to scorn all those who hold to the idea of the reality of the lives of
the persons who are agents and thinkers in this personal realm, which
is for us the highest reality of the universe, as believers in the
“exclusiveness of personality,” although I would certainly agree with
him that our experience, when properly interpreted, carries us beyond
the subjectivism and the individualism of some forms of Pragmatism or
Pluralism. The reader who is anxious to know about the real value of
the Hegelianism upon which Dr. Bosanquet’s philosophy reposes should
consult the work of Croce upon the “living” and the “dead” elements
in Hegel’s System. It has recently been translated into English. Dr.
Bosanquet, like many Hegelians, seems to me to overlook almost entirely
the important elements in the philosophy of Kant--of some of which
I speak of in the next chapter as developed in the spiritualistic
philosophy of Bergson.
CHAPTER IX
PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON[386]
The pragmatist elements in the philosophy of Bergson of which
it is, perhaps, legitimate for us to speak here are (1) his
“Anti-Intellectualism,” and (2) his “Activism” or “Actionism.” The
latter culminates in his freedom-philosophy and his spiritualism. I
shall comment shortly upon these two things, and then suggest one or
two general criticisms of his philosophy as a whole.
Bergson’s anti-intellectualism rests ultimately upon his contention
that the human intellect is related in the main to the needs of action,
that the brain is an organ of action rather than an organ of thought,
that our intelligence is at home only in the realm of the physical and
the mathematical sciences,[387] that contrivance and invention and the
practical comprehension of the “material” are its proper activities,
and that for these latter purposes it splits up the world of the senses
and the understanding into a discontinuous aggregate of physical units,
which it then proceeds to reconstruct in a spatial and temporal order.
We perceive in Nature, he holds, what interests[388] us in the way of
our vital needs; our intellect is adapted, not for the understanding
or the purely rational (“abstract”) comprehension of “causality” and
the “life of things,” but for the maintenance and furtherance of our
own lives, and for the creation of the instruments and agencies (signs,
language, tools, imagined sequences and laws, essences, causes, the
“descriptions” of science, the special senses, the convolutions of the
brain, etc.) that minister to this. Science is to-day still penetrated
through and through with primitive metaphysics, with the metaphysics of
animism, with a belief in separate things like forces, atoms, elements,
or what not--indicative all of them of its attempt to “divide up” the
real that it may command it for theoretical and practical purposes. We
can see this in the “structural psychology”[389] of the day and its
analysis of our mental life into “elements,” in respect of the number
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