William James and Henri Bergson; a study in contrasting theories of life

Preface

In the spring of 191 2 I was asked to give a series of talks on the relation between the philosophies of William James and Henri Bergson. This book is the outcome of the meditations which compliance with that request demanded. I have sought in it to draw the " counterfeit presentment of two brothers," brothers in that they are the children of the same age, that the same blood of its characteristic and perhaps unique tradition runs in the veins of their thought, and also, it may be, in that their individualities are so strikingly distinct and unique.

"There is," William James writes somewhere, "very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." The difference between James and Bergson has seemed to me much more than little, and of an importance difficult to calculate in advance; for the difference turns on what is ultimately a philosophic prevision of the future and a philosophic summation of the past.

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James's theory of life seems to me to face forward, to be an expression of the age's underlying and hence vaguely felt and unformulated tendencies. Bergson's theory of life sums itself up as a consummation of the philosophic tradition, restated in the modes of thought and harmonized with the modes of feeling of the age. For this reason it has been easier to portray Bergson's philosophy than James's. Bergson has a system in which there is logical relation between premise and conclusion, a relation so complete and integrative, indeed, that it is difficult to state any single opinion of Bergson's plausibly without becoming involved at once in a restatement of the whole system. His doctrines literally " interpenetrate," and have thus made necessary a certain amount of repetition in the exposition of them. To portray James's philosophy, on the contrary, has required much direct quotation, partly because of the novelty of his opinions, partly because of the existence of some difference among philosophers concerning just what was central and important in James's own mind. James,

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more than any other protagonist in the history of thought, was free from that " certain blindness in human beings." His mind and eye were alert to the unique, the individual, hence the important, in all phases of life and reflection (it is said of him that he used to put an opponent's case better than his own); he could so think himself into a cause as to become, for the moment, dramatically identical with it, to the exclusion of everything else. His sympathetic and persuasive statement of one phase of the Bergsonian point of view, for example, has led many careless readers to regard him as a Bergsonian; and of the position of the " psychical researchers," as a spiritist, and so on; while his readiness to entertain and to try out any philosophical hypothesis has led various readers to consider him irrevocably committed to this or that philosophic dogma. His attitude toward "panpsychism" (see the concluding passages in Some Problems of Philosophy) is an example.

Now readers approaching so myriad-minded and empirical a thinker as James will, if they are philosophical, approach him with preconcepx Preface

tions, and if they are friendly, they will attribute their preconceptions to him. The portraits they draw of him will consequently be far more expressive of their own views than of James's. If I seem to claim for the present portrait a greater authenticity, it is only because I acquired my own theory of life at his feet, and because in five years of close and intimate personal contact with him I attained to a definite perception of what he regarded as central and what tangential in his Weltanschauung.

Of the six chapters of the book, two, in slightly different form, have been printed before, the first in the Philosophical Review, the fourth in Mind, and I acknowledge with thanks the editors' permissions to reprint these chapters. To my friends Dr. H. M. Sheffer, Mr. Alfred D. Sheffield, and Dr. H. G. Brown I owe a greater debt than I can repay for careful examination of the proofs and many valuable suggestions.

Horace M. Kallen

Boston, Massachusetts August 24, 191 4

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Radical Empiricism and the Philosophic

Tradition i

Chapter I Radical Empiricism And The Philo- Sophic Tradition

The vision of the philosopher and the perception of the artist have this in common: they both ingest an existence alien in its nature and interests to the human mind, and they both re-create it, giving it color and form which the soul desires but does not find, character and effects which the spirit yearns for but cannot discover. The marbles of Phidias and the philosophy of Plato, the canvases of Raphael and the conceptions of Descartes, the poems of Goethe and the dialectic of Hegel, all obey the same impulse and express the same will — an impulse to make over unsuitable realities into satisfactory ideas, a will to remodel discordant nature into happy civilization. Indeed, all cultures own this parentage, and rest, together with philosophy and art, the inevitable offspring of the creative imagination. Experience as it comes, comes full of shocks and checks:

it obstructs the will, it deceives the mind, it disrupts into tumult the even, onward flow of life. The will seeks the good and finds evil; the mind desires order and encounters disorder; life seeks to expand into the harmonies of its kind and finds itself constricted, repressed, and even self-opposed. Plural, chaotic, always full of a potential menace, experience, coming so, is not to be endured. The mind must of its own motion make it over, and its re-creations are the arts and philosophy. A painted fire pleases without burning, a sculptured hero has power to delight without power to destroy. But the creations of the artist are at once less radical and more enduring than the creations of the philosopher. The artist works upon the solid stuff of experience itself, eliminating, adding, molding, until this stuff bears the shape of his heart's desire. The philosopher, however, tends to spurn altogether the stuff of experience and to carve a world of his desire alone. Is felt reality manifold, embattled, chaotic? The philosopher casts it aside; as such, it is mere appearance: true reality is one, harmonious, orderly. Is felt reality alien in substance, oppugnant to man in its nature and effects ? So, it is to be set aside as mere appearance: its real nature is spiritual, its true face is the face of God. Do the actualities of experience show human life ever-ending in its period, never continued? Then these actualities are false actualities, pure deception: in fact and in truth each man's life goes on unceasingly. Does the world offer hindrances in all directions to life's free flow, frustrating its desires, betraying its interests, binding its every movement with a chain of causes ? This behavior of the world must be set aside as mere appearance: in reality man is in no sense bond, his desires are already attained, his interests accomplished, his spontaneity assured. In brief, the universe, like a Japanese mummer, wears a hideous mask of multiplicity, materiality, necessity, and death, behind which whoever will look may behold the joyous features of its unity and spirituality, its assurance of human immortality and human freedom. These are the traits of the real; all else is mere appearance.

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And so, from Thales to Royce, philosophy has concerned itself with seeking proof, almost unexceptionally, for one or all of these four desiderates — the unity of the world; the existence of God, in some form of spiritistic substance, from theism to pantheism; the immortality of the soul; the freedom of the will. At the very least, the unity of the world was asserted. Even materialisms and atheisms refused to concede that to the actualities of experience. And as the full quota of these excellences, said to lie beneath and to support the flux, cannot without logical contradiction all be defended at once, most systems of philosophy are content with defending two, or at most three, of them. Thus the unity of the world is incompatible with the freedom of the will, the freedom of the will with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and well-disposed God. Individual immortality is oppugnant to cosmic unity, and cosmic unity to theistic divinity. These oppugnances, coupled with the mind's natural demand for logical consistency, have given rise to the typical philosophic " problems/' and in the shuffle of adjudicating the rights of the " problems" by dialectic the data of immediate experience have been completely neglected. When these did get any consideration whatever, beyond such consideration as is implied in neglect, they were at once transmuted by means of " forms of the understanding" or of "unknowables" into the substance of some desiderate; and when it was acknowledged, as by Kant, that the data of immediate experience could not in these forms yield any proof of the sublime desiderates, they were segregated from experience, and the desiderates were enacted into postulates of conduct. This compromise, which was rather a refusal to face the metaphysical dilemma than a resolution thereof, could not endure. Kant's chief contribution to the history of philosophy is the dialectic triad of the transcendental method. Transcendentalism itself goes, however, the way of traditional metaphysics, substituting in the ancient way desiderates for data, ideals for facts. It is, in a word, no less than the older metaphysic, essentially the vicarious fulfilment of unsatisfied desire, a compensation in discourse for a disappointment in reality.

The metaphysical tradition is not, however, the only tradition designated by the term " philosophy.' ' This term once meant the total field of thinking about experience. As, in the course of time, various special ranges of thought became enriched with collections of accurately observed data, yielding a common formula descriptive of their behavior, these dropped off and became special sciences. Mathematics was probably first, then astronomy, then physics, and in the three hundred years' duration of modern positive science all the special sciences whose names are now so familiar. One range of investigation seems none the less indissolubly linked to philosophy: this range is the human mind, for it is the mind's ultimate aims and inward character that philosophy seeks to make reality conform to. Now those philosophers who are known as the English empiricists devoted themselves almost exclusively to a study of the human mind, its content, its behavior, its laws. They are known, significantly, as philosophers, not as psychologists, and though psychology makes today pretensions to being a positive science, it is not less closely allied to philosophy than in the days of Locke and Hartley and Hume. The empirical bias of these Englishmen gave them this superiority over the traditional metaphysicians: they tended to face mental facts as facts, not in the light of compensatory desiderates. The "problem" concerning these latter did indeed, as Locke tells us, give rise to his investigations, and it is true that Berkeley made a metaphysical special plea by means of his researches. But in the long run they did face the facts, and the outcome of the tradition in Hume's famous conclusions was nearer envisaging the actual processes of experience than anything prior or contemporary.

Nearer, I say. But nearer only when the experiential flux itself or the human mind taken in isolation is not too closely scrutinized. With respect to both of these, important or essential data were missed or translated, not permitted to speak for themselves. Principles, relations, connections, denied to reality, were unwittingly set in the mind, and the opposition between the mind and reality was made such that the former's integral place in the latter was ignored. Take the case of " necessary connexion." This Hume reduced to a psychological habit of expectation, setting this relation altogether in the mind. But in so doing he failed to observe that acquiring a habit demands just that kind of modifiability designated by " necessary connexion/' and that hence, in crediting the mind with an acquired habit, he credited the universe in so far forth with an actually experienced " necessary connexion." The fact is that the same desideration which claims for unity in the world a reality superior to diversity claims for unity in discourse a truth superior to diversity. Hume was as much a rationalist in his procedure as he was an empiricist in his conclusions. The logical implications of premise and consequence were in fact of greater importance to him than the actual oppugnances and counter-implications of experience. He aimed, not to be correct, but to be consistent. And

Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition g

in his attempt to be consistent, i.e., to move only within the range of chosen premises to their logical conclusions, he missed envisaging reality as it is and substituted therefor a picture-reality logically deduced.

Now such a picture, like an artist's drawing, will have that unity and consistency and satisfactoriness which the mind desiderates from all things. But these are always attained at the cost of ehminating "irrelevancies," solving "contradictions/' dressing up facts, whether or no. And all the while, just these "irrelevancies," just these " contradictions," just these bare facts have in and of themselves the same right and status in reality as the data saved and transformed. The first to recognize and acknowledge this right was William James. 1 Where, throughout the nineteenth century, philosophers persisted either in discriminating between appearance and reality in such wise as to formulate reality in one or all of the

1 Cf. "On Some Omissions of Introspective Pyschology," Mind, IX (1884), 1-26; The Will to Believe, p. 299: "What Psychical Research Has Accomplished."

io William James and Henri Bergs on

compensatory terms of God, freedom, immortality, and cosmic unity; or where, in response to the pressure of rapidly growing sciences, men faced fact, only to change it in such wise as thereby to satisfy the inner need for " logical consistency," James insisted that each event of experience must be acknowledged for what it appears to be, and heard for its own claims. To neither doubt nor belief, datum nor preference, term nor relation, value nor fact, did he concede superiority over the others. Each had for him the same metaphysical claim, the same right to opportunity to make that claim good. Hence he pointed out to the rationalist the co-ordinate presence in experience of so much more than reason; he called the monist's attention to the world's diversity; the pluralisms to its unity. He said to the materialist: You shall not shut your eyes to the immaterial; to the spiritualist: You shall take cognizance also of the non-spiritual. He was a rationalist without unreason, an empiricist without prejudice. His empiricism was radical, preferring correctness to consistency, truth to logic. All

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things, he urged, however and whenever they occur in experience, must be taken at their face value, for what they are as they occur, and they must not be mistrusted until they have proved themselves untrustworthy. Pure experience knows no favorites. It admits into reality, without making over, evil as well as good, discontinuities as well as continuities, unhuman as well as human, plurality as well as unity, chance and novelty as well as order and law. It is a record and a description, not a transmutation; an expression, not a compensation. As a philosophy its principle is that of direct democracy, and William James, who first gave it voice, is the first democrat in metaphysics.

Now democratic metaphysics does not readily submit to systematization. A philosophic system is essentially a work of art. Like a picture or a drama or a symphony, it is the cunning arrangement of certain selected premises and their explication, according to dialectic law. It invariably omits more than it envisages, alters and harmonizes all that it touches, concerns itself, in a word, with consistency rather than with truth. There is no philosophic turpitude in errors of fact; the metaphysician's unpardonable sin lies in error of form, in self-contradiction. His reputation, like the painter's, tends to depend far more on his technique than on his subject-matter. The universe, however, exceeds technique. A systematic treatment of it harmonious with correctness is out of question. On every side appear "inconsistencies" and "irrelevancies" demanding equal treatment with the favored instances, claiming to be, no less than those, essentials. Each datum, moreover, offers its own seductive implications; each crosses, penetrates into, and interferes with, others. Reality comes, from moment to moment, as an infinite melange of systems, never as system in itself. But reality, coming so, comes as every man must meet it in perception, when it compels his attention on peril of his life, challenging him to choose which of its protean faces he will, to engage and to conquer. Hence, what this challenge evokes from him actually cannot be a special envisagement of his perception's never-completed total, called philosophy. He is required to operate rather than to envisage, to save himself rather than to see. And he meets the requirement by a method of treating reality piecemeal, which under one set of circumstances is common-sense; under another, science; under another, religion; under another, art; under still another, philosophy. In each case one particular bit or combination of bits of reality is used as an instrument to render the residuum more congenial to mankind; each is a special sort of tool, serving a common end. And a system of philosophy is nothing more. It harnesses the universe in the lines of some preferred order, making it more akin to man and more amenable to his interests. No less so do common-sense, religion, art, and science. They all unify, assure, conserve. They are all tools and modes of life, and are all as such pragmatic.

If this be true, pragmatism is not merely a new name for old ways of thinking; it is a new name for all ways of thinking. In view of the general attitude of its opponents, of the elaborate instruments of argumentation set in motion against it, of the appearance of new overshadowing issues, this observation gets the twist of paradox, for in the light of it the opponents must have been stultifying merely themselves, not the pragmatists. Yet nothing could have been more natural than the controversy over pragmatism, and nothing more inevitable than the shift of ground to other issues.

To begin with, it is only through the explication of the pragmatic rule itself that thinkers became conscious of the motives which, in the spirit's deep, underlie the persistent construction of philosophies. In ancient times the Aristotelian wonder had been accepted as sufficient; and this wonder stirred no further wonder about its own nature and origin, the intimacy of the sentiment and its ultimacy being undistinguished. The mediae vals wished only to reconcile brute experience with the Christian theory of life, and held the purpose of philosophy to be the confirmation of theology. That theology itself is only philosophy of a particular flavor and color, they failed, on the whole, to observe. They held it simply and frankly for a method of confirming desiderates whose existence was an unquestioned dogma. The " critical philosophy" was the first explicitly to deny confirmatory powers to metaphysics and veridical assurance to theology, but it reserved the desiderates of both as the sine qua non of conduct, and demonstrated God and freedom and immortality by the needs of action, as it demonstrated unity by the "laws of thought." But these needs and these laws remained unquestioned dogmas, no less unwarranted by the processes of experience than the desiderates of the mediae vals. Schopenhauer sought to found philosophy on the "consciousness that the non-existence of the world is just as possible as its existence." This was going deep, but it was not going down to an inspection of this consciousness and the possibilities that it recognized. It remained for him an ultimate fact, whereas it is not ultimate at all, being no more than barest schematic formulation of the growing experiential flux, of becoming, where things truly are and are not at the same time, and hence compel the mind to special alertness. Schopenhauer was perhaps the last, till William James, to have been troubled about the origin of metaphysics. Philosophers of our own age concerned themselves little about the spring and origin of their speculative activity. Their interest in philosophy was, on the whole, professional rather than human; for them thinking has turned into a self-sufficing exercise in dialectic, where it used to be an adaptation to a not over-kindly world. Philosophy has fallen into the position of a toper whose first drink was taken to save his life and who ever afterward lived to drink. In a word, philosophy is gripped by the inveterate habit of hypostatizing the instrument.

Hypostasis of the instrument is not the peculiar vice of philosophy alone. When science sacrifices observed fact to hypothetic law, when art conserves a technique, such as impressionism, and foregoes beauty, when government puts the perfection of its machinery above the happiness of the people, when religion wars over doctrine and ritual and neglects salvation, there occurs hypostasis of the instrument. The reason is not far to seek. The world we live in is one in which we happened, not one which was made for us. If it had been made for us we should not live in it as we do. Existence would have been beatitude and thought divinity, self-absorbed and selfpossessed. But we live only at the risk of life and only too often barter living for a living. In every region of experience, from ideals to things, there is a struggle to be, as utter and profound as it is implacable. In every region very few are the fit who survive. Not a moment's thought, not a pleasure felt, nor an idea realized, but keeps its head above the flux at the cost of innumerable suppressed and lost. What is man but a battle-field of interests, a field of a few dominant ones and a horde starving, unfulfilled ? To possess little he must forego much, and what he lives by, what keeps him in so far forth, unsubmerged, becomes the more precious for what it has cost. It is the all-saving tool, won at great hazard, used with constant risk, and preserved with constant cost. A hypothesis, a religion, a form of government sweeps all appropriate data under its beneficent control, divests them of their power to harm, prepares them to feed the proper life of man.

To conserve these, henceforward, becomes more important than the conservation of their end. For their end, although no less than they, fleeting and elusive, is still inalienable; in its manifold intimacy of feeling, life's goal is everywhere no more than life. But the instrument, fashioned always of some especial fragment selected from the experiential complex, is not so inalienable. Initially it is a nature foreign to man's, distrained from its own ways to life's uses, and at every moment it may slip from the hands and go those ways. Hence it becomes an ultimate concern. It signifies inward possession, where the goal signifies only desire; it is the key to the heaven where the treasure is laid up, while the goal is only the yearning for the treasure, an uneasiness and irritation until possessed. Inevitably, therefore, the instrument, being always the more immediate and certain possession, assumes a constantly greater importance, and ends like the Arab's camel, by crowding its master out of the tent. There arises a worship of the instrument. And about this worshipful object is it that men fight their greatest quarrels in science and religion and philosophy. What could have been more bitter than the quarrel between the theologians and Galileo, on the theologians' side? The fact announced by Galileo made a cherished instrument useless. Or the feeling among theologians themselves concerning such questions as: Shall the priest use three or two fingers in uttering the benediction? Does the miracle of transubstantiation occur in the sacrament ? Are indulgences valid? Is grace better had by partial or by total immersion? Is the pope infallible? These are matters, among numberless others, the Christian world has not ceased to quarrel about. They are notably merely means; the end, salvation, all Christians are agreed on. Or more largely : What was the issue in the wars of opposed faiths, as between Moslems and Christians? Not heaven, nor yet the nature of God. Concerning these there is no inconsiderable unanimity. The issue concerns the instruments whereby these are to be attained — Mohammed the prophet of Allah versus Jesus the only-begotten son of God. Or yet in art, do men quarrel about beauty or about technique? The impressionist against the realist, the futurist against the classicist, defend means of painting, making these the paramount issue, and forgetting the end in the means. There is no need to multiply examples: men tend to differ chiefly about instruments. They do not quarrel about the wine, they quarrel about the bottles.

Philosophy is perhaps least of all exempt from this quarrel. The end which philosophers seek is the same. The empirical reality they seek it in is the same. The urgency that compels the search is the same. Schools and systems do not debate about starting-points and stoppingplaces. They debate about vehicles of transit. Do we secure ourselves in experience more effectively by thinking the world in terms of matter or in terms of spirit ? Do we gain our ends better by thinking reality as altogether free or altogether bond? as one or many? a block or a sandheap ? as divinely controlled or as mechanical? as ultimately good or ultimately bad ? Each of these predicating words, if it means anything at all, means some specific datum of immediate experience, one of an infinite number of such in the warring flux. And according to the answer you choose to make to any of these questions you refashion this vast residuum in the image of this one and announce it to behave after the manner of this one. So, you unify all your world, are prepared for the chances and shocks of new experience, and go your way rejoicing. Your philosophy becomes your most precious possession, your device eternally and happily to rest in harmony with the residual universe; becomes, hence, the source and unshakable foundation of the reality of this end, and so itself alone, and not the residuum, the content and standard of creation. Instrument and end have changed places. No longer is it a question of the adequacy of the system to secure you in the world;

it is a question of the adequacy of the world to measure up to your standard system. If the world doesn't, so much the worse for the world. You then call it mere appearance. The true and abiding reality is your system.

Now, there are very many systems and each lays practically exclusive claim to the salvational power of metaphysical truth. Each refuses to be enumerated over a common denominator. But pragmatism, with its democratic presupposition in metaphysics, its perception that philosophy is fundamentally a method of using pieces of reality to control the remainder, but that it can never be a vision of the total, is just such an enumeration. For pragmatism all systems start on the same level; their opportunities are equal, and the superiority of one over another is eventual, not primary; to be achieved by works, not by an inborn and inoperative gift. To envisage philosophies thus is, however, to restore to perception the older relations of thoughts and things; it is to recall metaphysics to its original status and forgotten business. There was vexation in such a call, inevitably; and not a little of the controversy about pragmatism sprang from this unanalyzed vexation, sprang as a defense, against pragmatist challenge, of the hypostasis of the instrument which all compensational systems practice. 1

But, furthermore, the exposition of pragmatism, the method and theory of truth, went on without much consideration of the undiscriminated immediacies of experience (the subject-matter of radical empiricism) to control which method was born. The exposition looked back, when it did look back, to science

1 It is such hypos tatizing treatment that gave rise to the much-debated analysis of pragmatism into thirteen mutually exclusive and contradictory varieties. But it is clear that there may easily be an infinite number of such, which, different, and even oppugnant with respect to each other, as hypostatized substances, will yet be unanimous and identical with respect to a common function. The Hon and the lamb are intrinsically inimical, but under appropriate conditions functionally agreed to aim at the same thing, the conservation by each of his own life. Rivals for the hand of the same woman may seek to cut each other's throats, but they will both be agreed in glorifying the beloved. And so on. Only the hypostatization of function or the identification of function with structure or substance can cause and constitute the incompatibilities of which pragmatism is accused. And this accusation is only another example of the hypostatizing habit of philosophy.

only; but chiefly it looked forward, determining procedure in terms of " future consequences," desiderated and undesiderated. Now science itself is discriminative; and, though it rests more obviously than other human institutions on primary immediacies, the immediacies it handles are the primary ones already modified by such experience-stuffs as order and quantity. These pervasive contents ot reality are highly excellent; they facilitate, as little else save " spirit" is supposed to do, the mind's prosperous movements among other realities. They become therefore easily the foremost subjects of hypostasis, which then seems to dominate their total range of influence. In scientific method, consequently, the opponents of pragmatism perceived what they thought was a morphological distinction between hypothesis and truth, but what actually is a functional one, truth being pragmatically no more than fit hypothesis. But this was enough to cause anti-pragmatists to attribute to the pragmatic exposition, not the character of a description of the genesis and nature of method, but, by virtue of the psychologist's fallacy, the character belonging to their own systems as inoperative instruments, the character of one more hypostasis, additional to those already existing. The unavoidable stress on consequences, moreover, these being the goals of desire (marked by " satisfaction")? and thereby "terminal" to processes, served to divert attention somewhat too much from the situations out of which consequences grow, with the result that the momentary structure of method was substituted for its operative movement, even by pragmatists themselves.