A History of Western Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

  “Memory must be, in principle, a power absolutely independent of matter. If, then, spirit is a reality, it is here, in the phenomena of memory, that we may come into touch with it experimentally.”

  At the opposite end from pure memory Bergson places pure perception, in regard to which he adopts an ultra-realist position. “In pure perception,” he says, “we are actually placed outside ourselves, we touch the reality of the object in an immediate intuition.” So completely does he identify perception with its object that he almost refuses to call it mental at all. “Pure perception,” he says, “which is the lowest degree of mind—mind without memory—is really part of matter, as we understand matter.” Pure perception is constituted by dawning action, its actuality lies in its activity. It is in this way that the brain becomes relevant to perception, for the brain is not an instrument of action. The function of the brain is to limit our mental life to what is practically useful. But for the brain, one gathers, everything would be perceived, but in fact we only perceive what interests us. “The body, always turned towards action, has for its essential function to limit, with a view to action, the life of the spirit.” It is, in fact, an instrument of choice.

  We must now return to the subject of instinct or intuition, as opposed to intellect. It was necessary first to give some account of duration and memory, since Bergson’s theories of duration and memory are presupposed in this account of intuition. In man, as he now exists, intuition is the fringe or penumbra of intellect: it has been thrust out of the centre by being less useful in action than intellect, but it has deeper uses which make it desirable to bring it back into greater prominence. Bergson wishes to make intellect “turn inwards on itself, and awaken the potentialities of intuition which still slumber within it.” The relation between instinct and intellect is compared to that between sight and touch. Intellect, we are told, will not give knowledge of things at a distance; indeed the function of science is said to be to explain all perceptions in terms of touch.

  “Instinct alone,” he says, “is knowledge at a distance. It has the same relation to intelligence that vision has to touch.” We may observe in passing that, as appears in many passages, Bergson is a strong visualizer, whose thought is always conducted by means of visual images.

  The essential characteristic of intuition is that it does not divide the world into separate things, as the intellect does; although Bergson does not use these words, we might describe it as synthetic rather than analytic. It apprehends a multiplicity, but a multiplicity of interpenetrating processes, not of spatially external bodies. There are in truth no things: “things and states are only views, taken by our mind, of becoming. There are no things, there are only actions.” This view of the world, which appears difficult and unnatural to intellect, is easy and natural to intuition. Memory affords no instance of what is meant, for in memory the past lives on into the present and interpenetrates it. Apart from mind, the world would be perpetually dying and being born again; the past would have no reality, and therefore there would be no past. It is memory, with its correlative desire, that makes the past and the future real and therefore creates true duration and true time. Intuition alone can understand this mingling of past and future: to the intellect they remain external, spatially external as it were, to one another. Under the guidance of intuition, we perceive that “form is only a snapshot view of a transition,” and the philosopher “will see the material world melt back into a single flux.”

  Closely connected with the merits of intuition are Bergson’s doctrine of freedom and his praise of action. “In reality,” he says, “a living being is a centre of action. It represents a certain sum of contingency entering into the world, that is to say, a certain quantity of possible action.” The arguments against free will depend partly upon assuming that the intensity of psychical states is a quantity, capable, at least in theory, of numerical measurement; this view Bergson undertakes to refute in the first chapter of Time and Free Will. Partly the determinist depends, we are told, upon a confusion between true duration and mathematical time, which Bergson regards as really a form of space. Partly, again, the determinist rests his case upon the unwarranted assumption that, when the state of the brain is given, the state of the mind is theoretically determined. Bergson is willing to admit that the converse is true, that is to say, that the state of brain is determinate when the state of mind is given, but he regards the mind as more differentiated than the brain, and therefore holds that many different states of mind may correspond to one state of brain. He concludes that real freedom is possible: “We are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.”

  In the above outline, I have in the main endeavoured merely to state Bergson’s views, without giving the reasons adduced by him in favour of their truth. This is easier than it would be with most philosophers, since as a rule he does not give reasons for his opinions, but relies on their inherent attractiveness, and on the charm of an excellent style. Like advertisers, he relies upon picturesque and varied statement, and on apparent explanation of many obscure facts. Analogies and similes, especially, form a very large part of the whole process by which he recommends his views to the reader. The number of similes for life to be found in his works exceeds the number in any poet known to me. Life, he says, is like a shell bursting into fragments which are again shells. It is like a sheaf. Initially, it was “a tendency to accumulate in a reservoir, as do especially the green parts of vegetables.” But the reservoir is to be filled with boiling water from which steam is issuing; “jets must be gushing out unceasingly, of which each, falling back, is a world.” Again “life appears in its entirety as an immense wave which, starting from a centre, spreads outwards, and which on almost the whole of its circumference is stopped and converted into oscillation: at one single point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has passed freely.” Then there is the great climax in which life is compared to a cavalry charge. “All organized beings, from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and to clear many obstacles, perhaps even death.”

  But a cool critic, who feels himself a mere spectator, perhaps an unsympathetic spectator, of the charge in which man is mounted upon animality, may be inclined to think that calm and careful thought is hardly compatible with this form of exercise. When he is told that thought is a mere means of action, the mere impulse to avoid obstacles in the field, he may feel that such a view is becoming in a cavalry officer, but not in a philosopher, whose business, after all, is with thought: he may feel that in the passion and noise of violent motion there is no room for the fainter music of reason, no leisure for the disinterested contemplation in which greatness is sought, not by turbulence, but by the greatness of the universe which is mirrored. In that case, he may be tempted to ask whether there are any reasons for accepting such a restless view of the world. And if he asks this question, he will find, if I am not mistaken, that there is no reason whatever for accepting this view, either in the universe or in the writings of M. Bergson.

  II

  The two foundations of Bergson’s philosophy, in so far as it is more than an imaginative and poetic view of the world, are his doctrines of space and time. His doctrine of space is required for his condemnation of the intellect, and if he fails in his condemnation of the intellect, the intellect will succeed in its condemnation of him, for between the two it is war to the knife. His doctrine of time is necessary for his vindication of freedom, for his escape
from what William James called a “block universe,” for his doctrine of a perpetual flux in which there is nothing that flows, and for his whole account of the relations between mind and matter. It will be well, therefore, in criticism, to concentrate on these two doctrines. If they are true, such minor errors and inconsistencies as no philosopher escapes would not greatly matter; while if they are false, nothing remains except an imaginative epic, to be judged on aesthetic rather than on intellectual grounds. I shall begin with the theory of space, as being the simpler of the two.

  Bergson’s theory of space occurs fully and explicitly in his Time and Free Will, and therefore belongs to the oldest parts of his philosophy. In his first chapter, he contends that greater and less imply space, since he regards the greater as essentially that which contains the less. He offers no arguments whatever, either good or bad, in favour of this view; he merely exclaims, as though he were giving an obvious reductio ad absurdum: “As if one could still speak of magnitude where there is neither multiplicity nor space!” The obvious cases to the contrary, such as pleasure and pain, afford him much difficulty, yet he never doubts or re-examines the dogma with which he starts.

  In his next chapter, he maintains the same thesis as regards number. “As soon as we wish to picture number to ourselves,” he says, “and not merely figures or words, we are compelled to have recourse to an extended image,” and “every clear idea of number implies a visual image in space.” These two sentences suffice to show, as I shall try to prove, that Bergson does not know what number is, and has himself no clear idea of it. This is shown also by his definition: “Number may be defined in general as a collection of units, or speaking more exactly, as the synthesis of the one and the many.”

  In discussing these statements, I must ask the reader’s patience for a moment while I call attention to some distinctions which may at first appear pedantic, but are really vital. There are three entirely different things which are confused by Bergson in the above statements, namely: (1) number, the general concept applicable to the various particular numbers; (2) the various particular numbers; (3) the various collections to which the various particular numbers are applicable. It is this last that is defined by Bergson when he says that number is a collection of units. The twelve apostles, the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve months, the twelve signs of the zodiac, are all collections of units, yet no one of them is the number 12, still less is it number in general, as by the above definition it ought to be. The number 12, obviously, is something which all these collections have in common, but which they do not have in common with other collections, such as cricket elevens. Hence the number 12 is neither a collection of twelve terms, nor is it something which all collections have in common; and number in general is a property of 12 or 11 or any other number, but not of the various collections that have twelve terms or eleven terms.

  Hence when, following Bergson’s advice, we “have recourse to an extended image” and picture, say, twelve dots such as are obtained by throwing double sixes at dice, we have still not obtained a picture of the number 12. The number 12, in fact, is something more abstract than any picture. Before we can be said to have any understanding of the number 12, we must know what different collections of twelve units have in common, and this is something which cannot be pictured because it is abstract. Bergson only succeeds in making his theory of number plausible by confusing a particular collection with the number of its terms, and this again with number in general.

  The confusion is the same as if we confused a particular young man with youth, and youth with the general concept “period of human life,” and were then to argue that because a young man has two legs, youth must have two legs, and the general concept “period of human life” must have two legs. The confusion is important because, as soon as it is perceived, the theory that number or particular numbers can be pictured in space is seen to be untenable. This not only disproves Bergson’s theory as to number, but also his more general theory that all abstract ideas and all logic are derived from space.

  But apart from the question of numbers, shall we admit Bergson’s contention that every plurality of separate units involves space? Some of the cases that appear to contradict this view are considered by him, for example successive sounds. When we hear the steps of a passer-by in the street, he says, we visualise his successive positions; when we hear the strokes of a bell, we either picture it swinging backwards and forwards, or we range the successive sounds in an ideal space. But these are mere autobiographical observations of a visualizer, and illustrate the remark we made before, that Bergson’s views depend upon the predominance of the sense of sight in him. There is no logical necessity to range the strokes of a clock in an imaginary space: most people, I imagine, count them without any spatial auxiliary. Yet no reason is alleged by Bergson for the view that space is necessary. He assumes this as obvious, and proceeds at once to apply it to the case of times. Where there seem to be different times outside each other, he says, the times are pictured as spread out in space; in real time, such as is given by memory, different times interpenetrate each other, and cannot be counted because they are not separate.

  The view that all separateness implies space is now supposed established, and is used deductively to prove that space is involved wherever there is obviously separateness, however little other reason there may be for suspecting such a thing. Thus abstract ideas, for example, obviously exclude each other: whiteness is different from blackness, health is different from sickness, folly is different from wisdom. Hence all abstract ideas involve space; and therefore logic, which uses abstract ideas, is an offshoot of geometry, and the whole of the intellect depends upon a supposed habit of picturing things side by side in space. This conclusion, upon which Bergson’s whole condemnation of the intellect rests, is based, so far as can be discovered, entirely upon a personal idiosyncrasy mistaken for a necessity of thought, I mean the idiosyncrasy of visualizing successions as spread out on a line. The instance of numbers shows that, if Bergson were in the right, we could never have attained to the abstract ideas which are supposed to be thus impregnated with space; and conversely, the fact that we can understand abstract ideas (as opposed to particular things which exemplify them) seems sufficient to prove that he is wrong in regarding the intellect as impregnated with space.

  One of the bad effects of an anti-intellectual philosophy, such as that of Bergson, is that it thrives upon the errors and confusions of the intellect. Hence it is led to prefer bad thinking to good, to declare every momentary difficulty insoluble, and to regard every foolish mistake as revealing the bankruptcy of intellect and the triumph of intuition. There are in Bergson’s works many allusions to mathematics and science, and to a careless reader these allusions may seem to strengthen his philosophy greatly. As regards science, especially biology and physiology, I am not competent to criticize his interpretations. But as regards mathematics, he has deliberately preferred traditional errors in interpretation to the more modern views which have prevailed among mathematicians for the last eighty years. In this matter, he has followed the example of most philosophers. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the infinitesimal calculus, though well developed as a method, was supported, as regards its foundations, by many fallacies and much confused thinking. Hegel and his followers seized upon these fallacies and confusions, to support them in their attempt to prove all mathematics self-contradictory. Thence the Hegelian account of these matters passed into the current thought of philosophers, where it has remained long after the mathematicians have removed all the difficulties upon which the philosophers rely. And so long as the main object of philosophers is to show that nothing can be learned by patience and detailed thinking, but that we ought rather to worship the prejudices of the ignorant under the title of “reason” if we are Hegelians, or of “intuition” if we are Bergsonians, so long philosophers will take care to remain ignorant of what mathematicians have done to remove the errors by which Hegel profited.

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p; Apart from the question of number, which we have already considered, the chief point at which Bergson touches mathematics is his rejection of what he calls the “cinematographic” representation of the world. Mathematics conceives change, even continuous change, as constituted by a series of states; Bergson, on the contrary, contends that no series of states can represent what is continuous, and that in change a thing is never in any state at all. The view that change is constituted by a series of changing states he calls cinematographic; this view, he says, is natural to the intellect, but is radically vicious. True change can only be explained by true duration; it involves an interpenetration of past and present, not a mathematical succession of static states. This is what is called a “dynamic” instead of a “static” view of the world. The question is important, and in spite of its difficulty we cannot pass it by.