This little book is due to two articles published under the same title in the "Revue des Deux Mondes", 1st and 15th February 1912. Their object was to present Mr Bergson's philosophy to the public at large, giving as short a sketch as possible, and describing, without too minute details, the general trend of his movement. These articles I have here reprinted intact. But I have added, in the form of continuous notes, some additional explanations on points which did not come within the scope of in

There is a thinker whose name is today on everybody's lips, who is deemed by acknowledged philosophers worthy of comparison with the greatest, and who, with his pen as well as his brain, has overleapt all technical obstacles, and won himself a reading both outside and inside the schools. Beyond any doubt, and by common consent, Mr Henri Bergson's work will appear to future eyes among the most characteristic, fertile, and glorious of our era. It marks a never-to-be-forgotten date in history; it o

The sciences properly so called, those that are by agreement termed positive, present themselves as so many external and circumferential points from which we view reality. They leave us on the outside of things, and confine themselves to investigating from a distance. The views they give us resemble the brief perspectives of a town which we obtain in looking at it from different angles on the surrounding hills. Less even than that: for very soon, by increasing abstraction, the coloured views giv

A broad survey of the new philosophy was bound to be somewhat rapid and summary; and now that this is completed it will doubtless not be superfluous to come back, on the same plan as before, to some more important or more difficult individual points, and to examine by themselves the most prominent centres on which we should focus the light of our attention. Not that I intend to probe in minute detail the folds and turns of a doctrine which admits of infinite development: how can I claim to exhau

The philosopher's first duty is in clear language to declare his starting-point, with what a mathematician would call the "tangent to the origin" of the path along which he is travelling, as afterwards the critic's first duty is to describe this initial attitude. I have therefore first of all to indicate the directing idea of the new philosophy. But it is not a question of extracting a quintessence, or of fencing the soul of doctrine within a few summary formulae. A system is not to be resumed i

Of what the work of return to immediacy consists, and how the intuition which it calls up reveals absolute fact, we shall see by an example, if we study more closely a capital point of Mr Bergson's philosophy, the theory of external perception. If the act of perceiving realises the lived communion of the subject and object in the image, we must admit that here we have the perfect knowledge which we wish to obtain always: we resign ourselves to conception only for want of perception, and our idea

The perception of reality does not obtain the full value of knowledge, except when once socialised, once made the common property of men, and thereby also tested and verified. There is one means only of doing that; viz. to analyse it into manageable and portable concepts. By language I mean the product of this conceptualisation. Thus language is necessary; for we must always speak, were it only to utter the impotence of words. Not less necessary is a critique of spontaneous language, of the laws

Armed with the method we have just described, Mr Bergson turned first of all toward the problem of the ego: taking up his position in the centre of mind, he has attempted to establish its independent reality by examining its profound nature. The first chapter of the "Essay on the Immediate Data" contains a decisive criticism of the conceptions which claim to introduce number and measure into the domain of the facts of consciousness. Not that it is our business to reject as false the notion of ps

After the problem of consciousness Mr Bergson was bound to approach that of evolution, for psychological liberty is only truly conceivable if it begins in some measure with the first pulsation of corporal life. "Either sensation has no raison d'etre or it is a beginning of liberty"; that is what the "Essay on the Immediate Data" (Page 25.) already told us. It was easy then to foresee the necessity of a general theoretical frame in which our duration might take a position which would render it mo

We know what importance has been attached since Kant to the problem of reason: it would seem sometimes that all future philosophy is a return to it; that it is no longer called to speak of anything else. Besides, what we understand by reason, in the broad sense, is, in the human mind, the power of light, the essential operation of which is defined as an act of directing synthesis, unifying the experience and rendering it by that very fact intelligible. Every movement of thought shows this power

As my last word and closing formula I come back to the leitmotiv of my whole study: Mr Bergson's philosophy is a philosophy of duration. Let us regard it from this point of view, as contact with creative effort, if we wish to conceive aright the original notions which it proposes to us about liberty, life, and intuition. Let us say once more that it appears as the enthronement of positive metaphysics: positive, that is to say, capable of continuous, regular, and collective progress, no longer fo