He suffers from cosmic agoraphobia. We
might think empty space an innocent harmless thing, a mere opportunity
to move, which ought to be highly prized by all devotees of motion.
But M. Bergson is instinctively a mystic, and his philosophy
deliberately discredits the existence of anything except in immediacy,
that is, as an experience of the heart. What he dreads in space is
that the heart should be possessed by it, and transformed into it. He
dreads that the imagination should be fascinated by the homogeneous
and static, hypnotised by geometry, and actually lost in
_Auseinandersein_. This would be a real death and petrifaction of
consciousness, frozen into contemplation of a monotonous infinite
void. What is warm and desirable is rather the sense of variety and
succession, as if all visions radiated from the occupied focus or
hearth of the self. The more concentration at this habitable point,
with the more mental perspectives opening backwards and forwards
through time, in a word, the more personal and historical the
apparition, the better it would be. Things must be reduced again to
what they seem; it is vain and terrible to take them for what we find
they are. M. Bergson is at bottom an apologist for very old human
prejudices, an apologist for animal illusion.
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