Bergson and His Philosophy | Page 8

is one of
the intellectual headquarters of France, indeed of the whole world.
While the Sorbonne is now the seat of the University of Paris, the
College is an independent institution under the control of the Ministre
de l'Instruction publique. The lectures given by the very eminent
professors who fill its forty- three chairs are free and open to the

general public, and are attended mainly by a large number of women
students and by the senior students from the University. The largest
lecture room in the College was given to Bergson, but this became
quite inadequate to accommodate his hearers.
At the First International Congress of Philosophy, which was held in
Paris, during the first five days of August, 1900, Bergson read a short,
but important, paper, Sur les origines psychologiques de notre croyance
a la loi de causalite. In 1901 Felix Alcan published in book form a
work which had just previously appeared in the Revue de Paris entitled
Le Rire, one of the most important of his minor productions. This essay
on the meaning of the Comic was based on a lecture which he had
given in his early days in the Auvergne. The study of it is essential to
an understanding of Bergson's views of life, and its passages dealing
with the place of the artistic in life are valuable. In 1901 he was elected
to the Academie des Sciences morales et politiques, and became a
member of the Institute. In 1903 he contributed to the Revue de
metaphysique et de morale a very important essay entitled Introduction
a la metaphysique, which is useful as a preface to the study of his three
large books.
On the death of Gabriel Tarde, the eminent sociologist, in 1904,
Bergson succeeded him in the Chair of Modern Philosophy. From the
4th to the 8th of September of that year he was at Geneva attending the
Second International Congress of Philosophy, when he lectured on Le
Paralogisme psycho-physiologique, or, to quote its new title, Le
Cerveau et la Pensee: une illusion philosophique. An illness prevented
his visiting Germany to attend the Third Congress held at Heidelberg.
His third large work--his greatest book--L'Evolution creatrice, appeared
in 1907, and is undoubtedly, of all his works, the one which is most
widely known and most discussed. It constitutes one of the most
profound and original contributions to the philosophical consideration
of the theory of Evolution. Un livre comme L'Evolution creatrice,
remarks Imbart de la Tour, n'est pas seulment une oeuvre, mais une
date, celle d'une direction nouvelle imprimee a la pensee. By 1918,
Alcan, the publisher, had issued twenty-one editions, making an

average of two editions per annum for ten years. Since the appearance
of this book, Bergson's popularity has increased enormously, not only
in academic circles, but among the general reading public.
He came to London in 1908 and visited William James, the American
philosopher of Harvard, who was Bergson's senior by seventeen years,
and who was instrumental in calling the attention of the
Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor. This was
an interesting meeting and we find James' impression of Bergson given
in his Letters under date of October 4, 1908. "So modest and
unpretending a man but such a genius intellectually! I have the
strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus,
will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of
turning point in the history of philosophy."
As in some quarters erroneous ideas prevail regarding both the
historical and intellectual relation between James and Bergson, it may
be useful to call attention to some of the facts here. As early as 1880
James contributed an article in French to the periodical La Critique
philosophique, of Renouvier and Pillon, entitled Le Sentiment de
l'Effort.[Footnote: Cf. his Principles of Psychology, Vol. II., chap xxvi.]
Four years later a couple of articles by him appeared in Mind: What is
an Emotion?[Footnote: Mind, 1884, pp. 188-205.] and On some
Omissions of Introspective Psychology.[Footnote: Mind, 1884, pp.
1-26.] Of these articles the first two were quoted by Bergson in his
work of 1889, Les donnees immediates de la conscience. In the
following years 1890-91 appeared the two volumes of James'
monumental work, The Principles of Psychology, in which he refers to
a pathological phenomenon observed by Bergson. Some writers taking
merely these dates into consideration, and overlooking the fact that
James' investigations had been proceeding since 1870, registered from
time to time by various articles which culminated in The Principles,
have mistakenly assigned to Bergson's ideas priority in time.[Footnote:
For example A. Chaumeix: William James (Revue des Deux Mondes,
Oct, 1910), and J. Bourdeau: Nouvelles modes en philosophie, Journal
de Debats, Feb., 1907. Cf. Flournoy: La philosophie de William James.
(Eng. Trans. Holt and