The Hour of God

Notes on Bergson

I

Bergson—"philosophy of change".

"It symbolises the protest of the modern impatient man of action against the great Platonic tradition in philosophy of reason or intellect and static reality."

"It substitutes force for inertia, life for death and liberty for fatalism." "Physics and logic are appropriate to the study of the inverse movement, matter, which is life or élan vital pulverised and its method is intellect and logic."

"Philosophy is the study of becoming in general and its method is intuition."

"Scrap the Platonic tradition and follow Plotinus. 'Ask me not but understand in silence as I (Nature) am silent and am not wont to speak'."

***

"A philosophy of evolution itself evolving", "positive and empirical", "moulded on experience, determined to base itself on solid grounds, a doctrine in no sense systematic, distinguishes different problems to examine them one by one ... enemy of conventionality ... antidote to the dogmatic finality of the traditional philosopher."

A short-cut through "the turning of the mind homeward, the coincidence of the human consciousness with the living principle."

"The destiny of man will be realised because it is the nature of the élan vital to triumph over matter and environment."

II

The office of intellect is not to fathom reality, but to fabricate and preside over action... intellect cannot comprehend life

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and reality. Intellect (logic) goes round the object, intuition enters into the object; one stops at the [absolute], the other enters into the absolute.

A philosophy of change? But what is change? In ordinary parlance change means passage from one condition to another and that would seem to imply passage from one status to another status. The shoot changes into a tree, passes from the status of shoot to the status of tree and there it stops; man passes from the status of young man to the status of old man and the only farther change possible to him is death or dissolution of his status. So it would seem that change is not something isolated which is the sole original and eternal reality, but it is something dependent on status, and if status were non-existent, change also could not exist. For we have to ask, when you speak of change as alone real, change of what, from what, to what? Without this "what" change could not be.

Change is evidently the change of some form or state of existence from one condition to another condition. Otherwise, what is it? Is it itself fundamental and absolute, not explicable or definable by any other term than itself, perceivable and intelligible as the sole reality by a naked intuition which feels and cries out "Change, reality" and then falls dumb and can say no more?

An object changes, a person changes, a condition of things changes. But can it be said that the object is no real object but only a continuity of change, or that a person is not a person but a continuity of change, a condition of things is not a condition and there are no things but there is only a continuity of change? This seems to be an illustration of the besetting sin of metaphysics—to exalt a word into a reality or an idea into a reality without fathoming what is the reality which it tries to indicate. For to label with a word or a name is not to fathom and to define, to erect a concept is not to fathom. Fathom for us then what is change before you ask us to accept it as the only reality. You may say, "I have fathomed it, I have seen it to be the one constant real, but do not ask me to define what it is; listen rather in silence to the silence of Nature and you too will fathom." But what if so listening, I fathom other realities than change—let us say, immutable being as well as mutable force, status as well as

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change? To prevent that you plunge into speech and not silence, into dialectics of the intellect instead of the undebatable certitudes of intuition, and so abandon your own methodology. If intuition alone is to be used, then you must give a place to my intuition as well as yours, and all, however contradictory in appearance, must stand until a greater intuition comes in to put all in their place, reconcile, include in a consistent whole.

In the world of our experience contradictories often complement and are necessary to each other's existence. Change is possible only if there is a status from which to change; but status again exists only as a step that pauses, a step in the continuous passage of change or a step on which change pauses before it passes into another step in its creative passage. And behind this relation is a duality of eternal status and eternal motion and behind this duality is something that is neither status nor change but contains both as its aspects—and That is likely to be the true Reality.

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