As for the freedom-philosophy with which Bergson’s Actionism is to be
associated, this is worked out by him, firstly, in the most perfect
correspondence with what he believes to be the facts of life and
mind; and, secondly, in terms of that anti-rationalism (or hostility
to the merely scientific intellect) which is his working theory of
knowledge. His views upon this subject have also been depreciated and
misunderstood by some of his opponents who attack what they call his
“intuitional” treatment of the freedom-question--his insistence upon
the direct intuition of our life that we have when we act consciously,
and when we are “most ourselves”--when we act out “freely” our own
nature. To him the primary fact for any human being is the life-impulse
that is both instinctive and reflective, that is certainly far more
of a fundamental reality than any of those entities or concepts
(“cells,” “atoms,” “forces,” “laws,” or what not) which, with Kant, he
clearly sees to be the creation of the intellect for its descriptive
and practical purposes. This life is “free” in the sense that we are
not “determined” by any or all of those forces and laws to which our
intellect subjects everything else, but which it cannot apply to the
life that is more than mere matter, that is a real becoming and a real
process, a real creation and development.
The “spiritualism,” again, of his interpretation of this life and
activity rests, to begin with, upon his opinion that the very inception
of the activity, and the adjustment, and the selection in which the
simplest life-effort, and the simplest perception of a living being
consist, indicate the presence and the operation of a controlling
agency,[400] or mind, or principle of spiritual “choice” that is not,
and cannot be, explained on the principles of a mechanical science
or philosophy. This principle is, in a word, the life-force, or the
creative activity, the _élan vital_ of which we read so much in his
books, that has “seized upon matter,” vitalizing it into force and
energy, into the “play” upon each other of all the varied activities
and grades and forms of the will to live, and into the various forms of
socialized and co-operative living on the part of animals and men. We
shall immediately remark upon the matter of the apparent limitations
of this spiritual philosophy of life, or reality, that is here but
indicated or stated.
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