The truth, which all philosophers
alike are seeking, is eternal. It lies as near to one age as to
another; the means of discovery alone change, and not always for the
better. The course of evolution is no test of what is true or good;
else nothing could be good intrinsically nor true simply and
ultimately; on the contrary, it is the approach to truth and
excellence anywhere, like the approach of tree tops to the sky, that
tests the value of evolution, and determines whether it is moving
upward or downward or in a circle.
M. Bergson accordingly misses fire when, for instance, in order
utterly to damn a view which he has been criticising, and which may be
open to objection on other grounds, he cries that those who hold it
"_retardent sur Kant;_" as if a clock were the compass of the mind,
and he who was one minute late was one point off the course. Kant was
a hard honest thinker, more sinned against than sinning, from whom a
great many people in the nineteenth century have taken their point of
departure, departing as far as they chose; but if a straight line of
progress could be traced at all through the labyrinth of philosophy,
Kant would not lie in that line. His thought is essentially excentric
and sophisticated, being largely based on two inherited blunders,
which a truly progressive philosophy would have to begin by avoiding,
thus leaving Kant on one side, and weathering his philosophy, as one
might Scylla or Charybdis.
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