William James, rather too generously, attributed this vision to M.
Bergson, and regarded him in consequence as a philosopher of the first
rank, whose thought was to be one of the turning-points in history. M.
Bergson had killed intellectualism. It was his book on creative
evolution, said James with humorous emphasis, that had come at last to
"_ecraser l'infame_." We may suspect, notwithstanding, that
intellectualism, infamous and crushed, will survive the blow; and if
the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes were now alive, and heard that
there shall be news in heaven, he would doubtless say that there may
possibly be news there, but that under the sun there is nothing
new--not even radical empiricism or radical romanticism, which from
the beginning of the world has been the philosophy of those who as yet
had had little experience; for to the blinking little child it is not
merely something in the world that is new daily, but everything is new
all day. I am not concerned with the rights and wrongs of that
controversy; my point is only that William James, in this genial
evolutionary view of the world, has given a rude shock to the genteel
tradition. What! The world a gradual improvisation? Creation
unpremeditated? God a sort of young poet or struggling artist? William
James is an advocate of theism; pragmatism adds one to the evidences
of religion; that is excellent.
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