublesome problems of philos- ophy. The Question of Causal Explanation Let us consider what personal realism may have to oflFer in the matter of causal explanation. The impasse of mechanical causation often has ^0 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY been shown in philosophical discussion. It seems hardly necessary to call attention to the fact of the inadequacy of any causal explanation which depends merely upon succession in events.^ In such a case there could be no first cause, and any cause must be assumed to con- tain within it all effects. Such a scheme comes little short of the static universe of the Eleatics, as it affords no opportunity for innovation or freedom. Moreover, it makes insoluble the problem of progress. Evolution becomes an unthinkable and irrational conception along lines of impersonal causation. The vital neces- sity for all evolution is the introduction into the effect of that which does not appear in the cause; this new element is that which consti- tutes the progress. If we attempt to explain the effect by the cause in any impersonal way, then all elements in the effect must be traced in the mechanical cause, and we have not progress but a state of rest. Cause and effect are on such a basis identical. Evolution is the differentiation of one event from another in the order of succession. This differentiation, and not the order of succession, is the problem. The question arises whether we ever do expe- rience such differentiation by the appearance 1 For a clear discussion of this matter compare article by J. S. MacKenzie, in Mind, 1912, pp. 339ff. BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM in the effect of elements that have no apparent physical source. Do we have any experience of self -creativity? Bergson says we do, and that this self-creativity is the "vital elan," the essence of life and reality. But "vital elan" is a term as abstract as "fountain of perpetual youth," and as hard to locate. We cannot trace it to a concrete instance. It is said to be everywhere, but it is also undefinable. At this point the personal realist calls atten- tion to the self -creative energy which we do not imagine, but experience and of which each of us is conscious. This is the element which Kant, who had declared against self-creativity, had to acknowledge in order to retain the reality of moral responsibility. This self -creativity lies in the free choice and purpose of the individual person. In personal causation the ultimate ex- planation is not adequately provided by any mechanical assumption whatever. The ass that starved midway between two haystacks because the external impulses were exactly equal and op- posite in direction, never existed outside the speculations of the closet philosophers. The deciding factor is not external but internal. If the human will is but the prey of external impulses, all personal responsibility for action has gone to the winds. There are philosophers who consider the question of moral responsi- 242 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY bility to lie outside the realm of philosophy. But the moral elements in man are quite as important as the intellectual, and any philoso- phy which renders that realm unreal must eventually be discarded as inadequate and unsatisfying, because it is at war with the facts of personality. The ultimate explanation in personal causa- tion comes back in every case to individual purpose or will. This uncaused purpose brings in the element of novelty between cause and effect which spells advance. If this be true in the case of human causation, it becomes plausible at least that the evolution which we witness in the world around us is to find its ultimate explanation in the purpose and will of a supreme personality. While we may be reluctant to admit so much, it is clear that on the impersonal or mechanical plane of explanation, the grounding of any efficient evolution is impossible. As Bergson has pointed out,^ such cutting of reality into little bits like a puzzle picture, in order to reas- semble them and attain an imaginary progress, is without value as a means of metaphysical explanation. The explanation of causation by purpose will seem inadequate to many, because in science, 2 Creative Evolution, p. xiiif. 243 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM for purposes of clearness, certain symbols must necessarily be used, and these symbols seem important in the explanation. Here science has been hard pressed to give any satisfying definition of its terms, or any very intelligible and tangible proofs of its affirmations. It has been driven by the necessities of explanation from the cruder forms of atomism through a whole series of symbols, such as monads, seons, electrons, etc., invisible and indefinable, but sufficient upon which to hang figures of speech, such as vortices, repulsions and attractions, and electrical action. The use of these figures is necessary to science, and any symbol which serves to meet the requirements of description of observed action is equally valuable. The trouble comes when the figures or symbols are assumed as the basis of reahty, and that there is no other. It seems impossible in the midst of the preva- lent scientific mood of the age for the philos- opher to brave the storm of scientific scorn in order to affirm the figurative and symbolic nature of these scientific assumptions. But if one thing more than another is clear to the philosophic mind, it is the purely hypothetical nature of these assumptions regarding the nature of reality. Their real value lies in their dis- closure of the laws and uniformities of nature. £44 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY They are valid according to their utility, but they leave the metaphysical question of reality and causation just where they found it. This need cause no trouble nor embarrassment so long as the limits of empirical explanation are realized. It is only when the scientist attempts to draw metaphysical conclusions that he passes from the realm of reality into that of conjecture where he lives no privileged existence, but must submit to metaphysical rather than to scientific tests. As an illustration let us consider the attempt to explain qualitative value by quantitative changes.^ As different rates of vibration in wave-lengths give us the scale in music and the various colors of the spectrum in light, so it is conceived that the only difference between sound and color is a difference in intensity of vibration, in the cosmic substance. On this supposition it is possible to build a complete system. The whole world of hearing, taste, feeling, seeing, subjective and objective, is reduced in imagination to a system of vibrations more or less intense. We have not referred to the scheme in order to ridicule it. All this might in time be scientifically elucidated and yet fall short of metaphysical explanation. One need have no quarrel with such a system if it holds 3 Matter and Memory, pp. 270ff. 245 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM to the limits of its possibilities, and submits itself to the facts whose explanation is desired. If it is proved that all qualitative differences can be reduced to quantitative changes, we are still sobered by the fact that we continue to bear an undiminished burden of metaphysical and epistemological explanation. The question to be answered is as difficult after the admis- sion as before, for now we must show why, instead of a quantitative consciousness of vibra- tions, we have consciousness of pitch, timbre, music, or noise, raising within our personalities the surging tides of hope and action, speaking to aesthetic and moral impulses, or creating within us a vast despair. Why is difference in quantity in vibration interpreted by us as a difference between sound and light .f^ Why do I distinguish a certain speed as the moaning voice of the sea and another as the glory of the mountains? Whatever scientific progress has been made by the assumption — and it is not necessary to contradict the possibility — it will be clearly seen that the whole personal world which is of value and interest to man is yet to explain. A world of love and hate, of heroism and treachery, of selfishness and sacrifice — this is the great mystery and miracle. Why do mere vibrations, differing in intensity, bear so large a tale of meaning.? It is obvious that the asser- 246 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY tion that qualitative diiferences may in some scientific scheme be reduced to quantitative, however true for science, is a begging of the metaphysical question. Having made the aflSr- mation, the problem is still to be answered. Why do quantitative facts represent qualitative meanings.? The qualitative meanings are the ones that carry the major interest. Space and Time With regard to space and time, which have already received consideration, it will be neces- sary here only to indicate the point in which personal realism would place peculiar emphasis, the relation of personality to the spatial and temporal order. First would be the relative character of the spatial and temporal order, space and time being the categories under which the individual relates things and events to himself and to each other. It adds to the Kantian dictum the affirmation that the temporal and spatial rela- tions are saved from the solipsistic judgment by being part of a temporal and spatial order maintained by a Supreme Personal Intelligence. This addition may seem to some to complicate the problem. But its metaphysical results are better, and in the end less confusing, than the erection of space and time into an independent 247 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM order. This last inevitably lands in dualism, or makes the temporal and spatial categories wholly subjective and their universal nature inexplicable. Personal realism places distinct emphasis upon the nonspatial, nontemporal elements in personality. This enables it to meet the objection raised against making the spatial and temporal gain universal validity through dependence upon a spaceless and time- less Supreme Personality. It is just the space- less and timeless elements that are the dis- tinguishing features of human personality. Because personality can make the spatial dif- ferentiation between the here and the there, between the me and the not-me, it becomes self- defining and self-conscious. It could not make this differentiation were it not in some way transcendent over space. It is not confined to the spot on the earth where it rests nor to the limits of seeing, hearing, or feeling. In a similar way there is a real sense in which the human personality is timeless. Its tran- scendence of time is that which helps to give it a unique character in the universe. It brings its past experience with it into the present timeless moment, and looking out into the future transcends time by active willing, purposing, and causing. It works according to the tem- poral order, but it is superior to it. It is this 248 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY timeless and spaceless element in personality to which Bergson refers when he declares: "Perception is master of space in the exact measure in which action is master of time."'^ It is this transcendence of space and time which gives a hint for the solution of the relation of a spaceless and timeless supreme Personality to the spatial and temporal order. A further fact needs to be mentioned before we close the discussion. However arbitrarily the spatial and temporal order may affect the physical side of a man, it does not touch the inner springs of personality. In the course of a long life the physical elements of the body are renewed many times. Physical changes take place which cause a man to be unrecognized by his friends and which astonish him with differences marked by the years. So far as physical appearance is concerned it is difficult for him to recognize the little boy in the grown man. It is possible for him to make the dis- tinction of the poet who sings: "Across the fields of yesterday He sometimes comes to me, A little lad just back from play- The lad I used to be. * Matter and Memory, p. 23. BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM "And yet he smiles so wistfully Once he has crept within, I wonder if he hopes to see The man I might have been."' On the side of personality, however, there is neither doubt nor question, nor discontinuity in the recognition of one's individual identity. One knows himself past all the changes, as identical with that personality that walked with confiding hand in the hand of his father or laid his head to rest upon a mother's breast. This strange power of self -identification is the essence of personality. Time and space are the canvas on which it relates its experiences, but neither has power to make inroads into it. This is the surest element in human knowledge, without which the world, so far as the individual is concerned, spins away into chaos. One may doubt the reality of the world around him, or the reality of other persons, but to doubt himself would mean either insanity or idiocy. The Dualism of Thought and Thing One fact is made apparent by the clearing process in philosophy, which is that the dualism between subject and object, thought and thing, never can be solved by ignoring either element of the problem. It is useless, on the one hand, * Thomas S. Jones, Jr., in The Rose Jar, Thomas B. Mosher, Publisher. 250 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY to deny to the mind any reality beyond that contributed by the world of matter, or to attempt reducing thought to physical movement or cellular readjustment in the brain. Nor, on the other hand, is the result more happy, if, affirming the reality of thought, we banish the material world to an unreality of phantom and of shade, the product of finite thought, having no reality outside the mind. The question then arises as to how, if we are to maintain two orders of reality, it is possible to so relate them as to secure identity and continuity of meaning. This has become the problem of modem phi- losophy. In the past the problem has been met by an abstraction, and the old temptation remains. This fact finds illustration in that school of neo- realism which considers the fundamental reality to be not the thinker nor the thing but the rela- tion between them. In this system the rela- tion is the fundamental reality. If this be true, then the act of perception is indivisible, really unanalyzable. This realistic unity seems to us artificial rather than natural. It is a unity that we have to make in our thought. We have to force our minds either to leave out that which seems natural to perception or to think as indivisible that which in simple perception is ever divided. The old realism had less of 251 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM strain put upon it when it declared for things as they appear. It was comparatively easy for the unenlightened to believe in the funda- mental reality of material objects. One could easily believe in the reality of his personality, though one's attention was not so easily fixed upon the inner processes. But to believe that the reality is outside both of the personality and the natural object is as much of a strain upon credulity as the assumptions of abstract idealism. One is so close to one's mind that the unreflective man is not aware of its presence any more than the healthy man is aware of his stomach. To such a man food is more import- ant than physiology. So the crude realist had a certain consistency of thought. He was con- scious of material objects — nothing could be surer. Neo-realism is of quite another order. It has lost much of the naive common sense of the earlier doctrine. This is not the result of realism, but, rather, of reflection that has com- pelled it to vacate realism of the older type. Subjective idealism is not a more abstract con- ception than this of reality consisting of relation. I have not mentioned this lapse from the older realism of common sense in order to condemn it. The departure from original simplicity may be a philosophical advance and should be con- sidered on its own merits. This fact is men- ^52 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY tioned in order to point out that neo-realism is nearer to idealism in its essential features than is commonly supposed. Relation is an abstract term, and to name it as the ultimate reality is akin to naming the Absolute as the ultimate reality. How, then, does personal realism attempt the compromise between the ancient views.'* The answer is that the fundamental reality is not in the relation but in the relator. We have the individual relating the world of things to himself, and this is possible because the world of things and persons are mutually related by a supreme Intelligence. What is, then, the real? The reality is persons in a personal world. If it seems we have thus reintroduced abstrac- tion under the term "personality," a little consideration may soften the harshness of the judgment. The first of these considerations is that there is even to the ordinary mind no incompatibility in the assertion of the essential unity of the personality in perception. Unity at this point is the sine qua non of perception. One does not perceive with a divided personal- ity. The observer has no doubt of the world of appearances, and this world must possess as its fundamental characteristic intelligibility, else it cannot be understood. If, now, both thinker and thing can be considered as arising from a 253 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM common Intelligence and Purpose, we have a sufficient Ground for unity — a Ground which needs no further explanation. A second consideration is this: though person- ality may be an inexplicable mystery, it is at least that mystery with which of all the universe beside we are most familiar. It is not an ab- straction. It is the concrete source of all our understanding, the crystal through whose mys- terious depths comes all the knowledge which we possess. Mystery of this kind is much more endurable than that which hides itself in the unprovable depths of atoms, monads, seons, electrons, vortices, or even the Unknowable of sensational empiricism. It seems even better than the abstraction of an indefinite "relation" which gains its unity by main strength (and awkwardness), putting together that which every man naturally puts asunder. At least it may be advanced in defense, that this personal view gives us a basis on which to account for an intelligible world. Personality, at least in its human manifestation, can be studied, used, and related, while abstractions can only be imagined, like the unknown symbols of an alge- braic equation. Error and Evil The problem chiefly haunting realism of the 254 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY common type is the problem of error. The last enemy of personal realism as well as of theism is evil and death. If reality lies in perception, it becomes impossible to account for error. Whatever I perceive, or think I perceive, is real, and is what it appears to be without reference to any other judgment. If the reality lies in the relation between thinker and thing, it is impossible to see how there can be untruth or unreality of false relation. Every man's judgment is as good as every other man's. No matter how much they may differ in perception all are cor- rect. To use the ancient slogan which has been recently resurrected, "Man is the measure of all things." In common-sense realism matter was the independent reality which we could accept or leave, but which we could not question. Its difficulty was not so much in providing for the problem of error as it was to account for any true understanding. The gulf between mind and matter was complete. Mind might arise and pass away while matter remained forever independent. One could not be sure that the mental picture which he obtained was a correct one. Neo -realism is heckled by both the prob- lem of knowledge and the problem of error. Pluralistic realism makes no attempt to solve ^55 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM the problem, choosing rather to ignore it. But in thus avoiding the issue others more difficult rise up to confront it. These are the problems posed by the apparent unity in the world, problems of moral responsibility, of common understanding, of thought, and even of language and history. Idealism meets its intensest problem in the existence of evil. Here we are told of the glori- fication of evil, pain, and sorrow by that spirit of self-sacrifice which dignifies the human soul and marks the highest conquest of evolutionary processes. This noble viewpoint has made profound impression upon the choicest person- alities of all ages. Yet it needs ever to be tempered by the pragmatic tests of concrete circumstance and action. The Jewish youth with holy zeal dedicated his all to Jehovah, saying, "It is corban." Though moved by the loftiest of abstract motives, he had need to bring his action to the test of concrete circum- stances. The loftiest of religious motives and the deepest of self-denials did not lead to the fullest development of self if thereby he neg- lected his duty to his parents. So, an abstract idealism is likely to see but half, and that half in wrong perspective. SeK-sacrifice can never in itself, and standing apart from the concrete instance, be hailed as the solution of the problem 256 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY of pain any more than can the unadulterated egotism that ignores it. The virtue of egotism, as the virtue of self-sacrifice, is determined by the law of the highest good to the individual, and to those around him. It needs only to be remembered that all self-reservation must be kept from selfishness, and must never be tinged by any element of moral cowardice, prevarica- tion, or untruth. Neither the problem of error nor the problem of evil can be met and justified on the abstract, impersonal plane. The only justification for either error or evil, if justification there is, is personal. There is no abstract reason why half the world should be deluded in its inter- pretation of nature and of life. When we come to actual cases we can readily see how the pos- sibility of error has been a quickener of attention, a schoolmaster to the intellectual powers, which has presented us with the better part of our mental equipment. Through numerous failures of judgment, and mistaken interpretations, man comes to that mastery of himself and his world which gives meaning and power to life. The use of judgment is a part of that self -defining ele- ment necessary to the possession of personality. Likewise, the problem of evil can never be solved by reference to abstract principles. Sometimes suffering, or the endurance of it, is 257 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM the sign of moral flabbiness and lack of char- acter. The self-imposed flagellations of closet saints, and the meaningless sacrifices which men make, not for the benefit of humanity but to save their own souls, are cases in point. Evil never can be figured into an abstract good. The possibility of evil, which lies at the root of all moral responsibility, will be found, in concrete individual cases, necessary to a world of freedom and growth. Whether the pain, suffering, or evil that befalls a man is going to prove useful cannot, however, be determined abstractly, but depends on him individually in his reaction to it. The wrongs suffered by the individual may make him bitter, may drive him into a false attitude toward life, and create in him false standards and ideals. They may weaken him and render him useless. They cannot do all this, however, apart from his own will in the matter. On the other hand, the presence of the possibility of moral evil and the impo- sition of suffering may be turned by the indi- vidual into the source of moral conquest, the achievement of the supreme spiritual self- possession. One thing is very certain: if we cannot reach and solve the problem through a pragmatic personalism, we cannot solve it at all. The problem arises from the requirements of 258 PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY a world of growth and freedom and from the transcendent qualities of the human spirit, which is continually breaking its bonds from and mastering all that is strictly material. It is only by a strict personalism that we can clear the Divine Being from participation in the ancient wrongs, the sins and brutalities of man. If we think of God in the pantheistic fashion, an Absolute, everywhere in his world of things and men, and lacking in those self-defining qualities necessary to personality, we have a God who is mistaken in our mistakes, who sins in our sins, and who has let loose upon humanity as from a Pandora's box a brood of horrors and crimes for which he is responsible and for whose ending he is incapable. But if person- ality be the requirement of all life, directly or indirectly, the Infinite Personality is bound not to infringe upon nor to transgress against the personalities of his creatures. In patience he waits the late results of that discipline by which men shall achieve moral and spiritual independence and self-sufficiency like his own. There are already many indications that when man has become the intellectual master of the material universe and the moral master of his own purposes, thoughts, and impulses, suffering and evil will have vanished from his world. They are the growing pains incident to his 259 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM youth, the concomitants of a passing imper- fection, the tormenting evidences of growth or of the possibility of growth, the eloquent re- minders of that perfect world to come which has forever formed the object of his untiring search. To repeat here the verses of T. E. Brown quoted by Bosanquet in his volume on the Value and Destiny of the Individual : "The man that hath great griefs I pity not; 'Tis something to be great In any wise, and hint the larger state Though but in shadow of a shade, God wot! "But tenfold one is he who feels all pains Not partial, knowing them As ripples parted from the gold-beaked stem. Wherewith God's galley ever onward strains. "To him the sorrows are the tension-thrills Of that serene endeavor. Which yields to God forever and forever The joy that is more ancient than the hills." 960 CHAPTER XI PERSONALISM AND THE GROUND OF BEING Personality Assumed or Implied is the Basis of Explanation in Current Theories Because the law of the suflScient reason demands an intelligent source of intelligible results, widely differing theories and systems pretending to impersonalism and materialism will be found implying personality in the meta- physical ground, somewhere in the process of their reasoning. This is quite sure to be true as a matter of course in any system which attempts to explain a world of which intelligence is a part. Spencer hoped to found a system that would leave the ground of being quite impersonal. Driven by the infinite regress of cause and effect, he was led to affirm unknowable qualities of the First Cause. But in order to float his theories he had continual recourse to the affirmation of personal qualities, purpose, power, and choice or selection, in this same Unknowable without appearing conscious of his inconsistency. More modern theories which have recourse 261 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM for metaphysical explanation to theories of forces inherent in matter, to aeons, electrons, and vortices, unconsciously assume as necessary to atoms and electrons that very intelligent purpose and choice which it is their purpose to explain. Even a philosophy of "vital elan" finds it necessary to make a similar assumption. The term "vital impulse" is taken as suflBciently abstract to cover the case, and then it is dis- covered that a "vital elan" must have a certain degree of personality about it if it is to be used in explanation of the existence of a personal world. So continually the "vital elan" is referred to as if it were an abiding personality; and no consistent metaphysics has been able to escape the implication. Of course, one can reduce his language to mathematical nicety and with scientific skill avoid speaking the fateful word which will bring his theory falling about his ears, but he can scarcely avoid the attempt to make his theory adequate to explain that which he proposes for explanation. Just here it is that the most violent impersonalist endeav- ors to work personality into the universe under cover. It may be a private satisfaction to endow an atom or its more invisible equivalent with power of choice, freedom, intelligence, and purpose, in order to hold before our aston- ished eyes a result that has been wrought in the THE GROUND OF BEING dark like the miracle of the magician. The mind, however, which does not desire to be deceived cannot take seriously the thought that the rabbit, the goose, the flag, and the deck of cards, either sprang from thin air or were really concealed in the hat of the entertainer. The really inquiring mind will seek for the trick in the uncommon procedure. A progress toward the explanation of intelligence which denies intelligence until it is, so to speak, slipped dex- terously from the sleeve of language is really not quite satisfying to the alert mind. It does not seem worth while to deny teleological reality to the Ground of Being if it is our dark intention to make the teleological inference under a form of words such as "attractions" and "repulsions," which seem to explain only because they are purely hypothetical and abstract; that is, they beg the question. The metaphysical magician takes out of the hat the self-same rabbit that he put in, but there is nothing cosmic nor metaphysical about his proceeding, except to the minds of the very credulous. Affirming Personality in the World- Ground IS not to Confuse God with His World The greatest difficulties of the Absolutist 263 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM philosophy axise from the identification of God with his world. Immanence easily lapses into pantheism, in which the world becomes the body of the indwelling Infinite, the corporate ex- pression of an Infinite and Eternal power, which includes all things in itself, and is the Ultimate and Absolute One. The trouble is that it is compelled thereby to include some very shock- ing and inconvenient things, such as an imper- fect world of sin, wickedness, horror, and blood- shed. Our medicine may be sugar-coated, but we cannot quite avoid the after effects because its real character has been hidden from sight and smell. We would be saved this unsatis- factory result by affirming personality in the World-Ground and a world of lesser person- alities and things upheld and maintained by the unceasing purpose and will of such self -defining Purpose. God would then be immanent in his world but not identical with it. There is a true sense in which the artist can be said to be immanent in his work. Every line, every com- bination of color is the result of the artist's experience, character, skill, and personality. No other man could or would express himself in exactly the same terms. Once you know the artist and become acquainted with his way of handling a subject, you can tell his work as easily without his signature as with it, THE GROUND OF BEING for his work is all written over with himself. It is the expression of the unique in his person- ality. Now, no creator can become identical with his creation without ceasing to exist as a creator. To make God identical with his creation would be to destroy him. It would be ridiculous to declare the artist identical with his picture. If the artist created the picture, he is something more than the picture, though he has written himself into the picture with the greatest faithfulness, the utmost devotion. He is in his work it is true, but it is also true that he transcends it. A Changing World Implies not a Changing BUT A Living God A God whose essence is change, whose quality is to change through and through, I think has been already shown an impossible conception. Such a God, unable to link together his ever- flowing states would be the mere creature of the moving flux of the world. Man would then be the only God we know, for he at least, and he alone, in all the changing universe is master of his own fate, directing his own destiny. It is not necessary, however, to affirm a changing God in order to affirm a changing world. Our own transcendence of the undeviating flow should teach us this. In fact, the ancient 265 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Jewish and Christian idea of a living God will be found sufficient. To live implies an enriching content of experience, but it does not imply absolute change. It does not imply change of purpose, love, or identity. There never would have been the difficulty with this idea that there has been were it not for the confusions that arise from ascribing mathematical perfection to the Divine Being, instead of keeping to the essentials of personality, purpose, and character. Here the ancient ghosts of spatial and temporal thinking have arisen to trouble us. If we will think for a moment of the attributes commonly ascribed to the Divine Being, we shall see how many of them belong not necessarily to the divine character, but are, rather, the implica- tions of our human limitations. They are human limitations from which we feel that God must be free. And there are certain of the ascribed attributes of God that are merely our statement that God is not holden of our Hmitations. Omnipresence, omnipotence, om- niscience, and a brood of others are quanti- tative, and are but the contrast of our human limitations, the shadow cast by spatial and temporal limits under which we labor, but which cannot be allowed to limit God. Our incon- sistency springs not from the affirmation of these quantitative attributes but from our THE GROUND OF BEING attempt to measure their meaning to the Supreme Personality with the yardstick of our human limitations. They are the shadow of our own relations to the temporal and spatial order. We do not know their meaning for the Supreme Personality. These attributes are summed up in his self-creative activity in the ongoing of the world. The relations of the Supreme Intelligence to the temporal and spatial order cannot arise out of the necessities of his being, but are concerned with the form of his purpose toward an uncompleted or unfinished world. ^ "Why," it may be asked, "did he not make a complete or perfect world at the beginning?" The only answer is that to a moral being no world would be perfect without other moral beings and moral attainment may well be the final end of creative activity. When we say "God is love," we affirm some- thing qualitative, which is quite different from temporal or spatial attributes and has to do 1 So far as it may be given us to understand, space must mean to God the dififerentiation between the activity of his own will and consciousness and that of his free creatures. Not being, as finite personalities, under the form of corpo- reality, space would seem to be to him some such differentia- tion. As to time, that would be but the story of purpose in the process of fulfillment. The very incompleteness of that purpose is a token of contingency in result and action. It is the concomitant of freedom. 267 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM with character.^ Strictly considered, divine and human perfection may require other than merely static elements, for it scarcely can be conceived that any form of existence is less perfect than say a geological formation. The perfection of the living, on the contrary, lies in its nonstatic quality. If it ceases to grow, it dies and becomes something less perfect. On the other hand, there are some elements in living personality which do not change nor pass, namely, the self-identifying personality with its consciousness of survival and differen- tiation; the moral qualities of love, honor, justice, righteousness, loyalty; these grow richer in passing experience, but they need not change in perfection. A mother's love, to repeat an illustration already used, is not changed in essence and character by the flow of years. It is as perfect when the child is a babe as it will be when the child has become a grown man. Experience in time may have added richness and meaning to the content of that love, but neither joy nor adversity, blessing nor bitter- ness has changed it. Her motherhood may be perfect from the beginning, though it be- comes yearly more meaningful. For contin- 2 An interesting discussion of this phase of the subject is given by J. S. Mackenzie in Mind, 1904, p. 367 et passim; also in Mind, 1912, p. 341f. 268 THE GROUND OF BEING gency, the possibility of doing differently, and growth, these are necessary to the perfection of the living human personality, and it is con- ceivable that they may be in some manner necessary to the perfection of a living God. It becomes, indeed, impossible to apply the term "living" to the Divine Being without thinking of it in some such way as this. The world in its ongoing is not necessarily a static affair, forever predetermined. It may be on its way to an outworking all the more sublime because an Infinite Free Spirit is at the helm. The whole condition of the present spatial and temporal order might conceivably be changed to meet rising conditions of life. Such changes may be merely waiting upon new moral and spiritual achievements in man. If it be true that "in him we Hve and move and have our being," and that creation calls for the contin- uous exercise of His creative purpose, every act of discovery contains an element of faith. Columbus's venture on untried seas, the trust of the first aviator, the antennae of the first wireless apparatus were as much the act of faith, the expression of a prayerful belief in the Divine, as they are expressions of scientific thought. So far as man keeps himself in line with the orderly uniformities, submitting his will to a higher, there seem no limits to his possible BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM attainment. The watchword of the modern scientific investigator might well be, "Accord- ing to thy faith be it." God meets man's intelligent and lawful faith with willing purpose as we travel from the seen toward the unseen. And, further, unless the content of the divine experience is susceptible thus to growth it becomes impossible to say wherein the moral welfare of man, love, worship, or devotion, is of any moment to God. Certainly in the qualitative and positive attributes of the Divine Being we have those abiding and neces- sary characteristics that form the backbone of all religious thinking and living. And we shall at the same stroke rid ourselves of the age-long dispute about the relation of God to the tem- poral order, for time in the eternal sense could mean not that the eternal is dependent upon experience in time, but that for him it is but an order of succession dependent on his will and purpose. Personal Realism Provides a Philosophi- cal Basis for a Doctrine of Incar- nation (a) Impossible, holding a view of God as static, to show how he could be in Christ. It is impossible in any view of God as an Absolute, forever static and self-contained, to 270 THE GROUND OF BEING offer a reasonably philosophical hypothesis for a doctrine of incarnation. Dark and unanswer- able questions at once arise as to how any mani- festation in space and time, bound to the limits of our human days and years, could be at the same time the Absolute. And so under the weight of logical inconsistency theism often has broached a departmental and divided God and given cause for the charge of tri-theism which the hostile have been glad to term polytheism. Here again the questions that trouble us are wholly quantitative, like omnipresence, omnipo- tence, omniscience, and necessity, yet in spite of all a God but partially in Christ has not satisfied the feeling of men. Is it not plain that life itself must become a horrible dream overburdened with hopeless problems unless this God who made us is in some real and active sense participator in our struggles, pains, and moral victories? If as a living God he maintains any tangible rela- tion to his creation it must mean just this. An incarnation is demanded to meet the subtlest questions of the moral universe. Incarnation means a continuous divine participation in our life, our sorrows, and our struggles with evil. We must hold that God in some sense always has been participator in the life of the world, and so we speak of an eternal incarnation, and 271 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM of the profound character of the cross as an everlasting principle of human action. The dark antinomies of the problem of evil grow less dark. The existence of evil is the price paid for free moral character and the fatherhood of free spirits. But evil is within the control of man. As we do away with it, we help to build a perfect world in which we can rejoice as being free colaborers with him. But questions will arise concerning the limited nature of a human God. To posit a Divine Presence in Christ raises insuperable questions in many minds. There is no more limitation of the Supreme by his presence in Christ than there is in imagining him as creating the world, or in relation of any vital kind to the spiritual nature of man. The obscurities at this point arise out of assumptions of the temporal and spatial order which do not hold for the Divine Consciousness. How an incarnation can be is doubtless a great mystery. How a human body can be possessed and influenced by a nonspatial soul is likewise a very great mystery. Nevertheless, it is an ascertainable fact. We need not assume in order to provide for an incarnation that the Divine Consciousness abdi- cated the throne for thirty-three years, nor, on the other hand, that the human Jesus was consciously holding the planets to their orbits. 272 THE GROUND OF BEING That we have thought either of these concep- tions necessary has been due to fallacies of spatialized and temporalized human thinking. Our difficulties are akin to those that faced us in assuming quantitative attributes of God. It may help us in this connection to remember that even human self -consciousness is not limited to a single object of consciousness at a time. It can be conscious of several objects and several motives and several goals at once. It not only can be conscious but it can be conscious of con- scious states without any difficulty or confusion. It is only when we begin analytically to emuner- ate states, to intellectualize concerning them as Bergson would say, that we find theoretical difficulties springing up. (6) Does away with the question of how God could manifest himself in historic time. If, now, we turn from quantitative attributes, concerning which we can say nothing only that the Divine is not holden of our temporal and spatial limitations, to the qualitative attributes, we find these most important attributes repre- sented in the character of Jesus beyond power of gainsaying. Inasmuch as we do find these and inasmuch as temporal and spatial qualities are the reflection of our own necessity rather than fundamental divine attributes, we honestly 273 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM can declare that God was in Christ in the most real sense that man can know. Christology is the assumption that the moral qualities of God are the essential ones, that they are the ones we are capable of comprehend- ing, and that they are supreme. The world can be completed on no other basis. The con- crete appearance of goodness anywhere is of God, a manifestation of God, and we need not deny it nor commit theological hari kari in recognizing it. We are thus able to free ourselves from the perplexity of how God can manifest himself in a historical time and personality. Time and space are to him both transcendent and real. A Personal World-Ground Provides for "God, Freedom, and Immortality" Let us restate briefly what already has been discussed — the fundamental relation of a doc- trine of personality in God to the main problem. "How does a personal World-Ground provide for God, freedom, and immortality .f*" The first consideration must be this, that an impersonal World-Ground leaves man in lone moral possession of the universe, and yet the helpless and unsurviving slave of dead matter, wholly unaccountable. Or if this World- Ground be conceived as an impersonal Abso- 274 THE GROUND OF BEING lute, he is lacking in those personal qualities which give him concrete value to man. Again, though less lonely, the personality of man remains inexplicable. In the second place, any form of imperson- alism reerects the closed system of necessity. The one essential of freedom is contingency, the power of choice, and this is impossible to any but an intelligent purposive being. It would be most difficult to explain how there could be either freedom or life in an uncontin- gent Divine Being. Nor does the cause of freedom stop with the Divine Being. Unless there is freedom in the Divine Being there is none in man. Man is then but the prey of pitilessly driving forces which rid him of moral responsibility for his acts and choices. Third, any system which assumes imperson- ality in the World-Ground shuts the door in the face of one of humanity's most cherished and enduring hopes, the hope of immortality. Perhaps some one will arise to say that this is no affair of philosophy, which will be incorrect, for the abiding instincts of the human race cannot be ruled off the field of explanation without negating the explanation itself. If personality is able in its own intrinsic reality to abide the temporal flux, if it contains self-creative possibilities, there is nothing inher- %15 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM ently inconsistent for a belief in its survival of a world of time and space. And surely this conception will, for men who live deeply, in an age that is putting civiliza- tion to its greatest tests, be more satisfying than the suggestion that the only immortality for which we can philosophically hope is one of works and influence, that survive for some brief and indefinite period after we are gone. In the view of personal realism, personality stands upon a plane of its own. It is the ultimate, self -causing reality. Its very nature forbids its absorption into anything else, even though that something else be the Absolute. Its ability to transcend the spatial and temporal order bespeaks for it an existence when time and space shall be no more. Personality is the sole surviving principle in a world of change. And, surely, this conception is no more difficult than to posit an original "vital impulse," constantly repeating itself, but lacking in all power of self-direction and purpose, and possessing a meaningless sort of immortality. So far as we can have knowl- edge, "God and the soul abide." 276 CHAPTER Xn INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM The crusades marked the break-up of an institutionalized and provincial world. In poli- tics, the crusades, the resort of kings to further the monarchial system, were really the faint beginnings of a movement that ended far off in a high-tide of democracy. Intended to increase the power and authority of the church, they introduced a liberalizing tendency that resulted in the Reformation. Entered upon in a blind and dogmatic devotion, they opened the flood-gates of the revival of learning and gave to science its early impetus. In a day when philosophy was scholastic and pedantic were sown the seeds destined to revolutionize philosophical systems. Of these various developments, commonly known as the Renaissance, the deeper move- ments came to the later flowering. The period of revolution in government and of the en- lightenment in philosophy was really the after- flowering of the earlier attainments. The whole movement from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries is the story of a developing individualism. It represented a 277 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM breaking away from cramping institutionalized forms, the protest of tlie individual against tyrannical dominance and overlordship of every kind. It nursed the dream that the largest good to the whole could come only out of the largest development of the individual. Hence it was a movement of vast significance in its historical results. Upon its doctrine and achievements have been built some of the most precious accomplishments of society. It is interesting to note some of the late and culminating achievements in this process, for a question arises whether we have now reaped the full possible results without the introduc- tion of a new and more far-reaching principle than that of individualism. Rousseau might be named as the chief spokes- man for individualism in its late political evo- lution. He represented that mighty political revulsion which resulted in the establishment of independence in America and culminated in a new democracy in Europe, Nor was Rousseau's influence confined to the realm of politics. He gave a tremendous impe- tus to the romantic movement in literature. The prevailing passion of the age was a passion for self-expression. Stress was laid upon per- sonal meditation, reflection, and experience altogether out of proportion to their real value, 278 INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM The writing of intimate journals became a common literary occupation. Out of this grew an overvaluation of both the cultural and reli- gious worth of these inner experiences. One most profoundly influenced was the poet Goethe. His life story became one of an effort for indi- vidual development at any moral cost. The end of emotional attainment was held to justify the means, with the result that morals, religion, and sense of honor were sacrificed to individual Kultur. We note in Goethe the beginning of that process which has influenced so profoundly the literature of the nineteenth century and which has given us Nietzsche and the contempo- rary doctrine of the superman. Rousseau's Emile became the basis of an individualistic theory of education which is a widely prevailing standard in the educational system of to-day. Its development has been attended by an ever-increasing secularization of education. Worse than that, the place of morality and religion in cultural development has not only been ignored, in too many quarters it has become educational anathema. It has been dubbed unscientific and a prejudice has been created against it. Pure culture has been held to be not only complete when separated from deep religious sentiment, but religious senti- ment has been widely held as incompatible with ^79 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM deep culture or with scientific attainment. The influence of individuaHsm in education has run the hmit of its progress in the Prussian Kultur and in many American institutions of learning. On the ethical side the progress of individ- ualism was strangely influenced from behind its own age. Spinoza was scarcely known for a hundred years after his work was done. That he became a power then was largely due to the resurrection of his system by Herder and its acceptance by Goethe. Spinoza's doctrine that we become one with God by an act of reason becomes the keynote of Goethe's Faust. What- ever increases the understanding or is useful to the individual cultural development is morally good. According to this view pity, shame, remorse, repentance are but vices that repeat the offense. One who regrets an evil past is weak and is conscious of his weakness. The will to knowledge and to power is the moving element in great characters. Thus was injected into the world of education, art, and literature that subtle poison which has embarrassed indi- vidualism with an intolerable burden. This ethical development might have been far more widespread among the nations of democracy had there not been another move- ment contemporaneous with it and which pros- pered on the soil of individualism. This 280 INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM movement was religious, and though technically identified with Methodism has permeated all surviving forms of Protestantism and influenced Roman Catholicism itself. Methodism turned the wine of the new enthusiasm for individualism into new religious wine-flasks. Great emphasis was placed upon individual internal experiences and upon individual culture. While this no doubt led to many excesses and to some mis- understanding of religious reality, it had the balance wheel of moral and religious devotion which kept it from running into a pure selfish- ness like that of supermanism. In fact, when eventual history comes to be written it will be discovered as an inestimable influence in indi- vidual restraint and the moralization and strengthening of free institutions. In truth had it not been for this deeper religious influence running parallel with the movement of individualism, individualism could have accomplished nothing for democracy but utter ruin. Democracy without moral and spiritual restraint is impossible, and has been so demonstrated from the time of the excesses of the Reign of Terror to the exaltation of Russian Bolshevikism. True democracy means self-government, and self-government is impos- sible without the presence in the individual of restraining moral and spiritual influences. 281 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Li science individualism has manifested itself in the emphasis upon the empirical method. Each individual can conduct his own experiment and his experience becomes the ultimate word for science. The tendency on the whole has been to protest against the restraining influence of any unity or system and to emphasize the pluralistic view of life. The extreme of this development is to be seen in men of the type of Haeckel, and in many unjustified claims of modern materialistic science. In philosophy this movement has been along the lines of empiricism, realism, positivism, and intellectual skepticism. A persistent attempt has been made to clear the philosophical field of all religious and theistic implications in an effort to be more scientific and exact. The result has been a one-sided and inadequate view of the human person. Viewed as a mere receptacle for material and outward born impulses, or at best a conglomeration of reactions, the indi- vidual in philosophic thought has become little else than an automaton incapable of moral action and passing on the exact ratio of impres- sions received. The Cultural Ideals of Individualism With this interpretation of the person it is easy to arrive at a perverted view of individual 282 INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM culture, such as possessed the minds of many of the early and late romanticists. The emphasis on the evolutionary theory seemed to put the weightier elements of development beyond the power of individual responsibility. It further laid great stress upon the development of the individual as the goal of all progress. While it exalted the development of individuals it like- wise taught that less fortunate forms must perish to create the typical man. If one, then, were a "free spirit," typical man, or "super- man," there should be no distress at the suf- fering of the less perfect for one's own better advancement and deeper culture. One needed only a certain egotistic assurance that he was of the superman type and all the world was to lie like an oyster at his feet, to be opened and swallowed. It does not take such an individualism long, even though in the beginning it starts from a socialistic standpoint of opposition to estab- lished society, to become the narrowest and meanest kind of an autocracy. It may be the autocracy of a class, of birth, of education, of religious beliefs, or even of the proletarian. Its significant mark is that its hand is set against all other classes, its dream is of individual pre- ferment and exaltation. Its hope is the renova- tion of the world by the domination of all other BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM wills to its own. Its weakness lies in its egotistic selfishness. In the name of individualistic development the greatest crimes have been and are being committed. The only reason that such a theory can blind the hearts of men is because they fail to take into account the reality of moral and spiritual values. An sestheticism which leads the poet or artist to plunge into moral excesses for their cultural value overlooks the fact that any moral excess removes the fineness and delicacy which alone can make art or poetry great. A culture which is built up at the expense of toil and hardship of the forgotten multitudes is a false culture which carries with it its own curse and its own undoing. It is not strange that such a theory of culture should eventuate in the immoral and perverted doctrines of Nietzsche, and that these in a land where all scientific and cultural attainments have for many years been divorced from the deeper religious and even moral elements, should yield a fruitage of barbarity that has shocked the whole world. Such is the natural outcome of a morally untempered individualism. The Contrasting Ideals of Personalism The dominant principle of Personalism is the dependence of individual culture upon the INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM moral and spiritual values. Recognition is given to the fact that any culture which lacks these is lacking in essential humanity and cannot possess a lasting influence over men. In the following out of this higher individual- ism it may be necessary for the individual to make the utmost sacrifice of material advantage in order that he seize upon the finer gifts which are possible to human personality. He may have to sink his individuality in a higher good in order to rise to the heights of personality. The possession of life itself, often held to be the greatest good, is seen by Personalism to be inferior to the possession say of one's honor, or integrity, or self-respect. Moreover, if the well-being of the many demands the self-sac- rifice of the individual, the individual reaches his highest possible personal development by joyful surrender. If to be loyal to the highest principles of morality it be necessary to lay down one's life, one by that very act does the thing of greatest cultural value to himself. If, on the other hand, one is to save his life by dishonor, by being untrue to the moral welfare of himself or others, life itself becomes of little value because unfaithful to those higher inter- ests which make it worth living. The truth is beautifully expressed in Emerson's quotation for the soldiers' memorial in Cambridge: 285 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM ** 'Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die.** In Personalism the value of individual culture is not overlooked. It is simply carried to the higher realm of action, and here the highest values can be attained only by the highest self-forgetfulness. The culture of Per- sonalism leaves no bad taste in the mouth, no pangs of heartbreak for others, no blasting or festering trail of evil behind it. It is as benev- olent in the general culture as it is in that of the individual. The Present Conflict between Individual- ism AND Personalism Never in the history of the world has the battle been so clearly drawn between these conflicting ideals of life. Individualism with its exaltation of individual preferment at the expense of the many, with its ethical doctrine that whatever is useful in furthering its culture is morally right, with its scorn of the weak and helpless as beyond the pale of its care and responsibility, with its disregard and skepticism toward all spiritual values, is lined up in a great world conflict against all who believe in the inviolable human rights of the least and feeblest in the social structure, the personalists. S86 INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM The personalists, despite their philosophy, their previous condition of cultural servitude, and their previous devotion to individuahstic theories, are seeing with new vision that no elements are cultural unless they include the well being of all. The swift lesson is now being taught a slow moving world that when the fun- damental human rights of one are menaced the rights of all are endangered. And, better than this, vast multitudes have learned how sweet and beautiful it is to lay down one's life not only for one's country but for righteousness in the earth, and for the coming kingdom of God. And just in the measure that men are counting not their lives dear unto themselves, in that same measure do they experience the coming of the real superman — the man who can lay down his life for his friends. The Cross as the Solution of the Deeper Problems of Life One would be bold indeed who should propose the solution of the dark problem of evil, and to offer a principle on which alone permanent institutions of society may be organized. Yet in these trying days gleams of light are coming to illuminate our way. Not that they have been wanting to other days, but those that come now are very practical and very personal. 287 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM We can see how a crisis has been brought upon the world in which if the things dearest to civilization are to be saved many men must voluntarily lay down life. Values superior to life itself have arisen above the horizon of the average human thought. What man has, in the days just gone, been so thoughtless as not to prefer his son dead upon the field of honor to having him a slacker and a sneak — willing to live and prosper through the sacrifice of the noble and the brave .^^ It is impossible that some other lessons of life should fail to follow in the train of this recog- nition. In days of luxury, comfort, and inde- pendence it was easy to listen to the devil of a selfish individualism. One could so easily shut one's ears to the sufferings and injustices of the multitudes. One's personal comfort was so important that any demand of humanity or religion which broke in upon comfort was con- sidered preposterous. That one should en- danger his life for others was the brave act of a fool. And at the same time we were obsessed by a fear of suffering and were crying out against a world of pain and demanding that the theists show us the solution of the problem of evil or cease prating about a good God, or any other kind of God for that matter. In the meantime we are coming to see that the 288 INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM responsibility for the greatest suffering of these times, and sufferings that make those of other days seem insignificant, is not to be placed upon God, but upon evil men. Just as the real evil of the world is seen to be the result of an unholy, lustful and greedy individualism, we are beginning to see likewise that it can be done away and an age of peace brought in only as men are willing to give up everything material for the greatness of a spiritual ideal. There is in this fact too a suggestion for the solution of the problem of evil so far as it touches the individual. The individual can make the pains and sufferings of life yield him a rich treasure of personal and spiritual attain- ment according to the spirit in which he meets them. Death itself may become but the glory which consummates his earthly career. So much for the individual solution. Where it touches the wider ranges of society at large it is not so easy. There is much of mystery and darkness. Heavy responsibilities are thrust upon God — why did he make a world that could will to evil and to involve the innocent in suffering? There are two considerations that arrest the attention and constrain us at least to withhold judgment. The first is whether there would be any value or reality to moral freedom if evil were impossible. The second BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM regards the part of God. Suppose it shall be discovered that this life of moral possibility is the superior goal of creation, and that in order to create men in his own spiritual likeness he has himself been willing to partake in their suffering. If the concrete solution of the problem of evil is to be found in the individual attitude toward the woes of life through a spiritual self-mastery that glorifies all, then the endurance of the cross by the Master and Creator of Life himself must furnish the philosophical and theological justification of an uncompleted world. 290 INDEX INDEX Absolutism assumes personality in the Absolute, 228. Absolutist tendency toward pantheism, 263f. Atomism, when effective, assumes personality in the atom, 262. Atomistic conclusion of Bergson, 48. Bassanio choosing the caskets, 67. Beauchamp, Miss, as an example of dissociation, 209f. Beethoven, 131. Being as vibration, 45. Bergson and idealistic dialectic, 25. impersonalism, 25, 71, 74, 142, 152ff., 174. materialism, 24, 47, 48, personalism, 26, 123ff., 134f., 142, 176, 188f. psychoparallelism, 36. committed to materialism, 47f., 154, 187f. Bergson's aim, 24, 25. in his definition of matter, 31. criticism of Kant's doctrine of God, 152. definition of freedom, 132ff. God, 153f, 174. intuition, 82ff. life and spirit, 34f., 37f., 69. life and spirit as duration, 69, 72. life and spirit as intersection of matter and spirit, 69ff, 188. life and spirit as vital impulse, 69, 73. definition of matter, 31. as inverse of movement, 32. uncertainty, 32. personality, 176ff, 180f, 186f. space, 108ff. time, 117f. doctrine of the world-ground, 153f. neo-realism, 58, 61, 77, 78. Bolshevism a phase of individualism, 281. Bosanquet, 260. Bowne, 26. Bowne's definition of matter and spirit, 39, Browne, T. E., poem quoted, 260. Burbank, Luther, 93, 234. 298 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Carr, H. Wildon, 174. Causality and duration, 123. Causation and freedom, 132ff., 142ff., 147. eflScient, and phenomenal, 142flF., 147f, 231f. comes back to purpose, 243. mechanical, static, 75, 148, 151. provided for in personal realism, 240f . the unique possession of personality, 231f. uncaused, in ourselves, and in God, 128f, 147f., 150f., 218f., 231. unexplained by potentiality, 75. Change, absolute, impossible in world of intelligence, 158f. as original, 156f. implies a living God, 265. in God, 158f. applicable only to experience, 163f. in human personality, 158f, 164. Changelessness of God in purpose and righteousness, 161, 168f. Coe, The Psychology of Religion quoted, 210. Conservation of energy, an overworked doctrine, 219. Contingency necessary to freedom, 275. Creativity, human, 131, 150f., 218f. Cross, the, as the principle of life, 272. as means of culture, 285f. the solution of life's deepest problems, 287f . Crusades, influence on the world of learning, 277f . Culture, dependent on moral and spiritual values, 284f. Dante, 131. Definition, importance of, to being, reality, and life, 31. Descartes and the philosophy of change, 23, 144. Descartes' instantaneous metaphysics, 123, 143. Determinism in Bergson, 73f, 157. Dissociation, a problem for neo-realism, 21 1 . illustrated in the case of Miss Beauchamp, 209f . not of personality, but of conscious states, 208ff. Dualism and personality, 68f . of matter and spirit, 36f ., 40, 56f . ultimate solution in personality, 68f., 72, 184f., 250f. Duration and causation, 123. freedom, 121f, 134f. personality, 44, 71f., 124f., 227, 230. speed of vibration, 117f. spirit, 43. 294 INDEX Duration as succession in phenomena, 123. cannot solve conflict between mind and matter,43,53. causal, only in personality, 124, 129. defined, 71f. in God, 156f . in relation to time, 120ff. in things and persons must be reconciled, 146. necessary to freedom, 135, 139f, 145. of persons, 121ff., 134f., 145f., 227. of things, 121ff., 126, 134f., 145f., 227. possible only to personality, 72, 129, 135, 139f. "pure," a succession in states of consciousness, 123f. related to space, 114f. Education by standards of individualism, 279. in morals and religion, 279. secularized, 279. Elan, as original impulse, 157. in creative energy, 145, 156f. must be intelligent, 157. Emerson, lines for the soldier's monument, 285f. Emile, Rousseau's theory of education, 279. Error as viewed by neo-realism, 204f. not solved on the impersonal plane, 258. the chief problem of realism, 254f. Ethics of individualism. Evil, future of, determined by moral agents, 107. its origin, 107. its possibility, the condition of character, 289. may ofifer the opportunity of self-mastery, 258f. not solved on the impersonal plane, 258. not the work of God, 289. solved personally, 289. suggestion of solution, 289. the chief problem of personal realism, 254-256. the problem of idealism, 256. within man's control, 272. Evolution and individualism, 283. due to an increment, 150, 241f. dependent on unconditioned creative activity, 75, 140, 146, 150f. 233f. divine self-consciousness, 161. purpose in, 146f. Experience brings richer content to mother's love, not greater love, 268. contracted, as time, 117f. 29d BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Faith present in discovery, 269. Faust in Goethe's philosophy, 280. Fite, 231. Foreknowledge and determinism, 138f. Freedom and causation, 132ff., 147f. Freedom and duration, 134f. foreknowledge, 138f. miracle, 138f. defined by Bergson, 132fiF. impossible where homogeneity is the result of initial impulse, 73-76. in God needed to ground freedom in man, 275. in impersonalism impossible, 174flf. in personality alone, 72, 140f, 147f. 175f, 216f, 231. in the philosophy of change, 102f. in unconscious life, 135f., 140. not to be had apart from intelligence, 140. of personality as attained through the doctrine of duration, 124, 134, 139, 159. purposeless, untenable, 137f. through contingency, 275. French romanticism and the doctrine of intuition, 24. Functional response to environment not freedom, 136. Genius and intuition, 100. God as change, 153f., 156, 158f., 164flF. growing in experience, 172. living implies enriching content of experience, 266. rather than changing, 265. sufficient for contingency, 171. related to duration, 156, 158f., 166. static could not be in Christ, 270f. contingent, therefore living, 275. how immanent, 264. in the philosophy of change, 102, 150, 153f, 158f. made dependent upon matter, 154. must be an abiding self-consciousness, 161. self-creative, 169. transcendent as well as immanent, 265. not departmental, 271. not responsible for evil, 259. not static, 165. 168. not subject to his world, 164. related to the world, 165. to time and space through an uncompleted world. 267. 296 INDEX God transcendent of time, 166f. God's appearance in historic time reasonable, 273. God's attributes, character, and relation to temporal and spatial world, 172. qualitative or quantitative, 273. partnership in suffering, 290. perfection in life, 268. perfection, one of righteousness, 163. relation to spatial and temporal order, 160, 166f. Goethe and individualism, 279. Goethe's Faust, 280. Goodness, a manifestation of God, 274. Haeckel's materialism, 282. Haldane quoted, 238. Hegel, 238. Herder's "Self," quoted, 235f. Hocking, 208 note; quoted, 128, 235. Homogeneity, as the result of a single creative impulse, 73. dependent on free creativity, 76. Idealism, evil its chief problem, 256. Ideals, cultural, of individualism, 282f. Image, as the description of matter, 33, 37-39. dual meaning of the term as used by Bergson, 33, 37- 39, 176f. Immanence, doctrine of, tends toward pantheism, 263f. its meaning, 264f. Immortality, in the Bergsonian system, 174, 188ff. personal, important to philosophy, 188f. Impersonalism, against the moral order, 155. in Bergson's God, 154. philosophy, 25, 164, 176f. in neo-realism, 198. in world-ground, untenable, 213, 274f. Incarnation assumes moral attributes essential, 274. demanded by practical problems of life, 271f. eternal, 271f. inconsistent with a static God, 270f. not limiting, 272. of God in Christ, 164, 171f, 190f. philosophically grounded, 270. Individualism and autocracy, 283. evolution, 283. contrasted with personalism, 277f, in conflict with personalism, 286, 297 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Individualism, in education, 279. ethics, 280. Methodism, 281. philosophy, 282. religion, 281. science, 282. the Bolshevik movement, 281. its achievements, 278. cultural ideals, 282f. of Nietzsche, 284. weakness of, 283f. Individuality applied to personality, 181f. Instinct, applied by Bergson to organic and inorganic worlds, 82-87. conscious and unconscious, 85, 135. human, intelligent, 90fiF. in tropisms, 87-89, 135. unadaptibility of, 95f. Instinctive action in religion, 105f. Intellectualization, connected with freedom, 140f. fades from habitual action, 105f. Mr. Bergson's bane, 51, 76f. Intelligence, adaptable to change, 95. in religion, 103f. Intuition and genius, 100. revelation, 99ff. as a guide in vital matters, 80, 93flF. approach to life, 86, 104ff. human, inseparable from intelligence, 90, 98, lOlff, 184f. inaccurately used by Bergson, 86f. in religion, 103f. in the philosophy of change, 82, 86. "pure," 50. so-called, established by habit, 80f, 140f. theory of as an aid to religious ideas, 99flf. Intuitionalism and French romanticism, 24. Intuitions, moral, related to habit, 106. Jones, Thomas S., Jr., poem "Sometimes," quoted, 249f. Kant, 242, 247. criticized by Bergson, 152. by Haldane, 238. Knowles, Frederic Lawrence, "The Tenant," quoted, 192, Kultur in Goethe, 279, INDEX Larcom, Lucy, "A Strip of Blue," quoted, 127. Law of the sufficient reason, 261. Life, as duration, 71. intersection of matter and spirit, 153f. minimum cognition, 76. movement, 33, 37-39, 45, God's perfect attribute, 268. in God implies enriching content of experience, 266. the expression of personality, finite or infinite, 72. Lowell, James Russell, quotationfrom "Under the Willows," 63. Materialism, of Haeckel, 282. problem of error its chief difficulty, 31, 217. Matter and life, Bergson's failure at distinguishing, 36. Matter as a factor in its own genesis, 35. as exhausted life, 35. the inverse of movement, 33. described as image, 32, 37-39. defined by Bergson, 31, 37-39. as independent of memory, 54. Memory and life, 54. personality, 60, 64. as synonymous with spirit, 59. and the intersection of mind and matter, 58, 64. Bergson's definition, 55. defined, 60. dependence on materiality, 65. independent of matter, 54. must be of concrete facts, 60. "pure," 55-59, 63. Metaphysical explanation must include intelligence, 66. Methodism a phase of the individualistic movement, 281. Miracle not provided for in the philosophy of change, 102f. valuable as an indication of purpose, 103, 138f. Moral achievement, high point in personality, 155. attainment the goal of creative activity, 267. qualities in God the essential ones, 273f. reality of moment to philosophy, 242. Morality in education, 279f . Movement, as life, 33, 45. as transference of a state, 45. as world-ground, 45-49, 156f. Mystery in personality may be studied, 254. in ultimate explanation 67, 79, 220f., 237. Naidu, Sarojini, poem "Suttee" quoted, 190, 299 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Neitzsche, representative of individualism, 284. Neo-realism, affirms error as subjectivity, 204. and the problem of dissociation, 211. close to idealism in affirming reality of "relation," 203f., 229f., 251f. distinguished from personal realism, 200flF. fails to solve dualism, 204f, 251. fundamental propositions of, 198-201. pluralistic, 204f. provides neither unity nor continuity in expe- rience, 201. seeking reality apart from personality must fail, 196, 229f. Neo-realistic doctrine of relation, abstract, 253f. tendency in Bergson, 58, 61, 77. Number, a term of distinction, 116. as applied concretely 115f. counted in space or in duration, 114f. Oppositions of philosophy, 21 7f. Organism, self-constructive, 219. Perception, and intellectualization, 41f, 200. contrasted with spirit, 42. crux of problem in self-identification, 199f. dependent on self -defining quality of personality, 200. inseparable from intellectualization, 43, 200. "pure," 50, 54-58, 185. has no concrete meaning, 62. hypothetical nature acknowledged by Bergson, 58. never devoid of intellectualization, 77. Perfection in God implies life, 268. Perry, R. B., 204, 229; quoted, 224f. Personal equation in perception, 42, 57. Personal idealism holds to self-consciousness as fundamental, 211. Personal identity of another order than mathematical iden- tity, 226. Personalism and the dualism of matter and spirit, 37, 186f. and the philosophy of change, 26. contrasted with individualism, 277flf. in conflict with individualism, 286. its ideals, 284f . provides for "God, freedom, and immortality," 274. dOO INDEX Personal realism, aflSrms indivisibility of personality, 201 £F. distinguished from neo-realism, 200jGF. holds only to reality in the concrete, 202f. holds personality fundamental to the world- ground, 212. offers concrete object, for study, 80. provides a synthesis for the dualism of mind and matter, 250f. provides for a true relation of persons to space and time, 247f . provides for efficient causation, 240ff. provides a philosophical basis for the doc- trine of incarnation 270f . the acceptance of an indivisible "self," 180, 199f. the expression of relations, 74. the synthesis of mind and matter, 58. Personal Realism's definition of reality, 253. Personality, and duration, 44, 61, 71f, 215f, 230f. memory, 60, 64. recognition of other personalities, 227f . as ground of being, 71, 154f., 190f., 198f., 200. 206ff., 212ff., 228f., 233f., 238. Bergson's view, 39f, 176-178, 186. distinction between human and divine, 214. distinguished by, creativity, 131, 215, 218f, 237. moral action, 155. moral self-consciousness, 236f. self-identity, 178ff, 200, 250. in world-ground objected to as limitation, 213f. its dissociations are those of conscious states, 208ff. its place in personal realism, 223 ff. not an association of conscious states, 224. perfection in, implies complete transcendence of time and space, 214f, 248. so-called multiple. 208ff. the highest gift of life, 259. the indivisible unit of reality, 223f. key to metaphysics, 220, 238f. solution of the antithesis between perception and memory, 62-64, 72. source of unity, 206f. ultimate mystery, 67f, 220f, 237f. ultimate self-causing reality, 276, time-transcending, 145f, 159, 214f, 247f. 301 BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Personality, unity of, source of recovery from "dissociation," 209f. Philosophy influenced by individualism, 282. Philosophy of change, appearance in history, 23. relation to Descartes, 23. Piat, La Personne Humaine, quoted, 203f, 224 and note. Pluralism in the neo-realistic view, 204f. Pluralistic realism ignores problem of error, 255. Pluralistic universe, if consistent, inexplicable accident, 205f. Poincare, Henri, quoted, 91. Prince, Dr. Morton, 209 note. Problem, chief, of realism, 254f. Psycho-parallelism, 79. Purpose in the world-ground, 263. Qualitative change referred to quantitative difference, 246. Qualities as movement, 34, 45, 50f. Quantitative vs. qualitative attributes in God, 273. Race experience imaginary, 85. Realism, crude, 25 If. in perception, 78f, 197, 215. its service to thought, 197. Realistic element in personal realism, 20 If, 225. Reality defined by personal realism, 253. Reality, fundamental, personal, 237f. Relation of neo-realism an abstraction, 253. Religion as intuitional, 103f. in education, 279. intelligent, 103f. Renaissance, influence, 277. Revelation, and intelligence, lOlf. and miracle, 138ff. tested by morality, 101. Rolling snowball of experience, 61. Rousseau, and romantic literature, 287f . as the spokesman of individualism, 278. Rousseau's Emile, 279. Russell, Bertrand, 187, 226. Saint Augustine's prayer, 141. Santayana, 186. Science influenced by individualism, 282. Scientists, metaphysical conclusions of, 245. Self, intuitional and intellectual not separated, 184f. 302 INDEX Self-consciousness, perfect, the foremost affirmation regarding God, 161. the higher, of personality, 236f . Self-creativity, in God and man, 169ff, 218f, 231f, 236f, 242. in ultimate being, 174. Self-definition necessary to personality, 200, 225f. Self-development and self-sacrifice, 256f. Self-identity at heart of freedom, 159. in personality, 178ff. 226f. Shakespeare, 131. Sitaris and sphex as examples of intuition, 94. Skepticism of Spencer, 151. Space and time, a means of relation, 11 If. cannot be thought in homogeneous terms, 113f. must not be solipsistic, 11 If. validated by supreme creative intelligence, 112. Space as homogeneous, 108. not needed for counting, 116. Spencer, 261. Spencer's skepticism, 151, 169f. Unknowable, 261. Spinoza, 280. Spinoza's idea of causality, 143, Spirit, as binding the moments of duration, 48. as synonymous with memory, 59. Spirit differentiated from perception, 4 If. Symbolism in science, 244. "Things as they are," of realism, 215. Thought not explained by vibration, 52. Time, as bastard space, 109, 118f. and duration, 120ff. and freedom derive meaning from the incompleteness of the world, 128. and space, a means of relation. 111, 247. can mean for God only an uncompleted world, 267. must not be solipsistic, 11 If, 247. not to be thought in homogeneous terms, 113f. validated by a supreme creative intelligence, 112, 147. and the world-ground, 119, 127f, 166f, 214f, 247. as an arbitrary measure, 118f. BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM Time, as contracted experience, 117f. flown, as homogeneous with space, 113. transcended only by personality, 47, 166f, 214, 248. Time transcendence, necessary to consciousness of succession or change, 166f. Transcendence of God as important as immanence, 265. Truth, nature by Bergson's doctrine of intuition, 96f. pragmatic nature, 97. Truths, universal, 97. Unchanging element in personality necessary to thought, 159. Unity of personality, source of recovery from dissociation, 209f. Unity to be found in personality, 206f . Vibrations, as mental product, 49. as qualities, 34, 46, 52, 246. Vibratory theory, as metaphysical explanation, 45-47, 50, 156. as related to duration, 117f. does not account for thought, 52f . materialistic implication of, 47f. the result of "intellectualization," 50f. Vital elan, an abstraction, 262. when efiFective becomes personal, 262. Vital impulse as source of homogeneity, 73. World-ground, as impersonal 274f. personal, 193f, 212f, 215f, 227. in Bergson's theory, 153f. intelligent, 99, 212. personal, an epistemological necessity, 193. provides for "God, freedom, and immortality," 274. purposive, 263. Zeno, paradoxes of, 197. 804 N. , THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY WILL INCREASE TO 50 CENTS ON THE FOURTH DAY AND TO $1.00 ON THE SEVENTH DAY OVERDUE. 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