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gives no grounds for his assertion that the connection of all the laws into one statement which shall be itself a law is not possible.

Yet these laws can be connected into one statement which is not a law, but another kind of proposition. And then Mr. Campbell15 goes on to make a very curious justification for the search for this kind of proposition. The student of pure science "is forced to a new development of science beyond the formulation of laws, because the laws, even when he has got them, do not give him the intellectual satisfaction he seeks; he cannot accept them willingly as the end of his labors. It is quite impossible to say why he is not content with laws, just as it is impossible in the last resort to give any reason for an artistic preference, and fortunately there is no need to make the attempt. For my reader is supposed to be the plain man, and nobody feels more strongly than he the unsatisfying character of laws as an ultimate result of science; I can appeal to his own experience. If this little treatise were brought to a conclusion now, and the reader offered only the laws of electrostatics as the whole pronouncement of science on a great field of investigation, I think he would feel not only that the results were extraordinarily meagre, but that they were of the wrong kind. His natural instinct, unless it had been perverted by the mistaken admonitions of some people who ought to know better, would make him inquire 'why'? 'These laws are all very well,' he would say, 'but I have been expecting to be told why, for instance, charged bodies are able to attract uncharged, or only bodies which are conductors can be charged by induction.' That request voices just the need which leads men of science to their greatest discoveries." It is curious so to appeal to the instinct of the "plain man" when, later on,16 that very sort of man is rather disparaged: "Those results [of science] are attained by flights of imagination of which the plain man is quite incapable."

"The fresh step, then," says Mr. Campbell," "which we are going to take consists in the substitution for the laws which we have discovered of some other proposition or propositions which shall not be laws. And these new propositions have to fulfil two purposes: first, they have to be such that the laws can be deduced from them, and such that they sum up the laws as the laws sum up the individual observations; second, they have to be such that they give the intellectual satisfaction which cannot be obtained from the laws; for this latter purpose they will have to contain ideas which are more familiar 18 Ibid., p. 28. 17 Ibid., p. 20.

15

Ibid., pp 18-19.

16

than those of the laws." Such propositions are what Mr. Campbell18 calls "theories," and he says that "it should be clear that it [the 'theory'] does represent a new development, and that it is perfectly possible to state the laws of the phenomena without any reference whatsoever to it. The help which it affords is doubtless due to the fact that it reduces the quite unfamiliar actions observed with the charged glass and silk to the quite familiar action of the transference of a substance from one body to another."

Mr. Campbell1 is careful to point out the risk that there is in using "theories”: "A theory suggests a great deal more than it actually asserts." He emphasizes 20 that "science in its highest form is not opposed to art, it is a form of art"; and he is scornful21 about the study of science for utilitarian reasons. Of course this scorn is right; but it seems rather ungrateful not to remember that science was first developed from utilitarian reasons.

PHILIP E. B. JOURDAIN.

CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND.

AN ANSWER TO MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL'S ARTICLE ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON.1

Mr. Russell concludes his criticisms of Bergson's philosophy with the accusation that he confuses subject and object in his theory of perception. "As soon as this identification is rejected," we are told, "his whole system collapses: first his theories of space and time, then his belief in real contingency, then his condemnation of intellect, then his account of the relations of mind and matter, and last of all his whole view that the universe contains no things, but only actions, movements, changes, from nothing to nothing."

The theory that in pure intuition the subject which knows becomes its object, is certainly of very fundamental importance for Bergson. In justice, however, it must be remarked that this identification is not the result of a confusion; neither does it apply to thinking by concepts. Therefore Mr. Russell caricatures this theory when he says, "If subject and object are one....my friend Jones, though he believes himself to be in South America and to exist on his own account, is really in my head and exists in virtue of my thinking about him; St. Mark's Campanile, in spite of its great size 19 Ibid., pp. 25-26. "Ibid., p.18.

"Ibid., p. 23.

"Ibid., p. 28.

1See The Monist, July, 1912, Vol. XXII, pp. 321-347.

and the fact that it ceased to exist ten years ago, still exists, and is to be found complete inside me."

Thought about, knowledge by, concepts, involves the distinction between subject and object. It is only in pure intuition that Bergson ever claims that this distinction is transcended. It may fairly be questioned whether such a claim can be justified, but in any case criticisms levelled against Bergson's theory and perception as though it applied to conceptual thought will always be wide of the mark.

There are parts of Bergson's philosophy which are based upon this identification of subject and object, but there is much that is quite independent of it. Setting it aside for the present, therefore, let us consider one by one the important points in Mr. Russell's criticism.

First concerning space.

Mr. Russell's criticisms seem to rest here on a misunderstanding as to what Bergson means by space. The word is perhaps misleading. I believe the truth is that Bergson applies the term "spatial" to any series of distinct units in relations. Mr. Russell himself quotes a passage from Creative Evolution in which "spatiality" is described as "nothing but separateness." If this is Bergson's meaning, it follows by definition:

a. that greater and less imply space;

b. that every plurality of separate units involves space;
c. that all abstract ideas and all logic are spatial.

We may therefore pass over Mr. Russell's objections to these statements.

Again, if "spatiality" means forming a series of distinct units, this explains why Bergson calls thought "spatial."

The intellect operates with ideas and concepts and relations, all of which are distinct units, and it is for this reason that Bergson condemns it. Mr. Russell is therefore wrong in saying that this condemnation "depends upon supposed habit of picturing things side by side in space." The same answer applies to his suggestions that Bergson "mistakes a personal idiosyncracy (i. e., that of visualizing) for a necessity of thought."

In connection with space, Mr. Russell raises the question of continuity in change. Whenever Bergson attacks the mathematical explanation offered for change on the grounds of consistency, Mr. Russell can at once crush him.

Bergson's real objection to this explanation of change, however, is not concerned with its logical consistency. His real charge against

the so-called explanation of change by means of a mathematical continuum is that this explanation leaves out the essential things which is the process of change.

The fact is that Bergson starts from the intuition of a kind of change whose essence is indivisible continuity. A so-called continuum made up of distinct units in relations, even though they be infinite in number, is, for him, discontinuous.

He believes that change is a process. We may call this process an indivisible continuity, but this really only comes to the same thing as saying that a continuum composed of units in relations does not truly describe it. Now mathematicians deny that there is any such thing as a process of change. They say that an infinite series of different states in relation to an infinite number of different moments is all we mean by change. Clearly, any argument directed against Bergson which starts from this assumption begs the question.

Bergson claims that change is not made up of any number of unchanging states, and that therefore the explanation of it in terms. of a series of states leaves out the essential thing, the process; change consists simply in a process of changing.

So long as Mr. Russell assumes that we do not mean anything more by change than can be explained by a series of points, he and Bergson will always be arguing about different things. Mr. Russell seems to be partly aware of this when he says, that "whether (Bergson's theory of change) is possible is a question which demands a discussion of his view of duration." A better way of putting it would be to say that Bergson's theories both of change and of duration depend upon the assumption that change is a process and not a series of points. It is because Mr. Russell never seriously tackles this assumption that his criticism of Bergson does not seem to go to the root of the matter.

Before we pass on to his criticisms of duration, therefore, I propose to try and explain what is meant by saying that change is a process and not a series. If this could be made clear the task of answering Mr. Russell would be easier. Bergson himself, however, must not be held responsible for the following attempts at explanation-they merely stand for what I have understood him to mean and he may well disclaim my interpretations as quite false.

It would have been simpler to divide the problem into two separate questions: (a) What is meant by a process of change? (b) Why should we suppose that the mathematical description of change is unsatisfactory? Unfortunately this division cannot be

made, because any attempt to define what is meant by a process of change will be circular. Change in process is, in fact, indefinable.

It is claimed that if we try to describe change we have always to regard it as change completed and not in process of changing. But change completed is something unchanging. We can therefore only describe what is unchanging, never change itself. We must leave our first question, then, and pass to the second.

Why should we suppose that the mathematical description of change is unsatisfactory?

We will grant at once that this description is self-consistent. The objection to it therefore must be that it does not describe objective reality as we know it. Change is described by mathematics as a series of states in relations. This description is objected to on the grounds that real change is no such thing.

Let us consider carefully what we know of change. In perception the data are already divided by our senses and our power of attending to one thing at a time. Out of this material the human intelligence has constructed a vast scheme of things and events, filling up the gaps (inevitable to the intermittent attentions of a finite consciousness) by the help of inference. This inference is verified by subsequent perceptions.

What reason have we then for supposing that the data of our perceptions are not parts of objective reality, and that this constructed scheme of things and events is not a true account of objective reality itself?

It cannot be denied that such a world as is given by this scheme would at least be possible, and equivalent for all practical purposes to the reality that we know. Moreover this is just the kind of world that the data of perception would naturally lead us to expect. It is claimed, however, that our knowledge of change does not come from perception and that we know objective reality to be a process of change by immediate acquaintance more direct even than perception. If we compare the description of change offered by mathematics with this direct knowledge of it, we find that the description does not describe change at all: it leaves out the essential thing, the process.

It seems then, that we have reached a dead-lock. Even if we assume that we have this direct knowledge of the process of change, we cannot describe it any further. The difficulty is to see how thought and language can apply to this direct knowledge (even sup

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