Creative Evolution — Henri Bergson (trans. Arthur Mitchell, 1911)

If the mathematical order were a positive thing, if there were, immanent in matter, laws comparable to those of our codes, the success of our science would have in it something of the miraculous. Wliat chances should we have indeed of finding the standard of nature and of isolating exactly, in order to determine their reciprocal relations, the very variables which nature has chosen? But the success of a science of mathematical form would be no less incomprehensible, if matter did not already possess everything necessary to adapt itself to our formulae. One hypothesis only, therefore, remains plausible, namely, that the mathematical order is nothing positive, that it is the form toward which a certain interruption tends of itself, and that materiality consists precisely in an inter- ruption of this kind. We shall understand then why our science is contingent, relative to the variables it has chosen, relative to the order in which it has successively put the problems, and why nevertheless it succeeds. It might have been, as a whole, altogether different, and yet have succeeded. This is so, just because there is no definite system of mathematical laws, at the base of nature, and because mathematics in general represents simply the aide to which matter inclines. Put one of those httle cork dolla with leaden feet in any posture, lay it on its back, turn it up on its head, throw it into the air: it will always

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stand itself up again, automatically. So likewise with
matter: we can take it by any end and handle it in any
way, it will alwaj-s fall back into some one of our mathe-
matical formulae, because it is weighted with geometry.

But the philosopher will perhaps refuse to found a theory of knowledge on such considerations. They will be repugnant to him, because the mathematical order, being order, will appear to him to contain something positive. It is in vain that we assert that this order produces itself automatically by the interruption of the inverse order, that it is this very interruption. The idea persists, none the less, that there mighl be no order at all, and that the mathematical order of things, being a con- quest over disorder, possesses a positive reality. In examining this point, we shall sec what a prominent part the idea of disorder plays in problems relative to the theory of knowledge. It does not appear explicitly, and that is why it escapes our attention. It is, however, with the criticism of this idea that a theory of knowledge ought to begin, for if the great problem is to know why and how reality submits itself to an order, it is because the absence of every kind of order appears possible or con- ceivable. It is this absence of order that realists and idealists alike believe they are thinking of — the realist when he speaks of the regularity that "objective" laws actually impose on a virtual disorder of nature, the idealist when he supposes a "sensuous manifold" which is co- ordinated (and consequently itself without order) under the organizing influence of our understanding. The idea of disorder, in the sense of absence of order, is then what must be analyzed first. Philosophy borrows it from daily Ufe. And it is unquestionable that, when ordinarily we speak of disorder, we are thinking of something. But of what?

The Idea of Disorder

^m It will be seen in the next chapter how hard it is to ^V determine the content of a negative idea, and what illu- H sions one ia liable to, what hopeless difficulties philosophy V falls into, for not having undertaken this task. Diffi- culties and illusions are generally due to this, that we- accept as final a manner of expression essentially pro- visional. They are due to our bringing into the domain of speculation a procedure made for practice. If I choose a volume in my hbrary at random, I may put it back on the shelf after glancing at it and say, "This is not verse."

I Is this what I have really seen in turning over the leavea of the book? Obviously not. I have not seen, I never shall see, an absence of verse. I have seen prose. But as it is poetry I want, I express what I find as a function of what I am looking for, and instead of saying, "This is prose," I say, "This is not verse." In the same way, if the fancy takes me to read prose, and I happen on a volume of verse, I shall say, "This is not prose," thus ex- pressing the data of my perception, which shows me verse, in the language of my expectation and attention, which are fixed on the idea of prose and will hear of nothing else.

I Now, if Mons. Jourdain heard me, he would infer, no doubt, from my two exclamations that prose and poetry are two forms of language reserved for books, and that these learned forms have come and overlaid a language which was neither prose nor verse. Speaking of this thing which is neither verse nor prose, he would suppose, more- over, that he was thinking of it: it would be only a pseudo- idea, however. Let us go further still: the pseudo- idea would create a pseudo-problem, if M. Jourdain were to ask his professor of philosophy how the prose form and the poetry form have been superadded to that which possessed neither the one nor the other, and if he wished the professor to construct a theory of the imposition of

these two forms upon this formless matter. His question would be absurd, and the absurdity would lie in this, that he was hypostasizing as the substratum of prose and poetry the simultaneous negation of both, forgetting that the negation of the one consists in the affirmation of the other.

Now, suppose that there are two species of order, and that these two orders are two contraries within one and the same genus. Suppose also that the idea of disorder arises in our mind whenever, seeking one of the two kinds of order, we find the other. The idea of disorder would then have a clear meaning in the current practice of life: it would objectify, for the convenience of language, the disappointment of a mind that finds before it an order different from what it wants, an order with which it is not concerned at the moment, and which, in this sense, does not exist for it. But the idea would not admit a theoreti- cal use. So if we claim, notwithstanding, to introduce it into philosophy, we shall inevitably lose sight of ila true meaning. It denotes the absence of a certain order, but to the profit of another (with which we are not con- cerned); only, as it applies to each of the two in turn, and as it even goes and comes continually between the two, we take it on the way, or rather on the wing, like a shuttlecock between two battledores, and treat it as if it represented, not the absence of the one or other order as the case may be, but the absence of both together — a thing that is neither perceived nor conceived, a simple verbal entity. So there arises the problem how order is imposed on disorder, form on matter. In analyzing the idea of disorder thus subtihzed, we shall see that it represents nothing at all, and at the same time the problems that have been raised around it will vanish.

It is true that we must begin by distinguishing, and even by opposing one to the other, two kinds of order

ra.i THE roEA OF DISORDER

which we generally confuse. As this confusion has created the principal diiticulties of the problem of knowledge, it will DOt be useless to dwell once more on the marks by which the two orders are distinguished.

In a general way, reahty is ordered exactly to the degree in which it satisfies our thought. Order is there- ' fore a certain agreement between subject and object. It is the mind finding itself again tn things. But the mind, we said, can go in two opposite ways. Sometimes it follows its natural direction: there is then progress in the form of tension, continuous creation, free activity. Sometimes it inverts it, and this inversion, pushed to the end, leads to extension, to the necessary reciprocal determination of elements externalized each by relation to the others, in short, to geometrical mechanism. Now, whether experience seems to us to adopt the first direction or whether it is drawn in the direction of the second, in both cases we say there is order, for in the two processes the mind finds itself again. The confusion between them is therefore natural. To escape it, different names would have to be given to the two kinds of order, and that is not easy, because of the variety and variability of the forms they take. The order of the second kind may be defined as geometry, which is its extreme hmit; more generally, it is that kind of order that is concerned whenever a relation of necessary determination is found between causes and effects. It evokes ideas of inertia, of passivity, of automa- tism. As to the first kind of order, it oscillates no doubt around finality; and yet we cannot define it as finality, for it is sometimes above, sometimes below. In its highest forms, it is more than finality, for of a free action or a work of art we may say that they show a perfect order, and yet they can only be expressed in terms of ideas approximately, and after the event. Life in its entu-ety, regarded as a

creative evolution, is something analogous; it transcenda finality, if we understand by finality the realization of an idea conceived or conceivable in advance. The category of finality is therefore too narrow for life in its entirety. It is, on the other hand, often too wide for a particular manifestation of life taken separately. Be that as it may, it is with the idlal that we have here to do, and the whole present study strives to prove that the vital is in the direction of the voluntary. We may say then that this first kind of order is that of the vital or of the wilied, in opposition to the second, which is that of the inert and the auioTnaCic. Common sense instinctively distinguishes between the two kinds of order, at least in the extreme cases; instinctively, also, it brings them together. We say of astronomical phenomena that they manifest an admirable order, meaning by this that they can be foreseen mathematically. And we find an order no less admirable in a s>inphony of Beethoven, which is genius, originality, and therefore unforeseeability itself.

But it ia exceptional for order of the first kind to take 50 distinct a form. Ordinarily, it presents features that we have every interest in confusing with those of the opposite order. It is quite certain, for instance, that if wc could view the evolution of fife in its entirety, the spontaneity of its movement and the unforeseeability of its procedures would thrust themselves on our at- tention. • But what we meet in our daily experience ia a certain determinate living being, certain special rnani- festatioDS of hfe, which repeat, almost, forms and facts already known; indeed, the similarity of structure that we find everywhere between what generates and what is generated — a similarity that enables us to include any number of living individuals in the same group — is to our

eyes the very type of the generic: the inorganic genera