A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in PhilosophyJames, William
Philosophy
A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy
James, William
Philosophy, Modern
That he gives us no closed-in system will of course be fatal to him in
intellectualist eyes. He only evokes and invites; but he first annuls
the intellectualist veto, so that we now join step with reality with
a philosophical conscience never quite set free before. As a french
disciple of his well expresses it: 'Bergson claims of us first of all
a certain inner catastrophe, and not every one is capable of such a
logical revolution. But those who have once found themselves flexible
enough for the execution of such a psychological change of front,
discover somehow that they can never return again to their ancient
attitude of mind. They are now Bergsonians ... and possess the
principal thoughts of the master all at once. They have understood in
the fashion in which one loves, they have caught the whole melody and
can thereafter admire at their leisure the originality, the fecundity,
and the imaginative genius with which its author develops, transposes,
and varies in a thousand ways by the orchestration of his style and
dialectic, the original theme.'[2]
This, scant as it is, is all I have to say about Bergson on this
occasion--I hope it may send some of you to his original text. I must
now turn back to the point where I found it advisable to appeal to his
ideas. You remember my own intellectualist difficulties in the last
lecture, about how a lot of separate consciousnesses can at the same
time be one collective thing. How, I asked, can one and the same
identical content of experience, of which on idealist principles the
_esse_ is to be felt, be felt so diversely if itself be the only
feeler? The usual way of escape by 'quatenus' or 'as such' won't
help us here if we are radical intellectualists, I said, for
appearance-together is as such _not_ appearance-apart, the world _quâ_
many is not the world _quâ_ one, as absolutism claims. If we hold to
Hume's maxim, which later intellectualism uses so well, that whatever
things are distinguished are as separate as if there were no manner of
connexion between them, there seemed no way out of the difficulty save
by stepping outside of experience altogether and invoking different
spiritual agents, selves or souls, to realize the diversity required.
But this rescue by 'scholastic entities' I was unwilling to accept any
more than pantheistic idealists accept it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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