If he chances to call the calculable
elements of nature her substance, as it is proper to do, that name is
given without passion; he may perfectly well proclaim with Goethe that
it is in the accidents, in the _farbiger Abglanz_, that we have our
life. And if it be for his freedom that the mystic trembles, I imagine
any man of science would be content with M. Bergson's assertion that
true freedom is the sense of freedom, and that in any intelligible
statement of the situation, even the most indeterministic, this
freedom disappears; for it is an immediate experience, not any scheme
of relation between events.
The horror of mechanical physics arises, then, from attributing to
that science pretensions and extensions which it does not have; it
arises from the habits of theology and metaphysics being imported
inopportunely into science. Similarly when M. Bergson mentions
mathematics, he seems to be thinking of the supposed authority it
exercises--one of Kant's confusions--over the empirical world, and
trying to limit and subordinate that authority, lest movement should
somehow be removed from nature, and vagueness from human thought. But
nature and human thought are what they are; they have enough affinity
to mathematics, as it happens, to suggest that study to our minds, and
to give those who go deep into it a great, though partial, mastery
over things.
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