This negative dogmatism as to knowledge was rendered harmless and
futile by the English philosophers, in that they maintained at the
same time that everything happens exactly _as if_ the intellect were a
true instrument of discovery, and _as if_ a material world underlay
our experience and furnished all its occasions. Hume, Mill, and Huxley
were scientific at heart, and full of the intelligence they dissected;
they seemed to cry to nature: Though thou dost not exist, yet will I
trust in thee. Their idealism was a theoretical scruple rather than a
passionate superstition. Not so M. Bergson; he is not so simple as to
invoke the malicious criticism of knowledge in order to go on thinking
rationalistically. Reason and science make him deeply uncomfortable.
His point accordingly is not merely that mechanism is a hypothesis,
but that it is a wrong hypothesis. Events do not come as if mechanism
brought them about; they come, at least in the organic world, as if a
magic destiny, and inscrutable ungovernable effort, were driving them
on.
Thus M. Bergson introduces metaphysics into natural history; he
invokes, in what is supposed to be science, the agency of a power,
called the _elan vital,_ on a level with the "Will" of Schopenhauer or
the "Unknowable Force" of Herbert Spencer.
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