science is the symbolic knowledge, reached by pre-existing concepts
which proceed from the fixed to the moving. A truly intuitive philosophy
would bring science and metaphysics together. Modern science dates from
the day when mobility was set up as an independent reality and studied
as such by Galileo. But men of science have mainly fixed their attention
on the concepts, the residual products of Intuition, the symbols which
have lent a symbolic character to every kind of science. Metaphysicians,
too, have done the same thing. Hence it was easy for Kant to show that
our science is wholly relative and our metaphysics entirely artificial.
For Kant, science was a universal mathematic and metaphysics a
practically unaltered Platonism. The synthetic Intuition was hidden
by the analysis to which it had given rise. For Kant, Intuition was
infra-intellectual, but for Bergson it is supra-intellectual. Kant's
great error was in concluding that it is necessary for us, in order
to attain Intuition, to leave the domain of the senses and of
consciousness. This was because of his views of Time and Change. If Time
and Change really were what he took them to be, then Metaphysics and
Intuition alike are impossible. For Bergson, however, Time and Change
lead up to Intuition; indeed it is by Intuition that we come to see all
things, as he expresses it, sub specie durationis. This is the primary
vision which an intuitive philosophy supplies. Such a philosophy will
not be merely a unification of the sciences.
In an article contributed to the Revue de metaphysique et de morale
in January of 1908, under the title L'Evolution de l'intelligence
geometrique, we find Bergson remarking: "Nowhere have I claimed that we
should replace intelligence by something else, or prefer instinct to it.
I have tried to show merely that when we leave the region of physical
and mathematical objects for the realm of life and consciousness, we
have to depend on a certain sense of living, which has its origin in
the same vital impulse that is the basis of instinct, although instinct,
strictly speaking, is something quite different."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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