"Creative Evolution": A Résumé of the Teaching of M. Bergson (Part I — Time, Freedom, Body and Soul, Pure Becoming, the Evolution of Worlds)

Chapter VI: “Creative Evolution” — A Résumé of the Teaching of M. Bergson

M. Henri Bergson was born in Paris in 1859. He published his first work, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (“Time and Free Will”), as his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne in 1889; his second, Matière et mémoire (“Matter and Memory”), appeared seven years later, in 1896; and in 1907 he gave to the world his most characteristic production, L’Évolution créatrice (“Creative Evolution”).

Amid much in his philosophical writings that is arbitrary and indefensible, one meets with statements that are profoundly true, and others that are promising and suggestive. Kant wished to raise an impassable barrier between the world of phenomena, which he handed over to the understanding, and the world of realities, entrance to which was forbidden; but, Bergson observes, “possibly this distinction is emphasized too much, and the barrier may be easier to surmount than people suppose” (Données Immédiates, p. 18). Again: “we live and move and have our being in the absolute [i.e. the real]. The knowledge we have of the absolute is no doubt incomplete, but not external or relative. We reach to reality itself in its depth by the combined and progressive development of Science and Philosophy” (Creative Evolution, p. 210 — references throughout are to the English translation by Arthur Mitchell, Ph.D.).

The cardinal principle of the Bergsonian philosophy is contained in the statement: “Being does not exist, all is Becoming” — that is, all is in a state of perpetual and integral change: panta rhei kai ouden menei, “all things flow, and nothing abides.” Certain results follow from this universal fluidity of being. Metaphysical results: there is no substance, only attributes without a substance; there is no category save movement. Logical results: there is no principle of identity, no principle of contradiction; “2 + 2 = 4” does not express an absolute and definitive truth, but the formula is useful, since it has succeeded. Criteriological results: since all is change, the faculty of abstract thought, which gives us fixed principles, is deceitful.

To gain some knowledge of Bergsonian teaching, it will be well first to examine what is taught on certain particular subjects, and afterward to attempt a synthesis of these points.

I. Time

M. Bergson contends that the ordinary conception of time is false because it is spatial. Time is not a homogeneous medium like space; la durée — real time — is a heterogeneous, qualitative multiplicity of conscious states, a stream of consciousness. In his own words, la durée is “a wholly qualitative multiplicity, an absolute heterogeneity of elements, which pass over into one another” (Données Immédiates, p. 106). Such a time cannot be measured by clocks, but only by conscious beings, for “it is the very stuff of which life and consciousness are made.” The intellect does not grasp real time; we can have only an intuition of it. The fundamental self is a qualitative multiplicity of conscious states, flowing, interpenetrating, melting into one another, and forming an organic whole, a living unity or personality. Adapting the old phrase sub specie aeternitatis to his own view of time, Bergson urges us to strive to perceive all things sub specie durationis. La durée is the continuous progress of the past gnawing into the future: “Our past still travels with us from afar, / And what we have been makes us what we are.” It matters little whether we regard our inner life as having duration, or as actually being duration; if the former, personality is only an aspect of reality, but if our very personality is la durée, then time is reality itself.¹

II. Human Freedom

Having dissolved psychological duration into which freedom itself is said to move, Bergson proceeds: “Some say we must follow the strongest motive, and hence freedom of the will is impossible. Others point out that the strongest motive may have become such through our own free choice, and therefore freedom remains. But since, in psychological duration, there is no real multiplicity of distinct motives, the conflict of motives is itself illusory.” Bergson claims for freedom of the will the direct testimony of consciousness: “Human freedom is a fact, and among facts capable of proof, there is none clearer than the truth of human freedom” (Données Immédiates, pp. 161, 165, 168). But his proofs are not merely unsatisfactory; they are actually destructive of freedom.

All agree that a free act is one not necessarily determined by its cause. When the principle of causality is introduced into the discussion, Bergson, criticising the maxim that “the same cause in the same circumstances produces the same effects,” denies the assumption that causes or circumstances can ever truly be “the same.” In one sense he is right — but is the variation in causes and circumstances essential, or merely accidental? A hen never lays exactly the same egg twice, and yet all her eggs share the essential characters of her species and race; the leaves of a tree likewise resemble one another despite their individual differences. What, then, remains of M. Bergson’s proof of human freedom? Every definition of Liberty, he tells us, would betray it, for “we are free when our acts spring from our entire personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance which one finds sometimes between the artist and his work” (Données Immédiates, p. 129). Two objections meet this description at once: it is too narrow, for when I write or read I am free, though the act does not express my whole personality; and it is too wide, for the pursuit of happiness is the profoundest desire of human nature, and yet is not thereby a free act.

Had M. Bergson not been so thoroughgoing an anti-intellectualist, he might have seen that intelligence itself is the root of freedom: the ideal conceived by the intellect enables us to perceive the imperfections in things already created, thereby giving us genuine motives for their rejection. Moreover, if intelligence were not necessary for freedom, one might reasonably ask why the lower animals are not free.

III. The Union of Soul and Body

M. Bergson has had the courage to disregard the veto of Kant, according to whom the problem of the union of soul and body is insoluble. He has had the courage, too, to maintain that “perception goes indefinitely beyond the cerebral state” (Matière et Mémoire, p. 199) — that is, that cerebral states are not themselves the cause of perception. He teaches that “les corps sont des images,” meaning, despite the doubtful suitability of the terminology, that bodies possess a real, objective existence; “une image peut être sans être perçue” (“an image can exist without being perceived”) stands in flat contradiction to Berkeley’s conclusion, esse est percipi, “to be is to be perceived,” which sums up the Bishop’s uncompromising Idealism. Yet when Bergson examines the meaning of the word “spirit,” he disregards the properly intellectual operations, and identifies spirit with memory — the memory of images rather than of ideas — though he fails to note that memory is itself organic, and organically localised.

The true opposition of soul and body is the opposition of the unextended to the extended. How, then, does Bergson effect their union? Matter, he tells us, is a succession of very rapid moments; spirit, or Memory, binds this succession together. The humblest role of mind is to bind together the successive moments of the duration of things, and it is in this very operation that mind makes contact with matter — but how? His assertion here amounts, in truth, to voces et verba, praetereaque nihil, “words and phrases, and nothing more.” Instead of seeking to unite, within one subject, two entities which are opposed but genuinely complementary, he attempts to identify them by finding middle terms between the two extremes, reducing what are differences of kind to mere differences of degree: “le physique n’est que du psychique inverti” — “the physical is nothing but the psychical inverted.” The Scholastics, by contrast, stress the true dualism of material being, composed as it is of an extended and passive principle together with one that is unextended and active — the scholastic theory unites contraries without collapsing the distinction between them.

IV. “Pure Becoming” — The Formula of Universal Change

Aristotle notes that nature is the totality of things that move (Physics, Bk. III, c. 1), meaning by “movement” not merely local translation, but transformation generally; movement or change is thus, for him, a genuinely universal phenomenon. What explanation is to be given of this universal characteristic? Three schools of thought have offered three different solutions.

(1) The Eleatic School of Zeno. Zeno denied the objective reality of movement altogether, holding that “being” alone truly exists — his example of Achilles and the tortoise is well known. But to declare movement an illusion is merely to explain the obscure by something still more obscure, obscurum per obscurius; to deny the plain evidence of the senses is, as Aristotle reminds us, an infirmity of thought, arrhostia tis dianoias (Physics, Bk. VIII).

(2) The Ionian School of Heraclitus. Heraclitus, on the contrary, contended that movement is the sole reality, and that “being” does not exist. Hegel, and after him his disciple Le Roy, revived essentially this teaching: Hegel repeatedly speaks of “the fluid mass of existing things,” and Le Roy maintains that “‘becoming’ is the only concrete reality” (Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1901).

(3) The Peripatetic School of Aristotle. Aristotle taught that both permanent and passing phenomena genuinely exist — a consistent being which underlies, and a conscious “ego” which perceives itself as the very cause of, its changing states. Reason compels us to believe that attributes such as colour, weight, and extension cannot exist of themselves, but require a substance in which they inhere, of which they are but modifications. Reasoning of the kind attempted by Taine, on this subject, is manifestly fallacious: he asserts that “the ego is only a verbal entity, a metaphysical phantom,” supporting this with the example of a board cut up into squares, triangles, and circles — as the board is only the continuous series of its successive divisions, so, he claims, the ego is only the continuous web of successive experiences (De l’Intelligence, p. 145). A single sentence is enough to expose the fallacy here: the parallel does not hold, because the board stands in the relation of a whole to its parts, whereas the ego and its states stand in the relation of a cause to its effects.

The Bergsonian thesis that only movement exists makes science itself impossible. Plato, through the mouth of Socrates in the Cratylus, has already exposed the essential fallacy in this teaching: “If Being is constantly changing, it will not be possible to say what it is; while we speak, it will already have changed and lost its first form.” Definition becomes impossible, and proof, which rests on necessary principles, likewise becomes impossible, since the very principles of Identity, Contradiction, and Causality vanish. The Bergsonian philosophy, however, does not hesitate to sacrifice these principles outright: “What is becoming,” writes M. Le Roy, “but a perpetual flight of contradictories which coalesce?” — but “becoming” is only intelligible through the being which fails to persist in it, and Bergson’s teaching thus fails in its application both to the world of matter and to the world of thought.

(A) The world of matter is a spectacle diametrically opposed to a state of perpetual flux. There exist solidity, stability, permanence; the law of inertia has become the fundamental principle of physical science. In order to change in figure, quality, or position, every mass, even every molecule, requires an external impulse or attraction — “being” is stable in itself, and changes only accidentally. The laws of the Conservation of Energy and of the Indestructibility of Matter show that beneath the flux of change there is a stable and permanent foundation.

(B) The world of sensations, feelings, volitions, and ideas likewise remains the same when its variations are only accidental and imperceptible. We are certain of the permanence of our personal identity — of the noumenon, to hypokeimenon, the substantia. M. Bergson denies the existence of substance altogether, being here in accord with the phenomenalist school of which John Stuart Mill was one of the ablest advocates. But substance is the being, or reality, which not only supports attributes but actually produces them; substance, or being, thus has a twofold function — static and dynamic — the static function consisting in being the substratum of phenomena, the dynamic in actually producing them.

V. The Evolution of Worlds

M. Bergson’s keen and subtle critical faculty has genuinely exposed the weakness of more than one form of evolutionary theory. He characterises Spencer’s evolutionism as false, “because it consists in cutting up present reality, already evolved, into little bits no less evolved, and then recomposing it with these fragments, thus positing in advance everything that is to be explained” (Creative Evolution, Introduction, p. xiv). He very justly points out that in Darwinism, evolution is explained by external and accidental causes — by mechanism — whereas the interior cause of evolution, the original vital impulse and its preferential direction, is rigorously excluded. He illustrates, with one of his splendidly cogent metaphors, the insufficiency of adaptation to environment as the directing cause of evolution: it is one thing to admit that adaptation to conditions of existence is a necessary condition of evolution — a species would perish did it not depend on such conditions — but quite another to claim that these external circumstances are the creating causes of evolution. The latter theory is that of mechanism, and it is one that Bergson’s hypothesis of an “original impetus” — meaning an internal push that has carried life, by ever more complex forms, to ever higher destinies — absolutely excludes. Yet the exact nature of this impetus remains hazy in the extreme. The truth is that adaptation explains the sinuosities of the path of evolution, but neither its general direction nor, still less, the movement itself: “it adapts itself to the accidents of the road; but the accidents of the road are not the cause of the road, nor even that which has traced the general direction of the road” (Creative Evolution, p. 108).

Neo-Darwinism, Bergson allows, is somewhat more scientific, since it appeals for its explanation of variations to differences inherent in the germ itself; but even so, he cannot admit that such differences are purely accidental and individual: nature, he observes, arrives at every moment, before our very eyes, at identical results by entirely different embryonic processes — as, for instance, in the strikingly different developmental history of the eye in vertebrates and in molluscs, which nonetheless converge upon a strikingly similar organ (Creative Evolution, p. 79). He notes, too, the various hypotheses advanced to explain the relation between the variations found in different lines of descent — the theory of Mutations, and the question of heredity generally, where the facts show that the hereditary transmission of acquired characters is the exception rather than the rule, so that Lamarckism and Neo-Lamarckism alike are no more able than any other form of evolutionism to solve the problem of how development actually took place — for instance, from the mere pigment-spot of the infusorian to the developed eye of the mollusc or the vertebrate.

M. Bergson’s splendid ability shows to advantage in his destructive criticism of these various forms of evolution; but when he proceeds to formulate his own positive view, he becomes vague and unconvincing, precisely because of his refusal to recognise the validity of the primary notions and principles of reason. “The evolutionary movement,” he writes, “proceeds like a shell, which suddenly bursts into fragments, which, being themselves destined to burst again, burst in their turn into fragments, and so on, for a time incommensurably long… it depends, we think, on two series of causes: the resistance life meets from inert matter, and the explosive force — due to an unstable balance of tendencies — which life bears within itself” (Creative Evolution, p. 103). “Bifurcations on the way have been numerous, but there have been many blind alleys besides the two or three highways; and of these highways themselves, only one — that which leads through the vertebrates up to man — has been wide enough to allow free passage to the full breath of life, without losing anything of its force, rather intensifying in proportion to its advance” (Creative Evolution, p. 27). “At a certain moment, in certain parts of space, a visible current has taken rise: this current of life, traversing the bodies it has organised one after another, passing from generation to generation, has become divided amongst species and distributed amongst individuals, without losing anything of its force, rather intensifying in proportion to its advance” (Creative Evolution, pp. 107–108).