But he relies on
biology alone to prove the present existence of an independent effort
to live; this is needed to do what mechanism, as he thinks, could
never do; it is not needed to do, as in Schopenhauer, what mechanism
does. M. Bergson thus introduces his metaphysical force as a peculiar
requirement of biology; he breaks the continuity of nature; he loses
the poetic justification of a metaphysical vitalism; he asks us to
believe that life is not a natural expression of material being, but
an alien and ghostly madness descending into it--I say a ghostly
madness, for why should disembodied life wish that the body should
live? This vitalism is not a kind of biology more prudent and literal
than the mechanical kind (as a scientific vitalism would be), but far
less legitimately speculative. Nor is it a frank and thorough
mythology, such as the total spectacle of the universe might suggest
to an imaginative genius. It is rather a popular animism, insisting on
a sympathetic interpretation of nature where human sympathy is quick
and easy, and turning this sympathy into a revelation of the absolute,
but leaving the rest of nature cold, because to sympathise with its
movement there is harder for anxious, self-centred mortals, and
requires a disinterested mind.
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