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

» letter, and perhaps also to the spirit, of the Critique of Pure Reason. No doubt, knowledge is presented to us in it as an ever-open roll, experience as a push of facts that is for ever going on. But, according to Kant, these facts are spread out on one plane as fast as they arise; they are external to each other and external to the mind. Of a knowledge from within, that could grasp them in their springing forth instead of taking them already sprung, that would dig beneath space and spatialized time, there is never any question. Yet it is indeed beneath this plane that our consciousness places us; there Qows true duration. In this respect, also, Kant is very near his predecessors. Between the non-temporal, and the time that is spread out in distinct moments, he admits no mean. And as there is indeed no intuition that carries us into the non- temporal, all intuition is thus found to be sensuous, by definition. But between physical existence, which is L spread out in space, and non-temporal existence, which Lean only be a conceptual and logical existence like that

of which metaphysical dogmatism speaks, is there not
room for consciousness and for life? There is, unquestion-
ably. We perceive it when we place ourselves in duration
in order to go from that duration to moments, instead of
starting from moments in order to bind them again and
to construct duration.

Yet it was to a non-temporal intiution that the immediate successors of Kant turned, in order to escape from the Kantian relativism. Certainly, the ideas of becoming, of progress, of evolution, seem to occupy a large place in their philosophy. But does duration really play a part in it? Real duration is that in which each form flows out of previous forms, while adding to them something new, and is explained by them as much as it explains them; but to deduce this form directly from one complete Being which it is supposed to manifest, is to return to Spinozism. It is, like Leibniz and Spinoza, to deny to duration all efficient action. The post-Kantian philosophy, severe as it may have been on the mechanistic theories, accepts from mechanism the idea of a science that is one and the same for all kinds of reality. And it is nearer to mechanism than it imagines ; for though, in the consideration of matter, of life and of thought, it replaces the successive degrees of complexity, that mechanism supposed by degrees of the realization of an Idea or by degrees of the objectification of a Will, it still speaks of degrees, and these degrees are those of a scale which Being traverses in a single direction. In short, it makes out the same articulations m nature that mechanism does. Of mechanism it retains the whole design; it merely gives it a different coloring. But it is the design itself, or at least one half of the design, that needs to be re-made.

If we are to do that, we must give up the method of constructim, which was that of Kant's successors. We

tr.]

THE KANTIAN C3RrnCISM

' must appeal to experience — an experience purified, or, in other words, released, where necessary, from the molds that our intellect has formed in the degree and proportion of the progress of our action on things. An experience

, of this kind is not a non-temporal experience. It only

I seeks, beyond the spatialized time in which we believe
we see continual rearrangements between the parts, that
concrete duration in which a radical recasting of the whole

, is always going on. It follows the real in all its sinuosities. It does not lead us, like the method of construction, to higher and higher generalities— piled-up stories of a mag- nificent building. But then it leaves no play between the explanations it suggests and the objects it has to explain. It is the detail of the real, and no longer only the whole in a lump, that it claims to illumine.

I That the thought of the nineteenth century called for a philosophy of this kind, rescued fronn the arbitrary, capable of coming down to the detail of particular facts, is un- questionable. Unquestionably, al30, it felt that this philosophy ought to establish itself in what we call con- I' Crete duration. The advent of the moral sciences, the progress of psychology, the growing importance of embry- ology among the biological sciences — all this was bound to suggest the idea of a reality which endures inwardly, which is duration itself. So, when a philosopher arose who announced a doctrine of evolution, in which the progress of matter toward perceptibility would be traced together with the advance of the mind toward rationality, in which the comphcation of correspondences between the external and the internal would be followed step by step, in which change would become the very substance of things — to I him all eyes were turned. The powerful attraction that Iflpencerian evolutionism has exercised on contemporary

thought is due to that very cause. However far Spencer
may seem to be from Kant, however ignorant, indeed, he
may have been of Kantianism, he felt, nevertheless, at
his first contact with the biological sciences, the direction
in which philosophy could continue to advance without
laying itself open to the Kantian criticism.

But he had no sooner started to follow the path than he
turned off short. He had promised to retrace a genesis,
and, lo! he was doing something entirely different. His
doctrine bore indeed the name of evolutionism; it claimed
to remount and redescend the course of the universal
becoming; but, in fact, it dealt neither with becoming
nor with evolution.

We need not enter here into a profound examination of this philosophy. Let us saymerely that(A«ws«aZdeutceq/"rt« Spencerian method consists in rectmstructing evolution v?ith fragments of the evolved. If I paste a picture on a card and then cut up the card into bits, I can reproduce the picture by rightly grouping again the small pieces. And a child who working thus with the pieces of a puzzle-picture, and putting together unformed fragments of the picture finally obtains a pretty colored design, no doubt imagines that he has produced design and color. Yet the act of drawing and painting has nothing to do with that of putting to- gether the fragments of a picture already drawn and al- ready painted. So, by combining together the most simple results of evolution, you may imitate well or ill the most complex effects; but of neither the simple nor the complex will you have retraced the genesis, and the addition of evolved to evolved will bear no resemblance whatever to the movement of evolution.

Such, however, ia Spencer's illusion. He takes reahty
in its present form; he breaks it to pieces, he scatters
it in fragments which he throws to the winds; then he

The Evolutionism of Spencer 365

"integrates" these fragments and "dissipates their move-
ment." Having imitated the Whole by a work of mosaic,
be imagines he has retraced the design of it, and made the
genesis.

Is it matter that is in question? The diffused elements which he integrates into visible and tangible bodies have all the air of being the very particles of the simple bodies, which he first supposes disseminated throughout space. They are, at any rate, "material points," and consequently unvarying points, veritable httle solids: as if solidity, K being what is nearest and handiest to us, could be found H at the very origin of materiality I The more physics pro- H gresses, the more it shows the impossibility of representing H- the properties of ether or of electricity^the probable base V of all bodies— on the model of the properties of the matter which we perceive. But philosophy goes back further even than the ether, a mere schematic figure of the re- lations between phenomena apprehended by our senses. It knows indeed that what is visible and tangible in things represents our possible action on them. It is not by divid- ing the evoh'ed that we shall reach the principle of that which evolves. It is not by recomposing the evolved with itself that we shall reproduce the evolution of which

I it is the term. Is it the question of mtnd? By compounding the reflex with the reflex, Spencer thinks he generates instinct and rational volition one after the other. He fails to see that the specialized reflex, being a terminal point of evo- lution just as much as perfect will, cannot be supposed at the start. That the first of the two terms should have reached its final form before the other is probable enough; but both the one and the other are deposits of the evolution movement, and the evolution movement itself can no more be expressed as a function solely of the first than solely

366 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap.

of the second. We must begin by mixing the reflex and the voluntary. We must then go in quest of the fluid reality which has been precipitated in this twofold form, and which probably shares in both without being either. At the lowest degree of the animal scale, in living beings that are but an undifferentiated protoplasmic mass, the reaction to stimulus does not yet call into play one definite mechanism, as in the reflex; it has not yet choice among several definite mechanisms, as in the voluntary act; it is, then, neither vohmtary nor reflex, though it heralds both. We experience in ourselves something of this true original activity when we perform semi-voluntary and semi-auto- matic movements to escape a pressing danger. And yet this is but a very imperfect imitation of the primitive chai^ acter, for we are concerned here with a mixture of two activities already formed, already localized in a brain and in a spinal cord, whereas the original activity was a simple thing, which became diversified through the veiy construction of mechanisms like those of the spinal cord and brain. But to all this Spencer shuts his eyes, because it is of the essence of his method to recompose the con- solidated with the consolidated, instead of going bock to the gradual process of consolidation, which is evolution itself.

Is it, finally, the question of the correspondence between mind and matter? Spencer is right in defining the in- tellect by this correspondence. He is right in rt-garding it as the end of an evolution. But when he comes to re- trace this evolution, again he integrates the evolved with the evolved — failing to see that he is thus taking useless trouble, and that in positing the slightest fragment of the actually evolved he posits the whole — so that it is vain for him, then, to pretend to make the genesis of it.

For, according to him, the phenomena that succeed

The Evolutionism of Spencer

rIT.] each other in nature project into the human mind images which represent them. To the relations between phenom- ena, therefore, correspond symmetrLcaily relations between the ideas. And the most general laws of nature, in which the relations between phenomena are condensed, are thus found to have engendered the directing principles of thought, into which the relations between ideas have been integrated.

» Nature, therefore, is reflected in mind. The intimate Htructure of our thought corresponds, piece by piece, to the very skeleton of things — I admit it willingly; but, in order that the human mind may be able to represent re- lations between phenomena, there must first be phenomena, »that is to say, distinct facts, cut out in the continuity of becoming. And once we posit this particular mode of cutting up such as we perceive it to-day, we posit also the intellect such as it is to-day, for it is by relation to it, and to it alone, that reality is cut up in this mamier. Is it probable that mammals and insects notice the same aspects of nature, trace in it the same divisions, articulate the whole in the same way? And yet the insect, so far as inteUigent,

I has aheady something of our intellect. Each being cuts up the material world according to the lines that its action must follow: it is these lines of possible action that, by intercrossing, mark out the net of experience of which each mesh is a fact. No doubt, a town is composed ex- clusively of houses, and the streets of the town are only the intervals between the houses: so, we may say that nature contains only facts, and that, the facts once posited, the relations are simply the hnes running between the facta. But, in a town, it is the gradual portioning of the ground into lots that has determined at once the place of the houses, their general shape, and the direction of the streets: to this portioning we must go back if we wish to understand the particular mode of subdivision that causes each house

368 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap.