Bergson and His Philosophy | Page 5

that any careful observer of human experience
would deny the presence and power of intuition in that experience. The
fact is too patent. Many who would not give the place to intuition
which is assigned to it by Bergson would be ready to say that there may
be more in the thrilling and passionate intuitive moments than
Philosophy, after an age-long and painful effort, has been able to
express. All knowledge, indeed, may be said to be rooted in intuition.

Many a thinker has been supported and inspired through weary years of
inquiry and reflection by a mother-idea which has come to him, if not
unsought yet uncompelled, in a flash of insight. But that is the
beginning, not the end, of his task. It is but the raw material of
knowledge, knowledge in potentia. To invert the order is to destroy
Philosophy not to serve it, is, indeed, a mere counsel of desperation. An
intuitive Philosophy so- called finds itself sooner or later, generally
sooner, in a blind alley. Practically, it gives rise to all kinds of crude
and wasteful effort. It is not an accident that Georges Sorel in his
Reflexions sur la Violence takes his "philosophy" from Bergson or, at
least, leans on him. There are intuitions and intuitions, as every wise
man knows, as William James once ruefully admitted after his
adventures with nitrous oxide, or as the eaters of hashish will confess.
To follow all our intuitions would lead us into the wildest dervish
dance of thought and action and leave us spent and disheartened at the
end. "Agnosticism" would be too mild a term for the result. Our
intuitions have to be tried and tested; there is a thorny and difficult path
of criticism to be traversed before we can philosophically endorse them
and find peace of mind. What Hoffding says is in a sense quite true:
"When we pass into intuition we pass into a state without problems."
But that is, as Hoffding intends us to understand, not because all
problems are thereby solved, but because they have not yet emerged. If
we consent to remain at that point, we refuse to make the acquaintance
of Philosophy; if we recognize the problems that are really latent there,
we soon realize that the business of Philosophy is yet to be transacted.
The fact is that in this part of his doctrine--and it is an important
part--the brilliant French writer, in his endeavours to make
philosophizing more concrete and practical, makes it too abstract.
Intuition is not a process over against and quite distinct from
conceptual thought. Both are moments in the total process of man's
attempt to come to terms with the universe, and too great emphasis on
either distorts and falsifies the situation in which we find ourselves on
this planet. The insistence on intuition is doubtless due, at bottom, to
Bergson's admiration for the activity in the creative artist. The
border-line between Art and Philosophy becomes almost an imaginary
line with him. In the one case as in the other we have, according to him,
to get inside the object by a sort of sympathy. True, there is this

difference, he says, that aesthetic intuition achieves only the
individual--which is doubtful--whereas the philosophic intuition is to
be conceived as a "recherche orientee dans la meme sens que l'art,
indeed, but qui prendrait pour objet la vie en general." He fails to note,
it may be observed, that the expression of the aesthetic intuition, that is
to say, Art, is always fixed and static. This in view of other aspects of
his doctrine is remarkable. But apart from this attempt to practically
identify Art and Philosophy--a hopeless attempt-- there is, of course,
available as a means of explanation the well-known and not entirely
deplorable tendency of the protestant and innovator to overstate his
case, to bring out by strong emphasis the aspect with which he is
chiefly concerned and which he thinks has been unduly neglected. This,
as hinted, has its merits, and not only or chiefly for Philosophy, but also,
and perhaps primarily, for the conduct of life. If he convinces men,
should they need convincing, that they cannot be saved by the
discursive reason alone, he will have done a good service to his
generation, and to the philosophers among them who may (though they
ought not to) be tempted to ignore the intuitive element in experience.
The same tendency to over-emphasis can be observed elsewhere. It is
noticeable, for instance, in his discussions of Change, which are so
marked and important a feature in his writings. His Philosophy has
been called, with his approval apparently, the Philosophy of Change,
though it might have been called, still more truly and suggestively, the
Philosophy of Creation. It is this latter phase of it which