M.
Bergson, however, is on the side of Spencer. After studiously
examining the egg on every side--for he would do more than taste
it--and considering the source and destiny of it, he would summon his
intuition to penetrate to the very heart of it, to its spirit, and
then he would declare that this spirit was a vital momentum without
parts and without ideas, and was simplicity itself. He would add that
it was the free and original creator of the bird, because it is of the
essence of spirit to bestow more than it possesses and to build better
than it knows. Undoubtedly actual spirit is simple and does not know
how it builds; but for that very reason actual spirit does not really
create or build anything, but merely watches, now with sympathetic,
now with shocked attention, what is being created and built for it.
Doubtless new things are always arising, new islands, new persons, new
philosophies; but that the real cause of them should be simpler than
they, that their Creator, if I may use this language, should be
ignorant and give more than he has, who can stomach that?
Let us grant, however, since the thing is not abstractly
inconceivable, that eggs really have no structure. To what, then,
shall we attribute the formation of birds? Will it follow that
evolution, or differentiation, or the law of the passage from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous, or the dialectic of the concept of
pure being, or the impulse towards life, or the vocation of spirit is
what actually hatches them? Alas, these words are but pedantic and
rhetorical cloaks for our ignorance, and to project them behind the
facts and regard them as presiding from thence over the course of
nature is a piece of the most deplorable scholasticism.
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