I confess I
am one of these, and I am not inclined, even if I were able, to
reproduce M. Bergson's sentiments as he feels them. He is his own
perfect expositor. All a critic can aim at is to understand these
sentiments as existing facts, and to give them the place that belongs
to them in the moral world. To understand, in most cases, is intimacy
enough.
Herbert Spencer says somewhere that the yolk of an egg is homogeneous,
the highly heterogeneous bird being differentiated in it by the law of
evolution. I cannot think what assured Spencer of this homogeneity in
the egg, except the fact that perhaps it all tasted alike, which might
seem good proof to a pure empiricist. Leibnitz, on the contrary,
maintained that the organisation of nature was infinitely deep, every
part consisting of an endless number of discrete elements. Here we
may observe the difference between good philosophy and bad. The idea
of Leibnitz is speculative and far outruns the evidence, but it is
speculative in a well-advised, penetrating, humble, and noble fashion;
while the idea of Spencer is foolishly dogmatic, it is a piece of
ignorant self-sufficiency, like that insular empiricism that would
deny that Chinamen were real until it had actually seen them. Nature
is richer than experience and wider than divination; and it is far
rasher and more arrogant to declare that any part of nature is simple
than to suggest the sort of complexity that perhaps it might have.
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