intellect is essentially the instrument of action. For the purpose of action it is necessary to specify and fixate some present aspect of the environment. The object of action must be distinguished and held by the attention. Through the repetition of such attitudes the intellect elaborates a scheme or diagram in which the several terms of analysis are correlated. They remain distinct and external, but are woven by relations into a system, which is like its component terms in being stereotyped and fixed. The pattern of all such systems is geometry, the most perfect expression of the analytical method. The sign of the intellect's handiwork is spacial "juxtaposition" and arrangement, the static coördination of discriminated elements. In vain, then, does the intellect seek to correct itself for the further it proceeds the more thoroughly does it reduce reality to this form. - And it is this form itself, and not any specific or incomplete phase of it, that is foreign to the native, aboriginal quality of reality. The latter abides, not in fixity, but in fluidity; not in sharpness of outline, but in adumbration; not in external juxtaposition, but in "interpenetration;" not in discreteness, but in continuity; not in space, but in time. The helplessness of the intellect to escape its own inveterate habits appears most strikingly in its treatment of time. For it spacializes even this, conceiving it as a linear series of instants, whereas real time is an "enduring" (durée. réelle), a continuous and cumulative history, a "growing old." And this real time we cannot think; we must "live it, because life transcends intellect." 1 A radical anti-intellectualism may serve as the ground of an attack upon science, as is illustrated by the views of the French pragmatist LeRoy, and the Italian pragmatist Papini. "Science consists only of conventions, and to this circumstance solely does it owe its apparent certitude; the facts of science and, a fortiori, its laws are the artificial work 1 Bergson's Creative Evolution, trans. by A. Mitchell, pp. xiv, 46. Cf. Ch. I, passim. The Failure of Method. Concept as Function and as Content of the scientist; science therefore can teach us nothing of the truth; it can serve only as a rule of action." But there is a sequel. For with LeRoy and Papini, as with Bergson, the failure of science is compensated by an immediate sense of the power of life. Science manufactures concepts, which misrepresent reality; but the life which science serves, the creative agency which forges and uses the instruments, is known to itself by instinct and faith. § 6. This wholesale indictment of the intellectual method rests, I am convinced, on a misunderstanding of that method. It will be worth our while to seek more light on the matter. In the first place, as has been already suggested,2 neither Bergthe Intellectual son nor James is clear as to whether a concept is to be distinguished by its function or by its content. Is 'concept' the same as 'idea,' or is it a special class of ideas? This question is of crucial importance. For if 'concept' is only another name for 'idea,' and if an idea is essentially a function or office, and not a content, then the failure of concepts must mean simply the failure of the ideating or mediating operation of thought. But this operation, according to the pragmatist account, is essentially a mode of access to immediacy. The more it is perfected the more unerringly it leads us into the presence of its object. To prove that intellect is essentially instrumental, and then to attack it in behalf of the very end for which it is useful, would be a strange procedure. In fact the anti-intellectualist perpetually employs intellect in this sense, even with reference to 'reality.' He uses words and figures of speech which he hopes will conduct the reader or hearer to the immediate experience in which 'reality' is revealed. A pragmatist can have no ground for maintaining that there is any reality which cannot be represented, for he means by repre 1 Quoted from an exposition and criticism of LeRoy by Poincaré, in The Value of Science (trans. by Halsted), p. 112. See also above, pp. 93 ff. For Papini, cf. below, p. 264. See above, p. 227. sentation only a pointing or guiding, for which anything may serve. Whatever is experienced or felt can be represented in this sense, because it is necessary only that it should have a locus or context to which one may be directed. We may suppose, then, that what the anti-intellectualist attacks is not the idea as such, but a certain class of ideas; such, for example, as the logical and mathematical ideas, 'term,' 'line,' etc. But' term' and 'line' are ideas only when used in a certain way. In themselves they are simply characteristic bits of experience. They may be immediately known or presented, as well as used in discursive thought. Even 'abstractions' may be apprehended by a direct act of discrimination, and it is only in such direct apprehension that their specific character is revealed. It cannot be claimed that such bits of experience as 'term' and 'line' are peculiarly ill-fitted to serve as ideas, because, as we have seen, the content of an idea is irrelevant. Any bit of experience will do, as is best illustrated by the case of words. In short the fault, if there be any, cannot lie in the intellectual use of these elements; it must lie, not in their employment as ideas, but in their inherent character. The anti-intellectualist polemic must mean that reality is not such as 'term' and 'line'; or that these characters are somehow contradicted and overruled by the dominant characters of reality, such as continuity and life. The Con § 7. But this contention rests, I think, on another misunderstanding. There is an inveterate liability to confuse a symbolized relation with a relation of symbols. fusion between It is commonly supposed that when a complex the Relations is represented by a formula, the elements of the of Symbols complex must have the same relation as that which subsists between the parts of the formula; whereas, as a matter of fact, the formula as a whole represents or describes a complex other than itself. If I describe a as "to the right of b," does any difficulty arise because in my formula a is to the left of b? If I speak of a as greater than b, am I to assume that because my and the Relations Symbolized symbols are outside one another that a and b must be outside one another? Such a supposition would imply a most naïve acceptance of that very "copy theory" of knowledge which pragmatism has so severely condemned. And yet such a supposition seems everywhere to underly the anti-intellectualist's polemic. The intellect is described as "substituting for the interpenetration of the real terms the juxtaposition of their symbols"; as though analysis discovered terms, and then conferred relations of its own. Whereas, as James himself has been at much pains to point out, terms and relations have the same status. Terms are found in relation, and may be thus described without any more artificiality, without any more imposing of the forms of the mind on its subject matter, than is involved in the bare mention of a single term.1 It is this misunderstanding which underlies the antiintellectualist's contention that continuity cannot be described. "For," says James, "you cannot make continuous being out of discontinuities, and your concepts are discontinuous. The stages into which you analyze a change are states, the change itself goes on between them. It lies along their intervals, inhabits what your definition fails to gather up, and thus eludes conceptual explanation altogether." I can understand this argument only proIvided the author assumes that the intellectualist tries to explain continuity by adding concept to concept. The successive and discontinuous acts of conceiving are then held to be contrary to the continuity of the subject matter. But the assumption is incorrect. A line, for example, may be conceived as a class of positions possessing interrelations of direction and distance. This conception may be represented by the formula, a. b. . . c. . . n. ... One may then add the statement that between any two posi1 Bergson: Time and Free Will, trans. by F. L. Pogson, of Les données immédiates de la conscience, p. 134; James: A Pluralistic Universe, Appendix A. 2 James: op. cit., p. 236. tions such as a and c, there is a third position b, which is after a and before c; thus expressly denying that there is the same hiatus between the positions of the line as between the symbols of the representation. The use of the symbols, a, c, etc., indicates the manifoldness and serial order of the positions, and the statement defines their compactness.' With such a formula and such a statement, one may mean continuity, despite the fact that the symbols and words are discrete. The word 'blue may mean blue, although the word is not blue. Similarly, continuity may be an arrangement meant by a discontinuous arrangement of words and symbols. The Suppo- § 8. In the third place, the anti-intellectualist polemic is based upon the misconception that whenever concepts are used they must be used "privatively," in James's sense. In other words, it is taken for granted that all intellectualism must be "vicious," or blind to its own abstractness. James, as we have seen, distinguishes this view as one variety of intellectualism. To conceive a thing as a, and then assume that it is only a, is to be viciously" intellectual. 2 But it is evident that provided one recognizes that to be a does not prevent a thing's being also b, c, etc., one may be innocently or even beneficently intellectual. And this possibility, Bergson, at any rate, appears to overlook. Thus he constantly argues as though the use of the relational logic involved the reduction of everything to it. The analytical method does imply that reality consists of terms and relations. It does not, however, imply that this bare termand-relation character is all there is to it. Thus, blue is different from red, which is a case of t1 (R). But in the concrete case, the bare logical term-character t is united first with one quality and then with another; while R is not merely relation in general but the specific relation of 1 Cf. Russell: Principles of Mathematics, p. 296. See above, pp. 228-229. |