It is M.
Bergson, the most circumspect and best equipped thinker of this often
scatter-brained school, who has put this view in a frank and tenable
form, avoiding the bungling it has sometimes led to about the "meaning
of truth." Truth, according to M. Bergson, is given only in intuitions
which prolong experience just as it occurs, in its full immediacy; on
the other hand, all representation, thought, theory, calculation, or
discourse is so much mutilation of the truth, excusable only because
imposed upon us by practical exigences. The world, being a feeling,
must be felt to be known, and then the world and the knowledge of it
are identical; but if it is talked about or thought about it is
denaturalised, although convention and utility may compel the poor
human being to talk and to think, exiled as he is from reality in his
Babylon of abstractions. Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by
practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside. The mystic can
live happy in the droning consciousness of his own heart-beats and
those of the universe.
With this we seem to have reached the extreme of self-concentration
and self-expansion, the perfect identity and involution of everything
in oneself. And such indeed is the inevitable goal of the malicious
theory of knowledge, to which this school is committed, remote as that
goal may be from the boyish naturalism and innocent intent of many of
its pupils.
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