The philosophy of change; a study of the fundamental principle of the philosophy of Bergson

Front matter

FROM THE

SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND

THE GIFT OF

Preface

This book is the outcome of a course of lectures on " The Philosophy of Bergson " delivered in the University of London. The title "The Philosophy of Change " was suggested to me by M. Bergson himself as a sub-title for the little volume on his philosophy in The Peoples Books} It emphasises the fundamental principle of the new philosophy, the principle that change is original.

It seems to me that our present generation is witnessing a wide extension of science in directions unimagined by, and inconceivable to, the last generation. In two directions especially experiment is opening up realms of reality the existence of which has until now been unsuspected, and the discovery of which is probably destined to widen immeasurably the horizon of human knowledge and thereby increase indefinitely human power. One of these new realms of reality may be fitly described as the world beyond the atom, the other is the spiritual (or mental, if that word is preferred) reality revealed in the new method and science of psychoanalysis. The Philosophy of Change is in

1 Henri Bergson : The Philosophy of Change. (T. C. and E. C. Jack.)

vi THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE

striking agreement and complete harmony with the extension of science in both these experimental fields. The simultaneous formulation of a new principle in philosophy with its confirmation in scientific discovery must be something more than coincidence. There is no apparent connection, and it is certainly not due to direct influence. But is it not just as if a greater mind, of which our individual minds are the present activity, had brought to consciousness a new idea ? It is this idea, the idea of original change, that I have tried to expound in this book.

From this standpoint I have endeavoured to present a clear and concise account of what seem to me the definite doctrines worked out in Bergson's philosophy. In this task I have been privileged to have the advantage of friendship and personal communication with M.. Bergson himself. He is in no way responsible for the order or the manner in which I have set forth the doctrines nor for the arguments with which I have supported them, but he has encouraged me by the deep interest he has shown in the work, and has discussed with me many of the more difficult problems.

The reason I have devoted so much attention to the problem of the relation of mind and body is that I feel it to be the point of departure for a philosophy of action. What impresses me is the quite evident initial determination of M. Bergson to reach a definite conclusion as to the exact nature of that relation, and not, as so many have done, to rest satisfied with a cautious acceptance of some provisional hypothesis.

PREFACE vli

Matiere et Memoire convinces me that this problem was among the earliest to attract Bergson's attention, and that his conclusion from his studies of the physiology of cerebral processes, that those processes cannot of themselves by any possibility give rise to a perception or a memory, is the real starting-point of the development of his philosophical theory.

On this portion of my book I have had the advantage of the criticism of my friend Mr. William McDougall, to vs^hom I am deeply indebted for his kindness in reading the manuscript, and who, besides pointing to defects in my argument and suggesting many improvements in my treatment of the problem, expressed his strong dissent from me on two most important doctrines. I mention them here because I think it is possible that in each case M. Bergson would himself incline much more than I do to Mr. McDougall's view. In the first place, Mr. McDougall objects that what I have called solidarity in action is nothing else but interaction, that it is meaningless unless there is interaction, and that it cannot therefore be described as a third alternative to the two alternatives of parallelism and interaction. To this my reply is that I by no means deny interaction, but I say that the theory I have put forward would stand even though all experiments designed to prove interaction should continue to be negative. On the question of the possibility of experiment to prove interaction I am able to quote from a letter written to me by M. Bergson : " En ce qui concerne la possibility d'une creation viii THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE

d'energie physique, j'inclinerais a considerer la question conime susceptible d'etre trait^e un jour exp6rimentalement. II ne me parait pas impossible qu'une energie purement psychique puisse accroitre (quoique, sans doute, dans une mesure excessivement restreinte) la somme d'energie physique existant dans un syst^me donn^ ; et il n'est pas non plus impossible que des mesures convenablement prises viennent confirmer cette hypothese, quand la science sera plus avancee." If such a test experiment can be contrived I hope it will be (like the well-known experiment of Michelson and Morley to show the effect of the movement of the source of light on the observed velocity of its propagation) equally capable of demonstrating a negation or an affirmation. For it seems to me that the negation of interaction, if there be none, is quite as important as would be its affirmation. What I claim for the solidarity of mind and body in action is that it is a fact which does not depend on the proof or disproof of an hypothesis.

In the second place, Mr. McDougall, conformably with the view he has developed in his book on Body and Mind, thinks that I, following M. Bergson, shirk the problem of individuality and fail to draw what he regards as the plain conclusion from the doctrine of memory, and of the vital impulse, that each human being has a psychical nature which is individual, which is the product of racial evolution and individual development, — a soul. In his presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research, M. Bergson has expressed his view that the

PREFACE ix

survival of individual personality after death is so probable as to compel belief in the absence of any positive disproof. 1 should not myself rank the probability so high. But, in any case, one thing is clear, — that, so far as action is concerned, we not only have no evidence of, but we have no way of conceiving, action except as a function of the union of mind and body. And this is plain when we consider the alleged evidences of survival. These are in every case certain actions of living bodies alleged to be the expression of a mind which is not the mind of the person who performs the actions. The important thing to me is that whether or not there be the highly complex psychical structures called souls, capable of maintaining some sort of existence when the organism they acted through is disintegrated, such existence would not, even were it capable of the clearest experimental proof, solve the tremendous problem of individuality and personality. Indeed in many respects it would multiply the difficulties of the problem, which is to understand how the whole can be, as it seems to be, present in the part. It seems to me that however successful we may be in distinguishing the spiritual reality from the material reality, we must recognise that in living action they are inseparable, and that the solidarity of mind and body in action means that only in their union do we know their existence.

It will be seen, therefore, that in making it my aim to present the fundamental principle and definite doctrines of Bergson's philosophy I have sought like-

X THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE

wise to distinguish clearly what is definite and essential from what is vague and only suggestive. I do not mean that what is precise and certain in philosophy is alone important. I do not undervalue the prospect of finding true the hopes and ideals that materialism has seemed to condemn as groundless and vain. But I have written for those whose interest in what we know is greater than their interest in what we should like to know.

I wish to thank Mr. Alexander for his kindness in reading in the MS. the account of his doctrine of realism on pp. 100-102. He remarked that the shortness of the statement makes the doctrine more difficult than it really is. I am fully conscious of this, but as my account is only introduced as a side argument I must be content with hoping that readers will wish to know more of Mr. Alexander's theory and will go to the source.

I have had most valuable assistance from Mr. Dawes

many suggestions. Mr. T. P. Nunn and Mr. Arthur

Robinson have also read my proofs, and I owe to

each of them some improvement in the original

statement.

H. W. C.

London, June 19 14.

Chapter I ; The Method Of Philosophy

The study of philosophy is not easy. We enter upon it knowing beforehand that its history is a long record of failures to attain the simple end — a reasonable account of the universe — that each philosopher sets out with the intention of reaching. We know too that unlike science, in which common agreement and unity of method have led to continual progress and in which, by reason of its great expansion, workers have been compelled to specialise, specialisation in philosophy is practically impossible, every worker being engaged in a fierce strife over first principles. And yet it seems as though philosophy ought to be of all studies the easiest, its method of all methods the surest, its object of all objects the most attainable. For in philosophy, though the whole of reality is the object of study, yet we approach it in an entirely different manner from that in which we study physical science. It is ourself and our knowledge that is our subject-matter. The analysis of knowledge as conscious e^Jperience is our method. It is in this large meaning, as distinct from the narrow psychological meaning, that " Know thyself" is now, as it was for the ancient Greeks, the business of philosophy. Why then should it be difficult, and In what exactly can the peculiar difficulty we meet with in philosophy lie ? The whole subject-matter is with us at every moment, no elaborate preparation of material or invention of apparatus is required as in the physical sciences, no discipline beyond that attention which all serious study demands as a pre-condition of success.

What then can the reason be that whenever we reflect on this most familiar, most intimate, and most accessible reality — our own life and consciousness, our own experienced apprehension of reality — and try to frame for ourselves a rational conception of it, that here, where we should expect our intellect to be most at home, it is, on the contrary, foredoomed to failure, whereas when it deals with a reality external to us, a matter that is foreign to us, its continual approach to success is so remarkable ? There is one consideration that may help us to give the answer. The difficulty of philosophy is not at the beginning. Start with whom we will — Plato, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel — no difficulty arrests us on the threshold, all is easy and familiar ; it is only as we advance that the difficulties begin to appear, and only at the end that they seem insuperable. It is not in their beginnings but in their conclusions that philosophers meet those fundamental difficulties which are for ever throwing them back on the study of first principles. May we not suspect that in this very fact lies the key to the solution ? May it not be that the path on which we enter the study of philosophy is easy and inviting just because it follows the natural bent of our intellect ? May it not be that the concepts which have proved so successful in dealing with external reality are unfitted to comprehend the active life itself which has evolved those concepts in us ? If this should prove to be so, then the very ease with which we enter

THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY 3

on the study of philosophy is the origin of the difficulty we meet in the course of it.

If the view that we are now going to put forward be true, that philosophy begins in an intuition of reality, and that intuitionJsjespeeiaUy the method of philosophy, as distinguished from intellectual apprehension which is the method of science, then there will be this difference between our philosophy and other philosophies, that its difficulty will meet us at the beginning and not at the end. The further we advance the easier and the more convincing it will become. But of the beginning we may say, as was said of the rich man who would enter the kingdom of heaven, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. And why .? Because we must start with a mental effort of extreme difficulty, not merely with a mental abnegation, not merely with the determination like that of Descartes, to doubt everything until the fact of doubting itself alone is left — I think therefore I am — but with an act of the mind which turns the mind from its own natural bent, turns aside from ready-framed concepts to place itself in the real activity out of which the conceptional habit has been formed.

There is a general idea that intuition in philosophy is a kind of impressionism, aff"ecting blurred outlines and colours which run into one another. It is thought that intuition substitutes a vague indefiniteness of feeling and emotion for the clear logical thinking and sharply defined categories of intellectual analysis. It has been regarded as a kind of religious mysticism. I shall try to prove that the very contrary is true ; there is no philosophy clearer in its method, more definite in its doctrine. We might almost say, in fact, that its most striking feature as a whole is its scientific character. Intuition prese nts the ideal of a meth od j_n_ £hilqsoph^which shall obtain not merely recognition but lead to results in knowledge of mind comparable in every way with the continual progress and practical achievement which have marked the advance of physical science. It does not attempt to minimise the value of science, it does not triumph over the limitations of science, nor claim to offer a kind of knowledge that is at once higher and nobler than science can attain to. It does not dig below science in order to sap its foundations and involve its structures in ruin. On the contrary, it recognises its value in its limitations, and seeks to supplement it by a method that shall join to it a knowledge that of itself science is by a natural disability unable to attain.

And what is the knowledge that philosophy may and science cannot attain ? What object is it that philosophy can comprehend but that science by its very nature cannot ? We may answer in one word — jreedom. If there be — there may not be — anywhere in the universe a free activity, it is clear that by its very nature science will fail to comprehend it. Sc ienc e is the discovery of law. Its whole character is deterministic^ Every advance of science is the bringing under one law, into one rigidly determined system, whatever fact or phenomenon has seemed capricious. Physical science is essentially deterministic, and its ideal is a universal mathematic in which everything is calculable. If we find a fact that science does not comprehend, we must conclude either that the fact is not a fact but a mistaken view of a fact, or else that science is not all-embracing, that it is not the only mode of knowing. There is a fact, the fact of life, that science does not comprehend.

How does this fact appear to us ? If we look at it from the point of view of our own living experience, from the inner standpoint of our consciousness, it appears to us as a power which we possess of acting freely. We feel that we are free — the freedom may be an illusion, but the feeling is an absolute fact. If wel look at the fact of life from the external standpoint as a fact among other facts that constitute the world, then it seems as though here and there in a universe, which appears otherwise completely determined, there are centres of indetermination. These centres of indetermination are wherever there is life. Everywhere else we can calculate the actions and reactions which determine one another, but wherever there is life there is something incalculablg^^ nd un foreseeable, somethi ng new and u npredictable, continuously happen ings It may be illusion, or it may be appearance, due to the limitation of our outlook and to our ignorance, but so it appears. If the meaning of the appearance is that the essential character of life is freedom, then it must be incomprehensible to science. Must it therefore be unknown or unknowable ? The very idea involves an absurdity, for the fact of life and consciousness is the very basis of experience itself. But it is elsewhere than to science we must turn. If our knowledge of life is to be precise, consistent, and sure, it is to philosophy we must go. This is the positive aspect of philosophy. It has a definite subject-matter, a reality which science cannot comprehend, which can only be brought into one scheme of human knowledge by the method which philosophy and not science employs.

But some will not agree that the essential character of life is freedom. They will admit that there is an appearance of spontaneity or freedom in living matter which we do not meet with in inert matter, and they will admit the fact of consciousness that we feel our actions to be free. If, however, this feeling of freedom is not a fact but an illusion, then there is no natural disability in science to comprehend life. The failure is in that case due not to natural disability but to the enormous complexity of the phenomena of vital actions, the feebleness of our powers of investigation, and the extent of our ignorance. Many biologists are sure the solution of the problem is one of time, and that some day the last secret of the nature of life will be yielded up to the chemist in his laboratory. And if, indeed, others are more humble and regard such a consummation as an unattainable ideal, it is not because they recognise a natural impossibility, but because their instruments and methods are so hopelessly inadequate to the task. Let us admit, then, that there may be no such fact as freedom. Let us suppose with the materialists and the mechanists that the universe is completely determined, that freedom is an appearance only and not a reality, and that the feeling of freedom is a consequence of our ignorance of the factors that determine our action. Yet even if we take the view that freedom is an appearance and not a reality, we have to admit that there is an appearance of freedom, and that in individual experience it takes the primary form of a feeling. We cannot therefore escape the burden of proving that it is appearance and not reality. How shall we do this ? No argument will prove the impossibility of a fact. The only proof we can offer that this freedom is an illusion is that science is deterministic and therefore unable to comprehend it. But this is tacitly assuming the very fact that has to be proved, namely, that there is no other way of viewing a fact but the scientific way.

There can be no ground for such an assumption. The determinist character of science may be a consequence of our intellectual nature, determinism may belong to the view that we take of a reality itself free. If this be so then philoso phy must supplement scien jg^_

Again, some will not agree that physical science is restricted to a determinist or mechanist view of the universe. Freedom, they will say, if it be a fact will find its place — must find its place — in physical science. And even if it be admitted that the rigid concepts with which mathematics and physics bring preciseness into knowledge are unfitted to comprehend the phenomena of life and consciousness, it is not a new method that is called for, but a larger, more inclusive, system. Yet it is scientific thinkers who are responsible for the restriction. They claim, apparently with good reason, that the discarding of all aspects of nature which will not submit to measurement, and,, the reconstruction of experience on a mathematical model, the fitting of reality into a scheme of which pure mathematics is the type and the incentive, has constituted the notable success of physical science, and is the secret of its hold on the human mind. An example of this tendency to restrict science to mechanism is to be found in the youngest of the sciences — psychology. States of consciousness — sensations, emotions, pleasure, pain, desire, conation, will, cognition — do not naturally adapt themselves to measurement, yet we see an increasing body of scientific workers engaged in devising experimental methods the object of which is to impose on this refractory material a mathematical order and to bring it within the scheme of a universal mechanism. To these workers the whole success of the new science depends on the successful introduction of measurement.

There is, however, a still more important consideration. It is quite true that no mechanical system, no system that confines itself to explanation by efficient causation and eschews final cause or purpose, can be a comprehensive system of the reality of the universe. 'The world of mind is the world of purposes and meanings and values, and these must find a place in any complete scheme of reality, but those who include purpose with mechanism in one scheme and name it physical science, or simply science, those who see no difficulty in combining efficient and final causation, seem to miss altogether the crux of the problem. T1he_problem_surely lies in_the_ fact that th£-xealm --Q£ scie iitific explanation or mechanism is a system complete iii_jtself. The physical order is not torn out of or broken off from the whole of reality, it presents no ragged edges, it has no need of the psychical order to complete it, however necessary it may be to recognise the equal reality of that order. How comes it that it is possible, nay, even necessary, to regard the chain of physical causation as complete, in the sense that all the gaps in our knowledge, or limitations of our knowledge, are conceived by us to be causes or conditions of the same order, and not causes or conditions of a different order, while at the same time we are well aware of an order that is not physical but psychical ? This is the real problem. I.^_Js_a_^n3blejn_of two orders and their rela tion. fU-»..'-Jl

Science has not always been distinguished from philosophy, either in subject-matter or in method. Originally there was no distinction ; philosophy was merely the more comprehensive word, and science denoted particularly the part of philosophy which was specially directed to the study of external natural phenomena. This original unity is preserved in the term natural philosophy, and in the description of opticians and others as makers of philosophical instruments. When the great advance of science began there seemed at once to develop an antagonism between two opposed methods — the'iflductive method, the be- ^ ginnings of which we associate with the names of XGalileo, Bacon, and Newton, and the rational or logical method which we associate with Descartes, Leibniz, and Spiriosr. Not that there was ever real antagonism, but there developed a more and more complete separation. To many historians of the intellectual development of western civihsation the line of science has seemed a continual advance and increasing victory of mind over matter ; the line of philosophy, on the other hand, has seemed, if not a useless waste of intellectual activity, a continual struggle against an increasing obscurity. Science has seemed to be ever widening the circle of human knowledge, philosophy to be plunging in the morass of an unsubstantial and ineffectual metaphysics. And philosophers themselves have been very different in their attitude towards science, sometimes, like Hegel, expressing a magnificent and bitter contempt for its method and attainment, sometimes, like Comte and Herbert Spencer, regarding philosophy as a mere humble servant of science waiting to co-ordinate its results. Bergson, on the other hand, adopts an attitude to science which is neither superior nor servile. Its value, method, and attainment receive full recognition ; its limitations are not a reproach but reveal the need and give the opportunity to philosophy ; and philosophy, while following its own method, can only be justified if it gives results worthy to be compared with those of science.

lo PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE chap.

A great change is noticeable in the last few years in the relations of philosophy to science. It seems as if a mutual attraction had been drawing together the two sometimes divergent lines of the human pursuit of knowledge. The enormous expansion of scientific knowledge in the direction of mathematical and physical theory has seemed to give to many of the modern physical conceptions a metaphysical character. The electrical theory of matter on the one hand, and the theory of the stellar system on the other, seem almost to press to the limits of physical investigation and to invite metaphysical explanation. It is really difficult to say whether we ought to class the Principle of Relativity as a physical or metaphysical principle. The paradoxes of modern science judged from the standpoint of ordinary experience are in every way as staggering as the most transcendental theories of philosophy. When we are told that mass is a function of velocity, that space and time themselves are derivatives of systems of movement, that nothing is at rest, not even the hypothetical ether, that the propagation of light is a critical velocity which cannot be exceeded and which is at the same time uniform for all observers whatever their own system of movement, we seem not only to have left altogether the ground we are accustomed to think of as the firm basis of scientific conceptions, but to be transported into metaphysics. I do not mean that any actual physical theory is metaphysical, nor that the terms physical and metaphysical in respect of any theory lose their sharp distinction, but that many modern physical speculations, in their contradiction of accepted ideas and their dependence upon concepts, share with metaphysical theories the character of dialectical subtlety

I THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY ii

and the obscurity and difficulty so commonly ascribed to the latter.

I shall explain this best by examples. The e ssential princi ple of the philosophy of change is that movement Js original. Things are derived from movement, and movement is not a quality or character that things have added to themselves. I shall have much to say oh this principle, but for the present let us leave out of question whether it be true or false. If it be true it is a metaphysical principle, and it is philosophy not physical science. By this I mean that it is not a hypothesis verified by working. No experiment that we can imagine ourselves to contrive would increase or decrease its probability. It is beyond physics in the sense that it does not rest on anything we are able to observe in the external world but on the nature of conscious experience itself. It^bielongs to philosophy because it is^on]y_^the. method of mtuitl^ that reveals it ; it _is indeed, as I shall endeavour later to show, the positive_ fact about reality that int u ition reveals. At the same time no philosophical principle that is in direct contradiction with physical science can stand. All I affirm is that its philosophical character is not its scientific character.

On the other hand, what is now named the Principle of Relativity is a scientific principle, — scientific in precisely the same sense that Newton's laws of motion are scientific. The Principle of Relativity is that electro-magnetic phenomena are constant (that light, for example, is propagated at a uniform velocity of about 185,000 miles a second) for all observers in uniform movement of translation relatively to one another. The principle has been formulated to express the uniformly negative results of all the experiments designed to reveal the rate and acceleration of a movement from observation made within it. Clearly if the medium in which light is propagated is absolute and stationary in relation to all systems of movement, then the velocity and direction of each system of movement will be revealed to an observer within it by the variations which the velocity and direction of light propagation will appear to undergo. All experiments designed to show this variation have had a uniformly negative result, and this has rendered necessary a set of new equations. It is a scientific advance along scientific lines. When I say, then, that this Principle of Relativity is metaphysical in its direction, I mean that the results that follow from it — the abolition of the ether, the profound and complete metamorphosis of the hitherto accepted notions of space and time, the meaning of simultaneity, and so forth — seem to involve a reformation of the very concept of external reality which physics assumes, and on which it is based, and so to challenge a metaphysical explanation.