T.J. WalsheApologeticsChapter 6

"Creative Evolution": Résumé of the Teaching of M. Bergson — Part I

Chapter VI.—“Creative Evolution”: Résumé of the Teaching of M. Bergson

M. Henri Bergson was born at Paris in the year 1859. He published his first work, “Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness,” as a thesis for the doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1889. Seven years later (1896), his second work appeared, “Matter and Memory,” and in 1907 he gave to the world his most characteristic production—“Creative Evolution.”

Amidst much in his philosophic writings that is arbitrary and indefensible, one meets with statements that are profoundly true, and others promising and suggestive. “Kant wished to raise an impassable barrier between the world of phenomena which he handed over to the understanding, and the world of realities, entrance to which was forbidden. But possibly this distinction is emphasized too much, and the barrier may be easier to surmount than people suppose” (Les Données, p. 187). Again, “we live and move and have our being in the absolute (i.e., the real). The knowledge of the absolute which we have is no doubt incomplete, but not external, or relative. We reach to reality itself in its depth by the combined and progressive development of Science and Philosophy.” (C.E., p. 210. References are to the Eng. Trans. by A. Mitchell, Ph. D.).

The cardinal principle of the Bergsonian philosophy is contained in the statement: “Being does not exist, all is ‘Becoming,’” i.e., all is in a state of perpetual and integral change: πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει.

Certain results follow from the universal fluidity of being:

(a) Metaphysical results.

There is no substance, only attributes without substance; there is no category save movement.

(b) Logical results.

There is no principle of identity; no principle of contradiction; 2 + 2 = 4 does not express absolute and definitive truth, but the formula is useful, since it has success.

Since all is change, the faculty of abstract thought, which gives fixed principles, is deceitful.

In order to gain some knowledge of Bergsonian teaching it will be well, first, to examine what is taught on certain subjects, and later to make a synthesis of such teaching at any rate in regard to important points.

I.—Time.

M. Bergson contends that the ordinary conception of time is false because spatial. Time is not a homogeneous medium like space. La Durée (i.e., Real Time) is a heterogeneous, qualitative multiplicity of conscious states—a stream of consciousness. To use M. Bergson’s words, La Durée is a “wholly qualitative multiplicity, an absolute heterogeneity of elements, which pass over into one another.” (Les Données, p. 176). Such a time cannot be measured by clocks, but only by conscious beings, for “it is the very stuff of which life and consciousness are made.” Intellect does not grasp Real Time, we can only have an intuition of it.

The fundamental self is a qualitative multiplicity of conscious states flowing, interpenetrating, melting into one another and forming an organic whole, a living unity or personality. Altering the old classical phrase “sub specie aeternitatis” to suit his special view of time, Bergson urges us to strive to perceive all things “sub specie durationis.” La Durée is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future:

Our past still travels with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are.

It does not matter whether we regard our inner life as having La Durée, or as actually being La Durée. If we have it, time is only an aspect of reality, but if our personality itself is La Durée, then time is reality itself.

Critique

The Aristotelian definition of time (adopted by St. Thomas) is “mensura motûs secundum prius et posterius,” i.e., measurement of motion from the standpoint of before and after.¹ M. Bergson claims that time is a succession of qualitative changes. He denies the quantity and divisibility of time. Now, if time is a succession of heterogeneous qualities—qualities in perpetual and essential change—two instants of time cannot be alike and the duration of time disappears. M. Bergson overlooks the fact that time is in part real, and in part ideal—real, because each of the successive parts has an existence and a real order of succession; ideal since the order is formally understood as a synthesis only by the mind. Hence without intelligence there would be no time, as Aristotle and St. Thomas assert. To identify time with human personality is to identify a modification of being with being itself.

II.—Human Freedom.

Having suppressed psychological duration in which freedom moves, M. Bergson proceeds:

“Some say we must follow the strongest motive, and hence freedom of the will is impossible. Others point out that the strongest motive may have become such from our free choice, and therefore freedom remains. But since in psychological duration there is no multiplicity of motives, the conflict of motives is illusory.”

M. Bergson claims for freedom of the will the testimony of consciousness: “Human freedom is a fact, and amongst facts capable of proof, there is none clearer than the truth of human freedom.” (Les Données, pp. 161, 165, 168). But his proofs are not only unsatisfactory, but destructive of freedom. All agree that a free act is one which is not necessarily determined by its cause. When the principle of causality is introduced into the discussion, Bergson, criticising the statement that “the same cause in the same circumstances produces the same effects,” denies the assumption that causes or circumstances can be the same. In one sense he is right, but is the change in causes and circumstances essential or accidental? A hen never lays the same egg, and yet all the eggs have the same characters of species, race, etc. Similarly the leaves of a tree resemble one another, despite their individual distinction.

What then is M. Bergson’s proof of human freedom? “Liberty cannot be defined. Every definition would favour determinism. To define liberty would be to deny it. We are free when our acts come from our entire personality, when they express it, when they have with it the indefinable resemblance which one finds between the work and the artist.” (Les Données, pp. 131, 132). In regard to which we say that this description of freedom is:

(1) Too narrow. When I write or read I am free, although the action does not express my whole personality.

(2) Too wide. The pursuit of happiness is the profoundest desire of human nature, and yet it is not free.

If M. Bergson was not an anti-intellectualist, he could show that intelligence in man is the root of freedom. The ideal conceived by the intellect enables us to see imperfections in created things, thus giving us motives for rejection. Moreover, if intelligence is not necessary for freedom, why are not the lower animals free?

III.—Union of Soul and Body.

M. Bergson has had the courage to disregard the veto of Kant, according to whom the problem of the union of the human soul and body is insoluble. He has had the courage also to maintain that “perception goes indefinitely beyond the cerebral state” (Matière et Mémoire, p. 199), i.e., that cerebral states are not the cause of perception. He teaches that “Les corps sont des images,” by which he means (notwithstanding the doubtful suitability of the terminology) that bodies have a real objective existence. “Une image peut être sans être perçue” is a statement in contradiction to the conclusion of Berkeley summed up in the phrase “esse est percipi”—a conclusion which witnesses to the bishop’s uncompromising Idealism.

When Bergson examines the meaning of the word “spirit,” he disregards the intellectual operations, and speaks of memory as being practically identical with spirit. “Memory manifests the mind.” He contends that in passing from perception to memory, we pass from matter to spirit. He makes what is virtually the scholastic distinction between the memory of images and the memory of ideas, though he fails to note that the memory of images is organic and is localised organically. The opposition of soul and body is the opposition of the unextended to the extended.

How does he effect the union?

Matter, he tells us, is a succession of very rapid moments. Spirit or Memory binds together this succession. The humblest rôle of the mind is to bind together the successive moments of the duration of things; it is in this operation that mind makes contact with matter. But how? His assertion contains “voces et verba, praetereaque nihil.” Instead of seeking to unite in one subject entities which are opposed but complementary, he tries to identify them by finding middle terms between the two extremes, which will reduce differences of kind to differences of degree: “Le physique n’est que du psychique inverti.” Scholastics on the contrary stress the dualism of material being, made up as it is of an extended and passive principle and one that is unextended and active. The scholastic theory unites contraries without identifying them.

IV.—“Pure Becoming”—formula of universal change.

Aristotle notes that nature is the totality of things that move (Phy., Book III. c 1). And by movement is meant not only movement of translation but of transformation. Thus movement or change is an universal phenomenon. What is the explanation of this characteristic? Three different schools of thought have given three different solutions.

(1) Eleatic School of Zeno.

Zeno denied the objective reality of movement. His example of Achilles and the tortoise is well known. Zeno held that “being” alone exists. But to make movement an illusion is to explain the obscure by something more obscure—obscurum per obscurius. To deny the evidence of the senses is, as Aristotle reminds us, an infirmity of thought—ἀρρωστία τίς ἔστι διανοίας (Phy., Book VIII., c. 3).

(2) Ionian School of Heracleitus.

Heracleitus contended that movement is the sole reality. “Being” does not exist.

(3) Peripatetic Schools of Aristotle.

Aristotle taught that both “being” and “movement” exist. Passing phenomena are the manifestation of persistent being.

Bergson, like Hegel, chooses the teaching of Heracleitus, and speaks repeatedly of “the fluid mass of existence,” “the perpetual flux of things,” whilst his disciple M. Le Roy maintains that “‘becoming’ is the only concrete reality” (Revue de Méta. et de Morale, 1901, p. 418).

The teaching of M. Bergson fails in its application both to the world of matter and the world of thought.

(A) The world of matter is a spectacle diametrically opposed to that of a perpetual flux. There exist solidity, stability, permanence. The law of inertia has become the fundamental principle of physical science. In order to change in figure, quality, or even in position, every mass, every molecule requires an external impulse or attraction. “Being” is stable in itself, and changes only accidentally. The laws of Conservation of Energy, Indestructibility of Matter, shew that under the flux of change there is a stable and permanent foundation.

(B) The world of sensations, feelings, volitions, ideas remains the same when the variations are only accidental and imperceptible. We are certain of the permanence of our personal identity of the “noumenon,” τὸ ὑποκείμενον, sub-stantia. M. Bergson denies the existence of substance, being so far in accord with the phenomenalist school of which John Stuart Mill was one of the ablest protagonists.

Substance is the being or reality, which not only supports its attributes but produces them. Hence substance or being has a double function—static and dynamic. The static function consists in being the substratum of phenomena; the dynamic function produces the phenomena.

How can this teaching regarding substance be proved?

(1) From the “ego,” i.e., from experience of personality.

(a) The conscious “ego” perceives itself as a permanent subject under the contingent flux of sentiments and volitions. How can the past be remembered unless the “ego” persists?

(b) The conscious “ego” perceives itself as the cause of these phenomena.

(2) Reason compels us to believe that attributes such as colour, weight, extension, etc., cannot exist of themselves, but require a substance in which they inhere, and of which they are modifications. On this subject, reasoning such as that of Taine, is manifestly fallacious. He asserts that “the ego is only a verbal entity, a metaphysical phantom,” and he supports this statement by the following example: A board is cut up into squares, triangles, circles, etc. As the board is only the continuous series of its successive divisions, so the ego is only the continuous web of successive experiences (De l’Intelligence, p. 345).

A single sentence is sufficient to reveal the fallacy. The parallelism does not hold, because the board is a case of the whole and its parts, whereas the ego and its states are a case of cause and effect.

Plato (Cratylus) through the mouth of Socrates has exposed the essential fallacy in this teaching. “If Being is constantly changing, it will not be possible to say what it is. Whilst we speak, it will have changed and lost its first form.” Definition becomes impossible, and proof, which rests on necessary principles, likewise becomes impossible, because the principles of Identity, Contradiction and Causality vanish. The Bergsonian philosophy, however, does not hesitate to sacrifice these principles: “What is ‘becoming’?” (writes M. Le Roy) “but a perpetual flight of contradictories which coalesce?” “Becoming” is only intelligible through the being which becomes.

V.—Evolution of Worlds.

Exposition

M. Bergson’s keen and subtle critical faculty has exposed the weakness of more than one form of evolution. He characterises the evolutionism of Spencer as false, because “it consists in cutting up present reality, already evolved, into little bits no less evolved, and then recomposing it with these fragments, thus positing in advance everything that is to be explained” (C.E., Intro, p. xiv.). He very justly points out that, in Darwinism, evolution is explained by external and accidental causes—by mechanism—whereas the interior cause of evolution—the original impetus with its preferential direction—is rigorously excluded. He shows with words of power and cogency, illustrated by his splendid metaphors, the insufficiency of adaptation to environment as the directing cause of evolution. “I do not question for a moment that adaptation to environment is the necessary condition of evolution. It is quite evident that a species would disappear, should it fail to bend to the conditions of existence which are imposed on it. But it is one thing to recognise that outer circumstances are forces evolution must reckon with, another to claim that they are the directing causes of evolution. The latter theory is that of mechanism. It excludes absolutely the hypothesis of an original impetus, I mean an internal push that has carried life, by more and more complex forms, to higher and higher destinies. Yet this impetus is evident… . The truth is that adaptation explains the sinuosities of evolution, but not its general directions, still less the movement itself. The road that leads to the town is obliged to follow the ups and downs of the hills; it adapts itself to the accidents of the ground; but the accidents of the ground are not the cause of the road, nor have they given it its direction” (C. E., pp. 107, 108).

Neo-Darwinism is slightly more scientific, inasmuch as it appeals for the explanation of variations to differences inherent in the germ. But M. Bergson cannot admit that these differences are accidental and individual. Every moment, he writes, right before our eyes, nature arrives at identical results by entirely different embryonic processes. For example, fixing our attention upon the eye of vertebrates and that of molluscs, “we may point out that the retina of the vertebrate is produced by an expansion in the rudimentary brain of the young embryo. It is a regular nervous centre which has moved towards the periphery. In the mollusc, on the contrary, the retina is derived from the ectoderm directly, and not indirectly by means of the embryonic encephalon. Quite different, therefore, are the evolutionary processes which lead in Man and in the pecten to the development of a like retina” (C. E., p. 71). Again as regards the claim that the variations inherent in the germ-plasm are purely accidental, “the theory of Mutations is modifying Darwinism profoundly.” Turning to the question of heredity, facts show that the hereditary transmission of acquired characters is the exception and not the rule—that is to say that Lamarckism and neo-Lamarckism are no more able than any other form of evolutionism to solve the problem how development has taken place, e.g., from the pigment spot of the infusorian to the eye of the mollusc and the vertebrate.

M. Bergson’s splendid ability is seen to advantage in his destructive criticism of various forms of evolution, but when he proceeds to formulate his own views, he becomes vague and unconvincing, because of his failure to recognise the validity of primary notions and principles. Note the haziness of the following:

“At a certain moment, in certain parts of space, a visible current has taken rise; this current of life traversing the bodies it has organised, one after another, passing from generation to generation, has become divided amongst species, and distributed amongst individuals, without losing anything of its force, rather intensifying in proportion to its advance” (C. E., p. 27).

“The evolution movement proceeds like a shell, which suddenly bursts into fragments, which, being themselves shells, burst in their turn into fragments destined to burst again, and so on for a time incommensurably long. When a shell bursts, the particular way it breaks is explained both by the explosive force of the powder it contains and by the resistance of the metal. So of the way life breaks into species and individuals. It depends, we think, on two series of causes: the resistance life meets from inert matter, and the explosive force—due to an unstable balance of tendencies—which life bears within itself” (C.E., p. 103).

“Bifurcations on the way have been numerous, but there have been many blind alleys besides the two or three highways; of these highways themselves only one, that which leads through the vertebrates up to man, has been wide enough to allow free passage to the full breath of life” (C.E., p. 105).

M. Bergson notes the various hypotheses which attempt to show the relation between matter and spirit:

(a) Mind is determined by things. (Materialism.)

(b) Things are determined by mind. (Idealism.)

(d) The Bergsonian hypothesis. The same inversion of the same movement creates at once the intellectuality of mind and materiality of things.

“The mind can go in two opposite ways. Sometimes it follows its natural direction: there is then progress in the form of tension, continuous creation, free activity. Sometimes it inverts the direction, and this inversion, pushed to the end, leads to extension, to the necessary reciprocal determination of elements externalised each by relation to the others, in short, to geometrical mechanism.”

“What then is the principle that has only to let go its tension—may we say to defend—in order to extend, the interruption of the cause being equivalent to a reversal of the effect? For want of a better word we have called it consciousness. But we do not mean the narrowed consciousness that functions in each of us. Our own consciousness is the consciousness of a certain living being, placed in a certain point of space; and though it does not move in the same direction as its principle, it is continually drawn the opposite way, obliged, though it goes forward, to look back” (C. E., pp. 249, 250).

“Hence physics is simply psychics inverted … the two terms are of the same essence, but move each in the direction inverse of the other” (C.E., pp. 213, 214). “Intellectuality and materiality are of the same nature and have been produced the same way” (C. E., p. 231).

Critique.

(A) An obvious difficulty appears: since spirit and matter are two antagonistic movements, how can they come from the same original impulse?

In M. Bergson’s system there is no efficient cause. All change requires a cause, especially a change which is a passage from possibility to existence. It is not an explanation to assert that “God is not a substance, agent, cause, only a centre whence worlds spring” (C.E., p. 262).

M. Bergson’s philosophy is Pantheistic Monism though not materialistic. Vital impetus (élan vital) is an action and requires an agent. Otherwise it would be an evolution without anything which evolves, a perpetual creation without a creator, an autocreation which gives incessantly to itself the existence which it does not possess! The Bergsonian “becoming” is a movement towards increase, a “power” in process of becoming an “act,” and therefore an essential symbol of imperfection and contingency.

(B) M. Bergson hesitates as to the necessity of a final cause. If there is a contemporary writer, who has proclaimed openly the failure of mechanism—Cartesian, Spinozian, Leibnitzian, Spencerian, Kantian, etc.—surely M. Bergson is he. And yet he writes of “two ready-made garments that our understanding puts at our disposal, mechanism and finality; we show that they do not fit, neither the one nor the other, but that one of them (finality) might be recut and resewn, and in this new form fit less badly than the other” (C.E., Intro, pp. xiv., xv.). “Whether we will or no, we must appeal to some inner directing principle in order to account for the convergence of effects” (C. E., p. 80).

The original impulse has or has not a direction. If it has not, it can do nothing, for there is no movement without direction. If it has direction, it tends towards a goal, towards the realisation of an idea, of a plan, and we come back of necessity to finality. The representation of an end is not in the germ or embryo, but in the original impulse of the Creator. The end of a clock is not in the mechanism of the clock, but in the thought of the clockmaker.

To sum up: creative evolution without a creator and without an end, actions without an agent, effects without a cause, free actions without direction or aim are in opposition to the primary principles of Causality and Finality.

Notes

St. Augustine writes (Confessions xi., 14): “Quid est tempus? Si nemo a me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.” He notes that the world was created not in time, but with time. Bishop Gore makes the surprising statement that St. Thomas judged human reason to be unable without the help of Revelation to prove the existence of God (Cf. the Holy Spirit and the Church p. 190.) What St. Thomas held was that human reason needs Revelation to prove that God did not create from eternity. ↩