should be accomplished, he none the less believes that “in reality evolution has made its way (s’est faite) through the intermediary of millions of individuals.“[1] Bergson’s opposition to absolutism is, in truth, uncompromising: it is the most fundamental of his negations, based on his passionate conviction not merely of the reality but of the ultimacy of change and progress. An absolutist may believe that time and change arc vitally real, but he must conceive them as aspects, and in the end, subordinated aspects, of the eternal purposes,[2] whereas to Bergson, as to every pluralist, reality is forever in the making, “we are forever creating ourselves.” The cardinal error not only of Bergson’s critics, but of Bergson himself, in the valuation and the estimate of his system, is the exclusive emphasis laid on this ultimateness of change and freedom, to the neglect of his equally positive doctrine that back of change is that which changes, that fundamental to time and freedom and evolution is the enduring, willing, developing self.
In conclusion, fresh stress should be laid on the personalistic character of Bergson’s idealism. He loses no chance to criticise sharply what he calls deterministic associationism, that “gross psychology, the dupe of language [which] … reduces the I (le moi) to an aggregate of facts of consciousness.”[3] In opposition to this view of the self as ‘assemblage of psychic states,’[4] a conception, he declares, which ‘ever substitutes for the concrete phenomenon an artificial philosophical reconstitution of it,’[5] Bergson insists upon the fundamental reality of the ‘I which feels, or thinks … or acts,’[6] the ‘I ever identical with itself,’[7] the ‘fundamental,’ ‘concrete,’ ‘living’ self.[8]
Wellesley College.Mary Whiton Calkins.
- ↑ Op. cit., Chapter I, p. 58.
- ↑ Cf. Royce, The World and the Individual, Lecture III, and the writer of this paper, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, 3d edition, pp. 440 f.
- ↑ “Les données immédiates de la conscience,” Chapter III, p. 1262
- ↑ Ibid., p. 122. Compare Bergson‘s criticism in Matière et Mémoire to the conception of ‘the psychic state as a kind of atom’ (p. 1443) and his assertion (p. 181): “Consciousness never reveals to us psychic facts floating about in a state of independence.”
- ↑ Ibid., p. 125.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 1322. Cf. pp. 124, 1262, 128 f.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 1322.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 128. Cf. p. 167. Cf. also Matière et Mémoire, Chapter I, p. 54; and Chapter III; and L’évolution créatrice, Chapter IV, pp. 302–306, et al.
