It would not
require a great man to say calmly: Men, birds, even ether-waves, if you
will, feel after this and this fashion. The greatness and the excitement
begin when he says: Your common sense, your practical intellect, your
boasted science have entirely deceived you; see what the real truth is
instead! So M. Bergson is bent on telling us that the immediate, as he
describes it, is the sole reality; all else is unreal, artificial, and a
more or less convenient symbol in discourse--discourse itself being
taken, of course, for a movement in immediate sensibility, which is what
it is existentially, but never for an excursion into an independent
logical realm, which is what it is spiritually and in intent. So we must
revise all our psychological observations, and turn them into
metaphysical dogmas. It would be nothing to say simply: _For immediate
feeling_ the past is contained in the present, movement is prior to that
which moves, spaces are many, disconnected, and incommensurable, events
are indivisible wholes, perception is in its object and identical with
it, the future is unpredictable, the complex is bred out of the simple,
and evolution is creative, its course being obedient to a general
tendency or groping impulse, not to any exact law. No, we must say
instead: _In the universe at large_ the whole past is preserved bodily
in the present; duration is real and space is only imagined; all is
motion, and there is nothing substantial that moves; times are
incommensurable; men, birds, and waves are nothing but the images of
them (our perceptions, like their spirits, being some compendium of
these images); chance intervenes in the flux, but evolution is due to an
absolute Effort which exists _in vacuo_ and is simplicity itself; and
this Effort, without having an idea of what it pursues, nevertheless
produces it out of nothing.
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