In another place Bergson says: "When a poet reads me his verses, I can
interest myself enough in him to enter into his thought, put myself
into his feelings, live over again the simple state he has broken into
phrases and words. I sympathize then with his inspiration, I follow it
with a continuous movement which is, like the inspiration itself, an
undivided act." If this sympathy could extend its object and so reflect
upon itself, it would give us the key to vital operations in the same
way as Intelligence, developed and corrected, introduces us into Matter.
Intelligence, by the intermediary of science, which is its work, tells
more and more completely the secret of physical operations; of Life it
gives and pretends only to give an expression in terms of inertia. We
should be led into the very interior of Life by Intuition, that is,
by Instinct become disinterested, conscious of itself, capable of
reflecting on its object and enlarging it indefinitely.
In proclaiming the gospel of Intuition, Bergson's main point is to show
that man is capable of an experience and a knowledge deeper than that
which the Intellect can possibly give. "At intervals a soul arises which
seems to triumph... by dint of simplicity--the soul of an artist or
a poet, which, remaining near its source, reconciles, in a harmony
appreciable by the heart, terms irreconcilable by the intelligence"
[Footnote: From the address on Ravaisson, delivered before the Academie
des Sciences morales et politiques 1904.] His point of view is here akin
to that of an earlier French thinker, Pascal, who said: "The heart hath
reasons that the reason cannot know." The Intellect is, by its nature,
the fabricator of concepts, and concepts are, in Bergson's view,
mischievous. They are static, they leave out the flux of things, they
omit too much of experience, they are framed at an expensive cost, the
expense of vital contact with Life itself. Of course he admits a certain
value in concepts, but he refuses to admit that they help us at all to
grasp reality in its flux. "Metaphysics must transcend concepts in order
to reach Intuition. Certainly concepts are necessary to it, for all the
other sciences work, as a rule, with concepts, and Metaphysics cannot
dispense with the other sciences. But it is only truly itself when it
goes beyond the concept, or at least when it frees itself from rigid and
ready-made concepts, in order to create a kind very different from
those which we habitually use; I mean supple, mobile, and almost fluid
representations, always ready to mould themselves on the fleeting forms
of Intuition." [Footnote: An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 18.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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