INDEX
PROLOGUE

CHAPTER I
APPEARANCE AND FORMATION OF INTELLIGENCE IN THE
EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS

1. Life as a creative and divergent impulse
2. Psychology of the intelligence
3. Intelligence and instinct
4. From psychology to metaphysics: Genesis of intelligence
5. Specifications of the intelligence

CHAPTER II
THE COGNITIVE DIMENSION OF THE INTELLIGENCE

1. Presenting the problem
2. The "a priori" in Bergson
3. Perception as a physiological process
4. Perception as a psychic act
5. Genesis of the concept: General ideas
6. Intelligence and intuition
7. Science and philosophy
8. Scope and limits of knowledge

CHAPTER III
THE DIALECTIC OF SPIRIT

1. Meaning of the critique of conceptual thought
2. The need for the dialectic

CHAPTER IV
PROLEGOMENA TO A FUTURE METAPHYSICS

1. The natural metaphysics of the intelligence: The idea of nothing
2. In search of time
3. Myth of the unity of knowledge

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PROLOGUE
     My first encounter with the thought of Henri Bergson dates to my years as
a student when by pure chance I read this sentence: "There are things that
intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find.
These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them." From
then on those words resonated in my memory like the last note of a beautiful
melody, which deserved to be heard whole and thoroughly. Perhaps this
evocative echo was what inspired the present work.

     My constant preoccupation with a growing clarification of how thought
adjusting to understand reality--of which it forms a part and that seems to
overflow it everywhere--contributed to developing the idea. If already from
its beginnings philosophy found itself involved with this problem, interest in
it grows to the extent that in the history of philosophy it loses the security
of its conviction of internal concord between thought and reality.
 
     In this context, the suggestive thought of H. Bergson offered itself,
even more interesting and real, as much for his style of research, the
problems he poses, the solutions toward which he aims, as for the anxieties he
provokes. And, particularly his theory of knowledge that is, as E. Nicol
underlines, a prodigious Faustian adventure in the march towards life and the
concrete.

     Bergson wants to show why that adventure ignited through philosophy,
instead of approximating the goal, deviates ever more from it to the degree it
thinks and believes it is nearing it. And it is because, trying to reach the
objective, it did not know how to select an adequate means, nor measure its
own forces, before starting the march. From there to the constant denunciation
Bergson makes of the fundamental deficiency of the intelligence for providing
adequate knowledge of the whole domain of the real.

     I shall analyze the Bergsonian discourse to discover whether that
deficiency is radical and insuperable and in what measure one must criticize
conceptual thought.

     Despite the apparent simplicity of the goal, its achievement appears
arduous and painful. Someone said they knew why Bergson would have many
admirers and not one single disciple. This fact can be attributed to the ease
with which his thought vanishes. Because, when one thinks they understand what
with his lovely formulas he wished to tell us, they experience the sensation
that, in trying to translate it into a more conceptual language, it avoids and
rebels against the intent of rigorous exposition.

     Keeping this and the difficulty of explicating some of his original
intuitions in mind, I propose to follow his theory of the intelligence
throughout his works. No one better than he, with his goings and comings upon
the same theme, could help us to understand what he intended to bring to the
philosophy. By being an interesting aspect of Bergson's thought, if scarcely
treated directly by posterity, centering more in his philosophy of life, in
the theory of intuition or in the idea of duration.

     My proposition, I said, is to analyze the Bergsonian theory of the
intelligence. Since intelligence emerges at a determinate moment in the
evolutionary trajectory, one would have to review that trajectory to find its
origin and, at the same time, clarify its form and its function in the
evolutionary process. This will be the objective in the entire first chapter.
In the second I shall examine how that intelligence, which emerges out of
evolution with a specific goal can adequately comprehend a dimension of the
real. In the third chapter I shall analyze the problem of the concept and in
the fourth the natural metaphysics of the intelligence. So as to end with some
conclusions that will recapture the essential of this work.

     And it remains, as Bergson would say, to be put into action. But before, I
wish to express my profound gratitude to my colleagues at the University of
Seville, who with their support made possible the realization and publication
of this work.

CHAPTER I
APPEARANCE AND FORMATION OF INTELLIGENCE
IN THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS

     1. LIFE AS A CREATIVE AND DIVERGENT IMPULSE

     Bergson describes himself as "the author of Creative Evolution";
which already indicates to us the importance that the idea of life presents in
his philosophy. P. Trotignon has no doubt in considering it the center of
Bergsonian thought because, according to him, it is at once a nerve in the
critique of metaphysics and a fundamental element of a new conception of
philosophy.

     Certainly, it is a fundamental notion in his thought. Nevertheless, in
principle, the confessions of Bergson himself seem to distance us from this
interpretation. He insists in placing as the starting point for his
reflections the problem of time. From there he will proceed to what is
considered the central notion of his thought: the intuition of
duration, as Bergson himself says.

     In fact, P. Trotignon's interpretation is consistent with the meaning of
Bergsonism. Is duration not a fundamental attribute of life and the very
expression of vital spirit?

     We know that Bergson begins the philosophical journey with the reading of
Spencer's works and, although later it would become apparent that Spencerian
evolutionism should be renovated, even his own principles, yet there remains
with him enjoyment of the concrete and commitment to abide by experiment.
Loyal, then, to his proposal to start with facts, he will begin the study of
life with the reality he has nearest: one's own existence.

     What does it mean to exist, it is asked; and the answer is going to be
found in one's own interior. "For a conscious being, to exist consists in
changing, maturing change, the maturation creating itself indefinitely" (EC).

     This affirmation demonstrates meditating upon the psychological reality
of oneself; given that it is the existence with which we are most secure and
that which, indubitably, we know best. The I--equal to consciousness--is above
all memory, which embeds the past in the present; or better, and in Bergsonian
terms, embeds the present in the past. It is the guarantee of continuous
change and of duration itself.

     But the I that is perceived enduring is not a spectator who is limited to
contemplating their interior flux. We are "artisans" of our own life; each
moment is something new that we add to the preceding and which we ourselves
create in the liberty of our action. We are not dealing with an "added"
additive, but instead with, to express it somehow, encompassment; that is, new
and simultaneously carrying all the preceding in itself.

     These conclusions concerning the nature of consciousness like those that
begin chapter I of Creative Evolution which are taken as the results of
his previous works (Essay on the immediate data of consciousness and
Matter and Memory) would be of little use to Bergson if they were only
prerogatives of the individual I. What happens with existence in general?

     Bergson applies the characteristics of the I--consciousness--to life in
general: continuity of change, conservation of the past in the present, true
duration; we have here the attributes that seem to endow the living being with
consciousness. Yet consciousness is also invention, creation, selection. Can
we go further and say that life is a incessant conscious activity, invention,
creation?

     In order to approach the notion of life, Bergson turns to science. And
among the different theories given there to explain it, understanding it as an
evolutionary process, he will find a transformist hypothesis sufficiently
valid. Once accepted this hypothesis holds that one can forget theorizing
about life in general and remain in the analysis of facts.

     Those show, says Bergson:

     "At a certain moment a current of life was engendered in different
     places, that transmitting itself from generation to generation has kept
     diversifying into individuals, species...in different evolutionary lines
     without losing any of its strength" (EC).

     Life presents itself, then, like a current "that passes from one germ to
another through the intermediary of the developed organism." It concerns a
current or impulse that expands upon advancing. The continuity of the progress
is essential, although the forms that life takes can be contingent.

     The philosopher is centered, now, on progressive continuity, to see if
there is a kinship between organic life and consciousness. If the history of
evolution is viewed retrospectively, life is seen as a past that pushes
against the present, causing new forms to emerge, which are not observable in
an instant, but over a trajectory. The forms can have their explanatory
circumstance, but it is inseparable from the form itself. In any case, the
circumstance can explain the form once produced, not predict it. This does
not mean that the novelty must be radical, absolute, only that it cannot be
predicted.

     Life appears, also, as an internal directional impulse. And this
direction must be understood as a progressive development, not as a direction
towards a goal. Life has meaning, but Bergson denies that that meaning is
given like a previously traced plan to which life must adjust.

     Bergson reviews the history of evolutionary progress with the intent of
obtaining an immediate vision of life. Here like in the Essay he examines
the data of consciousness to intuit what it might be.

     With that end, he analyzes the facts of organization, the divergent lines
of evolution, the relation between the energy of the living and of the inert,
so as to approximate through a long "turn" to the idea from which he
commenced: "that of the original impulse of life" (EC). Yet it is still an idea
and Bergson will have to keep observing facts with the objective of finding the
nature of life and the characteristics of the impulse that causes it to
manifest.

     Looking to the past, life appears as a sort of germ that encloses in an
embryonic state all the forms that it will sow throughout its evolutionary
history. Creation is not sudden. Novelty makes its appearance after a period
of slow, invisible maturation. It owes its existence, precisely, to time:
"Wherever something lives, there is, open  somewhere, some register where time
can insert itself" (EC). Real time, that of consciousness, is what interests
Bergson; and this is what is conceived as duration, creation, vehicle of
novelty.

     The influence of Schopenhauer in Bergson's thought has been discussed.
Our author cites him rarely. One of those times is indeed to criticize his
notion of time. Schopenhauer leaves time, when what must be done is to locate
oneself in it, in its duration to attain the reality in mobility which is its
essence. Schopenhauer claims to be an heir of Kant: "It is he who brought
seriousness to philosophy," he says, and "I follow him" which applies also to
the problem of time. Bergson however does not accept the Kantian conception. 
Time considered as a condition for the possibility of knowledge is a time that
has speculative interest, but it does not accord with vital time, that which
preoccupied Bergson.

     To eliminate the phantasm of empty time, as the place where phenomena
occur and which Bergson also called homogeneous time, and which results from a
projection onto space of a qualitative multiplicity, the philosopher introduces
the term "dureé." It is vital time, that of consciousness.

     Until now Bergson has limited himself to doing a phenomenology of
consciousness. Could life also be interpreted as duration? If this were so,
life would be similar to consciousness with both of a psychological essence.

     The philosopher insists on the difficulty of intuiting duration even in
one's own interiority. This difficulty is accentuated if one tries to capture
life in general as duration, since this capture presupposes transcending one's
own consciousness. Nevertheless in Creative Evolution Bergson affirms
that the universe endures and evolves progressively.

     To understand that this affirmation is not something rained from the sky,
we must turn to Matter and Memory. There, in speaking of the relation
between the body and the spirit, the universe is conceived as a set of images
in reciprocal action. We experience the interaction through the body and
become conscious of it through perception. Through that our "superficial I"
enters into contact with the exterior world.

     Bergson presents the I--consciousness--as a unity of different levels of
concentration and profundity. If the superficial I, which is no more than the
lowest grade of those levels of concentration, can intuit the universe as
duration, so that this I does not form "more than one single and identical
object with the profound I," we can conclude that consciousness also apprehends
exterior reality as being of the same nature as itself, namely, "duration."
From that moment, the I now is not the immediate datum of the Essay,
but a "metaphysical testament," as Barthélemy-Madaule notes, and Bergson
himself confirms in Ecrits et paroles.

     In Creative Evolution and in "La pensée et le mouvant" he
affirms, with more precision, the possibility of capturing the universe
enduring, and one only has to look without a secondary intention of practical
utilization.

     All this leads us to affirm that the extension of the capture of the
interior life as duration to that of the universe with the same prerogative,
is not an abusive generalization, but is imposed by experience.

     Bergson distinguishes two types of experience: one that captures reality
in the form of facts that are repeated and which are spread out, juxtaposable
among themselves; another which is presented in the form of reciprocal
penetration, pure duration and, being such is opposed to law and measure. In
one and the other case experience signifies "consciousness," and this can
penetrate to the interior of life and of reality in general. That this is so
Bergson has no doubt, because, putting it in his own words:

     "But no! The matter and the life that fill the world are also in us; the
     forces that act upon all things we feel in ourselves, so whatever may be
     the inner essence of what it is and what it does, we are in it" (PM).

     Underline here the participation of everything in something common whose
inner nature is not even explicit, yet which suggests a force. Not only do we
want to intuit life as duration, but also the cause, so to speak, of that
manifestation.

     The transformist hypothesis, which Bergson adopts to explain the fact of
evolution, permits him to affirm that the force of impulse is unique and is
transmitted from species to species. If it is one, it is and acts in ourselves.
We can grasp life, because we carry the original totality and--thanks
to it--consciousness, co-extensive with life, can return to its source and
glimpse it, if only for a few instants.

     The assimilation of living existence to conscious existence is, as Husson
notes, the innovation in Creative Evolution. Its entire demonstration
starts from there. From this perspective, one can understand the claim that
life is a reality of a psychological order and that this will be its best
explanation. In identifying life with consciousness, his explanation of
creation as the action of an impulse has nothing strange about it. A distinct
problem is whether his reflections succeed in really approximating the
creative act for us.

     We can understand the creative act as the vital impulse realizing itself.
Bergson recognizes that the denomination "impulse" in reference to the creative
force is an image that can give us an approximate idea, but only that.
Altogether, to express it metaphorically, it is evidence that we tend to give a
content to an image, to personalize it. Thus G. Salet says that this impulse is
a sort of God, with limited horizons, specialized in the fabrication of living
beings, yet incapable of controlling them. And that the image of an "impulse"
invites us to give a content to the creative act, not that this means it was
Bergson's intention. It resembles any creative act, free, made explicit in
concrete actions. The action is the actualization of this impulse which,
however, is not anything on the margin of the action. We can interpret that
impulse as the requirement of creation held by life which causes it to manifest
and act.

     D. Martens suggests how the central problem in Creative Evolution
is the origin of materiality beginning with  the impulse, not the primary
creation. Certainly, Bergson does not put the arising of the "elan vital" as a
problem; it is a datum and what he tries to do is explain how the remaining
living beings comprised of matter and spirit emerge from it.

     But this datum can be approximated by a reflection on the empirical facts
of evolution. A reflection that prepares and sustains the metaphysical
induction of life as an impulse associated with consciousness. And indeed in
all the manifestations of life, whatever be their degree of evolution, Bergson
discovers an innate wisdom that leads the living being to utilize the energy
surrounding it to its own advantage. It is energy withdrawn from the material
environment.

     Since its origins, he sees that life presents itself as the continuity of
a single and identical impulse that has separated into divergent lines of
evolution. Which is equivalent to affirming the community of origin between
the vegetables, the animals and humans. The three forms of life were not
deposited following a linear evolutionary trajectory, but instead "vegetative
life, instinctual life and the life of reason, are three divergent directions
of an activity which split to progress" (EC).

     Why the excision? The evolutionary movement would not present any
difficulty if life were to offer a single trajectory: but "we have to deal
with a grenade that has exploded into fragments which in turn have fragmented
into grenades destined to explode and so on successively" (EC). It appears
that this divergence is essential to the impulse and cannot do less than
manifest it. From such traces, which are those that are the nearest, we may
start the ascent towards the origin.

     Bergson justifies the bifurcation for a double motive: because the
grenade upon exploding encounters the obstacles placed by matter; and above
all, because life is a force of impulse. The two causes are determinant of the
process.

     Withdrawing into our interior, we "feel" that life is the tendency,
impulse, requirement to create. Absolute creation? It seems tied to matter
which has as function to brake and impede the advance. Yet life can also be
empowered by matter, tending to place in it the greatest possible degrees of
freedom and liberty. Destined to develop by means of matter and in combat
with it, the success attained by life is always situated beneath effort.
Success is brief, because the impulse is limited and given "already" once and
for all.

     We have alluded several times to the purpose of Bergsonian research: to
obtain an intuition of the essence of life. Or, as Husson indicates, to deepen
the meaning of the latter, in seeing the extent of the limitation of the
spirit by matter.

     Already in the Prologue to Matter and Memory. Bergson confesses to
dualism and that his intention is to "mitigate" Cartesian dualism. There he
expounds how body and soul interrelate in perception - which we shall study
below. In Creative Evolution. the perspective widens and the body-spirit
union reveals a cosmic fact. Here it is discovered that life, from plant to
man, presents itself as an impulse which is or resembles consciousness,
although such a conscience only fully appears in mankind, while for the rest
of beings it dwells in a latent mode. Yet, with science asleep or vigilant,
the organism "arranges it" so as to extract from the material medium
surrounding it that which it needs for its development.

     Very well then, this dependency upon matter "brakes," we shall say with
Bergson, the evolutionary process and obliges life to adapt, at least in part,
to the structure of the material. We shall not pause now on this aspect. We
only want to indicate the solidarity of life with matter, to enable
understanding the Bergsonian philosophy of the intelligence, the goal of our
work. Indeed the impulse is limited. How can that require continual creation?
Will we have to understand the limit as an incapacity to bend totally to
matter?

     The impulse we can understand as the multiplicity of virtualities that
life carries and, in this sense, is already given virtually, yet is limited
because virtualities are not, but can become. They would have to
be limited also, though Bergson does not say so, by being forces. An infinite
force lacks meaning.

     Bergson knows that to call the creative force an "impulse" is a metaphor
and by it he does not manage to explain to us what of ours that impulse is.
Nevertheless, he believes that the image of "explosion" better expresses,
though it may be only satisfactorily, the immanent production of the vital,
furthermore, the productive force coincides with the creative act; and Bergson
can forget other types of causality that give the reason behind production.

     V. Jankélévitch, in trying to qualify this Bergsonian notion,
says it is nothing, only a dynamic scheme designating a certain accretion to
evolution, always harmonious, never predestined.

     Certainly, Bergson presents life as a force that advances; and there is
direction to the advance, but it is verifiable only after the fact. The
harmony, the unity, must be sought in the origin, not in the terminus of the
evolution, since it proceeds by "dissociation" and "doubling back" (EC).
Bergson also employs these terms to characterize the mode of operating in
what he calls "organic causality" which is the normal operating mode of life
in general.

     In fact life is a reality of a psychological order, one and multiple,
like the person, an immensity of virtualities, an interpretation of a thousand
tendencies, which will not become a thousand until there is specialization. He
compares it to a poetic sentiment  that is explicated in different verses, of
which the most perfect and completed is that which culminates in mankind.

     It is well to ask whether the Bergsonian interpretation of life is mere
psychology, phenomenology of consciousness, or if it transcends those
investigations. From the moment when Bergson declares "that we do not endure
alone," he has crossed the penumbra of psychology. But he will take pains to
demonstrate to us that that affirmation is not gratuitous, but an object of
experience, although it deals with an inner experience not controllable by
science. It is a metaphysical experience, as Barthélemy-Madaule, P.
Trotignon, L. Husson, and Bergson himself (ME) observe.

     Existence itself, which is incessant creation, reveals that, for this
power to be understood, it should be redirected to its source, that is life,
the immanent principle of the universe in which everything participates. It is
a principle of a spiritual order. Upon the experience of this spirit, which is
reached in the apprehension of life as duration that is its very reality,
Bergson wishes to found his philosophy. It is what E. Gilson calls the
absolute, the total experience of created being.

     This interpretation of life and the need to return to the beginning from
which our existence emerges, to capture it in its original purity, will mark
all of Bergson's philosophy. It allows him to conceive a new idea of
metaphysics or philosophy of life, at the same time he firmly rejects
"traditional" metaphysics and the instruments it has used to elaborate such a
metaphysics.

     One could question the interpretation of life as creative evolution, but
Bergson holds to the scientific hypothesis that seems most acceptable to him:
transformism; and he would be willing to revise his entire work if the facts
show him that that hypothesis is not viable. It is enough to view Creative
Evolution in passing, and above all Chapter I, to take account of the
frequency with which Bergson uses the analogy. In the Bergsonian universe
everything passes "as itself." Bergson does not dogmatize and leaves the field
open for subsequent research.

     We have summarized a great deal and, accordingly, diminished the richness
of the Bergsonian exposition. Yet our intent is not to contemplate his
philosophy of life, but instead to express some hints that make his theory of
the intelligence more comprehensible, since that emerges from life itself and
toward a determinate end.

     In fact, life, its essence, eludes us. Would it not be because it
overflows our cognitive structures? Bergson is going to indicate to us the road
towards the solution, but before contemplating it, we should attend to the
process of origin and formation of those structures, which permit or
obstruct the advance.

     2. PSYCHOLOGY OF THE INTELLIGENCE

     In the introduction to Creative Evolution. Bergson explains the
general plan of the work, and the goal of resolving the great problems
presented by philosophy.

     The analysis of "mechanist" and "finalist" explications of life reveal
that they are insufficient for  what they attempt. After confirmation of this,
one deduces that it is necessary to unite a theory of knowledge to the theory
of life. Led by the hand of facts, evolution will give insight into the genesis
of intelligence and matter, sink to the very root of nature and of spirit, and
permit pursuing reality itself in its generation and growth.

     The project could not be more ambitious. And Bergson, prudently, limits
his plan warning that he does not pretend to resolve all problems once and for
all, but simply to define the method and to glimpse the possibility of
applying it concerning several essential points. One such problem is the
origin of the intelligence. To clarify it, we must review the history of
evolution and proceed with caution, if we wish to reach a good outcome and
avoid the traps that our understanding fabricates, when it tries to attempt
the same.

     Observing facts, the author of creative evolution comes to the conclusion
that all evolution in the animal kingdom has been realized along two paths:
one that leads to instinct and the other which leads to intelligence. "Both
potentialities become dissociated solely due to the fact of evolution" (EC).

     Consider, then, intelligence as coming naturally out of the evolutionary
process; something that the world deposits in its mundane trajectory. The
family line will be conserved through instinct, but this will differ from that
according to its development, though without losing the original parentage.

     To what is this awakening, apparently spontaneous, of the intelligence,
due? Life unfolds through the medium of matter by acting upon it. For Bergson,
the impulsive force is limited and cannot totally dominate matter; it has to
choose its means of acting upon it. This selection is what determines the
splitting.

     Nature established two modes of action: either immediately creating an
organized instrument, or mediated through an organism that itself fabricates
the instrument, while it "works" the material. Immediate action characterizes
instinct and the mediated, intelligence. The division is made, then, between
instinct and intelligence.

       Before directly confronting the problem of the origin and psychology of
the intelligence, it is well to pause at the notion of consciousness in
general, since this is the horizon where intelligence appears. Bergson will
not give us a definition of consciousness for he considers it constantly
present in our experience. He will limit its characterization to its most
prominent features.

     In the Essay he does a sort of phenomenology of consciousness
itself, reflecting on the data that appears in it. There he describes as "pure
consciousness" or immediate perception, although vague, one's own interiority;
as reflexive or "mediated consciousness" that which emerges from the attempt
to analyze the data of the first, and as "attentive consciousness" that which
represents the effort which one can and should make to obtain the data in its
original purity and originality that mediated consciousness yields when
altered by analytic reflection.

     In Matter and Memory he switches perspective and performs a
functional analysis of this notion. It appears as an instrument of action.
"Possible action" that is reflected in the the perception which we have of
our body as an organ of activity; yet where there is an explicit representation
immanent that illuminates the action and the decision. His words depict it as:

     "Whatever may be the idea that we have of consciousness itself, such as
     it would appear if it were exercised freely, it cannot be disputed that
     in a being, who performs corporeal functions, consciousness will have
     above all the function of presiding over the action and clarifying a
     choice" (MM).

     In Creative Evolution he follows the same thread as in Matter
and Memory. Yet what matters now is the relation between the structures of
the living being in general and the role that is played in adaptation to the
surroundings where she lives. Consciousness becomes co-extensive with psychic
activity. At a conference titled Consciousness and Life, Bergson focuses
upon the problem from the perspective of Creative Evolution and reviews
what he said there. Consciousness is above all memory, but also anticipation
of the future, prevision, and everything with the prospect of a selection.
This aspect of choice is that which will occupy us now, since it will provoke
the split in the heart of consciousness.

     Bergson starts with consciousness being co-extensive with life. It
settles in the living material in a vague manner. Evolution is progress that
is externalized in action, creation. Nature can orient the progress in the
sense of the movement or the action or arrange them so as to obtain from them
all that is needed. If the second possibility is chosen, we have a secure,
tranquil existence; yet soon it remains stalled, asleep. Whereas, if the
direction of action is selected, consciousness progresses in different degrees
of intensity and profundity, because not all activity is equally conscious.

     Furthermore action can develop in two ways: automatic or deliberate. We
could understand life as action, an activity that is pursued indefinitely,
while no difficulty is placed in its way. At the moment when one occurs it is
as if life returns to itself, centering on the search for a mode of surmounting
the obstacle.

     In doubt, perplexity investigates a method of emerging whole. This
search and election of solutions, Bergson will denominate "consciousness."
Such consciousness is not a sudden apparition; it was there, waiting for the
sting of necessity to stimulate it and enable it to go into action. "It is,
then, the obstacle producing a vacuum, setting up an uncorking, which will
leave consciousness free" (EC).

     Bergson clarifies this point in reference to our psychological activity.
Ordinarily we proceed in an automatic manner, that is to say: between the
representation of the act and its execution there is nothing; "the action
covers the representation"; but, if something unforeseen emerges, the action
is paralyzed and the automatism is broken.

     Doubt, indecision, seeking, now enter upon the scene. They solicit the
participation of consciousness, which projects its light on the multiple
possible actions and "it measures the distance between the action and the
representation that causes it." Consciousness does not owe its birth to the
difficulty, but was there expectant and hidden beneath the action. Bergson
puts it like this:

     "The obstacle has created nothing positive, has simply created a
     vacuum... This inadequacy of the act to the representation is precisely
     that which we here call consciousness" (EC).

     This subtle analysis permits Bergson to affirm that instinct is oriented
towards the unconscious, while intelligence is oriented toward consciousness.
Yet consciousness emerges precisely when instinct is shown incapable of
pursuing an action: "It is the deficit in instinct that will convert into
consciousness"; and further on adds: "Deficit is the normal state of the
intelligence" (EC). It is born of contradiction, exists for it and from it
seems to receive all its dynamism.

     To affirm that instinct is oriented towards the unconscious does not mean
that it is unconscious, we repeat, unless consciousness is annulled by the
action. The contrary would contradict those claims that make consciousness
co-extensive with life in general. With this stipulation Bergson is going to
characterize instinct as unconscious in contraposition to the activity of the
intelligence, which he qualifies as conscious, without forgetting their common
origin.

     Contemplation of evolutionary history presents to consciousness
intelligence as a form of psychic activity, which is individualized upon
opening to the life of the world. Bergson, through a double theoretical and
critical analysis, wishes to show how the intelligence is formed and, at the
same time, argue that, it being the highest faculty which evolution has
created, its mundane trajectory makes it incapable of comprehending life.
This is the directing idea of Creative Evolution.

     It would be interesting to investigate how the philosopher arrived at
that conviction, already prepared for in his previous works and in which other
thinkers of the era participate. (We think of W. James, a friend of Bergson
with whom he maintained a correspondence, or of Nietzsche, who he read
assiduously). But our  intention is not to analyze the sources of Bergsonian
thought, but instead his doctrine of intelligence from the perspective of
knowledge.

     For that we shall follow Bergson's plan. Chapter II undertakes a
psychological study and III tries to expound the metaphysical genesis.
Enterprises linked among themselves, since the analytic description of
psychological activity traces the lines of metaphysical genesis. This is
indicated in expressions such as the following: "it is necessary here to enter
into some provisional details concerning the mechanism of the intelligence";
and a little previously: "put into action, the inner form of the intelligence
is deduced" (EC). That is, that the analysis will already be an explication of
the genesis.

     The enterprise could not be more ambitious: to attempt a genesis of the
intelligence which gives an account of its form. Yet Bergson is prudent with
regard to method; because, for from orienting himself in the sense of a
transcendental deduction that establishes the categories of the understanding,
or researching how the intelligence can be born in a consciousness united
within a vital impulse, he situates himself in the perspective of action. He
supposes intelligence given and asks towards what objects action took it and
what habits of thought developed the activity which it performs.

     For the moment, say, the problem that concerns us is of a psychological
     order. We ask what is the real part of the world to which our
     intelligence is especially adapted. To answer this question it is not
     necessary to opt for a philosophical system. It is enough to locate
     oneself from the viewpoint of common sense" (EC).

     Which is to say, before explaining a beginning, he will describe a
development; that will suffice to situate the intelligence in the history of
life.

     He is not even going to analyze any type of activity, except that
specific to human action upon matter: skilled activity. Indeed, this might
make us think that the proposal of the author of Creative Evolution
joins that of the author of the Communist manifesto or the pragmatism
of James. Bergson looks for what is specific to human activity, not a
derivation of the intelligence starting with practical activity. In other
words, he seeks the essential and constant characteristics that the
intelligence presents from the start and which we can find in ourselves
through reflection upon this activity.

     That is why Bergson aims directly at the objects of action, with the goal
of finding, behind the activity, the form of the intelligence. Thus, in the
light of a determinate action, oriented toward a definite object and modeled
after that object, Bergson undertakes to explain the "face" that mankind's
thought acquires.

     However unexpected it may seem for an evolutionist investigation, Bergson
wants to put in relief how the intelligence being given, it received from its
object a determinate form. That is, he wants to note how an internal
determination results from an external determination, which is equivalent to
admitting routine and constancy in the domain of spirit. We will see how.
Bergson opens his theory of the intelligence in the following way:

     "Doubtless there is intelligence wherever there is inference; yet
     inference, which consists of an inflection of past experience in the
     meaning of present experience, is already a beginning of invention. The
     invention is made complete when it materializes in a fabricated object"
     (EC).

     More than fabrication itself, Bergson wants to underline the inventive or
creative aspect of human activity that causes life to progress. Man is "Homo
faber," lately, but not to be limited to the prosaic use of the object, as in
his own words:

     "Let us say that the intelligence is modeled on matter and that it looks
     first to fabrication. Yet, is fabrication for fabrication or does it not,
     involuntarily, pursue something else? To fabricate consists in informing
     the material, modeling it, converting it into an instrument to be
     dominated. And it is this dominion that benefits humanity still more than
     the result of invention itself" (EC).

     From this there also results a conclusion important for the psychology of
the intelligence. In receives its form through fabrication, but such a form
could not result only from an imprint left by the object on the subject. It is
more the consequence of an activity that associates both.

     We would say with Bergson that the intelligence was awakened in
consciousness through a certain desire to act upon the matter. The form of the
intelligence proceeds from the object; but, as we shall see in regard to the
theory of knowledge, the intelligence is thought of the object. If the object
informs the spirit it is because the former was apprehended by the spirit
itself. We should not forget this point in understanding the true meaning of
the Bergsonian theory of the intelligence.

     Bergson is going to deduce the form of the intelligence from two pillars:
the activity of the subject and the nature of the object. We gather some of
the formulas with which the philosopher condenses the result of his analysis
of intelligent activity.

     "Intelligence does not clearly present itself except as discontinuous...
     immobile...and is characterized by the infinite power of deconstructing
     according to no matter what law and recomposing in no matter what system"
     (EC).

     Formulas that recall those of the Essays and Matter and
Memory. in which the understanding encounters nothing in its dominion
other than through stable things. But in Creative Evolution Bergson
underlines that characteristic, above all in the text titled "The natural
function of the intelligence," giving it greater precision and clarity.

     Intelligence looks to action; and since action require an object endowed
with a certain stability, it causes the intelligence to focus, preferentially,
on the stable or arranges to perceive the matter as a set of solids "since the
intelligence, such as it comes from the hands of nature, has for its principal
object unorganized solids" (EC).

     If to these formulas we append another given by Bergson to explain the
idea of "Homo faber" and which reads:

     "The intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original march, is
     the faculty of fabricating artificial objects, in particular useful
     utilities and of varying them indefinitely in the fabrication" (EC).

     We may conclude that the intelligence is the "faculty" of retaining the
stable and of manipulating it.

     To adequately comprehend what is said here it must be subjected to
analysis of representation and to his theory of the concept, which we shall
see in the next chapter. Here we mention that the form of the intelligence,
that allows representing the object beneath the aspects of solid and stable,
is a product of the thinking activity and of the object: It is a certain a
priori, yet drawn from experience.

     The tendency of the intelligence to retain what is stable is not
arbitrary on its part, nor is it something imposed from outside the object,
but obeys a vital impulse that is manifested in consciousness and which
results from the need for life to find benefit from matter in order to
advance. Only that impulse is capable of creating a form of thought contrary
to the profound nature of consciousness understood as duration.

     Yet before occupying ourselves directly with the comparative study of
instinct and intelligence, we are going to underline another characteristic of
the intelligence, its desire for universal knowledge, which Bergson analyzes
through the study of instinct as another result of comparison with that:

     "From the day when the intelligence, reflecting on its march, perceives
     itself as the creator of ideas, as the faculty of representation in
     general, there is no object without direct relation with practical
     activity that  it would exclude from the inclusive idea. Here is why we
     said there are things only the intelligence can seek. Only it, in effect,
     is affected by the theory. And the theory wanted to embrace everything"
     (EC).

     The desire for universal knowledge appears as a result of the apperception
of the internal power of intelligence itself to form ideas. From that moment
on it wants to represent everything to itself in the form of an idea.

     Bergson understands that the birth of reflection presupposes progress in
technical intelligence towards the liberation of the individual.

     "An intelligent being," he says, "has that within to transcend itself,
     however, will transcend less that it wants, less than it imagines" (EC).

     In a confused passage he will expound on why an intelligence that aspires
to know everything is, nevertheless, condemned to failure. For that language
presents itself as the pinprick which awakens reflection. Yet precisely this
deed, with what it has of the positive, will accentuate the incapacity of the
intelligence to comprehend itself. And, to apprehend life in its durational
being. We shall see how Bergson views the function of language:

     "We may presume that, without language, intelligence would have been
     pushed towards the material objects that it had an interest in
     considering... Language has contributed a great deal to liberate it. The
     word, made to go from one thing to another is, in effect, essentially,
     movable and free. It could pass, then, not only from one perceived thing
     to another perceived thing, but also from the perceived thing to the
     memory of that thing; from the precise memory to a more fleeting image;
     from a fleeting image, but nevertheless still represented, to the
     representation of the act for which it is represented, that is to say,
     the idea. Thus the eyes of the intelligence will, which looked to the
     outside, will open to an entire interior world, the spectacle of its own
     operations" (EC).

     Reflective intelligence is the product of a psychological evolution, that
begins with consciousness of objects and becomes consciousness of itself with
the help of language and of memory. That is, consciousness of oneself is a
virtuality that evolution will deploy, not a primary datum. Therefore the
orientation of consciousness toward matter and towards fabrication is stronger
than the orientation to itself. So then, reflection presupposes autonomy with
regard to practical activity and likewise is the source of disinterested
thought.

     But reflection emerges on the thread of language, and intelligence will
imitate the mechanism proper to it. The essence of the intelligent sign, the
word, is mobility, that is, the capacity of the sign to represent different,
although similar, objects beneath the same name. Thus the word travels from
one thing to another. It is "displaceable" and "free." The intelligence,
imitating that mobility, will also go from one perceived thing to another and,
assisted by memory, will move from perception to the memory of the image
obtained in the perception, until finally grasping the mechanism of its own
activity. At the moment when this occurs the intelligence is enabled to form
ideas at the edge of the concrete perception. Here we only wish to note this
capacity.

     We have, then, an intelligence able to speculate, that will not be
content with exercising its activity on matter, but will try to embrace
everything, also including life and thought. And, with what means? Here is how
Bergson replies:

     "Originally, it is adapted to the form of brute matter...thus the
     intelligence, especially when it operates upon matter, follows the habits
     it has established in that operation... It is made for that sort of work.
     It alone is fully satisfying. It is what is meant by saying that only
     that arrives at clarity and distinctness" (EC).

     Evolutionary history shows that intelligence presupposes progress in the
lines of making and of knowing; it is the history of an effort to liberate
itself from the conditions of matter and at the same time surpass its own
limits. But it is the history of a failure.

     Bergson should explain why a faculty, naturally inclined to speculate
about all aspects of reality, nevertheless, and despite having emerged from
life, itself being spirit and life too, should manifest constant impotence in
every domain. The birth of reflection provides the key to the explanation,
from the moment in which consciousness breaks the link that had it tied to the
body and for that reason it can contemplate matter; then it become a
consciousness distinct from its representations and invents language to
communicate with other intelligences. Thus it can settle upon words, unite
with the representation that the word carries within itself and, consequently,
return to the source of the representation, to itself.

     The progress towards reflection is natural; it was enough to intensify
the impulse of thought for it to become intelligence. Yet there we are also
going to find the cause of the failure. The intelligence, in focusing on
itself, does not perceive that changing the object it did not change the mode
of knowing it. It feels satisfied when it whatever domain, matter or spirit,
it arrives at "distinctness and clarity."

     Yet it does not see that clarity and distinctness for it are the logical
qualities it seeks to obtain from concepts. Consequently, knowledge that has
the form of conceptual thought will be clear and distinct in its eyes, that
is, the form of what is juxtaposed, in a discontinuous manner, in the manner
of solids, will be extension. From then on, to think clearly and distinctly,
will always be to deconstruct reality into stable elements each external to
the others, like concepts are, that is, in the last analysis, objects in space.

     But if the reality we study does not lend itself to this consideration,
if we wish to conceive of true continuity, real mobility, the reciprocal
co-penetration that characterizes duration, if we wish to know the creative
evolution that is life, we still begin to decompose the data into states and
parts that do not change and among which there can only be successive
juxtapositions, never the solidarity of progress or emergence of unpredictable
novelty.

     Psychological deduction concerning reflection explains the natural limits
of the intelligence. To see the cause of these limits one must await its
metaphysical genesis. But, before turning to the genesis, we are going to
*briefly stop at the relationship between instinct and intelligence with the
goal of mapping, more precisely, the peculiarities of that intelligence.


     3. INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT    

     Creative Evolution places us in the presence of an impulse that
causes life to develop in the form of a grenade, a rocket, a fountain. These
are metaphors that reveal the emergent and at the same time divergent
character of the evolutionary process. Yet we must not think that that
divergent emergence is something that arises in a spontaneous mode or by
chance. Bergson does not tire of repeating that life is organization and "this
act contains something explosive" (DS).

     To clarify what he is saying, he recurs, as always, to observation of
the great lines of evolution. If each line progressively develops its essential
character, one can conjecture that the vital potential "was possessed at the
beginning in a state of reciprocal implication" (DS). Thus evolution has
developed in two great lines, one that leads to instinct and another which
leads to the intelligence. We have here, then, the two potentials that are
mutually implicated.

     We note that Bergson employs the term "implication"; which already
suggests to us the idea of an inter-relation between the two terms, with the
face of one function to fulfill with respect to the whole. But it is not a
relation of functional dependency nor determination of instinct by
intelligence or vice versa, but instead one of complementarity.

     The whole is life and the mission of one or another faculty is to attend
to it. To capture something of these potentials, we should "take them as one
in the other, before their double-movement," yet, not as compounds joined
together, but as realities "constitutive" of one simple reality, of which the
intelligence and instinct are no more than points of view.

     The simple reality dealt with here is life, which offers, so to speak, a
double face. Seen in itself, it is an immensity of virtualities, the mutual
invasion of "a thousand tendencies." Seen in relation to matter it is
comparable to a demiurge. Yet these are vistas of a "unitary" reality, whose
essential attribute is being real duration. For Bergson life is like an
immense organ; and what he tries to see now is how it manifests, how it
organizes vital temporality, life as duration.

     Since consciousness is selection, made as a function of attention to
life, the mode of action that is chosen makes the break and determines the
organ's form in relation to the function it should serve. The forms by which
the activity is expressed are instinct and the intelligence. The first "deals
with things organically and the intelligence, mechanically" (EC). This first
approximation allows us to anticipate the characteristics of one or another
manifestation of consciousness in its action.

     Instinct and the intelligence have a common origin: consciousness in
general. And this nucleus, in which both potentials interpenetrate, results in
that we never find them totally separated. However, Bergson considers it an
error to suppose that, from the fact they are never given totally separate, a
gradual difference will be established between them, when he means to indicate
a difference in nature. They are different potentials. And they support his
affirmation precisely in the fact of their complementarity. If they accompany
each other, it is because they are complementary and if they are complementary
it is because they are not identical. Bergson will focus on their distinctive
nuances, but because these are what interests him, not because these
comprise their  only differences.

     He attempts to characterize them according to their worldly unfolding. He
does not claim to give us a definition, precisely because they are tendencies
and not created things. Likewise, it is far from his intention to establish a
hierarchical order between them, given that they are "equally elegant
divergent solutions of a single, solitary problem" (EC), that of adaptation.

     How shall we grasp the difference, define the two styles of activity, if
they carry within themselves the same impulse? The difference must be sought
once the impulse has split in its worldly development, since it seems that
here that original link fades, and vanishes to the extent the evolutionary
process advances. We shall consider, with Bergson, the manner of proceeding
for each one of its manifestations.

     He focuses first on that of action and finds a trait of intelligence
there, where the individual is capable of applying past experience to the
present situation; it is what is called making an inference. Yet inference,
says Bergson, "is a sign of invention" (EC) that attains its culmination when
it crystallizes in a made instrument. In constituting her intelligence, nature
endows the living being with a faculty of dominion that puts one in a
situation of themself fabricating the instruments which will serve in the
problem of adaptation.

     Science dates the origin of man to the epoch when the first tools
appeared. Yet experience indicates that this faculty of dominion opens
unlimited perspectives before us; that is to say, that fabrication also
progresses, precisely because the results are not perfect. This incapacity of
the intelligence to obtain everything at once, if indeed it is one of its
limits or imperfections, also has a great advantage, which is born, precisely,
from the perfectibility of the result. Every need that one attempts to satisfy
creates a new necessity and in this way opens an unlimited field to action.
This analysis allows him to establish a pragmatic definition of intelligence:
"the faculty of fabricating" (EC).

     Animals also have instruments for adapting to the surroundings, or can
create them according to the needs for adaptation; but there is a radical
difference with human behavior. The instrument in an animal forms part of its
own body and there is a "faculty" which knows how to use that instrument to
its own benefit. This activity, as opposed to that of the intelligence, is
called "instinct." Bergson defines it as "the faculty to use and even
construct organized instruments" (EC).

     Yet instinct is a simple form of acting. It expresses the movement of
life itself and attains its object directly in a simple fashion. In this
sense, instinct is not limited. Which does not mean that Bergson affirms the
infallibility of all instinct, but that it is perfect for satisfaction of the
need which arouses its attention, and only for that. We could say that it is
limited in extension, yet gives us a full grasp of its object. Life operates
in an organic manner, proceeds by integrating, totalizing, and the action of
instinct marches in this same direction. Bergson notes it for us as follows:

     "Instinct finds the appropriate instrument within its grasp; this
     instrument that one makes and repairs themself, which presents, like all
     the works of nature, a complexity of infinite detail and a simplicity of
     marvelous functionality, that carries out quickly, at the desired moment,
     without difficulty, with perfection, quite admirably, that which it has
     to do" (EC).

     If instinct proceeds organically, the intelligence does so in a
mechanical way. What does this mean? Here the intelligence, in order to be able
to fabricate its instruments of dominion, has to conceive the world where it
will perform its action as a machine where the elements can be thought of as
external to one another, analyze them, dissociate them, and in turn, compose
and recompose them in multiple different forms.

     We confront two modes of acting upon matter, between which life has had
to choose. The intelligence aims at fabricating; a task it performs on brute
matter, operating with solids. One imagines that that that is fluid in matter
escapes the intelligence. It is adapted to the inert and as such manipulates
that which falls within its domain. It is a kind of emanation of life to
understand it as matter. Its principal object "is the unorganized solid" (EC).
Abandoned to its spontaneity, it has no interest in occupying itself with what
is mobile; it is usefulness that captivates its attention and--guided by
that--it operates.

     The intelligence, to construct a utensil, must sketch the latter's form
upon the matter and then seek that matter which is best adapted to this form.
The imperfection of the implement means that the intelligence will never
remain with the present object. Fabrication presupposes that the matter can
yield to the forms which the intelligence imagines. For that, it must think of
it as moldable to its will and in which it can exercise, freely, its marvelous
combinatory art. Bergson thus qualifies his original characterization.
Regarding the power of fabrication he adds that "it can be exercised in an
indefinite manner, according to any law and in any system whatever" (EC). From
this combinatory power will emerge science and language, which also presupposes
in the intelligence the capacity to create symbols.

     Furthermore, the fabrication procedure carries two implicit assumptions,
which now we shall only enumerate: that the medium in which intelligence acts,
matter, be conceived as solid and stable, but by itself it does not present
itself in this mode to immediate perception; and the requirements of a vacuum
on which it can project its own constructions. This vacuum is homogeneous
space conceived as a receptacle.

     Bergson continues his comparative analysis from the perspective of the
knowledge which the action reflects:

     "If one views in instinct and the intelligence what they contain of
     innate knowledge, they discover that: in the first case innate knowledge
     bears upon things and in the second on relations" (EC).

     He is not going to respond to the question of whether the intelligence
covers certain relations such as those of equivalent to equivalent, those of
the contained and the container, those of cause and effect in a natural
manner. He leaves the problem to the logicians. He only wants to underline
that our spirit possesses an innate aptitude for establishing relationships
and comprehending them before knowing the things which can enter into this
relation:

     "In whatever way the analysis of thought is performed," he says, "it will
     always adopt one or several general images of which the spirit possesses
     innate knowledge, for it uses them naturally" (EC).

     We now underline the kinship that is established between the idea of form
and that of relation. The spirit--the intelligence--knows the general relation
between two terms, before knowing the terms themselves; or said otherwise: it
knows form without matter. This distinction allows it to establish the
distinction between instinct and intelligence in more precise terms, adopting
a terminology "dedicated" to that use. "The intelligence, insofar as it is
innate, is the knowledge of a form; instinct implies that of a material" (EC).
What does knowledge of a form signify? Psychological analysis does not give us
the complete answer, but it advances the solution.

     Technical activity implies the imposition of a form on a material. An
object is not fabricated if the form conceived by the "artisan" is not adapted
to the matter she makes her object. In other terms, the form imagined by the
spirit is not crystallized in an object, since this can exist independently of
that; and furthermore, the spirit must take some note of the medium in which
the action is realized.

     The property of matter most important to the artisan is solidity or
"consistency." "Matter ought to appear to the geometrician as an immense cloth
that he can cut as he wishes and sew as it pleases him." A thought that is
directed towards solids engenders the forms of space in the spirit and upon
those things. Separate from the spirit, space should be the symbol of solids
or, in the geometrical sense of the word, a solid in itself. It is the scheme
of an indefinite power of construction.

     The image or, more exactly, the idea of homogeneous space is a concept
constructed by thought, yet which results from its intimate linkage with
material things; it formed through the manipulation of these things; yet
symbolizes a natural power of thought, and hence can be known from within. The
philosopher asks:

     "Can this form without matter already be an object of knowledge? Yes,
     undoubtedly, with the condition that this knowledge resembles less
     something possessed than a contracted habit, less a state than a
     direction: it would be, if you like, the natural inclination of attention"
     (EC).

     It is, to put it into words, the consciousness of a power or of a
virtuality. There is not innate knowledge of specific relations, but instead
the possibility of establishing relations and inserting forms on to things.
Further on we shall return to the notion of form.

     From the plane of knowledge, the immanent force of life is also seen to
be limited. In it there co-exist and interpenetrate two different types of
knowing. Life has to choose between two limits: either comprehension or
extension. Thus, instinct reaches its object directly; which permits it the
categorical affirmation, "this is"; but it is an unconscious and non-objective
knowledge, that only suits a concrete object and which cannot express itself
explicitly. Yet from the object it does obtain a full interior knowledge.

     Intelligence does not refer to any object object in particular. It is a
potential of relating and establishing conclusions and above all of going from
what is known to what is ignored. A movement that enables its fabricator
destiny and its capacity for invention. As it proceeds establishing relations,
the intelligence captures that which is exterior and common to things. It thus
obtains a general and empty form, that can be filled with what one wants, be
applied to a great number of objects; yet, precisely because of this, its
conclusions cease being categories and assume the form of "if this...then
that." It is a hypothetical knowledge, but which can be extended indefinitely.
The gain in extension is paid for by a loss in profundity.

     The tendencies have been characterized starting first from action, after
the knowledge which the action implies. One imagines, because of this, that
the results have to be analogous. Instinct and the intelligence have as
functions to use instruments. To instinct they come given; but in the case of
the intelligence, it has to construct them. Therefore its function will be "to
discern in whatever circumstance the manner of  coming out ahead" (EC). Nature
must concede this prerogative to the intelligence, in denying it the instrument
adequate to continue advancing.

     Yet the individual is not totally helpless in her task of discernment.
The intelligence seeks the relations between the given situation and the way
of triumphing in it. This accounts for its tendency to establish
relationships. By proceeding in this manner, the understanding the
intelligence provides is purely formal. Yet the form, in being empty, awards
the intelligence the privilege of filling it with whatever it wishes. Thus
Bergson extends the merely utilitarian character of the intelligence, which he
has described for us up to now, with the freedom he gives it to be able to
fill a form with useless things. We have here the grandeur and, at the same
time, the limitation of the human intelligence.

     The intelligent being does not want to remain tied to circumstance; even
more, "it carries within itself that with which to transcend itself."  But it
never transcends it the way it wants. Bergson attributes this insufficiency,
precisely, to the formal character of the intelligence, which disables it from
remaining on a concrete object. It is a restless potential that lacks serenity
and a firm grasp. If overcoming will never be attained conducted by the hand of
intelligence, will we find it left to be guided by instinct?

     There are two types of consciousness. That of the intelligence is "formal"
which, freeing us from matter, allows us to advance; but it remains on the
exterior of the object. That of instinct is "material," which leaves us
captive in a concrete object; yet from which can be extracted all the nectar
of an intuitive and profound understanding. We are at the crux of the
Bergsonian investigation of this proposition, and to which the entire analysis
wishes to lead:

     "There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by
     itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it
     will never seek them" (EC).

     If the problem is framed in those terms one cannot see clearly how the
overcoming of man can occur. But we shall return to the starting point. There
we indicated two potentials that were mutually implicated; and although
Bergson, throughout his exposition, seems to forget that mutual implication,
he recognizes that it exists and that it has a function to serve: to attend to
life.

     It can seem paradoxical that two opposite and divergent manifestations
are implicated in the exercise. Bergson will give us his explanation. They
have the same origin: consciousness; and they express two opposite movements
of the same impulse; towards the interior of life itself, instinct; toward the
exterior, the intelligence. Nevertheless, "there is no intelligence where a
trace of instinct is not found, nor instinct that is not surrounded by a
fringe of intelligence" (EC).

     And it is precisely in that aureole of instinct that enfolds our
intelligence where man can find out how to overcome himself. Instinct is
sympathy; it gives us knowledge of something concrete, revealing to the
intelligence the poverty of its efforts and the insufficiency of its
mechanism. It wishes to embrace everything, but is not modeled to understand
mobility, the original and unforeseeable essence of life. It is instinct that
denouncing that what is fluid and mobile cannot be enclosed in its scheme,
without losing its peculiarities.

     If the sympathy of instinct could be extended to other objects and
reflect upon itself, "it would give us the key to vital operations" (EC). Yet
it cannot undertake its enterprise subject as it is to the concrete. It could
do so if it were capable of breaking its linkages. It is the intelligence that
can release the chains and launch it on the venture of comprehending life.
Yet then it will not longer be a trait of instinct, but of this manifested as
intuition:

     "Intuition will lead us to the very center of life, meaning instinct
     become disinterested, conscious of itself, capable of reflecting upon its
     object and of indefinitely extending it" (EC).

     Until now we have dwelt upon the theory of Creative Evolution. In
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion he resumes his concern with the
theme. Here too instinct and the intelligence have as their essential object to
use instruments; invented, variable and unforeseen in the case of the
intelligence; organically created by nature, in the case of instinct.

     In this his last work, Bergson does not limit himself to repeating what he
already said in Creative Evolution. However, from the perspective of
the theory of the intelligence he adds nothing new. He insists on the pressure
of instinct on the intelligence, which leads the latter to forge habits that
ensure the individual's personal and social equilibrium. He continues, also
insisting upon something that he had already insinuated under creative
evolution: the possibility of human self-transcendence.

     The transcendence will occur along the lines of instinct; but it is
necessary for this to awaken from its somnambulism. The intelligence has an
intermediary function; it makes possible the appearance of "dynamic religion."
For which it is necessary for a new force, that we might call "aspiration," to
be set in motion.

     Actually, instinct and the intelligence are operating modes of
consciousness; the selection of the action determines the splitting of
virtualities, immanent in the vital impulse. But there is not a total rupture
between the virtualities that split. They relate and this relationship permits
the mutual play between them and their coordination regarding the same
function they fulfill.

     Before finishing this theme, it seems wise to linger, briefly, on the
peculiarity of instinctive knowledge. We shall follow the observations made by
V. Jankélévitch concerning this proposition. One could say that
instinctive knowledge is unconscious, infallible, spontaneous, absolute, and
finite all at once. In it, the spirit is entirely absorbed in the object,
which permits Bergson to qualify it as unconscious. "The unconscious is the
normal state of a static understanding." Static, because it is direct
knowledge, without conceptual mediation.

     Jankélévitch speaks of "the magic of instinct" or, better yet,
of the object. This exercises a mysterious influence on the subject and draws
toward them in an irresistible fashion; thus it is infallible. Bergson says
that it is a "vision of things from afar" (EC). This distance should be
understood as absence of reasoning and of conceptual approximations that the
intelligence must make to access the object.

     Instinct, "infinitely learned and marvelously ignorant," does not
recognize knowledge, knows what it knows in an absolute manner, yet is
ignorant of its own wisdom. It springs from life itself and toward her directs
its march, but is rigid and looks in only one direction. Instinct does not
preview this direction; it works through inspiration, like the artist. The
future holds for it the novelty and unpredictability of creative evolution. We
could say that it is revealed in intuitions that do not surpass the immediate
future.

     Whereas the intelligence is made for calculation and prevision, instinct
keeps us linked to the past, is reminiscent; and it is, precisely, this value
of reminiscence that will make possible the return to the origin, submerging
us in life itself. Bergson develops his theory of instinct along the thread of
scientific data (it is enough to see the frequency with which he cites
biologists and naturalists with regard to the theme). Yet this does not 
deprive it of originality and sharpness.

     From the viewpoint of the intelligence, which is what interests us, the
comparison makes more manifest the pragmatic function of the intelligence that
Bergson has already underlined. It was posited to help the individual to defend
themselves in the environment. But in this mission it acquires some habits of
thought that incapacitate it from appreciating life as duration. Until now we
have only stated this fact. The explanation or justification we are going to
find in the analysis of the genesis of form in the intelligence. This will be
the subject of the following chapter.

     4. FROM PSYCHOLOGY TO METAPHYSICS: GENESIS OF
                 THE INTELLIGENCE

     With the psychological study of the functions of the intelligence,
Bergson comes to show how it adapted itself to a specific goal within the
evolutionary process. Yet, however we look at it, psychology cannot explicate
the natural tendency of the intelligence; or put otherwise, starting before all
action and experience, it displays something innate that he will claim is
explained only on the occasion when he can show how the vital impulse has
been able to engender it from within consciousness itself. Such an enterprise
requires transcending psychology, because it goes beyond the data that the
latter can offer the philosopher.
     In chapter III of Creative Evolution Bergson directly considers
the genesis, with the goal of establishing the orientation of thought that
defines the intelligence, the first idea that illumines it. That goes on for
several pages. So then, if the exposition of the genesis per se is
short, Bergson does not arrive at  it except through a long analysis that
continues past the genesis and as a sort of verification of it. He first
delimits the objective of his study and indicates its peculiarity: "we
attempt to engender it--the intelligence--in its form and in its matter"
(EC) and not to posit it in its essentials as psychology, cosmology or
traditional metaphysics has done.

     For one thing, the analysis of the "false" doctrines indicates to him the
direction wherein he might confront the true genesis, and for another, Bergson
is led to that attempt by the movement of his own thought. Because, if the
intelligence was "cut" from something vaster than itself, it seems natural
one could probe its genesis starting from the consciousness that envelops
it, the bosom where it thrived.

     Bergson refers to the mistake of previous philosophers regarding two
correlated convictions: "that nature is one and that intelligence has the
function of embracing it whole," or in other words, confused the inert with
the living, and from the moment when it was unable to see the duality of the
real the road to metaphysical truth remained closed to it.

     Throughout the grand metaphysical texts of chapter III Bergson pursues
the same demonstration. The intelligence, situated between matter and life,
cannot comprehend its origin outside of the former; yet, by not having
achieved the true relation of the order of matter with the order of life, it
cannot comprehend the true nature of the first order either. If it were to see
that there is a radical discontinuity between the two orders and that one
cannot pass from the first to the second, if it were to perceive that they are
arranged backwards, it would soon see that the order of matter is something
negative and it is constituted automatically. This ignorance incapacitates it
from understanding its true origin and leads metaphysics to an absurd and
impossible task. (In the last chapter of this work we shall have occasion
to attend to the losses into which, according to Bergson, metaphysics fall when
it follows the "natural tendency of the intelligence").

     He confronts genesis directly in the text titled "Intelligence and
materiality." Firstly, Bergson tries to show that the spirit can take the first
steps in the direction of matter, as much from the point of view of duration
as from that of extension; which is equivalent to claiming that the spirit has
a certain "a priori" knowledge of matter.

     Moreover, Bergson thinks that the intelligence and matter must have been
cut, through an identical process, from the same cloth which comprised them.
In this way at the same time the intelligence is engendered matter is also
engendered.

     We think it is opportune to cite almost whole Bergson's texts which
indicate that parallelism. Let us see those that show the parallel orientation
from the perspective of duration.

     "Let us then center ourselves upon what we have, at once that most
     separated from the exterior and least penetrated by intellectuality...
     It is necessary that through a violent contraction of our personality
     into itself, we reunite our past that is hidden, to push it, compact and
     indivisible, towards a present that is created by its introduction. The
     moments are rare when we control ourselves at this point. They form a
     unity with our free actions. And even then we do not possess them
     completely. Our feeling of duration, meaning the coincidence of my I with
     itself, admits of degrees. Yet the deeper the feeling and the more
     complete the coincidence, the more life will absorb of intellectuality
     and the more it will surpass it. For the intelligence has as its
     essential function to join same to same and will only adapt the facts
     that repeat to the images of the intelligence. We pause now, interrupt
     the effort that unites the greater part of the past to the present. If
     the pause were complete, there would be neither memory nor will; that is,
     that we never fall into this absolute passivity... Yet at the limit we
     glimpse an existence comprised of a present that begins without ceasing,
     with no real duration, only the instantaneous which dies and is reborn
     indefinitely. Is this the existence of matter? No, doubtless because the
     analysis resolves into elementary impacts; the shortest of which are of
     very weak, but not null, duration. One might suppose that physical
     existence inclines toward that second meaning and the psychic towards the
     first" (EC).

     Texts to which others can be added that provide the same relation, yet
from the perspective of extension:

     "We let go, and in place of acting dream. At the same time our I spreads
     and our past, which until then merged itself with the indivisible impulse
     that it sent us, decomposes into a thousand memories each of which
     exteriorizes in relation to the others. They stop interpenetrating to the
     degree that they congeal. Our personality thus descends in the direction
     of space. Indubitably we take no more than the first steps in the
     direction of extension... But we suppose that matter consists of that same
     movement taken further and that the physical be simply the psychic
     inverted. One will then understand how it feels so at home and moves so
     naturally in space, given that matter presents the most distinct
     representation to it. Such a space had its implicit representation in the
     same sense it had about its eventual relation, that is, its possible
     extension. It finds it in things, yet it could have obtained it without
     them if it had had a sufficiently powerful imagination to push towards
     the end the inversion of its natural movement" (EC).

     Bergson announces, by way of thesis, the idea that the intelligence must
have formed in the breast of the spirit through an inversion or detention of a
natural movement.

     The thesis is like a presumption, something that should happen in that
way. Indeed, Bergson does not establish it by chance. The solidarity that he
sees between intelligence and matter suggests to him that both must have been
"cut" from something more vast. He does not make explicit here what that
vastness might be. It would have to be understood as the vital impulse, life
as the principle from which everything proceeds. A tense concentration of
energy. Matter (and the intelligence) emerges from a distension or natural
relaxation of that concentration.

     He outlines only the genesis, since he does not attempt to offer a
complete picture of the understanding but only suggest his orientation. For
that he will not perform a reconstruction of the stages of development, but
instead, once he establishes the thesis, analyze whether actual activity
supports the conception he has of its appearance in consciousness.

     He quickly leaves genesis or, more exactly, continues it with an analysis
of observable activity. And indeed, as we indicated with regard to the
psychology of the intelligence, he deals more with finding the constants for a
form of thought than with tracing an evolution. Bergson seeks to verify,
through observation, what genesis allows him to glimpse. Reflecting upon the
operations of the intelligence and its proper object, he arrives at the
conclusion that:

     "All the operations of the intelligence tend to geometry, as the term
     where they find their perfect fulfillment. Yet just as geometry is
     necessarily anterior to them, and given that these operations will never
     result in the reconstruction of space and can do nothing but present
     it, it is evident that it is a latent geometry, immanent in our
     representation of space, that constitutes the great spring of our
     intelligence and puts it in motion" (EC).



     To approach this notion of latent geometry, one must return to the
Essay, where Bergson analyzes the two types of multiplicity: that of
"juxtaposition" and that of "mutual penetration" (DS).

     A multiplicity can be considered qualitatively and, in this case, it does
not have a number so much as a potential; or quantitatively, that is, in terms
that can be counted. The power to count presupposes thinking of items with some
exterior to others which implies, a priori, the possibility of
symbolization of a surrounding for them where that operation can be performed.

     Apart from that any multiplicity encloses this double possibility for
consideration (towards extension or towards pure quality) the conception of a
homogeneous medium will have been suggested to consciousness through
exterior repetition. Nevertheless, whether the homogeneity be suggested as a
qualitative multiplicity or by a repetition of phenomena external to one's
consciousness, the homogeneous, in Bergson, is inserted by the spirit.

     Homogeneity is the schema to which the unfolding of matter aspires. Yet
it is so because that is the schema of our possible action on things. That is
to say, a view of spirit which symbolizes the fabricating tendency of human
intelligence.

     Pure homogeneity is an ideal, but an ideal that signifies an abandonment
of the intelligence which sees reality from the manipulable side; and in this
sense, is interested only in facts that repeat themselves or can be
superimposed one on the other or which can be mathematically deduced.

     We gather that space as a homogeneous medium has negative connotations
for Bergson:

     "It is the final term in the spirit's movement of detention. Space cannot
     be given without also positing the logic and the geometry that are upon
     the trajectory of which pure spatial intuition is the terminus" (EC).

     There is then a natural geometry, immanent to the spirit, which leads to
the intuition of homogeneous space. Scientific geometry or the deductive
operations of the intelligence are founded on that natural geometry. In the
text bearing the title "Geometry and deduction," Bergson indicates that that
logic is nothing more than a degradation of the natural geometry; it triumphs
in the domain of matter, but--similarly--is not apt for revealing the total
structure of being, but instead one part of reality, that to which a certain
form of thinking is adapted.

     To come to understand this, one must leave space behind and return
towards duration. Then she will recognize that, following the natural tendency
of the intelligence, true reality cannot be discovered. Yet at the same time
that th e philosopher announces that thesis, he widens his theory of the
intelligence and of matter, showing how despite the skill of the intelligence
in the domain of geometry it is incapable, entirely, of understanding the true
meaning of the order seemingly followed by nature in its display.

     We retrieve texts that we think revelatory in themselves of that which we
want to say:

     "Surely, if one considers the admirable order of mathematics, the perfect
     agreement of the objects it considers, the immanent logic of the numbers
     and the figures, the certitude that we find, whatever be the diversity
     and the complexity of reasoning upon the same theme, to always obtain the
     same conclusion, it would tax us to find a system of negations in
     properties of such positive appearance, an absence greater than the
     presence of a true reality. Yet we should not forget that our
     intelligence, which verifies this order and admires it, is directed by
     the same sense of movement characterizing the materiality of its object.
     And furthermore, upon analyzing its object it puts complication into it
     and the order it finds is more complicated still. And this order and this
     complication necessarily produce in it the effect of a positive reality,
     having the same meaning that it does" (EC).

     The geometrical order does not need founding, neither in thought oriented
towards it, nor in a sort of necessity immanent to things; it is only an
inversion of a real activity. It is automatically constituted simply by falling
into the space of creative activity, without any geometrical wisdom having
governed its organization.

     Similar conclusion result if, in place of focusing on deduction, the
operation of induction is considered, which from a logical viewpoint is
nothing more than inverted deduction. Bergson does not so much seek to analyze
induction per se as investigate what permits thought to "induce"; that
is, how and why in experience thought discovers the same causes that produce
the same effects. "Deduction does not occur without a secondary intention of
spatial intuition. But much more could be said of induction" (EC). One induces
for the same reason that they deduce, because representation is displayed in
space; or said otherwise, because induction is relative to the intuition of
space and not to that of time. Bergson clarifies with an example what he is
trying to say:

     "In fact, when I say that the water set on the burner is going to boil
     today as it did yesterday, and that this is of an absolute necessity, I
     confusedly note that my imagination transports the burner of today to that
     of yesterday... Everything seems to coincide equally from that moment,
     for the same reason that makes the third sides of two triangles coincide
     if superimposed, if the first two already coincided totally... So that
     the system of today can be superimposed upon that of yesterday it would
     require the latter to have waited for the former with everything
     simultaneous, which is what occurs in geometry, and only in geometry"
     (EC).

     And previously he had said:

     "The belief that there are causes and effects...implies, first, that
     reality can be decomposed into groups that can be considered practically
     as isolated and independent" (EC).

     The basis of induction is the movement that causes matter to descend
towards space and at the same time is the principle of certainty. Because when
a system is isolated and we superimpose it at any moment of time, the
superimposition with the same conditions will result in the reproduction of
the same consequences, before even making explicit the deductions that verify
it. Induction is a natural fact: "It is not necessary to think geometrically,
nor even to think, to expect from the same conditions repetition of the same
facts" (EC).

     A similar induction suggests the idea of Law which the scientific spirit
can distill. Induction is founded on the repetition of phenomena. But, as
opposed to deduction, it keeps experience in mind and deals not only with
magnitudes, but also with qualities. This assumes that time does not count and
that qualities can be superimposed. Bergson expresses it exhaustively:
"Induction implies that in the physical world, like in that of geometry, time
does not count. It also implies that qualities can be superimposed like
magnitudes" (EC).

     Just as he had said in the Essay, quality is the province of
duration and, though it may be susceptible to measure and number, its own is
incommensurable. Bergson awards the right of superimposing qualities to the
physical; and the precise basis of induction lies in the possibility of
superimposing them. Yet with things seen this way, there is no essential
difference between inducing and deducing. They are geometrical operations, in
which time is set aside. Bergson's conclusion from that follows:

     "Just as geometry is the ideal limit of our inductions, it also is for
     our deductions. The movement at the end of which is spatiality distills
     over the length of its trajectory the faculty of inducing as much as of
     deducing, or complete intellectuality" (EC).

     In essence, space is the ultimate foundation of induction, as it is also
the a priori idea of the intelligence and of its proper object.

     We note that the philosopher says induction is within the trajectory of
movement; it is not the terminus, since the phenomena, objects of induction,
develop in time and endure in it. They are not totally deployable in space
without the risk of losing something of their originality. However, to
adequately comprehend the intelligence, in its form of thought so to speak, we
must consider it beneath that aspect. And thus the relativity of science
despite its objectivity. We shall return to this.

     From the different points from which Bergson confronts the problem of the
intelligence, its origin and formation, we can conclude that it was
highlighted in consciousness by a kind of concentration of attention upon the
obstacles that matter imposes in the development of life.

     It emerges at one moment in evolution wherein the obstacles are
surmounted. But every gain in nature has a price and that stipulated by life
in this circumstance is the need of the spirit to channel its energy. The
channelization will permit it to slip into matter; yet it is rendered inept to
confront life. This does not mean that the intelligence is reduced to being an
instrument of action. Fabrication or invention is the exercise of a natural
power, and we could even add that that work permits the destiny of the spirit
to be fulfilled, on liberating itself from the oppression of matter and acting
joyfully upon it.

     So then, a fabricating destiny contains a danger: obfuscation in the
dominion and manipulation of matter, making of one's action a medium for
dominating life instead of realizing or better serving it. And this can happen
because the tendencies, according to Bergson, unfold according to a double
law of "dichotomy" that first separates them, and by a law of "frenzy" or need
for each tendency to develop  up to the limit, once dissociated from the rest.
This law of frenzy leads the intelligence to obsess more and more about its
fabricating destiny and to a growing pride that foments its success and makes
it feel itself lord and lady of all that it touches.

     Since, moreover, the goal cannot be reached, for in Bergson there is no
end; the tendency, upon feeling limited, can return to itself and re-take the
position where the representation emerges. The return is not spontaneous;
but the intelligence can cause it to reflect upon its own making, which will
not occur without a certain violence. To what is this violence due? Reflection
is not produced without the intelligence deviating from its natural
inclination and, furthermore, because as Bergson tells us in the Essay,
we give much to matter, yet also receive from it. We are not yet free. The
excursion through the exterior world makes entering our own intimacy
difficult. We are obsessed with the idea of space.

     If, as Trotignon says, the genesis of the intelligence is a qualitative
distinction within consciousness and, moreover, consciousness if co-extensive
with life, knowledge of life on the part of consciousness does not seem to
present any difficulty.

     Nevertheless, this is not going to be so simple. We are in agreement with
Trotignon, in his interpretation of the genesis of intelligence by the author
who concerns us. We deal with a differentiation in consciousness that is
specified by the function life assigns to the tendency toward virtuality; "to
preside over actions." And we have already mentioned how this function behaves
in configuring intelligence. Yet, in being a differentiation in consciousness,
it is not so strange how some of Bergson's affirmations could make us think.
It emerges from consciousness and an aureole envelops it in its entire
deployment. Overall, the "constructive" intelligence, alienated in its mundane
discourse and such as Bergson characterizes it, is not able to comprehend life
as creation.

     It seems opportune to us here to bring in the distinction that G. Deleuze
establishes between form and meaning in the intelligence.
The form, he says, exists in the material, but the meaning is something more
concentrated. Were it only geometric form, its action would be arbitrary and
it would not know how to act in the direction of usefulness to life. Its
meaning is obtained from its intent, which signifies consciousness of itself
that here has to return in order to find it.

     J. Maritain, in commenting on the Bergsonian hypothesis for the
genesis of the intelligence, characterizes it gratuitously; it is a thesis
lacking meaning, he says. From Maritain's perspective, the accusation is
totally logical. For him the intelligence was given along with existence and
must be referred to it to understand it. For Bergson, the intelligence emerges
at a moment in evolution; it is an emanation of consciousness animated from
within by the vital impulse. And if like all occurrences in life, it is
unpredictable, nevertheless it does not appear by chance and has a mission to
complete. Precisely in this utilitarian destiny the philosophy finds the
justification for the characteristics he give it. Yet it emerges, at least
virtually, capacitated to fulfill its fabricating mission.

     Bergson presents his theory as an hypothesis, but the breadth he gives it
and the experimental verification he tries to establish seem to forget the
hypothetical status and to convert it into a certain thesis.

     Until now we have referred to the "formal" intelligence that can be
identified with what Bergson calls, in the introduction to Creative
Evolution, intelligence in the "strict" sense. It remains for us to know
whether one can or cannot speak of the intelligence in the "broad" sense.

     5. SPECIFICATIONS OF THE INTELLIGENCE

     In the philosophies of an intellectualist stamp, the intelligence is like
a sort of perfect and complete goddess; not so in Bergson. As J. Chevalier
notes, the philosopher confronts them, works to depict them in man and
questions their credentials. And viewing this being that lives and acts in the
universe, Bergson seeks to find the reply he wants. We spoke of the theory of
the intelligence that Bergson deduces from the contemplation of action. Now we
shall approximate to it starting with the different meanings for the term in
his works.

     In the Essay, the word "intelligence" makes reference to the
discursive, analytical and conceptual function of the spirit. It is usually
characterized with the adjective "discursive" to oppose it to the "intuitive"
function.

     In Matter and Memory he uses the term "understanding" more
frequently to characterize the discursive function of thought. He says this:
"Consciousness gives testimony in our understanding to one faculty
of dissociating, distinguishing and logically opposing, but not of creating
nor constructing" (MM). Understanding can be appreciated as equivalent to the
intelligence, equally opposed, like it, to immediate intuition. However, there
is a certain ambiguity in the texts and it is not clear that the understanding
reduces to the discursive function.

     At the conference, "La pensée et la mouvant " Bergson employs
the term "analysis" to refer to the discursive function of the spirit as
opposed to intuition. To qualify analysis as a faculty, intelligence or
understanding, when it is one of our acts, also turns out to be ambiguous.
Sometimes, he speaks of intellectual intuition; the term understanding also
persists, as opposed to intuition. Nevertheless, although opposed to intuition,
analysis emanates from it and places it in motion. (In the first edition of
this conference Bergson frequently uses the expressions "intellectual
intuition," "intellectual sympathy"... Later he will feel obliged by attacks
on his philosophy to correct these expressions, and he speaks of "sympathy,"
spiritual osculation. PM).

     Creative Evolution offers greater precision and rigor in the terms.
There, generally, the name "intelligence" is reserved for the discursive
function to which intuition and instinct are opposed. Qualifiers such as
"human" are frequent, or expressions like: "the intelligence such as we
ourselves find it," which suggests the possibility of an evolution of our
intelligence and the existence of others different from that of homo
faber.

     In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, he maintains the
position of Creative Evolution, underlining the interdependence between
the functions of the spirit. In consequence, a shading of the intelligence
appears that we had not explicitly found in the previous works: the story-
telling function. At the same time he insists on the possibility of an
intelligent being to transcend herself.

     We are going to try to recover the meaning of all these denominations,
with the goal of clarifying the meaning of the term "intelligence" and its
fundamental specifications.

     After reading Matter and Memory and above all Creative
Evolution, there remains in us no doubt whatsoever of the primordial
function of the intelligence. For Bergsonian man it becomes essential, in
order to insert oneself into the world, to materially and morally fabricate
things and to fabricate oneself. All this activity is piloted by intelligence
that we are going to call "technical" or more generally still, "practical."
Some of its characteristics are already known to us. It is the guide for human
activity, that which orients one's conduct, understanding by conduct any type
of behavior.

     Oriented, towards what? The primum vivere is also first in
Bergson's philosophy. "Before philosophizing it is necessary to live" and
living means to take advantage of nature, to help oneself. Here is the spring
of action. Upon accomplishing this function, the intelligence fulfills its
natural destiny, because "when we follow the movement of our own nature
we think simply of acting" and the goal of the action is utility. Bergson
presents this utilitarian character in a great number of passages, at the same
time he insists that supporting those actions is the natural function of our
intelligence. If that is your natural destiny, one must suppose it granted in
order to exercise it, at least whenever possible, a possibility which could
develop progressively in its mundane unfolding.

     Under the denomination of "practical intelligence," we recover the
expressions: formal intelligence, pure intelligence, intelligence in the
strict sense, technical intelligence... Different names among those that
appear in Bergson's works. We might imagine that a faculty destined to
"provide weapons and tools with a view towards combat and work" fulfills its
mission by realizing this task.

     Nevertheless, nothing is further from Bergson's intention. First, because
knowledge of and action on matter are limited. And because the action is born
from a lack, of a feeling of emptiness, which the intelligence tries to fill
with its constructions. And, starting from a needful dynamism, complete
satisfaction cannot occur; among other reasons because once attained the
proposed dynamism goal will disappear, to be paralyzed by the lack of meaning
and the activity of the intelligence. The condition of progress is precisely
the deficit character of the instruments that make it viable.

     What we are saying here presupposes, moreover, that mankind does not
reduce to the intelligence and that there is a source of aspiration in them
which finds the instrument limited or perhaps, more exactly, the results
obtained by it. Transcendence will not occur through the path of the
intelligence, at least that which we have described up to now. Yet it does
have one function to complete in view of this transcendence. Progress in
fabrication will lead mankind to liberation from the most pressing necessities
and will allow not all their energy to be consumed in production and to leave
some idleness to be devoted to contemplation. This is the meaning that we give
to the following passage from Bergson:

     "Surveying matter, consciousness first takes, like a mold, the form of
     the fabricating intelligence, and the invention which is held in
     reflection expands in freedom" (DS).

     First, "homo faber"; and Bergson adds, "This is the definition we
propose. Yet, also, "homo sapiens." To obtain this title we must renounce the
faber and the desired excursions through the external world and retreat
to our own abode so as to give light to the sapiens.

     It is convenient to distinguish, with P. Trotignon, two types of
reflection: first a psychological reflection; that which the intelligence can
accomplish by returning into its own operations, and which enables
speculation, theory. And a second reflection or interiorization in
consciousness, which permits returning to its origin, or to consciousness of
itself.

     The first type of reflection is necessary for the intelligence to fulfill
its utilitarian destiny and is exercised naturally. In order for the second
reflection to emerge, it needs man to detach from the action and forgets to
refer the faculty of perceiving to that of acting. We are not going to pause,
now, on investigating whether this is or is not possible. Yet it is good to
keep in mind that this cannot happen without the intelligence deviating from
its natural tendency, which is to say it will have to refer an external
circumstance to the intelligence itself to justify the inversion in direction.
Even supposing what Trotignon calls "secondary reflection" it will be an
activity of the intelligence.

     Bergson concedes to the intelligence the virtue of theorizing; and thanks
to it, science is elaborated. But the man who speculates is not yet wise, in
the strict sense of "Wisdom," for this prerogative would have to be awarded to
the intuitive man, to the degree that intuition presupposes turning one's back
on technical speculation and reverting to the origin, to life itself.

     In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion a function of the
intelligence appears that Bergson calls the "story-telling function" and which
we are going to call "symbolic." The intelligence develops this function
pressured by instinct and to liberate the individual and the society from the
dangers that follow from the indiscriminate exercise of the intelligence. The
importance he concedes to the story-telling function is so great he even
affirms that without it intelligence could not take place. It is a tendency to
eliminate that which would impede its march towards full success.

     Just as the speculative intelligence works on representations, it can
generate imaginary representations--fables--whose mission is to guide the
intellectual work. He calls the act that creates these representations
fabulation. Yet as opposed to what they might seem to be to psychological
analysis, they are an act of the intelligence, pressured by instinct. The
intelligence creates them with reference to the real.

     What leads Bergson to affirm that they are acts of the intelligence is
the fact that only an intelligent being is capable of creating these
representations. But does the fact that she elaborates them justify it being
an act of the intelligence?

     We accept it may be an instinct, or the semi-conscious basis of our
spirit, that which gives rise to the representation of such images, but we
think that the act which creates them must be referred to the imagination;
 although later or simultaneously, these symbols, by being the fruit of an
intelligent being, have coherence and "rational" justification.

     The story-telling function and the intelligence, as Maurelos points out,
make reference to the same level of reality. They work on representations.
They also have a shared function to fulfill  and between them there is a
relation that we could call one of complementarity; on one hand to service the
problem of adaptation and on the other, to restore equilibrium. Yet this
complementarity does not authorize awarding the fabulation function
exclusively to the intelligence.

     Maurelos gives so much importance to this fabulatory function that he
sees in it the key that enables freeing Bergson from the accusation of
irrationalist which other thinkers have made. Here, he says, the absurd and
the rational co-exist, and one is expressed through the other. Though
recognizing the co-existence, we believe that that is not the nucleus that is
going to permit us to qualify Bergson as rationalist or irrationalist, if we
must qualify him. The principle from which everything proceeds is an
impulse that resembles a free creative act and not a logos.
To investigate up to what point this act or impulsive force is apprehendable
by the spirit will give us the key that we seek. And meanwhile the forms of
intelligence that we keep considering are not going to be those which reveal
the secret to us. (This is one of the most problematic aspects of Bergson's
thought. The list of commentators who identify an irrationalism would be as
long as that of those who prefer to qualify it as a "new rationalism." Milet
considers the polemic superseded, following the work of Husson. We are in
agreement with him, yet we believe one must keep investigating how to
understand that "new rationalism.")

     From what has been said up to now we may conclude that the intelligence,
as Bergson presents it, has a technical or pragmatic dimension, a theoretical
or speculative dimension, that arises from the technical dimension, and a
symbolic dimension, which emerges, in turn, from the theoretical dimension. In
the final analysis, all those are distinct aspects of a faculty dedicated to
securing the individual in her worldly, individual and social surroundings. It
is the intelligence in a strict sense.

     The intelligence in a "broad" sense makes reference to reflection; yet
not that that the intelligence can perform in folding back upon its own
operations and which gives birth to theory, but instead that which violating
its natural tendency puts it in contact with the principle--life--itself.

     Like all the technical notions in Bergson's philosophy, the term
"intelligence" is a mobile concept, that acquires different modulations
insofar as this notion is applied to distinct fields. And, in every case,
Bergson must be read trying to capture the meaning of the terms, more than the
terms themselves.

     Concerned with the problems of his time and wanting to save mankind from
the narrow enclosure where scientism situated it, he offers us a conception of
the intelligence highly linked to the operative concept that he has of science
itself, not without rendering tribute to reading Spencer and to the very
associationism which he so harshly criticizes. It is a pragmatic intelligence,
which recalls the characteristics of Sophist intelligence: able, far-sighted,
searching for the way to triumph in life. It obtains that by going from one
object to another remaining on the periphery of things.

     He emphatically insists on its utilitarian character, yet he is not the
first to do so. Earlier Aristotle required leisure, the situation of liberty,
as a condition of the theoretical life, and he grounds his affirmation in that
tradition. "Man began to philosophize when he had the necessities covered."
Later, to satisfy these is first.

     Nevertheless, in the one thinker and the other, man is not reduced to
that. By this we do not mean to say that the Bergsonian intelligence be
compared to the Aristotelian Nous. In Bergson there is a pragmatic
compromise between reality and the intelligence that does not appear in
Aristotle. To understand the scope of that compromise we are going to consider
the relationship that Bergson establishes between reality and thought.

CHAPTER II
THE COGNITIVE DIMENSION OF THE INTELLIGENCE

     1. PRESENTING THE PROBLEM

     Reality and our mode of accessing it are the axes around which a theory
of knowledge must revolve. Given the possibility of knowing objects, it
remains to delimit the scope and conditions that make possible such knowledge.

     Bergson starts from the conviction that the human spirit can attain the
absolute, the thing in itself. His thought is presented, then, as a challenge
to the Kantian system and to agnostic and skeptic currents. We shall see how
he restores that which the philosopher of Königsberg considered lost from
philosophy.

     According to Bergson the problem of knowledge is presented in Kant as an
alternative: either the spirit is regulated by things, or things are regulated
by the spirit; or there is between both a mysterious concordance. To solve it,
Kant maintains that space and time are given a priori as "conditions of
possibility of all representation," and assumes matter perfectly adaptable to
these conditions. He presents the intelligence as "ready made" and the problem
is limited to deducing the categories of thought a priori; a meticulous
enterprise, yet a bearable one for an attentive spirit.

     With evolutionism the task is more arduous. Neither is space an a
priori by itself, nor is matter totally adaptable to it. It tries to
engender categories, as much those that enable perception as those proper to
understanding.

     The study of the genesis of the intelligence has permitted us to explain
how Bergson presents that emergence of the spirit and its "conformation" with
respect to the action it feels obliged to take in the heart of material
reality, to ensure the insertion of the individual in the surroundings. The
mutual play between matter and spirit will permit establishing the conditions
of external perception.

     And the categories of thought? The method cannot be other than that
recommended for perception. Revert to the origin and contemplate the spirit
determining itself in intelligence and intuition.

     All this will permit our author to give the solution that Kant had not
discerned; to reject all a priori properly speaking and to admit that
matter and spirit are constituted by reciprocal adaptation; without forgetting
that Bergson does not reduce spirit to intelligence. There remains intuition
that will be able to open the trans-phenomenal world for us.

     In fact, there is harmony between reality and thought, although one
cannot speak of overlap. And this is the fundamental problem: why is there
order? Bergson lingers on the consideration of this problem in Creative
Evolution and in a conference carrying the title The possible and the
real.

     The following expressions show us why Bergson ties the theory of
knowledge to the problem of order.

     "In a general manner," he says, "reality is ordered in the same way that
     satisfies our thought. The order is a certain accord between subject and
     object. It is the spirit found renewed within things" (EC).

     So then, the spirit can advance in two opposite senses. If it follows
its natural direction it produces free activity; if it follows the inverse
movement determination is necessary, yet in one case and the other, there is
order. We deal, in the first, with what Bergson calls "vital or desired
order"; and in the second, with "automatic order." "But in either case the
spirit will recognize itself, will find in that order what it has placed
there" (EC).

     To understand what Bergson means by "posited Order" one has to go to
those passages where he explicates the double modality of operating that we
can trace in experience. There we find two types of operations, the
"voluntary" and the "automatic." The first reflect what Bergson calls desired
or "vital order." The order is immanent to the production and can be known
from within, "sympathizing" with the creator. Yet it is an unpredictable
order, emerging with the creation of the work.

     The second manifests a necessary order; that is to say, given the cause,
the effect follows naturally. And therefore, knowledge of the effect offers no
difficulty whatsoever. It is predictable and calculable in advance or, at
least, can be so. Bergson exemplifies the two types of order, comparing that
expressed in a Beethoven symphony, in the domain of the vital, with what can
be observed when the movement of the stars is contemplated, in the realm of
the automatic.

     The two orders have distinct meanings and origins. The automatic has for
a limit and grounding that which Bergson calls "Geometric necessity." It is
like a requirement of the spirit in its practical destiny. To be able to
operate on reality, it must be thought subject to laws, and not an
arbitrary consideration; there are phenomena in nature which present that
aspect. What the intelligence does is take them to the limit, and thus he
speaks of the order posited by the spirit.

     In the case of vital order we are dealing, he says, with something that
is arranged so as to obtain, from multiple elementary causes, the same effect.
It is an approximate mode of approaching what might mean production of the
vital. Its act is a simple one and not analytically apprehensible.

     Bergson lingers on the consideration of the two types of order, for he
assumes that the confusion between them gave rise to the principal
difficulties embedded in the theory of knowledge. But the confusion is not
something that is due to chance, is grounded in experience, since in it the
vital as well as the geometric are repeated. Observe, for example, the
resemblance between individuals of the same species or the regularity of the
stars' movement. There are resemblances within it and, accordingly,
generalization is made possible at one level of order or the other.

     Resemblance interests the practical spirit, without it worrying about the
meaning it might have according to its origin. Thus we identify the two types
of order and thus, also, the belief in a general order of nature "hovering at
once over life and over matter."

     Bergson censures what translates to speculative dominion, a procedure
useful only for practical life, and he accuses ancient philosophy as much as
modern. He shows how, in the final analysis, the ancients reduced the laws to
classes; that is, they interpreted the automatic through the vital. Thus the
ancients believed in the existence of a "unitary" science that touched the
absolute, yet the reality of matter escaped them.

     The moderns reduced classes to laws and, in attempting to interpret
everything as law, prepared the belief in the relativity of human knowledge.
Because it is known that law has no reality outside of the intelligence to
which it relates. Kant did no more than make manifest this proposed relativity.

     We now encounter the key text:

     "This conception results from an arbitrary confusion between the
     generality of the laws and that of classes. Though an intelligence is
     necessary to relate certain terms to others, one can conceive that in
     certain cases, the terms themselves can exist in an independent manner.
     And if, beside the relations of term to term, experience also presents us
     with independent terms, living classes being a thing very different from
     the system of laws, at least half of our knowledge will be about the
     thing in itself, and will bite upon the absolute... We shall go further:
     the other half of knowledge will not be so radically relative... One
     might establish that it refers to a reality of an inverse order, a
     reality that we always express in mathematical laws...yet which does not
     lend itself to this work except by reason of finding itself burdened with
     spatiality and therefore by geometry" (EC).

     The spirit can, then, attain to the absolute as much in the direction of
life as in that of matter.

     Bergson is not satisfied with having disentangled the consequences that
follow from the identification of the two classes of order, whichever may be
the one taken as a model, and is going to expose for us the mistake living in
the idea of disorder and the absurdity of the pretension of founding order.
Order is a fact, but disorder seems to be a right. Then the pretension
of founding order could be legitimated, if it needs grounding in that, at
least in the eyes of the spirit, it presents itself as contingent and indeed
is contingent with respect to something. He arrives at this conclusion for a
double reason. On one side the two types of order are equated and, on the
other, the existence of disorder is assumed, at least as possible. We shall
see how Bergson interprets this idea.

     According to him it has a psychological origin and reflects the
objectification of a desire. He describes it as the result of a movement of
the spirit between two extremes, "doing nothing more than objectifying the
state of the soul of someone expecting one of the two kinds of order and
finding the other" (EC). This applies as much to the idea of disorder as to
that of chance, which Bergson presents as correlative.

     What is the content of this idea? We shall answer with Bergson's words:

     "The apparent absence of all order is in reality the presence of both
     and, furthermore, the swaying of the spirit not seated definitively with
     either one or the other... Disorder might very well be the negation of
     order, but this negation is the implicit confirmation of the presence of
     the opposite order, a confirmation to which we close our eyes because it
     does not interest us" (EC).

     Thus, beyond ourselves, an order; in ourselves, the representation of a
different order from that which interests us and also an act of spirit that
imposes the negation. Thus it is seen how fictitious elements compose the
pseudo-idea; it is an idea that lives from a lack, without its own content.
That is to say that disorder, chance, cannot be absolutes, nor even thought as
such. It follows that it lacks meaning to assume a disorder to which order
would arrive to be added like a sort of light projected on a chaotic night and
that the pretension is vain of a basis or research into the origin of the
light.

     Beneath this entire critique lies the conviction that what is not real
cannot, properly, be conceived nor even thought without a grave danger of
speculation. Beside this conviction, we find another that all negation is in
reality a suppression and simultaneously a position. To think disorder one
must imagine a possible order and decree its non-existence; but, since Bergson
has shown two types of order, it can be claimed that to negate the existence
of one is to affirm, implicitly, the other:

     "To speak of an uncoordinated diversity is to commit a true petitio
     principii, because imagining the uncoordinated actually imposes an
     order, or even two" (EC).

     Bergson thinks that the idea of disorder presents order as a conquest
over chaos and that the ancients speak of an idea that might be added to
matter--disorder--or the modern idealism of a sensory diversity that the
understanding might organize. But if there is no question of a similar
conquest, because order is a fact, still the questions do not end. And the
matter-form dualism will disappear. Yet, even supposing that Bergson is
correct in what he says, this does not mean that all dualism in his philosophy
disappears. It at least seems to maintain itself at the level of the theory of
knowledge; and from that moment on, we must place the unity of the real
between parentheses.

     How else to interpret that text which Bergson places immediately
following the critique of the origin of the relativism of knowledge, the "key
text" we cited? For vital reality one type of understanding, for the inverse
reality, a different understanding, which at least in principle one must
suppose irreducible to each other. The separation would be superfluous with
the contrary.

     Be that as it may, the reality is that oneself is cognizable in its
double form and that is what interests us now; and even more concretely, we
see how the philosopher has been able to refute the Kantian formalism or
"constructivism." This requires us to contemplate the relation that 
Bergson establishes between the intelligence and matter, that is, determine
the conditions of external perception. But before entering into that prickly
problem we can do no less than ask the philosopher.

     Let us admit that reality is given to us ordered, yet what objective
instance allows us to make that affirmation? We can say nothing about that at
the margin of our cognitive structures. We can take as a working hypothesis
that the world is ordered and, even, support that in experience, if a man is a
being immersed in the world and who unfolds in it, we can postulate that there
is agreement between reality and thought.

     Fidelity to the facts impedes Bergson from posing questions that
transcend them. Overall, have we not surpassed experience to claim that the
idea of disorder is the objectification of a desire? Despite Bergson's
analysis being suggestive, meticulous, emergent and of deep metaphysical
grasp, we do not see why one cannot think the idea of disorder, though it may
only be a logical possibility. To deny it assumes not recognizing the autonomy
of thought. (In treating the peculiarity of Bergsonian metaphysics we shall
return to this preoccupation of Bergson to remain true to the facts.)

     From the moment when the surroundings are not obvious, at least in an
immediate way, Bergson does not deny this, so it seems that disorder is
thinkable, although only were it the absence of order and hence the question
is legitimated for order. Order is something necessary for Bergson, although
in fact it is presented as contingent. That is to say, it is essentially
necessary and existentially contingent. In establishing two types of order,
each is contingent with respect to the other. This contingency is what
originates the idea of disorder as a movement of the spirit in search of an
absent order, depreciated that which is present.

     And if there were no more than one type of order? How to confront the
problem of its non-immediacy? To whom do we refer the order? To resolve these
questions one must leave Bergson, and imagine ourselves already having left.

     Indeed, there is order; yet, to be able to affirm that it is not a
product of the activity of the knowing subject, Bergson will have to make
explicit how the subject and the object inter-relate in the cognitive process.

     2. THE "A PRIORI" IN BERGSON

     There is, then, agreement between reality and thought. Bergson will have
to sketch how such an accord occurs and what gnoseological scope it has or, in
other terms, will have to submit to the judgment of the intelligence itself
the form it adopts for knowing, the conditions of external perception.

     Once again we encounter the philosopher confronting Kant regarding the
theme of the "a priori." According to the author of Creative Evolution,
Kant has seen correctly that extension is an attribute of matter incompatible
with the others. Because: 

     "It is noteworthy that the spirit, speculating about it with its limited
     forces, cuts a priori figures there whose properties will also be
     determined a priori, having not kept in contact with existence,
     which follows despite everything, through the infinite complications of
     its reasoning invariably gives them a reason. Kant has placed the fact in
     plain light. But its explanation should be sought, to our mind, by a
     different path from that followed by Kant" (EC).

     And the Bergsonian discourse keeps showing how, definitely, the Kantian
deduction ensures that matter performs with docility towards our reasonings,
but what is intelligible in them is our own work, because perceptions reach us
already "bathed" in an atmosphere of "mental spatiality"; that is, that matter
reaches us "refracted" though our perceptive forms. It follows that the thing-
in-itself is unknowable because:

     "Kant presents space as a form already made by our faculty of perceiving,
     a true deus ex machina of which we know neither how it emerges,
     nor why it is what it is, more than any other thing" (EC).

     In providing space "already made" the problem is reduced to knowing how
"sensory diversity" will adapt to it. And from there the establishment of the
three alternatives we indicated previously as a possible solution to the
problem of knowledge.

     Yet there remains another possibility that Bergson is going to clarify
and which Kant could not even suspect, because of not setting the problem in
an evolutionary context, as our philosopher will do. The solution will consist
in considering the intelligence a a special function of the spirit,
essentially turned towards inert matter and in maintaining that the
intelligence and matter have been progressively adapting to each other to
stay, at last, in a common form. The origin of this common form is the a
priori for which we are looking. An a priori that can be engendered
and accordingly explicated. When Bergson succeeds in showing us how such an
a priori is constituted we shall comprehend whether or not he excels
Kant.

     For that we must return to the places where Bergson establishes the
conditions of external perception; that is, to the intuition of "homogeneous
space" as the condition of possibility for all representation that has the
attribute, extension. Undoubtedly he presents this space as similar to the
"a priori form" that Kant postulates. Yet, despite the similarity,
there is a notable difference from the Kantian a priori.

     According to Bergson, the ideal space, as an empty medium, is an act of
the spirit, in part suggested by the immediate apprehension of sensory
qualities and in part constructed by the spirit itself.

     "We estimate," he says, "furthermore that if the representation of an
     empty space is due to an effort of the intelligence, inversely, we ought
     to find there the same qualities that in reason differentiate two
     sensations by virtue of which they each occupy a determinate place in
     space" (DS).

     It is an a priori, goes the expression, linked to the data of
sensory perception and indissolubly mixed with it. We are not dealing with
anything innate, nor with a form that is given in the same act that it is
perceived. As it is presented in the Essay, homogeneous space is a
conception which the spirit gives itself to be able to think of qualitative
heterogeneity, but this constitutes the root of our experience and the space
is a sort of reaction of the spirit against that heterogeneity.

     In studying the relationship between the intelligence and instinct,
Bergson recalls to memory the classic distinction between matter and the form
of knowledge. Matter is the given, and the form? Bergson asks whether such a
form can be an object of knowledge and he gives the reply himself.

     "Yes, without a doubt, with the condition that this knowledge resembles
     less a thing possessed than a habit contracted; less a state than a
     direction; it will be, if one likes, a certain natural bias of the
     attention" (EC).

     Yet such a distinction has a very different meaning from that which
traditional philosophy, and above all Kant, gave to the terms. The material of
knowledge is, for our philosopher, what exists in itself, individual or
concrete, which can only be reached through intuition or immediate perception,
if you like. It is, then, not a simple phenomenon, nor a datum that
might come to be inserted in the frames of sensibility or the understanding to
be organized by them. We shall return to this in regard to perception.

     Form is a habit contracted more than something possessed, a fabric of
relations more thought than perceived, it being what the intelligence thinks
of things seen from the outside. But what Bergson wants to make manifest is
that such a form is not something given and "fallen from the sky" intelligence
itself, but instead signals "a direction of attention" and, analyzing that
direction, we shall be able to deduce the form of the intelligence, which is
to say that the form is neither irreducible nor inexplicable.

     Bergson indicates to us the possibility of knowing how the form of the
intelligence emerges, the a priori; and now, starting from the act,
what is the attention's direction. Since the form of the intelligence is due
in large part to the action that it is obliged to perform in the midst of
matter, and the action, according to Bergson, is based upon perception of the
real, so he can conclude that "knowledge ceases being a product of the
intelligence to become, in a certain sense, an integrative part of reality"
(EC).

     The Bergsonian a priori has, then, a double origin, subjective and
objective; and since, moreover, in Bergson there is no clear distinction
between the sensory and the intelligible, so if engendering of space is
achieved, at the same time the form of spirit that thinks the space is
engendered. The business attempted by the author of Creative Evolution
in its chapter III, when he embarks on a study of the genesis of the
intelligence and of matter has no other objective. And what remains clear is
his intention, from the Essay, passing through Matter and Memory,
to Creative Evolution that without a perception of real extension the
spirit could not form the idea of homogeneous space and accordingly could not
understand that by which matter is peculiar: its extension.

     Bergson refutes formalism, yet cannot say, therefore, that he eliminates
it from his philosophy, but more that he inaugurates a new formalism. We say
"new," because the form of the knowledge is not a pure a priori, a
product totally of the conscious subject, but instead a result, a product of
two different activities. Since "the intelligence and matter have progressively
adapted to each other so as to stop at a common form" (EC).

     We deal with a product only in part, because, although the form locates
itself at the confluence of two movements (that constitutive of materiality
and that of consciousness which becomes intelligence thinking matter). The
form, the homogeneous space is, so to speak, drawn onto matter like onto
spirit, before their reciprocal conjunction. That intelligence-matter
interaction allows the spirit, for one thing, to derive intelligence about
solids, and for another, that things acquire the geometric aspect under which
we perceive them.

     It is not easy to represent the "common form," the product and ideal term
of the mutual play between matter and spirit. Homogeneous space, which is
nothing but the symbolization of that form, seems to be something independent
of things and independent of the spirit, being at once internal to one and the
other.

     We could interpret that independence as the result of the fusion of the
intelligence and of the matter where, so to speak, spirit is drawn outside
itself towards matter and at the same time matter is taken outside outside of
itself towards thought. Form results from that, it being something inherent to
both realities, at once a sort of projection beyond one and the other,
something which seems to exist in itself.

     Despite its composition, Bergsonian form is so solidly "mixed" that it
becomes difficult to distinguish in it the part corresponding to matter and
that corresponding to spirit. Nevertheless, and despite its apparent simplicity
or independence, the reading of Bergson's texts leaves no doubt that his
intention is to present it, itself and its properties, as the result of joint
fusion between matter's extension and the spontaneous labor of the spirit.

     It is a spontaneity simultaneously analytic and synthetic; which is to
say, that in the same act in which extension is apprehended, homogeneous space
is given as the condition of possibility for all representation. One can say
that in this form things become fully intelligible and the intelligence
perfectly objective, at the same time it enables efficacy. In this manner
Bergson refuted Kantianism, showing how the a priori is a form that
shapes perception, yet is derived from the apprehension of external reality.

     We shall see how Bergson describes the perceptive process.

     3. PERCEPTION AS A PHYSIOLOGICAL PROCESS

     We said that Bergson starts from the conviction that men can obtain
knowledge adequate to the nature of the object, whether this be material or
spiritual. The analysis of perception will permit him to show how this
understanding of matter occurs. 

     He assumes from the tradition that knowledge begins with experience and
understands by experience the "direct contact of the spirit with the object"
(MM). So then, the real can take two forms: that of the tension pertaining to
duration and that to extension, the specific attribute of matter. Hence
knowledge as well displays a double direction. If one looks to duration they
obtain an intuitive understanding; if they stop on extension, intellectual
knowledge is indicated. Bergson will insist on the cognitive duality, without
forgetting the interrelation. Parallel to the affirmation that all knowledge
commences with experience, we can place that other which intones, "all
knowledge begins in perception," understanding by perception here
the direct contact of the spirit with material reality.

     In the introduction to Matter and Memory he warns us that he is
going to accept the common sense conception of matter itself; which is to say
that the object "exists in itself, such as we perceive it; it is an image, yet
an image that endures in itself" (MM). Since the intent of this work is to
determine the relationship between body and spirit, and perception situates
that on the level of corporeal activity, one will have to determine the
function of the subject and of the object on the physiological plane and later
explain how that activity is made conscious.

     Bergson tries to respond to the first question with his theory of pure
perception that he develops in chapter I of Matter and Memory. There he
defines it as "the act by which we locate by force in the thing... Our
perception, in a pure state, will then truly be part of the things" (MM). The
subject appears to simply be drawn to the object and to remain entrapped by
it. Reality is perceived there where it is and it will not do to speak of a
subject-object, duality, nor of an image-background one.
Bergson arrives at this conclusion starting from the conviction that the world
is over there and is such as it appears to be; and this because perception is
oriented with a view to action and not to knowledge.

     The universe is conceived as a set of images in reciprocal interaction;
the body occupies the center of the system through the capacity it has, as a
living being, of being influenced by the set and at once an influence upon it.
But the body is an organ of action, not of representation. It seems to select
those images that interest it and also its form of acting on them.

     So as to offer a selection, the subject has to be able to "distance
itself" from the image, in the sense of not being totally determined by it.
And there Bergson situates the function of the brain, which inserts an
interval between the datum and the response: "it is an instrument of delay and
screening" (MM). Now, although perception is born from sensation, it is not
identical with it. We could say that sensation is a real action upon the body;
and perception, a virtual action of the body.

     Somewhere in his work Bergson compares the perceptive process to the
phenomenon of the reflection of light. The body behaves like the medium that
bends the rays which send the image; it allows the useless ones through and
retains the rest. Yet, just as with the phenomenon of total reflection the
rays which collide with the body project around it a virtual image of the
luminous point, so the perception will come to be the virtual image of those
sensations proceeding from the image-object that the body has detained. The
density or permeability of the surroundings will equate, in perception, to the
interest that the images present for the subject.

     Now we can understand why Bergson says that we perceive reality there
where it is, but does not mean to identify the image and its representation,
except that it is perceived as exteriority and not within the subject. Nor is
it like obtaining a photograph of the object, of bestowing meaning on the
perceived world. The photograph is already given, lucid and transparent.
Missing, according to Bergson, is the screen to allow "displaying" the image.
The zone of indeterminacy of action that a living being provides fulfills this
function. So then, the screen reproduces, always displays, but does not add
anything new. On the contrary, what results is an image "isolated" from the
rest and which has recovered in it an aspect of interest, but an aspect from
the image itself.

     Who is the subject of this perception? Bergson situates it in the
hypothesis of a consciousness, adult and formed, yet totally absorbed in the
present, with no preoccupation but to mold itself to the exterior object. This
being, lacking memory, will be capable of obtaining from material reality an
immediate and instantaneous vision. And in this vein he can conclude:

     "The reality of thing will not now be constructed or reconstructed, but
     felt, living, penetrated, and the problem pending between realism and
     idealism, in place of perpetuating itself in metaphysical discussions
     will be resolved by the intuition" (MM).

     Nevertheless, our author is conscious of the vulnerability of his theory
of pure perception, as much from the object's viewpoint as from the subject's.
Thus the need for empirical verification. In his judgment only a study of
memory will decide if in itself the body is an organ of action, before one of
representation, and whether an image is a subjective construction or is
acquired by itself.

     He will have to, then, re-integrate memory with perception since pure
perception is a limit, whereas real or concrete perception is a complex
phenomenon, a synthesis of perception and memory. He then tries to clarify the
function of the body and of the spirit in the perceptive process. This study
will permit him, at the same time, to resolve the pending questions and to
show how body and spirit unite upon re-integrating memory into perception.

     For Bergson "all perception is already memory" (MM). Indeed in a single
act of perception there is a redoubling of it in perception and memory. The
first is attentive to matter; the second, to the form. This form is that which
will be evoked in the successive perceptions that enable and favor the
recognition of the object, also contributing to configuring it. It is also
memory because all perception fills a time, however instantaneous it is
assumed, and therefore it does not coincide with the real perceived thing
either. Memory is what synthesizes and gives unity to the successive moments
of perception.

     The past lives with us, constitutes us; but since the pure past is
sterile, it does not act. It is the present that solicits its concurrence
causing only those memories to appear which are tinged with current interest.
And there Bergson locates the function of the brain, screening the past; that
is why he defines it as "the organ of attention to life by thought" (ME).

     That all perception be memory does not mean for Bergson that the latter
should be something like the track which the first leaves, in passing,
vanishing into memory.

     "We claim," he says, "that the formation of the memory is never after the
     perception, it is contemporaneous. To the extent that the perception
     persists, the memory is outlined by its sides, like the shadow beside a
     body" (ME).

     If the memory is not a reproduction of the perception it is what comprises
a distinct experience, yet is outlined in the same act in which the perception
occurs. Bergson describes it as follows:

     "Every moment of our lives offers two aspects: the actual and the virtual,
     perception on one side and memory on the other. It splits at the same
     time it is composed. Or better, it consists of that same splitting
     because the present instant is always on the march, a fleeting limit
     between the immediate past that no longer is and the immediate future
     which still is not, reducing to a simple abstraction were it not
     precisely a moving mirror endlessly reflecting perception in memory" (ME).
 
     The experience of the object that is given in perception assumes two
different modalities; one material: perception, which translates into movement
via the body; and the other spiritual: memory, which thus passes to become
part of our past; of a past which is preserved entire, but in a virtual mode.
The actualization of the "virtualities" takes place through what Bergson calls
the "memory-image," something intermediate between the perception and the pure
memory; it receives the content from it and the perception causes it to
materialize in an image. We do not mean to say that the image must be
material, only that it takes its form from that. 

     From the present, then, comes the call to which the memory responds. This
present is comprised of a set of sensory-motor habits that are set in motion
by virtue of an adequate stimulus; yet those habits form part of the past. It
is what Bergson calls "mechanical memory." There is no radical difference
between these habits and adaptive perception, just that they are a
representation, yet subsidiary, so to speak, to an action. It is what acts to
form the representation and reflects the possible action of the body in the
universe surrounding it.

     The action is, then, what enables the union of the body and the spirit in
concrete perception, a synthesis of pure perception and memory. In it the past
is "embedded" in the present looking to the future, to be manifested in actions
through the body. We could say that memory preserves the form of the
perception without the matter. The subjective element is introduced in the
perceptive act. Up to this point it is as Bergson says:

     "It is indisputable that the source of intuition upon which our
     perception of the external world develops is a small thing compared to
     everything that our memory adds to it... It is necessary to take into
     account that perceiving ends by being nothing more than an occasion for
     remembering, where we practically measure the degree of utility by the
     degree of reality, in which we take great interest, by erecting this
     immediate intuition which coincides at root with reality itself, into
     simple signs of the real" (MM).

     Although "to perceive is only an occasion to remember," one must perceive
in order to remember. Certainly this character of solicitation that actual
perception has is what permits distinguishing it from pure memory. But not
only this. That impersonal subject, which coincides with the object of pure
perception, constitutes the source of the concrete perception and enables
return to the immediate. What is intuitively given to sensory apprehension is
the universe as a set of actions and reactions, which are pursued indefinitely.
Perception isolates, shortens, limits in light of its practical destination;
but it does not create.

     Bergson, as Jankélévitch indicates, is respectful of reality,
"placing it very high." The Bergsonian object is comparable to an omnipresent
light on itself and the place it illumines, without being able to speak of a
projection of the subject on the object's exterior. The subject will limit
itself to being taken by the object. Jankélévitch himself,
evoking Schelling, explains this peculiar relation as an attraction, magic or
occult power, that the object exercises over the subject. They operate "at a
distance." The object is over there and by a sorcery of thought it is, also,
in the spirit. What is given intuitively is reality such as common sense
understands it; and Bergson does not tire of repeating that perception does
not alter the given, although it impoverishes it. In Jankélévitch's
words, "we are not estranged from it, and accept it with confidence as if it
were mystical." It is repeating in another fashion the Bergsonian expression
that affirms, "reality is there, and it is as it appears to be" (MM).

     Mossé-Bastide attributes a physical reality to Bergsonian
perception, from the fact of it being located in the set of actions and
reactions that comprise the universe and where the body can be thought as
the center. It would stand to reason that if perception were only "the act by
which we impact the thing" and if its limitation were to result from the motor
mechanism or mechanical memory selected, by virtue of an acquired habit, that
which is of interest in the present action. Yet we recall that, for Bergson,
in the same perceptive act there is a redoubling of perception strictly
speaking in perception and memory, and with the memory being an act of spirit
that intervenes in all perception, Mossé-Bastide's accusation would
affect only the sensory-motor face of perception.

     Bergson's analysis does not have as its mission to elaborate a theory of
perception, but to show how body and spirit, being distinct realities,
nevertheless can enter into contact. And the meeting place is, precisely,
perception. Therefore the spirit must be put into that process. Its presence is
already affirmed by saying that all perception is memory. We shall see its
function in more detail, since it is that that enables the sensory to become
intelligible.

     4. PERCEPTION AS A PSYCHIC ACT

     Perception, we said, is the place of encounter of the interior world with
the exterior. For us to have an approximate idea of how the encounter occurs
and of the role of the spirit in that process, Bergson, as so many other times
throughout his discourse, reverts to an image.

     The image depicts a cone slid onto a plane. The cone is comprised of the
set of memory, the plane symbolizing an image of the universe; the image of
the body ceaselessly in contact with the plane of experience is centered at
the vertex of the cone. From the present, the  point where the cone touches
the plane, the invocation of the past emerges which orients actual experience
at the same time the latter is actualizes throughout the body, thus
transmitting heat and life to the memory. The present, then, is the point
where representation emerges. A perfectly adapted being if one possessing a
memory sufficiently ductile as to evoke only those memories that pertain to
the actual situation, obscuring the rest.

     The moving point is that which gives birth to the representation; that
is, the image transformed into an idea endows it with a double origin: the
external world, co-extensive with the present, and the "compressed" inner
world that embraces the entire past. Despite its double origin, representation
has a unity of goal and of structure. A unity of goal, because all
representation has for a mission to serve the action. It is not necessary to
insist on this, for Bergson repeats it incessantly. It follows that
representative thought will not be adequate for philosophical speculation.

     Though he does not insist on the unity of structure or the analogy between
a being and its representation, he does not forget to incorporate it. There is
a difference in degree and not in nature between being and being consciously
perceived; and this means as much for the apprehension of external reality as
for that of a psychological state. In the case of external perception, it has
already been sufficiently highlighted in treating the relationship between
reality and perception.

     Regarding the apprehension of a psychological state Bergson has to
evidence the reality of the spirit, which is, above all, memory, and like all
our past including in it the form of pure memory; though it may not be
actually present to consciousness. He will support the demonstration in his
conclusions concerning the relation of matter and perception.

     We shall not linger on that analysis which is directed at criticizing the
current psychologists of his era; yet the conclusions to which he arrives are
important for his philosophy. Following that reflection he arrives at the
problem of existence and establishes the conditions that implies, when it
refers to the objects of experience, the only ones which matter here:

     "Existence seems to imply two related conditions: first, its presentation
     to consciousness, secondly, the logical or causal connection of what is
     thus presented to what precedes or follows it... Yet these two conditions
     admit of degrees and one imagines that, both being necessary, they are
     unequally fulfilled" (MM).

     The proportions in which these two conditions are combined characterizes
the nature of a given reality. Thus, the causal connection is strict if it
deals with external objects, since those obey necessary laws; while with
psychological states the determination of the present by the past leaves a wide
margin of contingency. However, the representation of consciousness is
imperfect when it deals with material objects and perfect in the case of
internal states; for the actual psychological state delivers the totality of
its content to us in the same act by which we perceive it.

     Bergson is trying to show that, as much for outer reality as for inner,
the criterion of existence is the same. Yet at the same time he announces a
distinction that he will fully develop in Creative Evolution with his
philosophy of the two orders. The intelligence will triumph in the domain of
matter, because it is adapted to understand the causal connections reflecting
the phenomena occurring there; but it fails when it tries to  offer a science
of the spirit, in the same measure that it "escapes" the determinism of
matter.

     By establishing that criterion of existence, Bergson recovers the
unconscious for the domain of spirit; nested in it in the form of pure memory,
yet always disposed to cross the threshold of consciousness, and of
actualizing in perception. Consciousness moving from the sphere of action to
that of representation, that is, of the image in memory, will create
representations provided by the senses and by memory. (For the theme of the
unconscious in Bergson the article by DAYAN, M. can be consulted.)

     This way of conceiving mental life as a movement of the dynamic of the
spirit from the present toward the past, from the nascent action towards the
virtual representation, will also permit him to explain the laws of
association of the images and to establish the emergence of general ideas,
given that they are nothing but the habits which surmount the sphere of action
to that of thought.

     We return to the problems that Bergson had set: first, to mitigate
dualism. With his theory of pure perception and memory, he shows how the
extensive and the non-extensive, quantity and quality, are approximated. To
understand how this is made possible one has to make a turn; that is to say,
turn one's back on our usual experience, a function of practical action, and
contemplate true experience, which is born from contact of the spirit
with the object. From that vantage, in which we would see reality itself in an
immediate intuition, the universe would be offered as an indivisible continuity
of qualities succeeding each other uninterruptedly. One deals with a moving
continuity in which everything at once changes and remains.

     Our usual perception condenses the continuous flux of that moving
reality, translating permanence into things and change by states that succeed
states. But to proceed in this way assumes abstracting the sensory qualities
from heterogeneity to its actual extension, and at the same time provide a
medium to allow projecting the things and where succession of states can take
place. Such a medium is none other than homogeneous space. Upon projecting
that mobility on it it becomes infinitely divisible, quality is transformed
into quantity; but, says Bergson:

     "Divisibility of matter is relative to our action upon it, which derives
     the space that we spread out beneath it to cause it to fall under our
     dominion" (MM).

     Returning perception to its origin, extensive matter presents the
character of indivisibility that instantaneous perception has. Yet, when the
object is perceived in its exteriority, the spirit touches the matter in the
pure perception, the extensive and the non-extensive approximate, and enter
into contact. Furthermore, the spirit is not a mere idea nor a set of ideas,
but instead there are gradual steps from the idea to the image and from this to
the sensation. To the extent that the idea is actualized in perception, the
spirit apprehends it in its indivisible extension, yet without identifying
with it. The spirit, says Bergson:

     "It is distinguished then by being, entirely, memory; that is, a synthesis
     of the past and the present with a view toward the future, to be
     manifested in actions which are the raison d'être of its union
     with the body. We had, then, reason to say, at the start of this book,
     that the difference should not be seen as a function of space but of time"
     (MM).

     The error of dualism resides, for our author, in locating matter in space
and the spirit elsewhere. From there there is no way to comprehend how such
opposed realities can interrelate, without reverting to a psychical-physical
parallelism or a pre-established harmony.

     On the contrary, if we begin with pure perception, the lowest grade of
spirit, this forms part of matter, as Bergson does not tire of repeating
throughout his second work. And he goes even further; he assumes a certain
presentiment of memory in the material, it being a past that is prolonged into
the present; but, on being subjected to necessity, the only thing it can do is
repeat itself indefinitely. Its past is not given and from that its present
can be deduced.

     There is a sort of fatal destiny in matter that obliges it to succeed
itself indefinitely. There is the intelligence's function, none other than to
seek the laws that rule succession in matter, so as to be able to operate on
it, that is, construct the science. Put otherwise, the uniting link between
the soul and the body must be sought as a function of duration and not of
space. For Bergson, memory is more a property of duration than a faculty of
spirit; he makes it coextensive with consciousness. This then allows
establishing the correspondence: a type of consciousness, a type of memory, a
type of future.

     In indicating two sorts of memory: the mechanical, comprised of the set
of corporeal habits and pure memory, which form part of the spirit, that also
gather and are created in actual perception, that moment can be interpreted as
the place of fusion of the past with the present, the encounter of the inner
world with the external, of the extensive with the non-extensive, of quantity
with quality; in a word, the conjuncture of matter's necessity with the
freedom of the spirit. (CAPEK, M: See in his explanation of the relationship
between time and space or duration and extension the most difficult part of
Bergsonism.)

     While the spirit envelops the present in the past, creating something new
every instant, matter is limited to repeating the past. Now the statement can
be understood: "It is necessary for the past to be represented by matter and
imagined by the spirit" (MM).

     Bergson is in agreement with idealism, in recognizing the lineage between
reality and consciousness. Yet since the image of the material world overflows
perception and, furthermore, is not located at the origin, it cannot be
explained how our knowledge limits itself, without knowing the true reality of
the material. It follows that, for the idealists, knowledge will be subjective
or relative. Whereas Bergson believes he has given the authentic origin of the
perceptual process; which allows him to conclude:

     (Our knowledge) "is not subjective, is in the things more than in myself,
     nor relative, because between the phenomenon and the thing there is no
     relation of appearance and reality, but simply one of the part to the
     whole" (MM).

     His posture is nearer to realism without identifying with it. He accuses
it of interpreting perception like a photograph of reality and space like a
real medium in which things are suspended. Yet, for Bergson, space is not even
an ideal medium in which sensory diversity is coordinated. It follows
the perception and has a practical, not a speculative interest. It is like a
mesh that lies beneath real continuity, to take ownership of it and decompose
it in the direction of our necessities. Not having seen the true origin of
space not only vitiates the theory of knowledge, but also the metaphysics. It
is the veil of Maya which hides the true reality of things.

     We already know that, for Bergson, consciousness perceives reality as a
function of usefulness and not as what things may be in themselves. It deals
with the operationally real and not with pure contemplation. It is the real
organized according to a linear succession of before, of now and afterwards.
The operationally real is an instrument of practical intelligence that
demonstrates its direction in the organization of time, in conjunction with a
mechanical causality that acts through laws to determine some phenomena by
others. Yet Bergson goes beyond the operational. In the same act of perception
we apprehend something that surpasses perception itself, as much in the
direction of spirit as in that of matter. "The pure intuition, external or
internal, is one of indivisible continuity" (MM).

     All Bergson's analysis has as a goal to prepare the spirit to access
intuition that, to occur, will be nothing but an effort of reflection upon the
data of perception. It is a return to common sense, but common sense purified
and purged by criticism. There the immediate is revealed to us, understanding
by that what is prior to all analysis or conceptual apprehension. The
immediate, then, is not a point of departure but the terminus of disinterested
speculation.

     The union between body and spirit must be sought as a function of time,
not of space, Bergson told us, and the body and spirit express themselves with
different rhythms of duration and this is the explanatory principle of all
reality. Where then, is Bergsonian dualism left? In his explanation of matter,
is not it a spiritualization of this to suppose it endowed with unconscious
consciousness?

     If duration is a property of every being, which by itself will group some
beings with others, it will be a trait of similarity among them. That implies
a metaphysical monism and then the Bergsonian investigation seems superfluous
of how body and spirit are united, or whether they express rhythms of such
different durations as to make them different by nature, and Bergson maintains
that among them there is an opposition by nature, while it seems excessive to
translate a trait of resemblance into the explanatory principle of union and
one should seek the matter-spirit interaction by another route than that
essayed by Bergson.

     He does not claim to solve all the difficulties that dualism has set. In
Matter and Memory he is concerned to show that, despite spirit and
matter being independent realities, they exist or can exist in themselves;
nevertheless, he sees them unite vitally. Therefore he analyzes the
psychological functions of the soul that make the union possible.

     Bergson makes manifest the movement of consciousness, following the
effort it makes to unite what in it proceeds from the soul and what proceeds
from the body, perception and memory. He tries to contemplate how
consciousness moves through the body and the spirit so as to select, from the
great reserve of representations of both, those of interest to the needs of
the moment.

     Yet since "to move, for consciousness, is to think," the designated route
in the midst of representations will have as one term, "new" representations
that will be intelligent syntheses of previous representations. Being the work
of spirit, these syntheses cannot be more than ideas or relations between
ideas. So then Bergson feels obliged to launch a study of the general idea
which, for its part as we said, will give birth to a positive theory of the
concept and that will be a new reading of the relationship between matter and
memory. A lesson that will provide evidence of how the sensory becomes
intelligible.

     5. GENESIS OF THE CONCEPT: GENERAL IDEAS

       Bergson presents the analysis of general ideas to us through a
meticulous study of the relations of perception and of habit with memory. He
first touches on their opposition in nature and later their conjunction, in
fact, in intellectual life. Pursuing these analyses, he discovers the
psychological movement that originates and gives meaning to general ideas.

     In reality, we said, it deals with a new reading of the relationship
between body and spirit. Opposing the self-representations of the one and the
other, he will show their conjunction. Ultimately, we are involved in an
analysis of the one-many, similar-diverse opposition; and the description of
intellectual life will bring to light the always problematic synthesis of the
opposites.

     From the perspective of a theory of knowledge, the problem center on
specifying how, starting from the diversity apprehended by the senses or by
consciousness, a general idea, a concept, can form. If the problem is old,
nevertheless the solution provided by Bergson does not lack in originality and
interest.

     To respond to the question of general ideas, it suffices for Bergson to
return his glance to the results obtained in the study of the opposition
between the two types of memory and in the relation of the present to the
past. There the idea will be seen as it emerges naturally from the reflection
of consciousness upon its own movement.

     "This idea of generality was not, in its origin, more than our
     consciousness of an identity of attitude in a diversity of situations; it
     was the habit itself rising from the sphere of movements toward the sphere
     of thought" (MM).

     It suffices, then, to consciously apprehend the different movements that
constitute the "ground" of the mental activity to also comprehend the
different principles from which the idea originates, without reverting to a
special faculty that creates or forms it in the spirit.

     Bergson explains the general idea as a changing synthesis which the
spirit must deploy between practical activity and pure memory. For that he
posits a double hypothesis: that of a being who "will dream his existence";
that is, who will live submerged in the past, this preserving the entire set
of memories in their originality and singularity. Yet similarly the past will
be useless to them. And that of a being absorbed in the present,
"automatically conscious," will be limited to following her habits, blind to
what in each situation is unique beyond its sensations. But Bergson continues:

     "The first will never leave the particular and even the individual.
     Leaving each image in space, it would see where it differs from the others
     and not where it resembles them. The other, always impelled by habit, will
     on the contrary, not discern in a situation more than the side where it
     practically resembles previous situations. Doubtless incapable of thinking
     the universal, given that the general idea assumes at least the virtual
     representation of a multitude of recalled images, evolving, however, into
     the universal, habit being to action what generality is to thought. But
     these two extreme states, that of a fully contemplative memory which in
     its vision does not apprehend more than the singular, the other a fully
     motivating memory which imprints its action with the mark of generality,
     not isolated and not fully manifested in more than exceptional cases. In
     normal life they intimately penetrate, thus abandoning, each to the other,
     some of their original purity. The first can be called the memory of
     differences, the second the perception of similarities; in the confluence
     of the two currents the general idea appears" (MM).

     The text, magisterial in expressive force, belongs among those where the
philosopher believes that stating the problem well is already to resolve it.
And thus for him it suffices to intelligently read what reflection upon
memory, perception and their relation have shown to, at the same time as
setting the problem, discern the response.

     We will refer, then, general ideas to perception and to memory, which is
no more than to repeat the old adage that goes, "there is nothing in the
intellect that was not first in the senses"; and by that that treating general
ideas it is necessary to abstain from generalizing, he will limit his study,
in Memory and Matter, to those that have as origin the perception of
similarities.

     To clarify his positions, Bergson follows a typical procedure in his
philosophic discourse. He tries to analyze the opposing interpretations of the
process (in this case nominalism and conceptualism) and to show the common
error into which they fall. Both seem to gravitate around the following circle:

     "To generalize it is necessary to first abstract, but to abstract
     usefully it is necessary to already know how to generalize" (MM).

     Bergson's effort is centered on showing how to break the circle or,
better, show it non-existence. We set aside interpretation of those extreme
currents to focus now on the analysis he performs of acts. His reflection will
lead him to discover the artificiality of the circle and, at the same time,
present the true origin of general ideas.

     If one is going to treat of ideas that have their origin in the perception
of similarities, it seems logical that the resemblance be the "primitive
datum" from which the process begins. To give a more empirical tone to his
study, he starts this with a reflection on perception in the animal kingdom:

     "It is the plant in general that attracts the herbivore, the color and
     the smell of the plant felt like forces being the only immediate
     data of their external perception" (MM)

     We underline the term "force" because we believe it make comprehensible
the Bergsonian posture with regard to what, improperly, we could call
"abstraction from similarities." Indeed it is not a force of nature that
"abstracts" the similar forgetting the difference, but instead that the
resemblance acts objectively like a sort of magnet which traps the
subject and provides it within.

     "It follows a purely physical law which asks that the same effects of the
     set follow from the same profound causes" (MM).

     Bergson continues making explicit how this physical law acts not only on
the organic matter but, from plant to mankind, follows the same process. The
organism apprehends, from the environment that surrounds it, that which offers
some interest to it, rejecting the rest, that is it captures the similar
aspect that objects offer in certain different ways. And he concludes:

     "This identity of superficially different reactions and actions is the
     germ which the human consciousness develops into the general idea" (MM).

     It seems, then, that one commences with a perception of the resemblance;
this is the datum from which we start. It is something objective, which acts
from outside, and perception is justly oriented towards it due to the
utilitarian character that Bergson awards that process.

     By proceeding in this way, Bergson leads reflection to the breaking of
the circle. The similarity from which the spirit begins is a lived
resemblance, felt, experienced or, if you like, automatically adopted by the
body. Whereas the similarity to which we return, when consciously generalized,
is an "intelligently thought or perceived" resemblance. How to pass from felt,
lived similitude to the general idea? In other words, how from common
qualities in sensation, spontaneously apprehended, does it pass to
representation of the idea of gender, species?

     Bergson delights in description of the facts that permit him to show how,
by itself, perception goes directly to similitude, with the goal of giving an
objective basis to the concept. It is right to insist on this, for the
philosopher is clear in this respect. But now it is not so much that which
refers to what, improperly, we could call a "step" from sensory to intellectual
knowledge or, in terms more in accord with his thought, from the felt to the
thought. We say "improperly" because here one cannot, with rigor, speak of a
"step," but of a movement from the fount of apprehension to that of
representation and inversely, or from that felt by the body to that imagined by
the spirit. A movement which in its own trajectory gives birth to the general
idea.

     We return to a passage which can seem paradoxical given that expressed up
to now:

     "A priori, in effect, it seems as if the clear distinction of individual
     objects were a luxury of perception, the same as the clear representation
     of general ideas being a refinement of the intelligence" (MM).

     Bergson is not going to reject that a priori; he will try to explicate
its meaning. That confused sentiment or intermediate knowledge located at the
beginning of the process, equally distant from distinct perception and a clear
idea, is that which according to Bergson:

     "It engenders one and the other by means of dissociation. Reflective
     analysis distills a general idea and discriminative memory solidifies it
     in perception of the individual" (MM).

     If perception goes right to resemblance and memory is constituted starting
with images, how can the previous conclusion be drawn? Yet the contradiction
is only apparent; that perception is oriented to similarity does not mean that
it totally dispenses with individual connotations. The variability is felt in
the perception, but additionally, memory intervenes. What Bergson has said
concerning conservation of the memory confirms that the clear representation
of individuals is due to it, that is, of capturing the difference.

     Overall, Bergson passes too quickly past apprehension of the individual,
to linger more on the apprehension of similarities, since his proposal is to
show how memory, slipping from memory to the resemblances perceived in
perception, assists the intelligence to form a general idea where the
similarity is no longer felt, but instead is the common trait of a set of
nevertheless different objects.

     How to pass from that lived as resemblance to the idea of similarity? For
Bergson, we repeat, the similarity is given in nature; it is objective and
acts as a sort of force. The surroundings themselves invite the individual to
perceive them as similar due to perception's utilitarian reason. There is no
need to abstract; the organism captures what is of interest to its action,
because the rest holds no relationship to it and it translates their capture
into identical reactions throughout the body. That is the germ which
consciousness develops into the general idea. Bergson says it exhaustively:

     "The body extracts from the material or moral medium that which has
     influenced it, that which interests it; it is this identity of reaction to
     different actions impinging on it, where the similarity is introduced or
     made to emerge" (PM).

     The apprehension of similarity has, then, its origin or principle in the
identical repetition of the same movements, emerging in part from the object
and in part from the subject. A useful face is presented and the body
represents it automatically.

     This mechanism is identical to that which Bergson has already described
in speaking of perception. As then, so now, the intelligence can incorporate
it, and so find itself in the presence of qualities, features that "follow
from a work of generalization." In other words, before all philosophical
question concerning the objectivity or basis in re of the similarity,
the intelligence is invited to think of the sensory objects as if these were
already really similar. So then, as Canguillen indicates, in Bergson
resemblances are inherent in nature; it presents essential similitudes.

     As much in Matter and Memory as in the Introduction to
Metaphysics where he returns to confront the problem of the idea from a
more metaphysical perspective, he insists on this invitation to generalize
that nature gives to the understanding. For it, whether vital or inert,
carries that tendency in itself. Such that life acts "as if it had general
ideas." It suffices to observe, for example, the classes and species into which
the individuals seem to be classified. For the tendency to engender the idea
it is necessary only that that same tendency slides from the action towards
thought.

     Bergson wants to make manifest that intellectual generalization, the
universal logic by which distinct images are grouped under the same
representation, has been presided over and prepared by a practical
generalization. The understanding only has to follow what attention to the
practical mechanism has taught it. It seems that the universal results from a
comparison between representations that include in a single act a multitude of
different representations of which it retains those in common. This is to say
that, in the domain of spirit, a generalization operation also occurs which
causes the confusedly perceived resemblances to detach from their
particularities and thus acquire unlimited extension.

     Memory, preserving the multitude of representations, in part different
and in part similar, makes the intellectual generalization possible. The
spirit only has to insert itself between those representations to form the
idea.

     In this fashion Bergson, without reverting to an agent intellect that
would abstract the sensory qualities making them intelligible, explains the
step from felt resemblance to that thought. The common, captured now in
perception, transforms into the universal through the same mechanism. And once
the intelligence apprehends it, it then possesses the idea of the idea.

     We shall not remain on the details of this mechanism. We see how he
summarizes it:

     "Yet from the classes thus mechanically outlined by habit, we have passed,
     through an effort of reflection performed upon this same operation, to
     the general idea of class and, once this idea is constituted, we have
     constructed, this time voluntarily, a limited number of general notions.
     It is unnecessary here to follow the intelligence in detail with this
     construction. We shall limit ourselves to saying that the understanding,
     imitating the work of nature, has it too developed motor apparatuses, this
     time artificial, to make them respond with a limited number to an
     unlimited multitude of individual objects; the set of these mechanisms is
     the articulated word" (MM).

     This is to say that language favors generalization and the idea becomes
objective, acquires consistency, in it. The word is the mechanism created by
the understanding to respond in an almost automatic way to the intellectual
apprehension of similarity.

     Yet before this artificial mechanism makes it appearance, the resemblance
is drawn in perception and the abstract universal has dealt with it,
comprising its material. Let us go further; the universal is the effect of an
operation that participates, at the same time, in generalization and in
abstraction and which is located on the corporeal level. Because the objects
would not generate the same reaction in the body if they did not have some
common property; and in turn, the body would not respond in an identical mode
to different situations if it did not have organs that permit it to capture
them.

     Bergson establishes a strong parallel between the activity of the organs
in relation to perceptible environment and the generalizing activity of the
thinking subject in relation to representations. In both cases, the subject
arranges to obtain that of interest to its activity. He wants to make clear
that that generalization activity rests on another more biological, and even
physical, than psychological. An operation that puts the subject into relation
with her environment. He awards to the word a value in the constitution of the
idea. And he puts the propensity to speak, on the intellectual plane, parallel
to the role played by the motor mechanisms in relation to perception. By
virtue of the similar relation that objects with the same motor mechanism
have, they are perceived as similar. The word provides a sort of schema or
frame in which the particular representations of the memory unite and form the
content of a general idea. Without the word, "the idea would evaporate into
memory" (MM). The term gives the idea consistency, materializes it and serves
as its expression.

     Despite its apparent clarity and simplicity, the Bergsonian exposition is
not exempt from difficulties. It seems that the word emerges from a double
internal movement of analysis, which brings out resemblances, and of synthesis
of the latter. It is the motor mechanism that the intelligence mounts at the
moment when it comprehends the body's habits and which causes the same tendency
to observe to born and to form a mechanism by which its observations can be
summarized; without this mechanism that brings out the resemblances within the
individual representations and which keep these similarities united, the
intelligence could not endow its ideas with extension nor comprehension.

     In Aristotelian-Thomistic thought, which conceived the bodily entity as a
composite of two principles, matter and form, to know intellectually would
consist in separating, abstracting the form from the matter. To cause the
universal given potentially in sensory apprehension to transform into the
universal in actuality thanks to the apprehension of it on the part of the
understanding; this was the task of the agent intellect.

     As we indicated with regard to perception, Bergson does not need to
revert to a special faculty that transforms the sensory into the intelligent,
since that phenomenon occurs within the same process itself, by the mere fact
of the image given in perception passing to representation itself in memory.
He does not try to separate the form from the matter, but to retain that of
interest to the action. In a spontaneous manner the individual isolates what
is convenient to its activity, in a psychological operation that can have
metaphysical scope.

     If from the domain of action we pass to that of representation, the
intelligence follows the same impulse as that where perception of similarities
ruled the organism, with the sole difference that it can understand what the
body does and limit its procedure. And, going from representation in
representation and by virtue of observation and comparing those
representations, the resemblance is caused to emerge, thus originating the
general idea. And at the same time, thanks to reflection, that apprehending
mechanism can understand the idea of the idea. In this way, we already have an
intelligence enabled to form ideas as it pleases.

     Maritain claims that the Bergsonian conception of the idea is nominalism
and a radical sensualism. The universal is reduced to a motor habit, not being
either in things nor in the spirit. Certainly, Bergson underlines and insists
on the role of the body as educator of the spirit, causing intellectual habits
to be born in it that imitate the motor habits, which elsewhere is consistent
with his evolutionary posture. Yet from that one cannot draw Maritain's
conclusion. The universal is in things and in the spirit, and observing how
that universal already feels within perception, one grasps the habit of
abstracting the similarity.

     All living beings, including the entire universe, generalize in the same
measure that they are endowed with a certain autonomous activity by which they
maintain a relationship with the surroundings. Physics, chemistry,
biology are a patent illustration of this universal fact which, in turn, is
the condition of all science, and which underlies its objectivity. If human
understanding lacked the capacity of finding some resemblance among phenomena,
there would be no possible explanation for the existence of the concept of
class, nor of the concept in general.

     Bergson gives the metaphysical explication of this fact in the
Introduction to Metaphysics, where he speaks of "generalities inherent
in reality itself" (PM). And to give generality an in re foundation he
marries it to conceptualism. Yet we deal with an approximation; nature
generalizes because it imposes its own structure, which science itself
corroborates; so then, generalization for Bergson is the fruit of a dynamic
interaction, by its own internal law, not the work of a thought. It is the
harmony reflected in a creative and unpredictable evolution. Bergson presents
this act in detail in his philosophy of the two orders. Nevertheless, he
thinks that all fixed forms are less than the moving individualities from
which the resemblances have been extracted, via the phantasm of space and in
view of a practical destiny, which obliges the intelligence to apprehend the
similarity already abstractly given in perception and to form its own concepts
to manipulate the medium.

     For Bergson, there is nothing in reality that truly corresponds to our
abstract forms and, if the understanding were to apprehend the individual
intuitively, it would have no reason whatever to divide it, split it or
analyze it into concepts. The critique of conceptual thought starts from its
own form of conceiving reality and from its functional interpretation of
perception.

     Whatever may be his manner of explaining it, Bergson managed to combine
the realism of the idea with his empiricism and evolutionism. (When we call
Bergson's position empiricist we wish to underline his tendency to emphasize
the individual and to denounce the abstract forms for expressing it.) And one
need not seek too many theoretical reasons for this combination. The
philosopher, empiricist by education or by personal sympathy, evolutionist by
intuition, feels obliged to profess realism through fidelity to the facts; and
we repeat, for him similarity in nature is a fact.

     At a conference under the title, "La perception de changement,"
Bergson reminds us that our faculties are limited and also, therefore,
perception, and will be as much in the direction of spirit as of matter. Yet
the spirit does not give up and will try to fill those perceptive lacunae with
other of its operations: conceiving and reasoning. Functions realized by the
intelligence in the absence of the perception, since "to conceive," he says,
"is to accept the lesser when it is not given to perceive, where reasoning is
done to fill the gaps in perception" (PM). Science and philosophy are born
from this insufficiency.

     The process of formation of the general idea gave a glimpse that the
operations which give birth to it are not possible without awarding the
capacity of relating to the intelligence. It retains the common in a multitude
of representations and synthesizes them in one concept, that later can be
applied to a great number of objects, now that its elaboration dispenses with
individual concretions. It follows that the concept should be a globalization
of experience. The intelligence, in forming them, possesses the material for
pursuing its task of comparison, deduction, and definitely reasoning.

     As a servant of life, it models itself to preside over and illuminate the
actions that ensure the insertion of the individual in the surroundings. This
implies that it, on the one hand gives the scheme of action and, on the other,
participates somehow in the result. In the Bergsonian philosophy, this means
subtracting the reality of true duration and thinking of it beneath the aspect
of fixity.

     Several times we have alluded that the intelligence establishes
relations of comparison. And we must assume in the Bergsonian intelligence
that ability to establish them; generalize all you wish, but that provides the
framework where others more concrete are outlined, an ability which Bergson
considers innate. Without this skill the intelligence would be circumscribed
by the timely occurrence of perceptions. If your objective is to know
relations, one needs, to apprehend them and establish them, to distance
themselves from reality and consider it in terms that permit referring
equivalent to equivalent, the similar to the similar, the identical to the
identical, the premises to the conclusions. Yet because of this, the
individuality escapes from the concrete being.

     The intelligence, turned towards matter, takes pleasure in it, elaborates
concepts, calculates, traces its line of action, without clearly representing
anything but the discontinuous; the mobility, the flux escapes it. Mobility
carries with it the novelty of variation, attributes of the occurrence which
the understanding forgets, because repetition interests it. It is justified to
so consider things; it itself is an abstraction and it is that to the kingdom
of monotony.

     As Bergson defines it, the normal faculty of knowing is "essentially a
power of extracting what there is of stability and regularity amidst the flux
of the real" (PM); the result, then, cannot be more than fixed, stable
concepts. With such instruments, to attempt to reach radical novelty and
absolute unpredictability is a useless task. The intelligence, if a prisoner
of its desire to comprehend everything, returns towards the spirit to give us
an understanding of the latter, the displacements and illusions it engenders
are a cause of the errors and disputes on which philosophy has spent itself.
Life and the spirit, pure mobility, continuous duration, cannot enter the
frames of the intelligence, without losing their individual character and
resolving into extension, into concepts that now hold none of what they wanted
to express.

     Shall we decree that the intelligence is an error of nature? Bergson
himself will indicate to us the place it occupies:

     "The intelligence exists in truth insofar as it refers to it, friend of
     regularity and of stability, of what is stable and regular in the real,
     of materiality. It then touches one of the sides of the absolute... The
     error begins when the intelligence tries to think of one of the aspects
     as it thought of the other and to be employed in a use for which it was
     not made" (PM).

     Here we have its proper jurisdiction outlined. Conservative, upon
confronting evolution, it explains it as a rearrangement of parts. The new, if
it occurs, is considered explained by a distinct combination of the same
elements. It is like a fan of the puzzles that amuse by constructing different
figures with the same pieces. The intelligence needs from the pieces, for this
combination, only that they derive from the senses or from consciousness.

     It is a fundamentally pragmatic intelligence which directs conduct; yet
its action is not spontaneous, is born from a lack and must satisfy the needs
which engendered it, losing itself in the material. It is an "intelligent"
alienation, sinking into the matter, adopting its rhythm, it seeks the mode of
filling its needy emptiness, discerning the most useful means. This is the
principle that rules all its activity; but the activity is shaped in the
direction of calculation and foresight. Overall, and despite this schematism
to which Bergson reduces intellectual knowledge, we now know that the
intelligence can access material reality in that which is distinctive about
it, its extension. As J. Levesque says it possesses the power of duplicating
the perceived world, that is, of representing it in space.

     Yet in this act, the intelligence does not totally follow the indications
of the real, except by representing evolution as "adjustment of the parts"
(PM). In it everything is given, while for Bergson reality is matter or spirit:

     "It appears to us as a perpetual becoming. It is made or is unmade, yet
     it never is a fact. We have here what the intelligence and the senses
     would show us if they obtained and immediate and disinterested
     representation from it" (EC).

     And it is from this peculiar notion of reality that we must understand
Bergson's attack on intellectual thought. We could say that to know
intellectually is to abstract the form of the matter. But the notion of form
is different in Bergson from conceptualism. For Bergson as well the form is
the "eidos" of the thing, but the external aspect; it reflects what is fixed,
reiterative and monotonous, in it. This is what the intelligence apprehends:
the common; never the true essence of reality, which is being-enduring. Whereas
for conceptualism the intelligence also abstracts the form, yet the form is
what causes the thing to be the thing it is, that is, the essence and, as such
essence, it is the permanent, the immutable in the entity.

     Bergson criticizes this presumptuous conception of the intelligence, to
make manifest it is not the only valid form of knowledge, nor even the most
elevated. One would have to, then, investigate other forms of knowledge giving
reason to being as duration. An investigation that will shed new light on the
problem of conceptual knowledge.

     6. INTELLIGENCE AND INTUITION

     In the essay, "Introduction to Metaphysics," which was published
in 1903 immediately before Creative Evolution, the term "intuition" can
already be considered a "technical" notion of Bergsonian philosophy. There he
presents it to us counterpoised to intellectual knowledge; he explains it as
"the sympathy by which we are transported to the interior of the object
so as to coincide with what is unique in it and hence inexpressible" (PM).

     Our intention is not so much to perform a study of the peculiarity of
intuitive knowledge, much studied elsewhere already by the commentators, but
instead to elucidate whether it is knowledge opposed to the intellectual, or
rather whether it could better be considered an "enlargement" of it. Before
pausing on this rugged problem which constitutes, as A. Vasallo notes, the
true crux of the commentaries, we shall briefly linger on the peculiarity of
intuition, precisely to specify with more exactness the opposition or
complementarity of both modes of knowledge.

     Intuition is a form of knowledge and, at the same time, a method that
allows attaining it. Following Husson we can distinguish a confused
intuition, from which the investigation begins, and a distinct
intuition, which appears to be the terminus of the search. The method is
nothing but the road that must be traversed to pass from the first to the
second.

     Strictly speaking the intuition is an act of the spirit that Bergson
designates with the terms, "sympathy," "penetration," "coincidence," "vision,"
"contact." The difference in names does not come without a difference in
meanings. And Bergson says:

     "Yet there is one fundamental: to think intuitively is to think in
     duration. Intuition signifies first, consciousness, yet immediate
     consciousness, vision barely distinguishable from the seen object,
     knowledge which is contact and even merger" (PM).

     Its proper domain is that of the spirit, yet it can also access that
duration in material things, insofar as they participate in the spirit, to the
degree that they also endure.

     In a clarificatory note, added after first publication of the
Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson confesses his indecision at the
moment of giving a name to a similar cognitive function. Overall, the intimate
knowledge of the spirit by the spirit continues being the fundamental meaning;
and the secondary, knowledge of the essence existing in the material. He tells
us as much:

     "We have long doubted using the term intuition; and when we decided, we
     have designated the metaphysical function of thought with that word,
     principally the intimate knowledge of spirit by spirit, subsidiarily the
     knowledge, by the spirit, of what is essential in matter" (PM).

     In a letter to the priest Gorce, Bergson resumes expressing his
vacillation when he tries to name the function of the spirit which we are
intent on characterizing. He chose it, he says, for convenience and clarity;
but he might have given the word intuition two meanings between which the
reader would have had to choose every time she encountered it in the
philosophic discourse.

     The itinerary that conducts Bergson to the discovery or intuition of
duration is the reflection upon consciousness itself. And so that the
apprehension of the spirit by the spirit does not reduce to a contemplation of
itself, he has to show the possibility of transcending that intuition. Again
philosophy returns to psychology. And in it finds, in the unreflective
sympathies and antipathies, a possible penetration of human consciousnesses.
They are what Bergson calls "phenomena of psychological osmosis" and they show
that possibility of penetration; and furthermore, if life is evolution and
duration is at attribute of it, it can be so intuited and a metaphysics of
life in general elaborated.

     Bergson wants to leave nothing outside of intuition; it is not enough to
have shown that the living being can be apprehended as participating in the
same vital impulse that animates consciousness itself. What happens with the
material universe? And he answers:

     "In its entirety, it awaits our duration. And it refers to the spirit by
     its origins or by its function, as much in one case as in the other,
     revealing to intuition all that it contains of change and real
     movements... The intuition is what accesses the spirit, duration, pure
     change. Its proper domain is the spirit and it wanted to apprehend in
     things, even in matter, their participation in spirituality" (PM).

     Bergson shows us the road towards obtaining an immediate vision of
reality and entering into contact with it. He tries to return perception to
its origins. "Thus reality will not be reconstructed, but lived, touched"
(MM). Yet the return will not be as simple as it might seem. "We repudiate
ease," says Bergson (PM). The object is attained through an effort of the
spirit which analyzes the data of common perception to find its root beneath
that which utilitarian knowledge may have added. (Bergson constantly insists
on this method in the Essay and practices it. A summary of it can be
found in the conclusion of that work.) And all that labor, which we might call
"purification," does not suffice. The facts must be minutely analyzed, the
doctrines debated, so they will appear in their original purity.

     This philosophical method, Husson says, is founded on confused intuitions,
natural to our spirit and it aspires to move to distinct intuitions. A method
that exercises the same functions of vulgar and of scientific knowledge, only
that it has another use and envisions another end for them. It deals with a
speculative, not a practical, use, oriented to contemplation and not utility.
Such a method requires "breaking the frames" that the understanding has
constructed in light of its practical and social destiny and having direct
experience of the object by the subject.

     Victor Delbos accurately defines the Bergsonian procedure as analysis
against the analysis; which is to say, an analysis that tends to make the
illusions disappear which engender an analysis turned towards the useful. Here
is how this V. Delbos relates Bergson's "Obsession": "In effect it is Mr.
Bergson's first and insistent preoccupation to bring the reader to consider
that reality contains nothing mysterious and that to access it, it is not
necessary to exercise transcendent faculties; reality does not have to be
guessed or constructed, it only has to be stated."

     Such a statement would not occur without an inversion of the "natural"
direction of the intelligence; Bergson never tires of repeating it; "tension,
concentration, such are the words by which we characterize a method that
requires of the spirit, for every new problem, a new effort" (PM). The method,
then, is the road that takes us from the confused intuition to the distinct
intuition. From the confused intuition vulgar understanding as well as
scientific and philosophy itself arise, if indeed the procedure and the result
are different.

     And here we enter into the fundamental meaning of the opposition between
intuition and the intelligence. They are two different ways of knowing, or
better, two methods which in the Introduction to Metaphysics receive
respectively the names of "analysis" and "intuition." Bergson describes them:

     "The first implies that it circles around the thing, the second that it
     enters into it. The first depends upon the point of view where one is
     located and on the symbols used to express it. The second does not depend
     and any viewpoint and is not expressed by any symbol. Of the first
     knowledge it will be said that it stops in the relative, of the second,
     there where it is possible, that it reaches the absolute" (PM).

     In speaking of names for the intelligence, we took note of the successive
qualifications that this notion acquires in Bergson's philosophy. We indicated,
also, his distinction concerning instinct and intuition. A distinction parallel
to the establishment of two intellectual functions: the intelligence is "the
attention which the spirit pays to matter"; intuition "represents the attention
that the spirit pays to itself" (PM This intelligence is that which in the
Introduction to Metaphysics receives the name of "analysis"). And
Bergson asks, how can the spirit, when it returns to itself, keep calling
itself intelligence? The necessity follows of arbitrating a different name for
each function. Yet, a little later, Bergson no longer speaks of function but
instead of "faculty." "Beside the intelligence," he says, "we show the
existence of another faculty, intuition" (PM).

     There is an opposition between intuition and the intelligence on the
plane of knowledge that is a reflection of the opposition, on the vital level,
between instinct and intelligence. An opposition that in Creative
Evolution he has made manifest from the angle of vital activity. And which
we already underlined with regard to the relation between instinct and the
intelligence.

     Intuition is a branch of instinct, is the display of intuition's
virtualities which dwell, so to speak, in the instinct. (See our citations
with regard to the relation between instinct and the intelligence, chap. I-3.)
But Bergson is concerned to put us on guard against an interpretation of one
as  being the same nature as the other:

     "We have nothing to say for those who would have our intuition be an
     instinct or  a feeling. Not one line we have written lends itself to such
     an interpretation. In all that we have written there is the contrary
     claim: our intuition is reflection" (PM).

     We are not dealing here with the capacity the intelligence has of turning
back upon its own operations giving the act by which it represents reality,
but instead as Bergson himself says:

     "The turn of the spirit back upon itself that occurs at the coinciding of
     the human consciousness with the living principle from which it emanates,
     an outlet of contact with the creative effort" (EC).

     More than reflection properly speaking, in which consciousness folds into
perception and representation, one must speak of a form of attention,
where the spirit sees itself as being one with the creative act and
participating in it.

     Alfredo Fressin attributes to the Bergsonian reflection the value of
providing "the experience of perception of the spirit by the spirit." And
there is no difficulty in maintaining this, if by spirit is understood reality
as such and what there is of the spiritual in the perceptible universe. That
is to say, to experience reality as duration.

     True experience "is that born out of contact of the spirit with its
object" (MM). But the object can be experienced at different levels of tension
and concentration. When Bergson criticizes Kant for having prohibited access
to the thing in itself, he asks, "Could not consciousness through two
efforts of inverse direction, rising and descending alternately, apprehend
from within and no longer perceive from outside the two forms of reality: body
and spirit?" (EC)

     We already know the answer: demonstration of the possibility of
perception in that double form. Bergson now calls the body's perception
"sensory intuition," which is not essentially different from what elsewhere he
calls "pure perception." The function of the intuition is to prolong that
perception in the double direction. The prolongation can occur if it delays
referring the faculty of perceiving to that of acting, since the division of
the real "responds less to immediate intuition than to the needs of life"
(MM). For its part, it can capture reality as continuous duration, thus
arriving at apprehending it in its very being, if the subject can be liberated
from the habits acquired or imposed by the necessities of action.

     We said that intuition is a branch of instinct and the manner in which
Bergson describes intuitive knowledge leaves not doubt of that continuity.
Here is how the philosopher expresses it:

     "Intuition signifies, then, first consciousness, yet immediate
     consciousness, vision scarcely distinguished from the object seen,
     knowledge that is contact and even coinciding" (PM).

     We also remember that instinct apprehends its object directly. Overall,
instinct does not know knowing. It lacks awakening from its somnambulism, which
fortunately will not take very long to occur. The intelligence, once liberated
from the needs of action, will be capable of realizing that miracle.

     How? Instinct and the intelligence are not totally separated, they inter-
relate and are mutually complementary. The former reveals to intelligence the
insufficiency of its intellectual mechanisms, causing it to glimpse what could
be put in its place; yet it will not be the intelligence which does it,
precisely because of its insufficiency. It will impel instinct to ascend above
itself. The impulsion makes it disinterested and conscious; "By the expansion
which our consciousness obtains, we are introduced to the realm of life" (EC),
surpassing one's intelligence. But it is the intelligence which causes
instinct to soar above it.

     Intuition is instinct made conscious; it implies, according to Bergson,
reflection. However, as apprehension of the immediately given, whether it be
external or more intimate, all that can be thought is what can be conscious,
in the sense of knowing that it is knowing, or better: seeing. Now
then, reflection cannot be simultaneous with the intuition properly speaking;
it can, indeed, provoke an intuition that makes us exclaim, Eureka! or proceed
to the intuition; yet by then it is an explanation, and what is this except
intellectual labor, even in Bergson himself? Or intuition and reflection are
two different functions of a single faculty, for one cannot see how reflective
intuition in Bergson could be seen otherwise; it would be constrained to
instantaneous vision or to pure perception if it could not be reflective.

     When Bergson expounds the two types of order--vital and geometrical--
he presents the second as a copy of the first. By virtue of it, the
intelligence can purify its own constructions, returning towards intuition
which served as its model. It will make obligatory, continually, the
purification of its steps, at the same time it communicates heat and life to
pursue its efforts. The mediation is made possible because the intellectual
analysis is a "relaxation" of the intuition. In other places, referring to the
intelligence, he will repeat the same expression: it is a relaxation, a
diminution of the "tension" and concentration which intuition presupposes.

     On one hand, the intelligence opens the way to the intuition; and even
more, the latter is sacrificed to the former. "It is," says Bergson, "an
almost extinguished lamp that will not be re-animated except occasionally for
a few instants" (EC). It is sacrificed to the intelligence, because its
appearance occurs when the man has been liberated from the necessities of
life, and on the other hand, intuition only can be communicated through the
intelligence. Being more than an idea, "it should, nevertheless, to be
transmitted, be mounted upon ideas" (PM). Despite that, intuition transcends
the intelligence and, for that reason, the latter cannot communicate it
adequately; and the philosopher will insist all his life upon the pretension
of bottling in his store of concepts the ray which illuminated him in a moment
of plenitude.

     Regarding the relation between intuition and intelligence, F. Gregorie
maintains there is a collaboration between both and indicates various aspects
of that interdependence; the intelligence questions and awakens intuition; for
instance, science gives the data of problems, yet also reveals the
insufficiency of its explanations and forces the spirit to seek them in a new
direction.

     Intellectual knowledge evokes the correlative intuition and the
intelligence controls that intuition. It sees that the facts are not in
contradiction and even contributes to verifying certain observations.
Intellectual knowledge expresses intuition in an approximate manner, rendering
it distinct and thanks to that, the intelligence can undertake the scientific
verification of intuition. Translated into concepts, it can be expressed,
communicated.

     Certainly, Bergson accepts this collaboration, but the translation into
concepts is exactly "a translation," which therefore distorts the original.
The task of the philosopher is, precisely, to return continually to the
original, to correct the translations and contrast one to another, seeking an
appropriate medium of expression, mobile like reality itself. We shall return
to this.

     The representation of intuition as a mode of knowing different from
analysis originated, with Bergson still living, the accusation of denigration
of the intelligence. And the philosopher was surprised that his thought had
been interpreted in the way. The reply he gives to E. Borei is illustrative in
this respect:

     "Nowhere have I asserted that it were necessary to replace the
     intelligence with something different, or to prefer instinct. I simply
     tried to show that when one leaves the domain of mathematical and
     physical objects to enter into that of life and that of consciousness,
     one should call to mind a certain sense of life imposed on pure
     understanding which has its origin in the same vital potency as instinct"
     (See the reply that Bergson gives in Revue de métaphysique et
     moral, 1908.)

     Consciousness or, still more in general, spirit is a principle of which
intuition is only one specification. In Matter and Memory, it embraces
all the mental functions and is subject to perception. In Creative
Evolution, retaining the same meaning, it also embraces instinct, but is
applied more properly to intuition: "Intuition is the spirit itself" (PM, EC).
This will further explain the statement, that Bergson makes so often, that
intuition can pass into intelligence, but not the inverse.

     Intuition is the possession of the spirit by itself. Intelligence is the
same spirit turned toward matter. The opposition between the two means that
intuition is supra-intellectual; that is, is beyond the intelligence and
enfolds it. Husson proposes a distinction of four terms in place of two in
explicit knowledge: sensory intuition, comprised of the pure perception of
Matter and Memory; intelligence properly speaking which discovers the
order inherent in the first datum of perception and that permits us to deepen
the nature of the inert world; the ultra-intellectual intuition through which
we attain, within duration, the pattern of spiritual and vital realities; and
finally a superior faculty of comprehension, which would be to ultra-
intellectual intuition what intelligence is to sensory intuition and which
gives us the basis of things. This superior faculty he calls the intelligence
of intuition.

     There are texts of Bergson which suggest that interpretation. Sensory
intuition is at the base of all exercise of the intelligence. And also there
is an intuition of a different order, of which the first is only a change of
meaning. The intelligence marches in the direction of sensory intuition and
there is no essential difference between this intuition and intelligence
itself.

     The intuition of a different order is intuition of the psychical or of
the vital, which he also calls "supra-intellectual-intuition." To capture the
profound meaning of this intuition is the highest aspiration of Bergson's
philosophy. To achieve it the intelligence must be "widened," vivified by that
intuition. "Real progress," he says, "is not achieved except through an effort
of intellectual dilation" and later adds:

     "True intelligence is that which lets us penetrate the interior of what
     we study, touching the bottom, breathing the spirit into ourselves and
     feeling the soul palpitate. It is an exact adaptation of the spirit to its
     object" (EP).

     We can identify this "true intelligence" with what we have called
intelligence in the "broad" sense and that which Husson calls "intelligence of
intuition." Whereas intelligence in the "strict" sense is that found linked to
sensory intuition.

     The possibility of surpassing intelligence with the same intelligence
appears outlined in Creative Evolution, is affirmed with a certain
vividness in Ecrits et paroles, and is profiled in a conference series,
appearing later than the publication of the Introduction to Metaphysics
--1903--and gathered into La pensée et la mouvant.

     Here intuition appears, more than as a new faculty, like a deepening of
consciousness:

     "For it is not necessary in order to go to intuition, to transport oneself
     outside the dominion of the senses and of consciousness... We take the
     perception to its origins and we shall have an understanding of a new
     class without needing to resort to new faculties" (PM).

     This was for Bergson the error of Kant, who by resorting to a transcendent
faculty, conceived an impossible metaphysics; "but intuition is not a faculty
of knowing that is distinguished from consciousness as from the senses" (PM).
The intuition that is at the root of the perception does not become clear and
distinct except by a "penetrating" activity of the spirit. Intuition is not a
feeling, but instead thought and reflection; it requires attention and this is
intellectual exercise.

     E. Nicol calls Bergson a dualist; according to him, he not only divides
reality, but also splits the cognitive faculties. We already mentioned the
difficulty of sustaining this dualism by itself; and even more difficult is to
sustain it on the epistemological plane. There is opposition between one
faculty and the other, yet we deal with an opposition of complementarity and
not of excision, where they inter-relate and mutually complement. Bergson
views this complementarity thus:

     "There is no thought without a spirit of refinement and the spirit of
     refinement is the reflection of intuition in the intelligence" (PM).

     Bergson's problem is to attend to the data; this is what offers the
double face: matter or spirit. Attention to them also requires the
determination of one whose gaze is directed in one direction or the other.
They are certainly opposed forms of attention, yet they proceed from a single
principle: consciousness. He does not claim to know whether they are different
functions of the same faculty or inverse faculties. Bergson does not
distinguish these notions and employs both terms indistinctly. Which, moreover,
is logical with his evolutionist posture; the function creates the organ and
what matters is how it proceeds, but not its nature.

     Bergson invited us to read his pages attending more to the meaning of the
terms than to the terms themselves. The term matters to the degree that it
reflects a meaning; but, so as not to fall into ambiguity and for the sake of
precision, exactly what Bergson seeks, one must choose some terms, explain the
meaning given them, and maintain that choice. The difficulty derives from
intuition being a simple act where "There is incommensurability between
intuition and the means available to express it" (A. Hayen posits reflection
as an internalization that causes the absolute bond which links beings
together to be discovered. It would be equivalent then to what Husson calls
"intelligence of intuition.")

     That intuition is not a simple act does not mean there must be a single
intuition. The simplicity comes from the intuition being a coincidence of the
spirit with the object; the former becomes one with it, contemplates it from
within. It is a form of attention which, to explain what Bergson considers
inexplicable, is limited to stating what the object itself is. Bergson's
thought would have gained in clarity if he had explained how he understands
reflection, and to what extent one can say their intuition is reflection.

     It can be interpreted as a compensatory movement of consciousness that
proceeds from analysis to intuition and at the same time from intuition to the
intelligence. Yet the intuitive act, such as Bergson presents it, cannot be
reflective because reflection assumes a doubling of consciousness into subject
and object. And intuition is coinciding, contact, vision. If by reflection is
understood the return of the spirit towards its acts, emptying them of
content, intuition would be equivalent to consciousness: to see that one is
seeing. And given the psychological weight that characterizes Bergsonian
research, it does not seem exaggerated to us to interpret it in this fashion.

     There is an intuition that we could call "revelatory," which evinces
reality, and another intuition, or more exactly the same intuition at a more
profound level, that we could call "creative," from which the impulse calling
for living and acting derives. This is what permits Bergson to proclaim:

     "Matter and the life that fills the world are also in ourselves, and the
     forces which work in all things we feel in ourselves; whatever the
     intimate essence may be of what is and what is made, we are in it" (PM).

     We are dealing, in this case, with an apprehension of being from the same
principle that emanates from one's participation in the vital impulse. The
highest form of "intellection" is the Bergsonian philosophy. And the only
medium one has available to communicate that intuition is, apart from image
and metaphor, the concept, yet how can it be communicated adequately, if by
its very nature it is inadequate to be expressed.

     J. Maritain, commenting on the Bergsonian notion of intuition, says that
it is a master key with which all the boxes where philosophy has the truth
captive may be opened, and wonders how a philosopher as scrupulous as Bergson
had not suspected that such a grand facility is nothing but the sign of an
illusion. Maritain would be right if Bergson were to award the spirit control
of such a key which would unlock the doors behind which the truth would be
found captive. But nothing is further from Bergson's mind. Intuition is a weak
light that is re-lit from time to time and only for brief moments and, in any
case, to grasp it a large task of analysis if necessary, which requires effort,
concentration. He knows that the human spirit is more discursive than
intuitive. His aspiration is intuitive becoming, but it is only an
aspiration. Nevertheless, Maritain scores a valid accusation when he
says that Bergson criticizes a particular form of the intelligence, the
natural product of associationism, of positivism, of logicism, and even of
Kantian criticism. And his position would have been more conciliatory if,
instead of leaving what he calls "pure intelligence" reduced to what those
currents imply, he were to try to transcend that notion from within the
intelligence itself.

     If indeed intuition is strictly linked to the intelligence, to insist too
much on the opposition between the two forms of knowledge and the peculiar
characterization he gives of intuitive knowledge, make the interpretation of
the true meaning of Bergsonian intelligence difficult. But we must value his
effort to surpass and break the narrow molds in which those currents tried to
enclose the human spirit.

     Bergsonian intuition seems to recover all that is impulsive, vital in man,
in the same measure that it links that to instinct. Yet it is well not to
carry that identification of intuition and affectivity too far. For Bergson
intuition is a form of knowledge superior to discursive knowledge and to the
purely affective.

     Bergson is the philosopher of the concrete and of duration. Tied to that
being, given by direct experience, he asks it to show you all its ontological
richness and precisely there is the difficulty. The individual being cannot,
not even according to Bergson, think of being something closed within itself.
To apprehend it totally, one must see it linked with everything, to the same
extent that all things are united or are contingent manifestations of a
principle that advances endlessly.

     The individual reality must be transcended; yet that transcendence must
be understood not as leaving the concrete. Bergson wants to make manifest that
to capture being, matter or spirit, linked in principle one must go no further
than the individual herself and assume unity as a point of departure. On the
contrary, deepening the given within experience, being is revealed as
duration, and to the same degree that everything "endures," it is linked to
the vital impulse, participates in it. Yet this unity appears at the end of
the search. An apparition that will never be the result of a construction of
the spirit; it is "felt," is "touched" in apprehension by one's own
consciousness. There being is revealed as linked to the "elan vital"
which animates and communicates heat and life from within to all concrete
beings.

     It can be concluded that the philosophy of life is not an effusion from
the heart, but a comprehension of the structure of the living being, which
allows an explanation of how the harmony, the order in life and the universe,
is manifested through the apprehension of concrete things.

     The opposition between intelligence and intuition translates, on the
epistemological level, to the science-philosophy opposition. With this
opposition we shall occupy ourselves immediately.

     7. SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

     Bergson shows us, in a clarificatory note added later than the first
publication of his conference, "Introduction to Metaphysics," the
circumstance in which it was written: "an era when criticism of Kant and the
dogmatism of his successors were generally admitted, at least as a point of
departure for philosophic speculation" (PM). The objective of his work was,
precisely, to lift metaphysics from the discredit into which it had fallen
through the tough Kantian critique. To expound the study of the relation he
establishes between science and philosophy, the delimitation he
performs on the area of investigation of one another and the cognitive value
he awards them, will help us to clarify how and up to what point he achieves
the goal that he sets.

     In the first place, we shall briefly consider the Bergsonian conception of
science, the value and the limits of this knowledge; as a second moment, we
shall try to make precise what he understands by philosophy, his method and
the possibility of elaborating a "new metaphysics"; later, we shall analyze the
relation between those two modes of knowledge, in order to conclude with an
interpretation of the meaning of Bergson's thought in relation to the proposed
objective.

     The reader of the "Introduction to Metaphysics" will find, already
in the first paragraph, the claim that "all philosophers are in agreement in
distinguishing two profoundly different modes of knowing a thing. That which
enters into it and that which remains on the exterior" (PM). The
first is obtained through intuition and will make the metaphysics possible.
The second is the work of analysis and through it science is constructed. Thus
the opposition between science and philosophy is the translation on the
epistemological level of that established between intelligence and intuition.

     We can define science in a general way as a set of methodically ordered
doctrines which constitute a particular branch of human knowledge. It seeks to
establish relationships between observable phenomena, assuming the existence
of the relations of cause and effect, investigating the laws that seem to rule
them; that is to say, it tries to determine the order of the world. Yet this
order that the intelligence seeks: does it have a basis in reality or is it
only a translation of the intelligence itself? We have here the fundamental
problem and, as Bergson says, the first that must be addressed before
beginning any scientific investigation.

     Bergson presents scientific knowledge to us as having for its point of
departure the same as common sense or vulgar knowledge and operating with
identical habits. Both have for their motor impulse the "primum vivere";
they perceive reality from the manipulable side. It does not identify, rather
that "the scientific knowledge perfects that of common sense, adding to its
precision and scope, although advancing in the same sense and putting the same
'mechanism' into play" (EC). With that he is adumbrating the practical
functionality he is going to award to scientific knowledge, which we cannot
doubt if we remember that he indicates as an essential goal of science to
"augment our influence over things" (EC). That is, he does not so much seek to
know, as to know in order to act. Such a destiny justifies the peculiarity of
the knowledge that we are studying.

     Science is auxiliary to the action and interested here in the result.
Furthermore, it seeks convenience and usefulness; in view of all that it has to
elaborate the logical system which enables the best dominion and control over
the materials on which it will act. For such a task of construction and
systematic elaboration it counts on a perfectly adequate instrument: the
intelligence. Science presents itself as the result of an analytic procedure,
since to analyze is its habitual function." Bergson understands analysis as:

     "The operation that reduces the object to already known elements, that is,
     common to this object and to others. To analyze consists, then, in
     representing a thing as a function of something it is not. All analysis is
     therefore a translation, an unfolding in symbols, a representation that is
     made from the successive viewpoints where contact is observed between the
     new object which we study and others that we believe we know. In its
     eternally unsatisfied desire to embrace the object around which it is
     condemned to draw circles, the analysis endlessly multiplies the
     viewpoints so as to complete the always incomplete representation,
     tirelessly varying the symbols in order to perfect the always imperfect
     translation. It continues, accordingly, until infinity" (PM).

     The translations, the symbols are expressed in concepts that result from a
synthesis which is obtained by comparing various objects and retaining what is
in common. One could define it as the reunion of that which in a differing
multiplicity there is of similarity. Science operates with these concepts,
putting them in place of the objects. With that it will pretend to also know
the unknown which is being offered for its consideration. And, since the
method continues to be analysis, once again the intelligence will deliver its
labor of relating, comparing, of abstracting the common, that is, the
measurable in the concepts it comes to know.

     The novel will be declared unknowable, when during a long and detailed
analysis the place to locate it is not manifested. Yet there always will
remain a depth of unknowability in the thing that is, precisely, what is
original about it and which the intelligence declares absolute. Such an
absolute is a residual of when the intelligence can pay no more attention, but
instead declare its incapacity to apprehend it. It remains on the outside of
the thing; it cannot know more than the comparable, the divisible, in a word,
that which can be translated into laws.

     However, Bergson says:

     "The universe cannot be a system of laws except if the phenomena pass
     through the filter of the intelligence. The relation is nothing outside
     of the intelligence which relates" (EC).

     Next to these texts we might place those others where the philosopher
insists upon the limited, fragmentary character of scientific knowledge. We
recover one among the many that could be cited:

     "Science does not give of the real any more than an incomplete picture.
     It only reaches it by means of symbols which are, inevitably artificial"
     (EP).

     If this is so and if "no definite system is at the base of nature" (EC),
it seems natural that scientific knowledge could be labeled flimsy and even
arbitrary. Although it may seem paradoxical, Bergson awards to science the
privilege of attaining the absolute; that is, of touching reality. Something
which, moreover, we could already suspect upon reading that "matter is
laced with geometry." Or that famous passage from chapter III of
Creative Evolution in which he presents to simultaneous genesis of the
intelligence and of matter, and where he affirms that the intelligence admires
the growing order it finds in the world because it recognizes in it, that it
is of the same nature, which we already mentioned with regard to the genesis
of the intelligence.

     The limitation of scientific knowledge must be understood in the sense
that science does not completely reach the object it studies, yet what it does
apprehend is also real. The artificiality of the symbols created by the
intelligence derives from them having been obtained starting with the
phenomenon and omitting the thing-in-itself, to express ourselves in Kantian
terminology.

     Bergson starts from a pragmatic notion of science, linked to the reigning
positivism in France in the 19th century. This utilitarian character justifies
its limitation. But Bergson does not reject science. As Veloso says, no one
spoke of it with more admiration and confidence. He simply analyzes its scope
and indicates the place where it belongs. He criticizes its absolutization. It
follows that one has to investigate the possibility of a different knowledge.

     Of the real the intelligence captures, we repeat, the inert, the complex,
the determinable and deductible. These are aspects, the gateway that in its
interior hides mobility and continual change, the true reality, which is
essentially qualitative. Man aspires to cross the threshold and penetrate into
the very heart of being. She tries to return to the immediate now that we find
it covered by the culture, to remove the veil. The method can be no other than
the reflection which, decomposing the concepts that form the pattern of the
fabric, the road to a vision of the immediate is opened for us. A "different"
knowledge is sought that will require an also new method and organ. With these
presuppositions one can engage the possibility of the "new science" and go
methodically to the search for lost time, that which science and "classical" 
metaphysics have ignored.

     That knowledge which is sought is metaphysics. And according to Bergson,
Kant has given the quid of the problem by demonstrating that if
metaphysics is possible as a science, it is so by an effort of intuition; but
he erred in the road towards the solution by "affirming that such an intuition
is impossible." Kant and his adversaries believed that to eliminate the
contradictions inherent in the change one had to rise above them. When, for
Bergson, the solution is exactly the contrary: "to install oneself in reality
itself, which is mobility, change, duration" (PM).

     Our author is going to inherit that ideal of a science of the positive
spirit and, admitting the difference in methods, is going to advocate for an
experimental metaphysics, for which he wants the same rigor and precision as
for positive science. We have his originality here and the point wherein he
opposes the positivism and criticism of his epoch. He himself confesses in 
Ecrits et paroles that his enterprise "is to take metaphysics to the
terrain of experience" (EP). An empiricist metaphysics; but true empiricism "is
that which proposes to grasp, as closely as may be possible, the original
itself, to deepen into life and feel the soul palpitate, and this true
empiricism is the true metaphysics" (PM).

     Let us see how he intends to fulfill the pledge. Already in his first
works he announces the project of a new science that keeps gathering substance
throughout the length of his research. In the Introduction to
Metaphysics his position is clear. There he insists on the difference in
methods required by two different forms of knowledge of a reality that presents
itself as: tension specific to the psychological life, and extension pertaining
to matter.

     In Creative Evolution the model for philosophy will be biology. It
attempts to perform a study of life insofar as it is peculiar and beyond the
reach of the intelligence; when one complicates it analytically, while life is
not reconstituted, she stops seeing it simply. Yet for the model to be biology
only means, for Bergson, that the new science also should start from facts,
with the goal of obtaining knowledge of another sort.

     In La pensée et la mouvant, the interest centers on
distinguishing his goal from that of science, without forgetting the difference
in methods. He is dealing not so much with a difference in goals in the
abstract, but, as we would say in traditional terminology, with a different
object formally considered. The intelligence and intuition and hence their
works, science and metaphysics, can attain the same object, matter or spirit;
yet whereas the first captures what is susceptible to spatial consideration,
intuition looks at reality from the side of duration, an aspect that even
matter offers, by never being pure extension.

     Bergson looks for a philosophy to go straight to the object and, in
his thinking, this presupposes omitting all concepts so as to return to the
immediate. Here is how he understands it:

     "If a mode exists of possessing a reality absolutely instead of knowing it
     relatively, of locating oneself in it instead of adopting viewpoints about
     it, of grasping it in an intuition instead of analyzing it, finally, of
     seizing it beyond all expression, translation or symbolic representation,
     it is metaphysics. Metaphysics is the science that attempts to do without
     symbols" (PM).

     He has already demonstrated the possibility of possessing a reality in
this way with his theory of intuition. The problem now is not so much the
intuition of duration, as its explication. Bergson puts it nicely:

     "Metaphysics will refer to experience, but inner experience will not find
     an appropriate language. It will have to revert to the concept" (PM).

     We have the paradox here. Nevertheless, the concepts wanted for the new
science have to be "flexible," as "mobile" as the very reality it tries to
express. More than of concepts, we will have to speak of images that suggest,
evoke...and somehow dethrone the precariousness of the concept, to give us the
totality of the experience of the object.

     Bergson seeks the form of the philosophy, that which science has
already found. And, justly for lacking it, he can accuse metaphysics of a
"lack of precision." With an entire language that tries to suggest, rather
than express fixed concepts, he will not give us the desired rigor and
precision, at least so it seems. The contradiction is only apparent since, if
we are trying to have the form of the metaphysics adequately reflect the
reality, it is logical that the language attempt to be like it, "cut to the
exact measure of the object," without any mediating operation of
generalization or abstraction, which are those that become inexact due to the
extension that the concept acquires by virtue of them.

     Bergson does not elaborate a metaphysics, limiting himself to defining
the method: intuition, and applying it to certain concrete problems, such as
that of liberty. Nor does he pretend to succeed in such an enterprise. He
prophesies it as a progressive and indefinitely perfectible task, constituted
in collaboration and reciprocal communication. Logically, an "always
progressive" metaphysics cannot require radical and definitive solutions. "With
incomplete solutions and provisional conclusions it will attain a growing
probability that can be equivalent to certainty" (PM).

     We have insisted on the opposition between science and philosophy. Now we
are going to concentrate on the relationship that Bergson establishes between
those two disciplines, which will permit us to further outline his conception
of the new metaphysics, discern its scope and specify the meaning of the
Bergsonian critique of "traditional" metaphysics.

     Bergson presents both "sciences" to us as divergent in aim and method,
yet each is "joined in intuition." The task of science is to translate
intuition operationally. The goal of philosophy is to cause that intuition,
instead of being translated into concepts, to be prolonged indefinitely. The
communion in intuition allows a relation of complementarity to be established
between science and philosophy.

     In Creative Evolution he holds that philosophy should follow the
science, which is not to say that the latter should be a starting point for
it, nor that philosophy is a synthesis of scientific acquisitions. To follow
it is equivalent to traveling in the direction that modern physics has
indicated. Bergson recognizes that a great merit of modern science, as opposed
to the ancient, is having intuited the value of time, to take into account the
relation that phenomena have to their progression. Put otherwise, modern
physics "invites" philosophy to seek the absolute on the side of time and also,
he suggests reaching it along different roads from those of science, since
science has not dealt with the true nature of time.

     Texts such as that to which we just referred, might suggest that Bergson
situates philosophy above science. A reproach that was already made during his
time. Bothered by those accusations, he demands recognition of having awarded
it the possibility of grasping the absolute. He wants only to delimit the
fields: that science keeps being scientific and that metaphysics be applied to
the spirit, to life. (See for example the reply he gives to E. Borel, who
accused him of depreciating science, in the article titled  A propos de
l'évolution de l'intelligence géometrique, appearing in Revue de
métaphysique, Paris, 1908. However, Bergson's response did not avoid the
successive accusations of devaluing science, if not intentionally, at least in
fact. See for example BANDAS, R.) Bergson himself provides us with an admirable
summary of all that we are trying to say:

     "We want a difference in method and do not admit to a difference in values
     between metaphysics and science. With less modesty towards science than
     most of the learned have had, we estimate that a science with a basis in
     experience, as the moderns understand it, can reach the essence of the
     real. Undoubtedly it will not include more than a part of reality, but it
     can touch the bottom of this part and, in any case, approximate to it
     indefinitely... There remains the other part (of reality). This
     seems to come to a stop in a metaphysics that shares equally in experience
     and which is discovered in a state of attaining the absolute: we would
     call it science if science did not prefer to limit itself to the rest of
     reality. Metaphysics is not, then, positive science of a superior type.
     The relation we establish between metaphysics and science is very
     different. We believe that both are, or can come to be, equally precise
     and certain. The one supports the other in reality itself. Yet each one
     retains less than half of the other, such that one could see in them, at
     will, two subdivisions of science or two departments of metaphysics, if
     they did not indicate divergent directions in the activity of thinking"
     (PM).

     It remains to say that he does not reject metaphysics, but only a
type of metaphysics; that which we could call rational, constructive.
He gives it birth at the moment when Greek thought took into account, with
Zeno's aporias, the incapacity of the intelligence to solve the problems
inherent in movement and change. But it erred on the road toward the solution
of the antimonies, by assuming that what one had to do to solve them was to
situate oneself above the moving succession.

     It follows that metaphysics "cannot be more than an artificial arrangement
of concepts," a hypothetical construct of the intelligence. A
construction that now substitutes true experience with the symbols and concepts
that, in being the result of a generalization and abstraction of experience,
translate into dessicated layers, empty, the shadow of the reality projected
onto space. Bergson censures what he calls the "natural metaphysics" of the
human intelligence, which presupposes the unity of the real and the capacity
of the intelligence to attain it. It presupposes, also, that "everything is
given." And thus that time is, in the majority of instances, useless.

     In a quick, concise and at the same time suggestive historical analysis,
he demonstrates that, although with important discrepancies, on the whole,
Greek metaphysics like the traditional rests upon those pillars that permit it
to erect a perfect system, but one constructed upon some inconsistent
fundamentals. Kant had the genius of intuiting the necessity of deriving the
pillars by comprehending that knowledge does not resolve fully into terms of
the intelligence. But he did not know how to make this primary intuition
fecund. And he declares science relative to the human understanding and
metaphysics impossible as science. (For all this historical discussion see
Bergson's Creative Evolution.)

     Bergson not only vindicates the restoration of metaphysics, but wants to
break down the wall raised by Kant between science and philosophy. He sees in
intuition the spring that will permit him to demolish it. By having forgotten
it, Kant has been able to conclude that scientific knowledge is relative to the
human understanding, since the former limits itself to rearranging the data
that come from the senses, in accordance with the rigid framework constructed
by the understanding.

     Metaphysics, not being able to rely even on sensory data, now is not
relative knowledge, but instead a conceptual architecture, lacking in meaning,
empty of content. And, in Bergson's judgment, Kant's conclusion is natural,
because:

     "If metaphysics tries to constitute itself with concepts already
     possessed, if it consists of an ingenious arrangement of pre-existing
     ideas, finally, if it is something different from the expansion of our
     spirit... it is very evident that it becomes artificial, like all the
     works of pure understanding" (PM).

     So then, the proviso is not a critique of all metaphysics, nor advocacy
for another that--like the Greek--is pledged to "rationalize the world, to
take intelligible reality and submit it to science." It does not try to make
reality intelligible, to recompose the unity of experience. The intelligibility,
for Bergson, is something given with the thing itself, by trying to
contemplate it; intuition makes this contemplation possible.

     We already indicated that Bergson's problem is not so much apprehending
reality in this fashion as explaining the content of intuition; that is to say,
establishing the metaphysics as science. In this sense, his project is as old
as that of Aristotle. He too investigates the form of metaphysics. Yet between
the two efforts is all the distance of time. Bergson himself says that "what
preoccupied Aristotle was the general insofar as it is necessary" (EP). While
for Bergson the problem is that of the individual.

     From the investigation of being as such, to that which can be reached
starting from experience and through gradual, formal abstraction, we pass to
contemplation of the concrete and temporal being, which our philosopher does
not want to ignore, but to require that it display its ontological richness.
All Bergsonian philosophy rests upon two basic coordinates, the double
irreducibility of the real, matter and spirit, and correlatively the
requirement of postulating two forms of knowledge that take account, each in
its way, of that duality.

     Bergson's valiant effort to restore metaphysics is also tinged with the
spirit of the environment in which it was born. On one hand, science was
considered experimental; on the other, speculative knowledge lacked a handle
on experience in its speculations and reason floundered, while Bergson's
peculiar genius and the spiritualism of the epoch sought a metaphysics with
the same rigor and precision that it required for science.

     In the Introduction to Metaphysics, he expounds the principles
that should rule the elaboration of the new science, promising to amplify what
is expressed there. He will not manage to fulfill his promise. Thus Bergson
does not oppose traditional metaphysics with his own, but instead with the
facts. All in all, we believe that Bergson's effort cannot be reduced to a
crass empiricism. He takes experience as his point of departure, but is
accused of not transcending it and of reducing his metaphysics to a study of
the actual and of the contingent.

     In Bergson experience need not be transcended, precisely because
intuition, the experience of the spirit by the spirit, locates us in the being
as duration, the absolute as he conceives it. We know that psychological
analysis of consciousness itself was the path that brought him to such a
discovery. Installing itself in it and by an effort of intuition being is
revealed as creation, as duration. Uniting one's own life to the life of the
being, he achieves perfect coincidence and absolute knowledge.

     The problem is that such an intuition can be the instrument of
metaphysics as science. That is the logical explanation of such intuitions.
A difficulty that did not escape Bergson either. Despite ourselves and him,
the kingdom of scientific discourse must be awarded to reason. Overall,
Bergson's intention is a song of experience, a eulogy to the concrete and a
project of positive metaphysics. Yet there is more, it being a "prophecy" to
indicate the direction in which metaphysics should advance: the search for an
appropriate language that "follows the sinuosities of the real." In this sense
his program is still incomplete and presents us with an endless task, to the
same extent that our spirit is immersed in a reality it tries to decode and
which overflows in every direction.

     We shall return to this project of metaphysics. Now we shall occupy
ourselves with what Bergson calls "the absolute" and with the possibility of
man to attain it.

     8. SCOPE AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE

     To conclude this chapter, which we have made revolve around knowledge of
reality, it seems opportune to add some considerations that help specify the
scope and limits that Bergson grants it.

     It starts from the conviction that the human spirit can attain the
absolute. So then, the fact of establishing two access routes to reality will
oblige him, also, to determine the reach of each of them. Before pausing on
this point we shall focus on the Bergsonian notion of the absolute, from the
perspective of the theory of knowledge, the only one that interests us here.

     In the Introduction to Metaphysics he presents us the absolute as
the thing itself seen from within, without reference to any other thing. "That
which is perfectly what it is." This absolute is the object of intuition, which
seen in itself is something simple, while when considered from outside
becomes, in relation to the signs which express it, the piece of gold that
never can be cashed. It is the concrete reality of its durational-being.

     In chapter IV of Creative Evolution Bergson concludes his
reflections upon the idea of nothing as follows: "This long analysis was
necessary to show that a reality sufficient in itself is not necessarily a 
reality divorced from duration" (EC).

     And he reveals the road to us that leads to a similar conclusion:

     "One must become accustomed to thinking of Being directly. It is required
     here to try to see for seeing, and not to see for acting. Then the
     Absolute reveals itself very close to us and, in a certain measure, within
     ourselves. It is of a psychological and not logical essence. It lives
     among us, yet in certain aspects infinitely more concentrated on
     themselves, it endures" (EP).

     Starting with the Introduction to Metaphysics, in which duration
is revealed as an absolute in relation to knowledge, to Creative
Evolution there is a progression. Here he not only tells us that knowledge
involves penetrating the reality itself and that reality is revealed to be
duration, but instead that the absolute is duration. It is the basis of
reality itself. This absolute is attained through and act of the spirit that
penetrates it and allows it to be clarified. Bergson understands by the
absolute not only the dynamic aspect of reality, but especially its creative
dynamic, which is reached by deepening into duration proper; a deepening that
permits us to transcend ourselves, though we can do no more than touch it.
Bergson affirms it thus in this eloquent text:

     "The intuition of our duration, far from leaving us suspended in a void,
     as analysis would do, puts us into contact with an entire continuous
     series of durations that we should try to follow, whether they lead down,
     or whether they lead up: in both cases we can expand indefinitely by an
     ever more violent effort. In either case we do not transcend ourselves.
     In  the first, we advance toward an ever more dispersed duration whose
     palpitations, more rapid than our own, upon dividing our simple sensation
     dilute quality into quantity: at the limit we shall find pure homogeneity.
     Advancing in the other sense, we go toward duration which elongates or
     narrows as it continually intensifies: at the limit would be eternity. A
     living eternity and consequently mobile, in that our duration would be
     encountered as the vibrations in light and would be the concretization of
     all duration, just as materiality is its scattering. Between these two
     extreme limits moves intuition and this movement is metaphysics itself"
     (PM).

     The absolute, life's eternity, is movement of which we cannot conceive,
yet in which we participate and that allows us to surpass the human condition.
Because it can, without rupture, go from tension to tension up to the limit.
We are dealing with an absolute "incarnated" in reality, as the future. It is
a notion that is presented, on one hand, as a dimension of reality and, on
the other, as a mode of knowledge of its encounter with that dimension.

     Such an absolute is not grasped by departing from duration, but
submerging oneself in it, penetrating the real. And since Bergsonian reality
is matter and spirit, its "basis" has to be touchable in one direction and the
other, if Bergson's affirmation is to have "consistency." However, it seems
difficult to reconcile the reiterated affirmations that relegate the absolute
to the world of duration, with those others which pray that science and
accordingly the intelligence can also grasp it.

     But, what does it mean for Bergson to know something in an absolute
manner? J. Chevalier, in some notes recovered from the lectures that Bergson
delivered at college in France in 1902-1903, copies this question that Bergson
asks and answers. He says there:

     "To know a thing absolutely is to know it from within, straining to
     locate in it," and a little further on adds: "it is to know it as itself,
     as simple; to know it relatively is to know it from outside, as a function
     of something else, as a composite."

     What is at the root of matter that touches the intelligence? If we attend
to Bergson's texts, considered literally, the exposition becomes ambiguous.

     In the Introduction to Metaphysics he says that the special
destiny of the intelligence is precisely not to get to the root of the matter.
And some years later, in Creative Evolution, in speaking of the
relationship between science and philosophy, he seems to establish that inert
matter is not an object of intuition and, hence, cannot be grasped from within.
Whereas in La pensée et la mouvant he maintains that the
intelligence can liberate the intimate structure of matter to us, such that we
deepen it sufficiently in our sensory impressions. Nevertheless, since it
expresses intellectual knowledge, it seems that the intelligence is destined
to forever remain in the relative, while intuition can attain to the absolute.
Yet we also know Bergson's reiterated affirmations insisting that science as
well as philosophy grasp reality in itself. We are going to focus, first, on
the scope of that science.

     Bergson already claims in the Essay that one can distinguish the
phenomenon, that given to us, from the thing in itself. Science and vulgar
understanding are relative knowledge because they deal with the phenomenon.
Yet for Bergson the noumenon is not located beyond the phenomenon
but instead is at the basis of it and is manifested through it. The phenomenon
is one sense of the absolute and reflects it. It follows that he cannot accept
the total relativity of scientific knowledge and, even less, attribute it to
the impotence of reason.

     Bergson wants to salvage the objectivity of science at all costs, despite
his relativism, and refute radical constructivism of the human
intelligence. For that he will have to show to what extent one or the other
give us the object and to what the attempted relativism of knowledge reduces.
In chapter III of Creative Evolution through a study of the geometrical
order which reflects nature and of the meaning that such an order has, we find
a key passage to confront the problem that occupies us: "We shall never insist
sufficiently on what is artificial in the form of a physical law, and
consequently in our scientific knowledge of things. Our unities of measure are
conventional and, so to speak, foreign to the intentions of nature" (EC).

     However, the problem is not so much the relativity of science but, it is
admitted, to discover how a knowledge laden with artificial constructions,
with ingenious techniques of measurement, logic and human imagination, should
attain success, that is, be verified in experience. How can such knowledge be
objective? We must seek the reply in those passages where Bergson refers to
the geometrical or automatic order of nature. It represents, with respect to
creative evolution, the unpredictable and continuous, an interruption which
Bergson describes this way:

     "One guesses, then, that the complication of the material elements and
     the mathematical order that joins them together, must emerge
     automatically, from when it is produced in the heart of everything, an
     interruption or a partial inversion. Since for others the intelligence is
     displayed in the spirit by a process of the same class, it accords with
     this order and this complication, and is admired because it is recognized
     in them" (EC).

     It follows from there that the intelligence can contemplate the order of
nature, discover it and take it to the limit. The order, then, is something
objective, the artifice coming when the intelligence, to apprehend it,
subtracts duration from it and conceives the material world as totally 
displayed in space, whereas spatiality is only one movement to which the
display of matter tends yet at the same time is the form which the intelligence
provides to be able to represent it.

     Yet, note well, we are not dealing with matter being ruled by a certain
internal geometric law which furthermore geometry must discover, but that by
its own weight it falls into a structure which permits being treated
geometrically. And that itself is a degradation of the intensive into the
extensive tending to unfold in the meaning of space.

     It matters little, now, that the cosmic order may be the result of an
ordering, immanent and transcendent intelligence or if you prefer an
interruption of the vital impulse, a fall into space. The intelligence
apprehends this order on its own and is grounded in it so as to "construct"
scientific systems. This is what Bergson claims when he says that science
touches the absolute.

     Science is not totally relative knowledge, because he cannot say, as
opposed to Kant, that the intelligence "constructs" its object. We have
already seen how in the apprehension in external reality the idea of
homogeneous space suggests the object to the intelligence, which is to say
that the form is constituted in reciprocal interaction of the subject and
object, while the Kantian a priori is the condition for the possibility of
anything. Direct experience of the object underlies the objectivity of vulgar
understanding as well as the scientific. We say "direct," because the object
is grasped there where it is, without mediation, at the beginning of the
process, from any structure that deforms or conforms to its presentation.

     To convince ourselves that this is so in Bergson's intentions, it is
enough to recall what he describes in Matter and Memory when he
expounds his theory of pure perception. One should not forget, however, that
the "charge" of relativism and contingency that weighs on intellectual
knowledge is enormous, even in Bergson himself. But what can be emphasized in
that such relativity does not obey the cognitive structures, but those of
 function. "Up to the limitation imposed on it by the necessities of bodily
life" (EP). And precisely taking into account the utilitarian character of the
action allows seeing what customary knowledge has added and in what measure
the subject can liberate itself from the conceptual wrapping it has acquired
in its practical destiny.

     It seems superfluous to add more arguments in favor of the objectivity of
scientific knowledge, such as Bergson understands it. He is convinced that he
has defended its objectivity and challenges those who think the contrary to
demonstrate it. There can be no doubt of his intention in reading this
passage:

     "When we go deep enough in our sensory impressions for matter to begin to
     liberate the interior of its structure, we find that the articulations of
     the intelligence apply exactly to those of matter, and cannot see why the
     intelligence does not attain the absolute. It instinctively assumes this
     grasp, that all natural belief must be taken as true, all appearance for
     reality, as long as its illusory character is not established. On those
     who declare our science relative, for those who assume that our knowledge
     deforms or constructs its object, the burden of proof then falls. And they
     will be unable to fulfill this obligation, because the doctrine of
     science's relativity finds nowhere to lodge when science and metaphysics
     are on their true terrain, that in which we situate ourselves" (PM).

     Not only must Kantian constructivism be refuted, but transcended, showing
the true meaning of the impotence of reason and tearing down the veil erected
by Kant between the noumenon and the phenomenon to contemplate them from
within, in clarity. That impotence of reason is manifested when, upon entering
the study of life and the spirit, we follow the "normal" procedure of the
intelligence in its use of matter. It suffices, to return to the immediately
given, to disengage from all the conceptual and symbolic wrappings it has
acquired in the mundane hustle and bustle, and to install oneself in the
reality itself.

     Bergson showed it was possible to situate oneself on such premises, at
least with one's own person, and he himself questions and answers:

     "Yet would the same occur with other realities including everything? The
     relativity of knowledge that impeded the impulse of metaphysics, was it
     original and essential? Is it not more likely accidental and acquired?
     Does not all good come from the intelligence having contracted habits
     necessary to practical life? Those habits, transferred to the domain of
     speculation, put us in the presence of a deformed or reformed reality, in
     any case arranged, but the arrangement is not imposed on us ineluctably;
     it derives from ourselves and what we have made we can unmake... It is
     not enough to remove the obstacle. It remains to walk" (PM).

     And the path is no other but that which leads to intuition. Because
"installing oneself" in reality requires, apart from all that labor of
"disengagement," demonstration of the possibility of such an intuition. It is
the crucial point of his opposition to Kant. We have seen how Bergson
maintains and demonstrates that possibility. Now we consider the scope of
intuitive knowledge. We recall that, for Bergson, intuition is "immediate
consciousness, a vision barely distinguished from the object viewed." It is
obvious that intuitive knowledge is complete consciousness. Yet human
intuition is weak and fleeting. The problem is to clarify and expand primary
intuition. On this proposition Bergson gives this clarification:

     "It is necessary, then, to distinguish between the ideas which carry their
     light within themselves and which cause it to penetrate their tiniest
     corners--they are the intellectual ideas--and those whose brilliance is
     exterior but it illuminates an entire realm of thought (content of
     intuition). These may begin being in inner obscurity: yet the light they
     project around them returns by reflection, penetrating them ever more
     profoundly and then have the double power of eliminating the rest and
     illuminating themselves" (PM).

     In virtue of what does the idea suffer that transformation? Of another
intuition? Of the reflection? It seems likely to be the latter and, if this is
so, intuition would be reduced to a presentiment, to a sign which intellectual
discourse will progressively illuminate. We shall return to this in connection
with the dialectic of the spirit.

     Bergson exerts himself to demonstrate that our spirit grasps reality in
itself. If the knowledge we obtain of it is somehow relative, it is enough to
decompose what necessities have made and we shall be disposed to obtain true
knowledge; true, but limited, as much in the direction of spirit as in that of
matter, because reality is not given all at once, complete. How to know
whether we have touched the bottom of reality? What and how to guarantee the
objectivity of knowledge? The problem of truth is not thematic in Bergson and
even the term as such appears mentioned rarely, if we except an article on
pragmatism written as a prologue to the work of W. James. The eulogy he
provides for that conception of the truth allows us to suspect that he shares
it in large measure, but he leaves us hanging by affirming that, with certain
adaptations, without explaining which, he shares the posture of his friend.

     The cited conference claims there are truths that emerge as much from
feeling as from reason, just as it has always been recognized that besides
made truths there are others which we help to make and which depend upon our
will. Lines further on add: "we call true those affirmations that agree with
reality" (PM) in the sense of copying it. But it is a definition of the truth
for which it is difficult to find application, because Bergsonian reality is
expressed in the gerund, singular and changing, and our affirmations concerning
it imply a certain stability of the object and are general.

     There is no pre-formed science in nature, it not dealing with a truth that
is there, like America waiting for Columbus to discover it. Those are the
truths that we "help to make," those which the intelligence invents and
elaborates in the breast of reality looking towards its practical destiny. But
it does not mean that science will be arbitrary.

     Arbitrary is the system of concepts which the intelligence organizes in a
certain science and for a specific realm of problems, always seeking to satisfy
the primum vivere. We are not dealing with a relativism of the truth,
but instead with the existence of different types of truth. That of science,
that of common sense, the intellectual, and that other which is nearer and
coincides with the object, the truth of intuition.

     In Matter and Memory Bergson already distinguishes useful
from true knowledge. The first is established in action, while the
second stops at the contemplation of that action. Throughout his work he
insists that common sense and science seek the utility deriving from action
and this is the criterion that is used to determine the objectivity of such
knowledge. For example, in Ecrits et paroles he says: "It is difficult
to say whether a notion is intelligible or not, for intelligibility comes from
the application that is made of it" (EP).

     It seems, therefore, that the truth is in strict correspondence with
utility. From greater capacity of dominion and control, greater objectivity for
the science. Nevertheless the author of Creative Evolution wants,
despite the enormous aspect of relativism and contingency, to ground the
objectivity of that knowledge. And he will do so precisely by virtue of the
utility that is derived.

     The fact of science being more than ingenious, sterile artifice indicates
to Bergson its objectivity; with the contrary there would be no possible
justification for its efficacy. How could action unfold through something
arbitrary? Its success is explained because it sinks its roots into the real;
that is, the objectivity generates the utility and not the inverse.

     Despite the pragmatic appearance that the previously cited text has, the
philosopher is not totally in accord with that conception of the truth. This
was reflected in conversations with J. Chevalier, who said there that, despite
what the pragmatists say, "fecundity is the sign, not the entirety nor the
essence of the truth." And Bergson assents to his affirmation without further
explanation.

     Properly speaking, utility is not a criterion of truth in Bergson's
philosophy; he allows it as confirmation and it has its mission. Yet Bergson
departs from the supposition that we are immersed in reality and attempt to
attain it loyally in fact, from within or "deforming" it to the needs of
action, it being there at the beginning of the scientific or philosophical
itinerary. To reduce truth to utility, even in the scientific domain, would go
against Bergson's insistent affirmation that intelligence can grasp that which
is absolute. However, a certain parentage between the Bergsonian position and
the pragmatic cannot be denied, on the level of ordinary and scientific
understanding. Truth can be interpreted as a route traced through reality and
others could have been discovered depending on the others being the interests
of the moment. But reality is there in the mode of a background fabric, which
allows the picture to be painted according to the tastes, the ability and the
interests of the artist. Even assuming that truth were relative, Bergson does
not claim it; there remain other demarcated directions through reality itself.
We are free to advance in that direction, but we do not create the current.
This would be the truth that almost coincides with the object, the truth of
intuition. To achieve it a full exercise of asceticism is necessary which
allows us to see without a secondary intention of practical usefulness and
makes it possible for the spirit to install itself in reality in order to
contemplate it from within.

     The means of knowing of which our institutions are certain is pleasure,
the satisfaction that this type of knowledge provides us. Several times
Bergson alludes to intuition giving us happiness. It is like the source from
which the impulse flows to keep us joyful and continue our effort of search.
It is a subjective criterion consistent with his thought because, if intuition
cannot be communicated but only help others to experience it, the criterion
has no reason to transcend those limits. Which never ceases being paradoxical
considering those affirmations by Bergson that philosophy should be
constituted in collaboration and dialogue. It is right, nevertheless, not to
inflate the contradiction; that intuition cannot be communicated does not mean
the philosopher must enclose herself in her own shell, custodian of the
splendid light that shines within her, but whose splendor disappears to the
extent one attempts to bring it to light. Dialogue is imposed; dialogue with
oneself, of the disciple with the master and above all between him and the
facts.

     For the philosophy of Bergson not to become a poetic, suggestive
digression, yet lacking in speculative interest, he would have to establish the
conditions that make such dialogue viable and which allow intuition to be
disqualified as the illusion of a visionary. We shall return to this.

     Bergson's philosophy could be interpreted as an itinerary that leads to
the heart of being, which can be reached through an act of spirit that
penetrates it, and all his philosophy is a protest against the pretension of
reaching this being with the same methods that have served us in practical
knowledge. If we trust them, what we shall be able to obtain will be a
reconstruction of the real. And Bergson himself, in a letter to P. George,
affirms: "I have never been able to consider knowledge as a
construction, so I rejected Kantianism or better, refused to delay
myself on it" (EP). That knowledge not be a construction means that the object
carries the primacy.

     To know in Bergson is not to endow unity or meaning onto the perceived
world, to reconstruct and organize the sensory multiplicity through our a
priori forms. Reality, matter or spirit, presents itself already unified,
and the spirit only has to "let it manifest itself," to witness it. The
possibility of such a verification, on the level of intellectual knowledge, is
not beyond doubt. His theory of perception, his philosophy of the
intelligence, the study of the relation between the intelligence and intuition,
the value he awards to science and to philosophy show, each in its domain, the
possibility of "touching" the absolute. But it is a "humble" absolute, so to
speak. We are not dealing with a metaphysical "construction" of the
understanding, nor even with an intuitive "fortune"; but instead with a simple
datum of experience, the experience of being as duration. The absolute
found within time.

     Bergsonian reality totally overflows thought. For we are "immersed" in it,
"it bathes us" and whether we attempt to grasp it from within or employ it in
view of the necessities of action, it is there and "we breathe" its atmosphere.
As M. Barthélemy observes, Bergson profoundly feels, as opposed to Kant,
that experience is a contact, with, not a reconstruction of the
real. Matter, the images... are in a universe wherein the subject-object
opposition is surpassed. Pure as well as ordinary perception, science,
metaphysics, are moments of thought, internally linked. Each of them should,
although in different ways and in Bergson's sense, touch the absolute.

     Throughout the length of this chapter we have insisted on the possibility
that Bergson awards to spirit the power of grasping that absolute in one area
after another of the real. Now the problem is how to express that knowledge.
We shall occupy ourselves with this in the next chapter.

CHAPTER III
THE DIALECTIC OF SPIRIT

     1. MEANING OF THE CRITIQUE OF CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT
(Some of the ideas expressed here already appeared in print in an article
titled "La critica de Bergson al pensar por conceptos" in Pensamiento no.177,
Jan-Mar 1989)

     It turns out to be meaningful that the first work which Bergson publishes,
Essay on the immediate data of consciousness, should be in the parts
which the author judges most important, chapters II and III, a critique of
concepts and especially those of time and space. (Cf. the clarifications that
Bergson makes to Ch. Du Bos, concerning the composition of the work, recovered
in the historical notes to the works cited here, PM)

     We already saw how he analyzes the concept of homogeneous space and the
need for apprehending it in its origin and meaning to allow refuting Kant and
negating that knowledge is a reconstruction of experience. However, this is
not the fundamental critique, which is instead that of time.

     The critique of the concept of time is the cornerstone of Bergsonism and
its negative part; but with a deliberately positive goal, being the search for
intuitive coincidence between the representation and its object. His
reflection starts from science in order to subject to criticism the way it has
of dealing with time. An animated critique oriented to the requirement of
finding knowledge that will not be empty, illusory, but the contrary, having
certainty and content.

     Science operates with an idea of time which Bergson calls "homogeneous,"
pure succession without qualities. Yet the concept of homogeneous time is not
consistent. It is the intellectual face of a time that is definitely space. He
condenses his reflection thus:

     "It is a fact that when one makes time a homogeneous medium where the
     states of consciousness seem to succeed each other, this is done all at
     once, which is equivalent to saying that its duration is subtracted. This
     simple reflection should warn us against then reverting, unconsciously,
     towards space" (DI).

     Bergson keeps analyzing the notions of movement, duration, simultaneity,
and arrives at the conclusion that time has been considered "as a medium
indifferent to that which fills it." Whereas, according to Bergson, to
consider it so is to empty it of content and project it in space. The
confusion follows between succession and simultaneity, duration and extension,
quality and quantity.

     But above all what results from that analysis is that duration,
succession, quality, can only be grasped through direct experience or
intuitively; if we attempt to apprehend them intellectually they are projected
in space and what is obtained are symbols of qualitative succession; that is
to say, representations which somehow betray reality itself. And this because
representative thought is incapable, by its own nature, of grasping the
dynamicity of the real; understanding now by representative thought that which
proceeds through concepts.

     Bergson criticizes the concepts of previous philosophy, not to remain
with a simple critique, but to make manifest their "weakness" and elaborate
his own philosophy. But he does not directly answer the question what a
concept may be, except through a description of how it emerges and of its
finality which serves to reveal its meaning and its cognitive limitation.

     In Matter and Memory, Bergson approaches the study of the process
of conceptual formation with his theory of the general idea. There also
appears there the identification of idea and concept, as a result of a process
of generalization and abstraction that is symbolized with a word. What Bergson
will not explain there are the "details of that construction," or that is, how
the general idea of class becomes the "voluntary construction" of general
notions.

     The identification of concept and idea is clear in Creative
Evolution. There, when he discusses the necessary translation of intuition
into concepts to communicate them, he says:

     "Intuition is refracted into concepts... The same effort that links ideas
     to ideas cause the intuition to disappear which those ideas--those that
     immediately beforehand had been called concepts--proposed to store" (EC).

     In La pensée et la mouvant, where Bergson returns to concern
with general ideas, the identification appears anew. In discussing the
Bergsonian consideration of general ideas, he said that that genetic study
would allow him to provide a fundamental goal for concepts, insofar as the
resemblance that apprehends the idea is given in nature. Yet despite that and
precisely because he assumes generalization and abstraction, the idea
misrepresents the primitive similarity. And there is the key to Bergson's
entire critique of conceptual thought.

     He distinguishes three types of resemblance: those that living beings
reflect and which permit classification into hierarchical series, those that
reflect inert matter and those created by human speculation. If we attend to
the inert, the resemblance is resolved into identity; that is, that the
principles which permits grouping certain types of color, flavor, etc. have the
same nuance. This explains how the science of the inert is successful and that
the intelligence can calculate, predict, design without risk of distorting the
original, that in which matter is peculiar: in repetition.

     Something else occurs in the domain of life. That which permits grouping
individuals is a trait of similarity, not of identity. Such a similarity can
provoke a generalization, not legitimate it, since by generalizing one
identifies, overlooking the specifics of the resemblance, that which deprives
them of identity.

     And lastly are the ideas created entirely by human industry. The real
there is the model or the construction blueprint that the intelligence applies
starting from the perceptible surrounding and in view of his practical
destiny. And Bergson continues:

     "Once in possession of these three types of general ideas, the
     intelligence has the idea of the idea and can construct ideas as it
     pleases. It begins, naturally, with those that best favor social life...
     Later will come those of interest to pure speculation, and finally those
     that we construct for nothing, for pleasure. But for the immense majority
     of general ideas, it is the interest of society and that of the
     individuals, that which precedes their birth." And he concludes: "We
     close this long parenthesis, which was necessary to open in order to show
     to what degree reform is possible, and at times to discard conceptual
     thought with the object of arriving at a more intuitive philosophy" (PM).

     Throughout the length of this work we has insisted upon Bergson's
preoccupation with indicating the function of the intelligence in the
evolutionary process, a function that he constitutes to obtain adequate
knowledge of reality, with regard to its practical use. Yet, just as he has
insisted on the need to guard the intelligence, when is attempts to transcend
that use, he now will stress the insufficiency of the concept to adequately
represent the whole range of the real. And always with the same goal: to
arrive at a more intuitive philosophy.

     In the Introduction to Metaphysics he compares the concept to the
schematic representation that an artist might form of the Notre-Dame tower
or to the rough sketches that a foreigner draws of Paris that he is seeing.
What is created is a "silhouette" of the tower or a "plan" of Paris, separated
from both by scarcely being related to the original. In "silhouettes," rough
sketches neither Notre-Dame nor Paris can be contemplated.

     Bergson has reason to affirm that the concept is not the object, nor even
its pictorial representation. Although the concept is understood as an
intentional representation of the object, there the intelligence apprehends by
abstraction or reduction the constitutive, the essential, that which makes it
be that object and not another, yet the individuality of the object itself
escapes it. To speak of intentional representation presupposes admitting the
subject-object duality in knowledge. Concepts are the objectification of that
relationship. The subject opens to the object, tends toward it and in that
opening the object is given; yet given in a formal manner, informing,
determining the subject.

     The information is what constitutes the intentionality and is,
furthermore, the content that the intelligence captures from the sensory
which now is no longer sensory. The intentionality consists of reference to
the form of the object; without such a reference, the form would be
meaningless. We admit that knowledge is a relational process and the way that
the terms are understood which enter into relation conditions the relationship
itself, its nature.

     Bergson does not speak of "intentionality." Knowledge is relational, but
not so much because of the relation established between subject and object, as
because it captures the relations between objects, and this is what bothers
Bergson and is the cause of his rejection. Since to apprehend the relation one
focuses on what the objects have of similarity.

     Reality in general has for our author characteristics we already know:
incessant mobility and continual change; and we believe that Bergson affirms
his insistence that that mobility can only be captured by submerging oneself
in it; yet we doubt that this sympathy can be achieved without being in one's
interiority; and even in this case, the knowledge that we attain is through
reflection, doubling consciousness into subject and object. Though
consciousness itself might be the object, what is objectified are states, if
we admit that consciousness is intentional.

     Mobility and continual change, which Bergson proclaims, can only obey one
mode of speaking, since he himself admits continuity in the incessant
mobility. How to understand, if not as duration, the vital impulse? Pure
mobility is unthinkable, unimaginable and we are in agreement with Bergson
when he holds that our intelligence is not adapted to it, though the
justification he gives of that non-adaptation may be debatable. In Chapter IV
we shall return to this.

     At the very root of Bergsonian reality is succession, qualitative
movement; and Bergson questions the possibility of whether the intelligence can
apprehend it in its pure being, in its changing temporality. It is the old
opposition between being and representation. The Bergsonian intelligence
already departs from appearance at the beginning of the process of
representation. Incapable of seeing the object directly it "represents" it
shaping it in accord with its structures. In the representation we can
distinguish the act and the content. The act is the very movement of thought
by which it gives content and the content is the "object" present to
consciousness. So then, such an object now is no more than a shadow, a
translation, a symbol and not the object itself.

     Nevertheless, and despite all the conceptual symbology, Bergson had
installed in his theory of perception that the data, not the subject, are
primary in knowledge. The data are imposed at the start of the process, data
that of course are received in accordance with the cognitive structures proper
to the intelligence. Before data, not even evolutionary intelligence is found
totally unprepared. Yet the object is presented split: matter and spirit; and
the intelligence is able to comprehend everything that is material or
mathematizable in it.

     And since that is only one aspect, and not the essential one in reality,
Bergson can conclude that the concept is a shadow, a "promise" of reality,
with the practical and functional value of a bank note, which is only the
promise of gold, exchange currency that will never give us the true piece. Yet,
even with this extreme assumption, we have to admit that the shadow resembles
the object, though not being the same as it. To know intellectually in Bergson
is a special function of the understanding, essentially extrinsic: to
apprehend reality in its spatial extension.

     Modern gnoseology admits--with what basis, is another question--the
process character of knowledge and rejects intuition's instantaneousness,
precisely because the object is not given in instants, with nothing further;
it is more an advance alongside of things, with subject and object intervening
in the "advancing alongside," until the objectified becomes present to
consciousness. The process-nature of knowledge makes the objectification of
experience problematic, but that does not justify its elimination.

     He tries to elaborate it and, by a cautious analysis approximate the role
of the object and of the subject. What is there of each at the end of the
objectification? Such and effort of analysis is performed using the structures
of the subject and we have to admit the capacity of our intelligence to know
reality; to deny that would be also to deny the fact of knowledge. With this we
do not mean that the result will be a double of multiform experience. The
subject constitutes the object, endows it with meaning, not constructing it;
it organizes the data; it synthesizes them to form the concept.

     Bergson does not reject concepts; they are necessary to thought and
indispensable to science; without them neither language nor communication
would be possible. Yet he requires us to recognize their mission and their
destiny, which Bergson sees as follows:

     "The things that language describes have been cut into the real by human
     perception and in view of the human task. The properties that they
     designate are those called from the thing to human activity. The word
     will then be the same, as we said, when the suggested indication is the
     same, and our spirit will attribute the same property to diverse things,
     representing them in the same manner, grouping them, ultimately, under
     the same idea... Such are the origins of the word and of the idea" (PM).

     All this conceptual "servility" does not leave us hanging. Not even in
Bergson, we repeat, is the symbol so arbitrary that it lacks grounding;
underlying every operation of construction is pure perception or immediate
intuition, which nothing can replace. The doodler who traces out sketches of
Paris could never give us, with her sketch, the Paris as contemplated by the
citizen on foot. Descriptions, as detailed as one wants, will give us a vague
image, yet an image ultimately, which--however--direct contemplation can
totally re-do.

     In his entire critique he is insisting upon the necessity for experience
in the process of knowledge. One could say that it has a pedagogic function; to
warn us against the illusion that concepts can grasp reality, when they are
limited to giving us its shadow. And at the same time, to indicate to us the
straight road that will liberate us from "speculative servitude." It concerns
returning to the immediately given, to the first perception.

     So then, an agreeable contact with reality is not enough to know it.
Paradoxically, for that we must distance ourselves, interpose between it and
us, concepts, symbols. Certainly they remove us from the concrete; yet, to the
extent that we distance ourselves from the object, the more complete is our
vision of the totality, though less detailed. In evolution, every gain is paid
with a loss and this will not be a different case.

     The process of objectification is one with that of conceptualization and
one cannot speak of knowledge if we do not manage to represent what is
objectified, in concepts. In the immediacy of the given we can speak of
contact, vision; not of knowledge, while with reflection we would not have
recognized the data. The recognition is not possible without mediation by the
intelligence.

     We are in agreement with Bergson, in saying that the concept conforms to
reality. In this sense, we can accept his affirmation that "we are born as
Platonists" (PM). And we have to assume structures in the intelligence that
make that Platonization possible. For that it is not limited to "arranging"
the data of confused perception, but endows them with meaning. Through
reflection we know ourselves as distinct from the object known. We have a
consciousness of not being one with it and that occurs, precisely, upon
translating the data of perception into concepts.

     Intuition, as apprehension of the sensorily or intellectually given, has
an indisputable value for knowledge, which Bergson takes pains to make
manifest. Yet all the grandeur of intuitive knowledge, even in Bergson himself,
remains subject to the dilemma of, whether to remain enclosed in the
consciousness that experiences the vision, or else, if one must communicate it,
to pass to the concept.

     The intelligence is the sieve that must filter intuition to make of it a
valid instrument of scientific or metaphysical knowledge. And Bergson assumes
the risk that his intuition should pass through the concept, and so establish a
dialectical process between intuition and the intelligence to ensure fidelity
of the conceptual expression to the intuition it tries to communicate.

     Scholarship will distinguish thought as acts of logical content that exist
by virtue of the action. If the content is not a mere arrangement of the data
of experience, it raises the difficulty for us of determining what in it is
given and what is put there by the act of thought. We already saw one way of
treating the theme of the a priori, which cannot be established without an
accord between reality and thought, whereby the latter is limited to tracing
the data. It is in ourselves and for us where the data acquires meaning; to
say this assumes admitting that our mind "conforms" the experience and, through
a process that puts the mental structures themselves in motion, the data become
familiar.

     The intelligence is enabled to think of matter, because both are of a
geometric nature. The difficulty starts when intuition is exposed to the light
of the understanding. The images which Bergson utilizes to characterize the 
transfer of the dynamical of the real to conceptual paralysis could not be
more eloquent.

     Whereas for the Scholastics the intelligence apprehends the essential in
the object that it studies, that which makes it be what it is and not
something else, the Bergsonian intelligence apprehends the relations of objects
among themselves, that which is external and common in them. For Bergson,
intellectual knowledge is mediated, which is to affirm its limitation. The
symbol interposes between reality and ourselves the "veil of Maya," which
impedes our direct vision. Not even the immediate data are originally pure.
Perception gives them to us already altered by the influence of memory, of
interests. Reversion to them is also oriented to a way of seeing the former
where the influence of history, the system of categories we manipulate, the
linguistic expressions that translate our concepts, cannot be forgotten.

     Bergson is the antipode of Hegel, for whom the dynamic was granted above
all to reason. Yet not because the intelligence is static nor its symbols
"fixed." Evolutionary intelligence and ideas progress, although the progress
may be due to a "spirit of perfection," a reflection in the intelligence of
intuition. "An intelligent signal," says Bergson, "is a moving signal" (PM).
So then, paradoxically, an intelligence which progresses and evolves cannot
directly apprehend the dynamicity of the real, and is limited to translating
it into concepts. Yet the translation is not arbitrary; despite all the
schematism, reductionism or vacuity of the concept, the uniformity of
experience attained by the intelligence and the intellectual activity comprise
knowledge in that the order of the concepts corresponds to the order of the
world.

     For Bergson, the reunited concepts constitute an intelligible world,
since the intelligence had elaborated them. But it is a parched, dry world,
the shadow left behind by the reality projected into space. These dessicated
"cuttings" that the intelligence performs, at the edge of mobile and changing
succession, have little to do with true reality: the uninterrupted succession
of unpredictable novelty. Bergson exaggerates the symbolic character of the
concept. But he is a contemplative, endowed with a fine, sharp artistic
sensibility. His special action is to cause us to see, feel the world, its
occurrences, as an ever novel flux.  It is not surprising that concepts turn
out to be static, withered, empty. However debatable his assertions may be,
one must value his extraordinary determination for fidelity to the experience
and the desire to omit all abstraction and metaphor. He wants, as D. Roustand
states, to establish that a thousand concepts are not worth one direct vision.

     We believe it is unnecessary to insist on the precariousness of the
concept for adequately reflecting the entire range of the real. Bergson
neglects no opportunity presented to him to do so. Nevertheless, Bergsonian
intuition, if it is to be communicated, will also have to pass through the
concept. This necessity to subject intuition to intellectual discourse obliges
thought to a constant movement from intuition to its expression and from this
to intuition, so as to produce the formula best adapted to that which is
attempted to be communicated. To this movement or dialectic of the spirit we
shall now turn.

     2. NEED FOR THE DIALECTIC

     Thought like that of Bergson, which concedes so much importance to
intuition, seems that it could be constituted beside all dialectic. However,
it is not in the reach of man to elaborate any philosophy without recourse to
the intelligence. Bergson recognizes that repeatedly. The term "dialectic"
appears sporadically in his works; but its function in the method is explained
in different ways with relative frequency.

     Let us see first, what meaning he gives to the term. In the Prologue to
the 7th edition of Matter and Memory, he makes it the center of the
dispute and of the dialogue. It has a pejorative meaning. In Creative
Evolution it is presented as the functioning of the spirit, which ensures
the agreement of thought with itself as considers it necessary from two points
of view: as the crucible in which intuition is purified and as enabler of its
refraction into concepts making it viable for human communication, without
forgetting to indicate its limits and the enslaved condition of intuition. If
it does no more than "unfold the result of the intuition that transcends it"
(EC) it can be identified with the discursive function of the intelligence.

     In La pensée et la mouvant he again links it to language; it
signifies at once "dialogue" and "distribution," in that it seeks to create
agreement upon the meaning of the words in the "repetition of things according
to the indications of language." It suffices to say that dialectic, as the art
of dialogue, deserves slight credit, for it does not look to find the truth,
but instead to "reasonably" adjust the concepts and conveniently manipulate
the words. Its domain is that of common sense; it triumphs in social life.
Bergson is going to give us the reason he deprecates the good dialectic:

     "Outside the properly human, which is to say social, domain the credible
     is hardly the true. Nature has little interest in facilitating our
     conversation. Between concrete reality and that which we had reconstructed
     a prior, what a distance! In this reconstruction there abides,
     nevertheless, a spirit that is no more than a critic, given that its role
     does not consist in working on a thing, but in appreciating what someone
     has said of it" (PM).

     And there even exists a deeper cause that brings him to repudiate that
method: the ease with which it is applied in philosophy that leads to the
illusion there exists an "intelligence" that is measured by "a certain power
of obtaining knowledge of the real from concepts, combining them more or less
skillfully among themselves." This power turns philosophy into pure dialectic
or mere reflection on established ideas, upon already given concepts.

     That pure dialectic is deprecated in Bergson's philosophy does not mean
that he eliminates all dialectic. It persists as a movement from the spirit of
things to their representation and inversely. It is an internal dialectic,
understood as an ascent of things to ideas and concepts and, with the
deficiency of the concept verified, to return to the thing itself with the
goal of polishing, of adjusting the representation. In this sense, it is a
dialectic which is in the line of Schopenhauer to the degree that it obeys an
opposition between being and representation. It is a continual movement of the
spirit in search of that coincidence and verification of the impossibility of
reaching it fully.

     If "homo loquax" enjoys Bergson's antipathy, because her thought when she
thinks is a reflection of her word, he does not omit reflection on what others
have said or written from his philosophy. Critical analysis of those doctrines
and systems occupies a large part of his philosophic discourse. So then, the
critique has as goal to prepare for a direct vision of the object. For that he
selects two opposite interpretations of the same fact or occurrence and shows
their common error deriving from previous reflections.  His reasoning usually
starts with a critique, follows a sort of phenomenological reflection and
concludes with a causal explanation of the phenomenon. This is the procedure
that he uses, for example, in the analysis of rationalism and of idealism, of
mechanism and of finalism, or of nominalism and of conceptualism.

     Yet Bergson does not establish the opposition of the systems through a
simple play of rhetoric; he wants to instruct us concerning his profound
thought which inspires the critique. And it is that, in Bergson's judgment:

     "Concepts ordinarily go in pairs and make reference to two contraries.
     There is hardly any concrete reality upon which two opposite views cannot
     be taken at the same time and which is not subsumed, consequently, in
     antagonistic concepts. A thesis and an antithesis follow that we try in
     vain to reconcile logically, for the simple reason that concepts or points
     of view will never succeed at manufacturing a thing. But the object
     apprehended through intuition easily becomes, in many cases, the contrary
     concepts, and since with them the reality of thesis and antithesis will
     emerge, we can see at once how this thesis and this antithesis are opposed
     and how they are reconciled" (PM).

     This passage adequately explains the principle that rules the critiques
of philosophy. If one places their trust in thought through concepts, as the
majority of philosophers have done, including the most deliberately empiricist
or nominalist, they possess a view of things that is not totally false: because
all concepts, unless they are empty, doubtless express an aspect of reality.
But since concepts provide views deriving from outside, they do not necessarily
express more than one side; and since furthermore they are stable, they cannot
represent the movement that comprises reality itself, and subject to the law
of identity are condemned, if employed too systematically, to be mutually
contradictory and to contradict some aspect of experience.

     Reflection upon concepts and the theories inspired by them is also rich
in lessons, for it allows us to precisely discern their own insufficiency, and
turn to adverse concepts and theories, so as to prepare an intuitive knowledge
that will be truly molded to the object. The contradiction between theories
invites returning to the study of experience, retaining everything that the
intelligence has seen and seeking that which it could not see, with the goal
of "grasping" that diverse data in one intuition.

     And criticism, similarly oriented, necessarily unfolds in broad outlines
and schematically. Because what concerns Bergson is to emphasize the positive
in the doctrines, along with their common defect. This explains the
reductionism in historical considerations, which has proliferated throughout
his work and above all in Chapter IV of Creative Evolution, with the
goal of making manifest the structure and the natural defects of the
understanding. In this regard, Bergson makes us think of Kant. In both cases
the dialectic is exercised to put two irreducible aspects of experience into
relief and for what identical reason every one of the doctrines is destined to
let one of the aspects escape, without correctly considering the other. Yet
whereas for Kant the cause is ignorance of transcendental idealism or
exaggerated confidence in pure reason, for Bergson it is excessive confidence
in the understanding and forgetting its practical character, which leads to
incomprehension of duration. Now then, in Kant the dialectic is necessary to
apprehend the limits that nature imposes on thought and to abide by them; in
Bergson they must be known in order to break through them as much as possible.

     In general one can assign to the Bergsonian dialectic the meaning that the
word carries: the art of dialogue; and a dialogue that is not mere logomachy
between contraries, but a confrontation which obliges continual movement from
thought, which carries it from intuition to the intelligence and from this to
intuition, to purify it of the dust that might have adhered to it on the
pathway of the discursive process. Seen from this perspective it is critical
thought's own mode of proceeding, always disposed to correct. It is born from
cognitive limitation, because intuition is obscure, fleeting and fundamentally
subject to using as a vehicle for communication and clarification a deficient
instrument, the intelligence. The dialogue is necessary to approach towards the
immediate and original. From the Essay to the Two Sources
Bergson requires and practices a method of continual reflection and vigilance.

     Reflection is imposed for we know that intuition is weak and fleeting and
the philosopher is obliged to abandon it once she has received the impulse;
and placing one's trust in herself, to pursue the search activity, staking out
the route of concepts which soon will make her feel she has lost her footing.
Then one must return to the immediate, a contact which will oblige the
philosopher to "reformulate" a great part of that already elaborated. Bergson
conceives of metaphysics as a movement that goes from intuition to the concept
and vice versa.

     A first approximation to his thought might suggest that intuition is the
origin and starting point of all philosophy; however, we find affirmations
that manifest the contrary. The starting point is common sense or vulgar
thought which reaches us through language. By default, it is natural that
philosophy might have begun as common sense. Thus began, according to Bergson,
Greek philosophy. He accepts the reality outlined in the language and through a
dialectical effort there will arrive, sooner or later, the establishment of
science if the indications of the intelligence are followed, or a philosophy
which, detaching from language's insinuations, seeks in the root of social
thought that which is intuitive.

     This position does not signal disrespect of language. It will persist as
the expression of the common thought, which also enjoys the privilege of
serving to initiate other forms of thought while being the only one that
existed at the start. Yet the philosopher should force herself to transcend
language and the concepts warehoused in it. Because, even assuming a clear
and distinct intuition in the Cartesian manner, and this is not the case with
Bergson, one must seek an adequate mode of communication, now that intuition
is not in the realm of common thought.

     On one side, the dialectic is necessary in order to awaken intuition, to
control it and allow it to communicate, and on the other communication betrays
that same intuition, it being sacrificed to the intelligence. "Only through it
does intuition communicate, but the inner experience can nowhere find
appropriate language" (Paraphrasing Bergson's expressions: MARTINS, D.)

     A philosophy elaborated in collaboration and dialogue cannot omit the
fact of communication. Yet the communicative phenomenon, whether established
through suggestive symbols or through allegories, myths, subjective images, or
rigid concepts, is mediated; for all of them are "translations" of the
original. We deal, then, with confronting the value of the translations and, if
it is inevitable to resort to them, we shall have to seek those that most
exactly reflect the original. In the domain of words the best translation and
the most suggestive will be the poetic. There the images, the metaphors, the
comparisons have an important mission to fulfill. Bergson also uses them to
this end. We can distinguish two types of images in the Bergsonian exposition:
those that present themselves to the mind of the philosopher when she wants to
communicate her thought; and those which remain within her. These are what he
calls "neighbors of intuition," including those for which the philosopher has
a personal need, yet which are inexplicable. Bergson says nothing further about
them. We think they can be identified with what Bergson in another place calls
"mediating images," being:

     "Like an image mediating between the simplicity of concrete intuition and
     the complexity of the abstractions that translate it, a fleeting and
     evanescent image, which obsesses, perhaps without perceiving it, the mind
     of the philosopher, who follows it like its shadow throughout the comings
     and goings of his thought and, if this is not intuition itself, it
     approximates much more to it than conceptual, necessarily symbolic
     expression, to which intuition must resort to provide its explanations"
     (PM).

     Yet perhaps more important than their mission of seeing what others have
seen, would be their internal power of negation. Bergson compares their
function to that of the Socratic "daimon." It says "impossible" when reason
and even certain facts seem to invite consideration that something is real or
possible. It is a sort of internal, confused experience, which speaks to the
spirit of the philosopher and infuses in him the presentiment that reasonings
can be false with badly observed facts. This image will confer absolute
certainty on what he negates, that is, that although the philosopher may have
to correct his doctrine or complete it, that will always be in what is
affirmed, but not in what he rejects, if it has been allowed to be directed by
the mediating image.

     Although Bergson does not speak there of the dialectic, it does not seem
exaggerated to call that the fount of this movement which goes from intuition
to the expression and inversely, and which elsewhere he defines as constitutive
of metaphysics: "Of these comings and goings are made the zig-zags of a
doctrine that unfolds: that is to say, which is lost, found and indefinitely
correcting itself" (PM).

     Besides these images are those that are juxtaposed with an abstract
expression, in order to illustrate it, and which the author wants to make the
reader comprehend. Images that abound in Bergsonian expression; and for more
than desire for poetic beauty or special artistic sensibility, which we need
not assume foreign to Bergson's "delicacy," for the dynamic itself of a thought
that seeks more to "suggest" than "express" that which he knows he can never
fully accomplish.

     The image not only has a mediating function, but is something intermediate
between complex intellectual analysis and intuition. It is an instrument
situated equidistant from abstraction and from concrete reality. As G.
Maurelios says, it is the first manifestation, the most direct expression, if
not the most literal translation of primitive intuition. (His profound study
of the use and function of images in Bergson's exposition surpasses our work;
for such we refer to BREHIER, E.)

     The philosopher wants precision and we suspect that such language will
not provide the desired rigor. Bergson recognizes the ambiguity of this. Yet
precisely because the image does not prescribe, does not limit, it adapts
better to a moving reality. It seeks to suggest and, if one attends to its
evocative capacity, can give us a direct vision. We do not have to understand
"giving us vision" as if intuition immediately were to communicate the image
to us, because intuition, by itself, in incommunicable. Its function is to
orient the search, as Bergson here expresses it: "Many images, converging in
the direction of that which we are trying to reach, can orient our spirit in
that direction" (PM).

     The image, despite its imprecision and ambiguity, or precisely thanks to
them, has a double advantage over the concept: "that it keeps us within the
concrete" and that it knows its function is not to describe, but instead
it takes value in reference to something other than itself; to what it
suggests. It is so mobile that it tends to go up in smoke, disappear and in
this fashion oblige the spirit to a search effort and continual attention.
Whereas the concept gives security and confidence to the spirit, creating
"illusions" which we shall consider later.

     The function of the image in the Bergsonian method is analogous to that of
the philosopher. His goal is not exactly to demonstrate nor even to show, but
to cause to see, discover, constitute. Now, the image is not the only
possible form to communicate intuition, or to allow another to experience it.
There remains recourse to the word or to the concept. Yet we already know
Bergson's "severity" with regard to conceptual expression.

     If what we are dealing with is "to grasp the original itself as closely as
possible," we must seek for every original studied a concept applying to it
exclusively, "cut to size," something very different from that to which
habitual, schematizing and paralyzing logic has accustomed us. Mobile
representations are sought, flexible, almost fluid, always disposed to mold
themselves around the fleeting forms of intuition. Such representations: can we
say they all are concepts? Bergson recognizes the difficulty of continuing to
call them that: "It can scarcely be said that it--the representation--is a
concept, because it does not apply to more than one single thing" (PM).

     If such representations are hardly concepts, what might they be? They are
words that receive their meaning from the context to which one must recur
continually.  It deals with replacing the idea, fixed and completed, with the
meaning that the word acquires in the rhythm of the sentence and in the
context in which it is used.

     Properly speaking, intuition is not communicated, it is translated, it
comments upon the translation. If we ask concerning the value of these
interminable commentaries, the Bergsonian position is not very hopeful. The
philosopher can spend his whole life trying to communicate "that which he has
seen" without ever achieving it, since:

     "He could not formulate what he had in spirit with feeling obliged to
     correct his formula, and later correct his correction: thus, from theory
     to theory, correcting it when he thought it complete, he does nothing
     else, due to a complication that recalls a complication and through
     amplifications and juxtapositions and amplifications, in order to
     translate, with a growing approximation, the simplicity of his original
     intuition" (PM).

     The labor of logical perfecting can proceed indefinitely, whereas the
generating act for the method, the intuition, endures for an instant. So then,
that such an intuition cannot be communicated does not mean that the expression
is condemned to debility or the occult.

     Granted that words cannot correspond to intuition, yet groups of words,
sentences, the movement from one to the other, can correspond to the comings
and goings of thought and be communicated directly to the reader. But we can
affirm, following Mossé-Bastide, that expression in these circumstances
has little that is conceptual and much that is poetic and musical.

     In addition to these forms of expression we find ourselves with those
pertaining to the logical and discursive intelligence and whose value we
already know for an intuitive philosophy. But, we repeat, it is not a
philosophy which repudiates all dialectic and that eliminates the concept but
instead one that seeks to renovate human knowing. It would substitute that for
the rigid, exhausted concepts that common sense, and science and its
precursors offer, with new concepts, adjusted to the structure of the real, and
sufficiently flexible so as to pursue the latter in all its sinuosities.

     So then, these concepts and their use, even having their source beyond the
intelligence, cannot form nor put to the test more than utilize the mechanisms
of that intelligence. Because, as Husson says, the intelligence alone can set
the problems, which places us on the road towards intuition and, even more,
that which puts the value of this intuition to the test, verifying its ability
to clarify the facts. This complex "dialectic" is fundamentally realized in
three ways: through examination of the facts accumulated by science, the
critique of philosophical doctrines and analysis of the ideas that float in
the atmosphere of the epoch.

     An expression familiar to Bergson that we do not tire of repeating is
that intuition or vision is not something gratuitous that falls from the sky.
A manifestation of reality is not obtained except through an effort of
camaraderie with it. It imposes an attentive attitude of seeking that keeps in
mind the different modes of approaching the real. All this is the condition
for arriving at intuition.

     So then, if the different sciences are as symbolical as we might suspect,
why should we keep their knowledge in mind? Trying to expunge it, one cannot
see the importance of familiarity with them, except their preventive
pedagogical value, which would not be necessary either to an unprepared spirit.
If, apart from this function we must know them because they enrich our
intuition it is because, somehow, the original is communicated, is expressed
in them. That one must know the road traveled by the moving to arrive at the
original impulse, can only have full meaning on the assumption that the
distinct points of the trajectory signify an original unfolding of the force
generating the movement. With the contrary, such a task of discernment would be
absurd or at least sterile. However important may be all the labor of
comparison and search, they are not enough to arrive at intuition. Their
mission is only to prepare. In the last paragraph of the Introduction to
Metaphysics, Bergson leaves the confrontation of the facts with the
observations sufficiently explained, as functioning of the method:

     "It is not enough," he says, "to assimilate the noteworthy facts; it is
     necessary to accumulate and bring together an enormous mass to be sure, in
     this fusion, of mutually neutralizing all the preconceived and premature
     ideas that observers had been able to deposit, unknowingly, at the root of
     the observations. Only thus is the brute materiality of the known facts
     separated... The definitive effort of distinct intuition would be
     impossible for one who had not reunited and gathered together a large
     amount for analysis. Yet intuition, though it cannot be attained without
     the force of material knowledge, is a very different thing from a summary
     or synthesis of this knowledge. It differs from the latter as a motor
     impulse differs from the road covered by the movement" (PM).

     Knowledge of the "documents," which appears as necessary in the
Introduction to Metaphysics, is dissonant with other affirmations that
we encounter in L'intuition philosophique, according to which the
philosopher will live in any case, and set any problem she expresses with the
formulas in use, to come to say the same thing, or more exactly, to try to say
it without being able to fully do so.

     The philosophy must manifest itself with the "instruments of the moment"
to deal with the problems, but they are accidental means and "other dust
storms might have been able to cause the same whirlwind." Those dust storms are
the fragile lever that permits us to rise to the original intuition; and from
there to contemplate philosophy elevating oneself above the conditions of the
time. Material knowledge is what we could call a "preparatory state" for
intuition. The search for it is subject to the same conditions of information
as scientific observation, not so as to coincide with science, but to arrive at
the intuition that scientific knowledge has missed and to indicate the limits
and the framework in which science is enclosed.

     The Bergsonian expository style is not demonstrative, and does not try to
arrive at rigid and definitive conclusions. Martins says that Bergson's
argumentation follows the course, it is possible, it is probable, thus arriving
at a growing probability that will confirm the facts. The philosopher himself
recognizes this trajectory in his thought, but also is surprised that he may
have been considered the philosopher of probability and evidence.

     Not everything is equally verifiable in philosophy and in may cases the
philosopher has to accept the risk and dare to propose provisional
conclusions: "But the philosopher accepts this risk only because there are
things of which he feels firmly certain" (PM), that is, which he has grasped
through direct experience.

     Bergson now would not accept the accusation that the same Martins makes,
regarding the problematic of the metaphysics, of Kantianism. We have underlined
the insistence of our author, as against Kant, to affirm that the absolute can
be attained. The problematic turns around the search for valid formulas that
would permit him to ground the new science. The probability in the metaphysics
would have to be situated in the deficiency of the formulas. Yet it does not
cease being paradoxical that, seeking precision, one arrives at probable
conclusions; though he recognizes that metaphysics is science in the making
and limits himself to indicating the direction in which research should
progress and stating the principles which have to underly it.

     It will be, ironically, a progressive science, elaborated through
communication and dialogue. We say "ironically" because if the metaphysics
must be constituted through collaboration and dialogue, it establishes itself
upon something it will never be able to fully state, so it seems one must
despair of elaborating such a metaphysics.

     This could suggest to us a dramatic interpretation of Bergson's
philosophy. However, nothing is further from the intention of the author. The
possibility of intuiting, although it might be only fleetingly, being as
duration, and helping others to experience it, animates the philosopher in his
painful search, with the hope of arriving, sooner or later, at the elaboration
of an intuitive metaphysics.

     Bergson rejects the pretension of dialectically reconstructing the real.
Indeed there is a "dialectic" in Bergsonian philosophy, but it is a dialectic
that we could call methodical for being in the very heart of the system
without affecting duration, in the sense that it is not its motor, nor the
matter-life space-time dualism which can be resolved dialectically, since
there is no better synthesis that joins the opposites. On the contrary,
divergences are accentuated more and more as evolutionary life advances.

     The dialectic can be interpreted as a movement of spirit that, starting
from the conceptual universe of science, advances toward the profundities of
consciousness, describing in its retrograde movement the different levels it
is finding, so as to return to the surface and "polish" that which science
offers as symbolic. In the last analysis one is reduced to the conceptual plane
where concepts are mutually opposed and are juxtaposed in space. It unfolds and
remains at the level of the intelligence where it has its origin.

     Throughout this whole chapter we have underlined the meaning of Bergson's
critique of conceptual thought: to deter us from the indiscriminate use of the
intelligence. This lack of caution has allowed metaphysics to expend itself in
contradictions and problems, which should not have been raised. The analysis of
those false problems is a deepening of his philosophy of the intelligence and
simultaneously an indication of the road the future metaphysics should follow.
We turn, then, to analyze the false problems of past metaphysics.

CHAPTER IV
PROLEGOMENA TO A FUTURE METAPHYSICS

     1. THE NATURAL METAPHYSICS OF THE INTELLIGENCE:
     THE IDEA OF NOTHING

     The supreme moment is when Bergson can announce that reality is "global
indivisible growth, a gradual creation like a rubber balloon which expands
little by little, always assuming unexpected forms," being consciousness
itself, that is, immediate perception of personal activity. There the subject 
feels herself an actor, creator of her intentions, of her decisions. In a word
artist of one's own life.

     So then, the subject is not only an actor, but also the spectator, and
does not become a spectator except by distancing himself from himself. Which
assumes a doubling of consciousness into subject and object. Bergson situates
himself with the viewpoint of the actor and censures the intellectualism of
locating oneself with the spectator's perspective. And the forgetting of self
is a guarantee of objectivity in the knowledge of matter. This procedure,
translated to the domain of life and of spirit, creates what
Jankélévitch calls "idols at a distance and Bergson, "phantasms,"
"pseudo problems," "illusions" that populate metaphysics and make it a
dialectical game and into a struggle without truce in search of the solution
to problems and antimonies which, however, should not have been posed.

     In La pensée et la mouvant he confesses that his task was to
show that, if indeed the "habitual stroll" of thought leads to problems that
are insoluble, it is because they are posed "in reverse"; and not having seen
the error in their posing makes the solution impossible. The hope of
constituting a metaphysics beyond phantasms and illusions finds Bergson with a
double conviction: that which leads him to affirm that the antimonies do not
provide the basis of things, except by an automatic movement to speculation
with the habits contracted through action. And the other according to which, to
state a problem is already to resolve it, if one adequately chooses the terms
in which it should be set. The horizon where that hope is revealed as possible
is that which emerges when philosophy is installed in the role of generator of
thoughts. It is a matter now not only of living as an actor, but instead as a
"sympathizer" with the creative effort that engenders the things. From this
perspective, the great problems "retreat, diminish, disappear."

     On the one hand, Bergson states that illusions and problems are
constitutive of the intelligence and the spirit will seem necessarily
conducted to pose then when it follows its natural agenda. And at the
same time, he maintains that what the intelligence has naturally created can
be undone by an effort of the same intelligence. Nevertheless, the effort of
the intelligence is reduced to correcting, intellectually reformulating the
error. Due to its own dynamic, it is incapable of recognizing the latter, "if
a warning from the outside had not verified it" (PM). Bergson is insisting,
anew, on the necessary collaboration between intuition and the intelligence.
Thus the philosophies unaware of intuition cannot see what he has seen.

     Practical activity is not of itself the creator of fantasies. The
problems derive from translating to the speculative domain the mechanisms
proper to practical thought. At the beginning of Chapter IV of Creative
Evolution this transposition engenders two illusions: to believe one can
think the unstable by means of the stable, and secondly, to serve as emptiness
so as to think fullness.

     The problems reduce to two types: one engenders the theories of
being and the other that of knowing. For the first question he
will take as center the idea of Nothing, for the second a critique of the idea
of disorder which we already saw with regard to the problem of
knowledge. The critique of these ideas is, in Jankélévitch's judgment
the key to Bergsonism. He dedicates some admirable pages to it, perhaps the
most perturbing that a philosopher has written. Which is at once a
manifestation of the importance and of the difficulty of the problem that
occupies us.

     We are going to linger now on the critique of the idea of nothing, a
critique that appears in Chapter IV of Creative Evolution, as
preparation for a critique of the systems and following the critique of the
idea of disorder developed in Chapter III. He returns to the same theme in the
two conferences which carry the title La perception de changement and
in the article Le posible et le réel. This last, a work of
maturity, can be considered as his intellectual testament. There he
unites the critique of the idea of the possible with the two previous
critiques. The critique of the idea of nothing appears first, as if it were
the key to the other two.

     Bergson bases his critique on a consideration of the psychological genesis
of that idea. We shall gather the articulations of reasoning that permit him
to arrive at his conclusion and for us to judge it. It starts from the idea of
nothing such as it is found in the spirit of the researcher. Bergson
interprets that presence in the following manner:

     "Existence appears to me as a conquest over nothingness. I say there
     could be, even should be nothing and it surprises me that there is
     something. Or maybe I present all reality extended over nothing, like a
     tapestry; nothing was first and being has appeared later. Or even perhaps,
     if something has always existed, it is necessary that nothingness has
     served it as a substratum or receptacle, and thus will be eternally
     previous to it" (EC).

     We are dealing with a nothing wider than the real, and chronologically
anterior. It gives the impression of being as real as being. What Bergson is
viewing here is nothingness as emptiness of being and as object of thought,
more than as thought upon the nothing. Furthermore he informs us in the
article, Le posible et le réel that he is dealing with the idea in
relation to the problem of being.

     The expressivity of the cited text makes us feel the philosopher's desire
to clarify the sort of mystery that envelops the idea of nothing since, as
Bergson says elsewhere, the nothing cannot be given in experience.
Nevertheless, the mystery must be clarified. So then, if it cannot be the
object of experience, there only remains to imagine it or think it. And
Bergson asks, what do we think of when we speak of the nothing?

     He delimits the problem in terms of contents and on that plane is going to
maintain his argument, to consider the intellectual operations that determine
it. Which is logical, because not being an object of experience, the content of
this idea can only come from those operations. He performs his argument on the
level of imagination and the understanding and here on the plane of concepts
and judgments.

     It begins with imagination. In essence, Bergson comes to say that
consciousness can easily imagine the destruction of all perception, inner or
outer. Yet if one tries to eliminate the outer, its own existence continues
being present and cannot be eluded. If one tries, all that results is an
imaginary consciousness that has for its object the operation of annulation.
And he concludes:

     "Outer or inner, there is, then, an object that my imagination represents.
     It can, in truth, go from one to the other and, alternatively, imagine an
     external nothing of perception or an inner perceptual nothing, but not
     the two at once, because the absence of the one consists, at root, in the
     exclusive presence of the other. Beyond that each relative nothing is
     alternately imaginable we conclude, in an erroneous manner, that they
     are imaginable together, a conclusion whose absurdity should jump to the
     eye, since we could not imagine a nothing without perceiving, at least
     confusedly, that we imagine it, that is, what is thought, acts, and that
     consequently, something still subsists" (EC).

     It turns out to be impossible for the imagination to represent an
absolute nothing, for one could not imagine a nothing without perceiving that
she imagined it. With this argumentation, Bergson passes from the objective
level to the subjective. Although on the plane of imagination this confusion
becomes inevitable.

     The importance of the argument resides, above all, in that it reveals the
principle which governs Bergsonian demonstration. The true conception of the
nothing would imply that all objects could be eliminated, at least in thought.
By referring to the idea of nothing by substitution, this idea proves illusory,
because to substitute is to replace. The elimination that is performed to
represent the nothing is only a face of the substitution. Beginning with an
elimination one reaches relative nothing, but not absolute. Because to think
the absence of something implies the more or less explicit representation of
the presence of something else: "It is evident that we could not oppose this
nothing to being, nor place it before nor beneath it, given that the latter
already encloses existence in general" (EC). That is to say, the idea of
nothing is a mirage.

     Armed with the principle that results from all this demonstration, we are
going to focus, now, on the most important part of Bergsonian speculation, that
which analyzes the concept of nothing and its subsidiary, the negative
judgment. To address the problem, Bergson invokes Descartes with the example
of the Polygon. To conceive it it is enough to clearly represent the rule of
its construction. Or, what is the same, to know its definition. It seems, then,
that to form the idea of nothing it is enough also to know the rule of its
construction, where "the nothing so defined is then the annulation of
everything." A thesis he is going to refute, since thinking in this way assumes
not knowing the operation by virtue of which the idea is obtained.

     He continues analyzing the psychological mechanism for that which shapes
the idea. The idea of emptiness, as absence of something, appears in a spirit
endowed with memory, with affection, with desire. And the reason for this is
that only such a spirit can "become attached" to what is disappearing, lose
interest in what is going to arrive and record the absence of that it would
want to find in the world and in herself. Memory, affectivity, action cause the
change to take the form of an abolition, for they invite us to look to the
past, one of the terms in the substitution, devaluing the other, that which is
occurring. The idea of emptiness has its origin in a thought imbued with
practical activity, and in memory. And for Bergson, this origin should make a
similar origin in the speculative domain suspect.

     Neither the understanding nor judgment succeed in modifying that
operation. Because it keeps conceiving the nothing as abolition of everything.
Yet behind an abolition there is a substitution that brings a second term which
replaces the abolished. For this reason the concept of total nothingness cannot
be constituted, not even as a limiting concept because, even if pursued
indefinitely, the operation of substitution never terminates at nothing but
instead upon being in general.

     The same conclusion results, according to Bergson, when the abolition is
reduced to a thought of non-existence. Recall Kant, who affirms that there is
no difference whatsoever between thinking an object and thinking it as
existing. Bergson accepts this and asks what does it mean to think it as non-
existent and he himself responds:

     "Strange as it may seem, there is more and not less in the idea of an
     object conceived as non-existent as in that same object conceived as
     existing, because the idea of the non-existent object is necessarily the
     idea of the existing object and a representation of the exclusion of that
     object by actual reality taken as a whole" (EC).

     The idea of non-existence implies, then, a movement of the spirit between
two modes of existence, the real and the possible, for they cannot be conceived
as jointly excluded, and the suppression of one entails, automatically, the
position of the other. Already to affirm that something does not exist is to
posit existence in general and exclude that something from it, equivalent to
expelling it to the realm of the possible.

     In the two previous hypotheses, the idea of nothing is the result of an
exclusion represented. But then, in the case of understanding it as annulation,
the last term never arrives. There is no final act that can give us that idea.
In the case of understanding it as suppression, when one plays with two terms,
to eliminate one is to posit the other and it too does not arrive at
representation of the idea of absolute non-existence.

     Bergson will confront us directly with negation in itself, to see whether
the idea of nothing can emerge from it. He shall try to reveal the error into
which one falls when they think of it as a self-sufficient operation, by thus
analyzing the act of negation:

     "Negation is nothing else than half of an intellectual act by which one
     infers or better, postpones the other half for an indeterminate future.
     It is not appreciated here that if the affirmation is an act of the pure
     intelligence, an extra-intellectual element enters into the negation and
     it is precisely the intrusion of this foreign element to which negation
     owes its specific character" (EC).

     That is to say, it is neither an operation that suffices by itself nor
even a pure act of the intelligence. The foreign element derives from the
negation being an attitude of the spirit confronting eventual affirmation.
It exemplifies what is meant by the negative-attributive proposition, "the
table is not white." In fact this judgment is not a direct judgment about the
table, but a judgment about another judgment that declared it white and that
indeed referred directly to the table. Yet furthermore, saying "the table is
not white" implies that it could be thought white and the reader is prevented,
suggesting that that judgment should be replaced by another, without
determining which.

     From that Bergson concludes that negation is not a fact of pure spirit,
separated from all movement. Negation "looks toward someone and not only,
as a pure intellectual operation, towards something." Which is to say it does
not remain on the objective plane; a subjective aspect is also implied because
it has, according to Bergson, a pedagogical and social function. Moreover, with
negation being a secondary operation, the objective content that it has is the
affirmative judgment which judges that "no idea will come from there." And
neither will the existential negative judgment.

     The demonstration, in its different moments, reaches the same conclusion,
whether nothingness is seen as an image, as an idea or as pure negation, the
only thing that fills the spirit is a partial nothing. The absolute nothing is
neither imaginable nor conceivable, nor even thinkable. Because it is a
contradictory idea: this is Bergson's originality.

     We said that Bergson's analysis is based upon operations that place the
nothing as an object of thought. To encounter the nothing truly considered one
must abandon the objective content, which is nothing but a representation
"full of being," and go toward intellectual operations. There the nothing
appears as a psychological phantasm or as thought inseparable from the
internal movement which constitutes it. The intelligence creates that idea; but
in fact it is an idea without objective content, a pseudo-idea and, analyzing
it closely, all that is found is a movement of spirit in it where one thing is
replaced by another.

     Bergson summarizes his reflection this way:

     "If we analyze this idea of Nothing, we find that it is, at bottom, the
     idea of All and a movement of spirit that jumps indefinitely from one
     thing to another, refusing to remain in its place and concentrate all its
     attention upon this negative, never determining its actual position more
     than in relation to that which it just left. It is, then, an eminently
     comprehensive and full representation, as full and comprehensive as the
     idea of the All, with which it has the strictest kinship" (EC).

     Theau compares Bergsonian reflection to a lengthy reasoning to which,
point by point, one would have to respond with a "yes," while with respect to
the whole one would have to pronounce a "no." Bergson does not succeed in
convincing us with his argument. The same Theau attributes the weakness of the
analysis to a false conception of the intelligence and of time. He does not
further explain his accusation with the hope of someday being able to
demonstrate that the idea of nothing is born from activity of thought, not of
practice as Bergson believed, and of analysis which the intelligence can make
of time.

     From nothing not being able to be an object of experience, can one
conclude that it cannot even be thought? Bergson has reason to affirm that the
nothing always appears in reference to being. Yet, is not the being which is
given in experience that which engenders the idea of nothing?

     The entire Bergsonian argument is supported by the conviction that being
"is" and from there there is no exit, that is, one cannot pass from being to
non-being, nor from non-being to being. It is true that the nothing appears as
emptiness, as lack, as the limit to which the operation of annulation tends.
Yet it can also appear as relative non-being; that is, when we attend to
experience, the being which is revealed is not full, self-sufficient being,
but instead a being A that is not B; and in the same measure, A is not
everything. The intelligence could question, starting from the deficiency of
the being given in experience, why is there being, without this necessarily
requiring imagining that nothing pre-existed being. The spirit's own activity
can create the idea of nothing, as the negation of being, since it is not
constrained to immediate perception.

     Maritain performs a harsh critique of Bergsonian argumentation from a
scholarly posture. He accuses Bergson of confusing being for itself--the
absolute--and being through participation--the concrete, and that at the same
time he does not distinguish between essence and existence. It follows that the
questions that become contradictory with regard to the absolute become so in
relation to being in general. Certainly, the scholastic distinctions are not
pleasing to Bergson; yet we do not believe it necessary to interpret them
externally to denounce their weaknesses. The insufficiency of the theory of
the intelligence and its negating the autonomy of logical thought with respect
to experience cause his analysis, despite its sharpness and originality of
argument, to be thought insufficient.

     However, Bergsonian duration is the fullness of being that expands by
advancing, with no mix in it of being and non-being. Bergson's absolute, we
have already said, is being encountered during time, an absolute that is not
foreign to duration. And with all his analysis of the idea of nothing he wants
to establish that if being is attained through something that contains the
nothing, such an absolute has nothing but an apparent existence, diminished
and obtained through a false demonstration because "If one passes consciously
or unconsciously by the idea of nothing to arrive at that of being, the being
that is reached is in essence logical or mathematical and therefore non-
temporal" (EC).

     Which for Bergson is equivalent to unreality, for the truly real is time.
In other words, a being capable of erasing the phantasm of the nothing has to
be a being reliant on himself, self-sufficient. That is the reason which led
the intellectualist philosophies to endow that being with a logical essence.
Since a logical principal seems to install itself, there is no time or place
or need for explanation. But if the self-sufficient being is endowed with a
logical essence, concrete beings will have to emerge from that principle like
applications of an axiom or consequences of a definition. That is to say, we
would be with Spinoza and that is what Bergson cannot tolerate, because in
that system there would be no place for an efficient cause, understood as free
choice.

     Bergson thinks that if he discovers the artificiality of the idea of
nothing it will then not seem strange to put duration, free choice, an absolute
with a psychological essence, at the bottom of things. For to endure is to
advance in the breast of the future, not to exist between limits. The concrete
being "rides" in the heart of duration and is enclosed in it; yet in duration
itself there is no terminus and the nothing cannot appear as something
absolute. It follows that duration presents itself as self-sufficient, since
it now needs no grounding.

     Overall, the idea of nothing does not have a totally negative
meaning. It is born from practical activity and finds its raison
d'être in it. It is indisputable, as we have taken note previously,
that all human activity has its point of departure in some dissatisfaction and,
thus, in a feeling of absence. One would not act if they did not propose a
goal and one does not seek something unless they feel privation. This is how
Bergson understands the process of human activity:

     "Our action proceeds from 'nothing' to 'something,' its very essence
     engraving something upon the depths of nothing... Our life is passed
     filling vacuums that our intelligence has conceived beneath the extra-
     intellectual influence of desire and of feeling, beneath the pressure of
     the vital necessities; and if by vacuum is understood an absence of
     utility and not of things, it can be said in a relative sense that we go
     from emptiness to fullness. Such is the direction towards which our action
     proceeds" (EC).

     Life carries within itself the illusion of the nothing, which is moreover
the spur to action. From this perspective, it is a positive and omnipresent
idea. To disengage from it, it would be necessary to stop acting or, in this
philosophy, to stop living.

     Bergson wants to resist this idea being translated to the speculative
realm, because there that illusion falsifies the conception of reality. It
leads to the belief that the nothing is prior to duration, when what truly
introduces it is the intelligence. Only if the spirit perceives this mechanism
could we consider being directly and not through the phantasm of the nothing.
Only then would thought find quietude and serenity and will see that the
future is not devoured by the nothing and that, if the real movement is
apprehended, one shall find repose of the spirit in duration, because she will
have comprehended that duration is being.

     The conclusion of the author of Creative Evolution is lucid by
itself: "This long analysis was necessary to show that a reality sufficient
unto itself is necessarily, not a reality foreign to duration" (EC). The
analysis hinges on what we might call "the fullness of being." Duration is not
a mix of being and non-being. There is only being. And he denies that pure
reasoning reveals the nature of that being. Therefore he does not conclude
with a rational argument or theory about what being might be, but instead in a
call for intuition. It is the experience that will supply, little by little,
the nature of that being found in its domain.

     The philosopher bans all speculation concerning the origin of being
because the question, why does something exist, inevitably carries the
implicit assumption that nothing, emptiness, pre-existed being; a vacuum that
one comes to fill. And if the nothing pre-existed being, even if only as pure
possibility, we would have to seek a justification for being.

     Bergson denies the need for reverting to a transcendental cause that
would give reason for the beings. Because, according to him, reversion to that
principle does not eliminate the difficulty of implying an infinite process
that terminates only to escape vertigo. Any attempt of the intelligence to
solve the problem is condemned to failure, since "it is always proved or
thought proved that the difficulty persists, that the problem is still posited
and will never be resolved" (PM).

     It is not resolved, but is one that should not have been set, and to make
it disappear it is enough to "install oneself" in being directly. There,
reality is revealed as a plenitude which ignores the vacuum. "We do not
perceive, we do not conceive, anything but plenitude." It is not a completed
fullness, but a fullness that expands from within, like a rubber balloon blown
up by its own dynamic force. For this reason Bergson does not think reversion
to a principle giving a reason for the change is justified. Duration is self-
sufficient. This conclusion obliges an investigation of time and why the
philosophy always situated itself beyond it.

     2. IN SEARCH OF TIME

     Bergson, already advanced in age, tells us in a retrospective vision the
progress of his philosophical research when he wants to return to a theme of
which we have spoken: "The continual creation of unpredictable novelty that
seems to continue the universe." This brings him to question anew the
presentation of reality. To say that reality endures, evolves, is equivalent
to affirming, for him, that time is the essential dimension of all experience
and of all existence. To which time does this refer?

     He tells us himself the stimulus that led him to an investigation of time:

     "50 years ago I was very tied to Spencer's philosophy. One fine day I
     noticed that time had no place there, that it did nothing. So then, what
     does nothing is not nothing. Nevertheless, I said, time is something.
     With what does it deal? What does it make? Common sense responds: time is
     what prevents everything from being given at once. It retards it or,
     better, is the retardant. It should be, then, elaboration. Would it not
     then be a vehicle of creation and of choice? The existence of time, does
     it not prove that there is indeterminacy in things? Is not time this very
     indeterminacy?" (PM)

     He does not only want to analyze time as an aspect of things or, more
exactly, as a dimension of reality, but instead its efficacy, its action. He
unites his theory of the possible to this action of time, which finds meaning
within the general framework of his philosophy; that is, what was already
implicit since the Essay with his theory of duration and of liberty.

     The critique of the possible is profiled with precision in the
article that carries the title, Le posible et le réel. We said, in
regard to the idea of the nothing, that this critique was linked to that one
and to the idea of disorder. The three collections form what Theau calls
"prolegomena to the future metaphysics."

     With this critique Bergson wants to eradicate the conviction that the
possible precedes concrete existence. The illusion he attacks has the same
origin as previous ones: the intelligence constructs, by its manner of
thinking, a metaphysical entity that slips under the experience of novelty
created over the course of time. If something exists as possible before
arriving at being real, one must justify the appearance of the real.

     The problem that Bergson wants to eliminate is the need to explain
contingency or, in his terminology, time. The false problems that he denounces
and wishes to erase from philosophic speculation are similar in the three
critiques. The intelligence, through the construction of those entities and
the illusions that follow from that, leads metaphysics to an absurd task,
because the problems set in terms of the intelligence disappear if they are
viewed from the experience of duration; and impossible, because these problems
cannot be resolved by the same intelligence that creates them.

     To bring metaphysics onto its true terrain and liberate it from those
false problems, a logical analysis is needed to show the emptiness of the
representations from which the illusions emerge and, at the same time, a
psychological analysis that reveals to consciousness the mechanism which forms
them. Thus it will be accepted that metaphysics departs from experience and one
will see that being in becoming, order, comprise primary realities which do not
need justification. This does not mean that all the difficulties disappear, but
only that problems appear whose solution is in reality itself and, sooner or
later, spirit will find it.

     We are going to pause now on the analysis of the possible and why the
intelligence depends on it. Though the critique is developed in the previously
cited conference, it is already announced in Chapter IV of Creative
Evolution; when Bergson speaks of the judgments of non-existence. And in
the first conference of La pensée et la mouvant, in analyzing the
retrospective value of the truth judgment, Bergson returns to evoke Kant:

     "Between thinking of an object A and thinking it non-existent there is
     absolutely no difference whatsoever...because the representation of the
     existence of an object is inseparable from the representation of the
     object and forms a unity with it" (EC).

     If one attempts to decree that object as non-existent one must add that
attribute to the concept. So then, to declare an object non-existent assumes
propelling it to the region of the possible or of the impossible. For an
object which is subtracted from the real necessarily enters in those
categories. Now he concludes:

     "The identity of an object, simple possibility, has no meaning other than
     in reference to a reality that moves to the ideal region, or to that of
     the simply possible, this object being incompatible with that" (EC).

     That is to say that if one declares a thing non-existent, two implicit
modes of existence are posited, the real and the possible.

     In the first conference of La pensée et la mouvant when
Bergson recounts the story of his philosophic trajectory he reveals the
surprise produced in finding that real time escapes from mathematics, and from
reason; because those operate with magnitudes and all effects of duration--such
as time--that are imposed upon it and which consequently are measurable, will
have as their essence not to endure. To measure is to superimpose and to
attempt to subject time to that operation implies an absurdity, because time
is not, except that "it is what it does, including what it does that
everything does" (PM).

     Convinced that time is effective and refractory to measurement and to
number, it deepens the inner life, raises the problem of evolution and "passes
in review" the previous systems to arrive at the conclusion that is those did
not know how to see the efficacy of time, it was because "throughout the
entire length of the history of philosophy, time and space were located in the
same range and treated as things of the same class" (PM). The reason for the
confusion between time and space lies in the very structure of the human
understanding, because one of the functions of the intelligence consists in
hiding duration, whether in movement, or whether in change.

     We are not going to pause now on the Bergsonian consideration of how the
intelligence "arranges" those aspects of duration. We remember that to
apprehend them we have to represent them, which assumes projecting them in
space; by so proceeding, the movement is split into "moments" and the change
into "states," which are nothing more than instants drawn from the continuity
of the movement and the change.
 
     The confusion between the representation of duration and duration itself
prevents seeing what duration itself is, and even more, how the problems occur
at the representative level; metaphysics feels obliged to solve the
difficulties that representation posits and, since the difficulties are
insoluble within the same representation, Bergson concludes:

     "Metaphysics saw itself led to seek the reality of things atop time,
     beyond what moves and what changes, outside, consequently, of what our
     senses and our consciousness perceive. From then on it can be no more
     than a more or less artificial arrangement of concepts. A hypothetical
     construction. It attempts to transcend experience; in truth there will be
     nothing more than substituting moving and full experience...with a fixed,
     dessicated, empty extract, a system of general ideas and abstracts drawn
     from that same experience or especially its most superficial coating"
     (PM).

     If the problems were due to the conceptual representation, Bergson has an
open road to the solution: it would be enough to eliminate all that covering
and return to experience, to that which the senses and consciousness perceive.
Then metaphysics would become the experience itself and from that experience
the following thesis can be established: "That in duration considered as
creative evolution there is perpetual creation of possibility and not only of
reality" (PM).

     To clarify his statement, he goes back to the example of the artist and
asks if when a musician composes a symphony, one could say that his work was
possible before it was real. It would be absurd to affirm this because, if the
artist holds the complete idea of the work, it is already realized.
Nevertheless, the conviction persists that, if it had not been conceived 
before being realized, it might have been so and in this sense existed
throughout eternity in the form of the possible in some intelligence which
could think of it.

     Bergson is going to analyze the why of that illusion that rests in
the essential mechanism of our understanding. At the first conference of La
pensée et la mouvant, he attributes it to what he calls the
"retrospective value of the truth judgment" (PM). Things, events succeed each
other in determinate moments and the judgment that validates their apparition
cannot appear except after the act has been completed, so then, from there
there unconsciously springs the belief that if the judgment is true at present
it must always have been so; "It exists by right before in fact."

     Bergson attributes the forgetting of its date to the principle, rooted in
the intelligence, that all truth is eternal and thus the events will be
produced automatically, once eternal truth is assumed. He wants to erase from
the mind the idea that all reality pre-exists, in the form of the possible,
its own realization, because this supposition vitiates the conception of the
past and the future. The past does not contain the future and, likewise, the
latter cannot be explained by it, cannot predict it. It is not that evolution
were an absolute novelty. The reality that emerges can always refer to
something previous; that is, those enclosed virtualities that permit the novel
to emerge, while what Bergson maintains is that, if other realities had
emerged, they could also be referred to the same past, only one seen from
another aspect. That is to say, he denies that we can determine which
virtualities are going to find their realization or that we know them before
being realized. The margin of indeterminacy that he awards to the display of
reality is high, but not total.

     The human spirit has great difficulty in seeing things this way "because
one does not want to admit that something emerges, that some thing is created,
that time would be effective" (PM). Bergson does not give the reasons here for
that unwillingness, which from the viewpoint of the intelligence, and in the
Bergsonian meaning of the term, in more an incapacity than a lack of will.

     The problem of the possible only touched in Creative Evolution and
that is posed in the first conference of La pensée et la mouvant,
is treated directly in Le posible et le réel. There he surprises us
with the following affirmation that summarizes his entire philosophy
concerning the possible and concerning duration or time. "It is the real which
creates the possible and not the possible that becomes the real" (PM).

     Bergson himself provides us, implicitly, the thesis that is going to
support his argument in the announcement of the theme of the conference; a
thesis we could summarize as follows: everything that comes to be is created
in essence and existence and, accordingly, is not possible except once it
already exists. And in turn the representation of the possible is a construct
of human consciousness. Like the illusory ideas by which we believe we think
about disorder or nothingness, possibility is a pseudo-idea with no objective
or intelligible content. "Hamlet," before being composed by Shakespeare, did
not exist anywhere as a representation of something susceptible of realization.

     If such is the consistency of the idea of the possible, we would have to
explain why and how such an idea emerges. In the same perceptive act,
perception is redoubled into pure perception and recall; by this simple deed,
it turns into an idea then forming part of a dateless past, which Bergson
calls "the indefinite past." He describes the process in the following fashion:

     "To the extent that reality is created, unpredictable and new, its image
     is reflected behind it in the indefinite past; it seems as if this would
     have always been possible, yet it is in that precise moment when the
     always have been commences, and here is why I said that its possibility,
     which does not precede its reality, would have preceded it once the
     reality had appeared. Possibility is, then, the mirage of the present in
     the past, and since we know that the future will end by becoming the
     present, as the effect of the mirage keeps producing itself without rest,
     we said that in our actual present, which will be tomorrow's past, the
     image of tomorrow is already contained, though we do not manage to attain
     it" (PM).

     Bergson does not elucidate here the reasons for this affirmation, but it
is enough to remember that memory projects the perception into the
indefinite past and the understanding, with the habits contracted in the
original action and later in scientific development, sees with foresight,
calculation. So then, by fixating on the foresight, the fundamental repetition
is forgotten and one retains that the foreseen elements have allowed
representation before being. From there one passes easily to imagining that
everything that arrives to the inner or outer being reproduces in its concrete
existence a possible eternal pre-existent.

     So then, since the idea cannot be confused with actual reality, it being
deprived of the aspect of soliciting the present:

     "We admit that realization adds something to simple possibility: the
     possible will have always been there, a phantasm awaiting its hour; it
     would have become real through the addition of something, of who knows
     what transfusion of blood or of life" (PM).

     And there for Bergson is the illusion: in believing that the possible is
less than the real, and this because, according to him:

     "It is not seen that the possible implies the corresponding reality and
     something that is added to it, given that the possible is the
     combined effect of already appeared reality and of a disposition that
     looks backwards" (PM).

     We are not saying that he concedes more richness to the idea than to
actual reality; the former is poorer, as is memory with respect to perception.
Yet, from the viewpoint of its genesis and its constitution, the idea is richer
because it assumes reality plus an act of the spirit that projects it into the
indefinite past; that is, into ideal existence. Bergson compares the process
of representing the possible to obtaining an image in a mirror. Just as the
image presupposes the object and the mirror, the idea assumes reality and the
activity of the spirit which reflects it onto the past. With this mode of
proceeding, the affirmation that we announced at the beginning is no longer
paradoxical: "The real creates the possible and not the inverse."

     Can one conclude from this that in Bergson there is no loophole for him to
include possibility? In this regard, Jankélévitch distinguishes
between logical possibility and organic possibility. Logical possibility would
be the absence of contradiction or, in Bergson's words, "absence of
impediment." The possible is not neutral between the nothing and something.
Logical possibility is "something that is not nothing"; it means, in
Jankélévitch's words, that the nothing could exist, that there is no
theoretical obstacle to its realization or, which is opposed to its existence.
It is a permission. Organic possibility is something else, a positive promise
of reality. It is expressed in the future and now not in potential. Now it
is nothing determinate, but it will be. We could call it virtuality or
potentiality, similar to that which a germ carries in an embryonic state and
whose progressive development will continue.

     Faced with logical possibility, merely formal and indeterminate, organic
or virtual possibility is real, in the sense that it is given in embryo, and
therefore is not indeterminate, although we cannot predict what possibilities
will be actualized, while they have not occurred.

     It seems paradoxical that the philosopher of the actual concedes so much
importance to the vital impulse in the explanation of life, to indeterminate
liberty in the explanation of the free act, which is to say, to virtualities.
In this regard, Deleuze considers chief, for a correct interpretation of
possibility according to Bergson, the distinction between possible and virtual.
The possible is what is opposed to the real and the
virtual is what is opposed to the actual. The possible has no
reality, though it may have a certain actuality. The virtual as such is not
actual, but it is real. By interpreting the question this way, unpredictable
creation can be seen as a process of actualization of the virtualities already
implicitly given, and which thus do not signify a step from non-existence to
existence or from the nothing to something, but instead more of a step from the
virtual to the actual. Because, were the real to be actualized starting from
the possible, that would be similar to this: While the actualization occurs in
the breast of virtuality, it has no need to enact a resemblance; on the
contrary, the virtuality, it order to be realized, must create its own lines of
actualization. We recall that what is peculiar to evolution is diverging
actualization.

     We said that the theory of the possible is linked or more exactly, one
with his theory of duration. Duration as such presumes nothing before itself
and, above all, cannot be represented before being given. This thesis fits
together the entire Bergsonian philosophy of the concept and the critique of
time. If one attempts to represent time, we transform it inevitably into space.
The same thing occurs with duration, which cannot be adequately represented;
it is only possible to live it.

     This does not mean that unpredictable creation, in which mankind
participates through their liberty, is something irrational. Possibility is
created by liberty itself. It is not that liberty is a selection among
possibles, nor that these arrive in existence through a sort of competition
among them, in which the strongest triumphs. The possible adds to the act that
is going to be performed and forms part of it, yet will not be fully determined
until the act will have finished. The possible is a creation of duration and
for that reason cannot be pre-determined before it finds realization; or in
Gouhier's expression, the end contains the beginning, but the beginning does
not contain the end.

     Bergsonian duration not only teaches us that the possible should be
brought from the heaven of ideas to the interior of time, from the order of
eternal pre-existences to that of beings created by the future, but also shows
us the profound cause of the illusions that originate the possible, disorder,
nothingness. All real duration is contingent, and we even live in this
contingency, without which we would not be free. This contingency is made
 evident in Bergson through critical reflection and intuition. That is, it
takes into account that no moment of our duration nor that of the whole
universe necessarily implies the following moment. Therefore it can be said,
without betraying Bergson's thought, that contingency is at the heart of
duration and, even more, that it is a principle of reality. And consequently,
that which arrives into existence is soaked in contingency more than necessity.

    So then, if contingency posits itself, for contingency is not the step from
the nothing to being but instead emergence of being in the breast of duration,
it seems that it could follow naturally from there that the world is self-
sufficient. Bergson is not going to draw this conclusion, because his
philosophy of duration and his proposal to stick to the facts prevented it.
One should keep analyzing them with the hope that someday they will permit
discovery of their cause.

     Moreover, the analysis of contingency would justify the appearance of the
possible, since if something does not occur by pure chance, some cause would
have to be the reason for its actualization. Duration is temporal but, due to
the understanding's fatal destiny, the latter has no other way of representing
it except projecting it in space. There the solidarity that grounds the
elements of duration one to another and link them is dislocated and presents
itself to our eyes as a juxtaposition of elements or states that succeed other
states, or because of that, are thought suspended in emptiness; the need
follows from there of seeking a justification of contingency, which would not
occur if instead of representing duration, we were to try to sympathize with
it, penetrate its very movement, live it.

     With this method of treating the theme of the possible, Bergson returns
to the preoccupation of the Megarians, inspired by Parmenides' formula, "being
is, non-being is." Yet Bergsonian being is not Parmenidean being. Duration
does not "exist" but arrives and, to that degree, possibility must find a
place, be it as explanation of contingency, or be it as virtuality. The
philosopher cannot deny a similar real possibility if he does not want to
see the future ruled by chance. Organic possibility then appears which will
have to be explained starting from the real once that has appeared.

     Possibility is thus linked to the notion of potential and is incarnated in
reality itself understood as creative evolution. Bergson focuses the problem as
a metaphysical, not logical, question; thus he abstains from performing a
logical analysis of that notion, as if it were like any other. Joussain
maintains that Bergson's thesis is exact if it is placed in psychology, not in
logic. And he is right to the extent that Bergson studies the psychological
process that originates the idea of the possible and the intellectual
mechanism which creates it; he does not analyze it in the domain of logic, but
it is a metaphysical thesis, rejected as a description of reality. By not
setting it in the logical domain, Bergson escapes the difficulties that an
argument brought from that field could raise. So then, does it solve the
problem of contingency?

     In all negative ideas, the psychological mechanism that originates them
is the same. Bergson describes it in Chapter II of Creative Evolution
with his psychology of the intelligence. We shall reproduce it in its essential
characteristics: the intelligence is essentially mobile; yet its movement,
similar to that of action, is comprised of discontinuous jumps, that resemble
intervals between two reposes. Accustomed through action to considering
results, the repose is more significant than the movement that it borders; and
since, moreover, it is not seen that the movement is effected upon a future and
continuous extension, it ends by considering extension as a set of things that
exclude and the future as a series of states which succeed each other. Thus,
when the intelligence reflects upon its own movement, when it thinks and when
it speaks, it will feel led to observe negation in the emptiness of the
intervals, outside of itself, so as to consider it objectively. In this manner
spontaneous reflection introduces the negative ideas.

     And an intelligence endowed with memory and subject to desire, capable of
conceiving in the form of an idea a double of the real, adheres to this double
that indeed is nothing more than an idea and prefers it to the actually real.
It is then when that double takes the form of the possible. It is enough for
the intelligence to compare the possible, and charged with desires, with the
actual in order to introduce negative ideas into thought and project them onto
reality.

     Ideas are born between two terms that are considered negatively, because
the possible is deprived of concrete existence, the reality of something that
is desired, whether it be a thing or an order. The ideas of nothing and of
disorder spring up spontaneously as a generalization of a lack, when the
intelligence unites the possible to the real comparing them. It does not mean,
as we have already repeated so many times, that Bergson repudiates that logic
but instead, in his words:

     "To expand it, make it flexible, adapt it to a duration in which novelty
     overflows endlessly and where evolution is creative" (PM).

     His accusation must be understood with the rejection of rationalism, of
the lineage of Wolff, Leibniz, Kantian a priorism and the idealism of his
followers, who considered it a principle of being. With his analysis he wished
to avoid that possibility be considered as the foundation of reality. This last
is what he rejects.

     From the consideration of the existence of possibles in an atemporal
region, awaiting their fall into time, to the negation of possibility there is
a leap. It does not mean that the intelligence supposes beings seated in a
supra-mundane kingdom before falling into real and concrete existence, but that
it abstracts from this existence. The insufficiency of logical thought and its
lack of autonomy with regard to experience also impede a purely rational
consideration of the question.

     In what Bergson likes to call "organic possibility," it is not in vain
that his analysis proceeds from biology and from psychology, and to what he
has us call "virtual" or "potential" possibility; something which is not merely
possible, but is on the road of passage to actuality; a mode of being as being
in movement; namely, of temporal being.

     Possibility, as an explanation of the being that needs a cause, which
actualizes what is formally possible, he roundly negates and it cannot be
otherwise with a philosophy that clings to the actual. Yet we cannot do less
than ask Bergson: does organic possibility justify the continual creation of
novelty and possibility? Would not that also be a sort of admission that
everything is given, even though it be in embryo.

     Organic possibility is something that exists, says Jankélévitch,
possessing the seminal potential of the complete adult and it can be known.
Regarding this proposition he establishes the following cognitive relationship
in Bergson: instinct is the science of the actual; intelligence the science of
the possible, ignoring its existence; intuition will come to provide the
synthesis:

     "It surprises the virtual at the precise moment of its passage to the
     action. Intuition is, then, the science of immediate and particular
     things, yet is not limited to the narrow and clear zone of completed
     data, is active wherever there is impulsion, force, tendency... Intuition
     is about, then, whether one wants, what is possible, and this possible,
     like youth, contains the impatience and enthusiasm of life."

     Nevertheless, it is problematic to capture, intellectually, events at
their own emergence. In Bergson, duration, movement, tendency, can be
the object of knowledge, attain it in their punctual occurrence and in their
originality. Yet it will not be the intelligence that will do it; though it
will not renounce the design of comprehending life. In trying to do so, there
remains no other alternative than to opt for a determinism, thus falling into
the mechanistic explanation or, leaving the future open, explain life by
liberty, leading to finalism. Chance, unpredictability, produce vertigo and
are declared irrational.

     Bergson attempts with all these critiques to establish the general
conditions for direct and immediate observation, that is to say, to seat the
pillars upon which future metaphysics should be constructed, following the
sinuosities of always novel events, instead of attempting to justify them using
conservative logic, as traditional metaphysics would have attempted.

     The critique of systems, which we are now going to analyze, will allow
him to place the fragilities of the presuppositions upon which they rest in
relief and, at the same time, emphasize more the originality and viability of
his own project.

     3. MYTH OF THE UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE

     Philosophy, due to its own dynamic, is oriented toward the totality of
objects. One can say that the idea of synthesis is as old in it as its very
birth. At the beginning of research, the philosopher aspires to obtain a
coherent vision of the world; for that, nature has endowed her with
understanding and reason. If the instrument is adequate, attainment of the goal
seems beyond doubt. But then we have Bergson to warn us against the
precariousness of such an attempt.

     Bergson sees the origin of philosophy in the insufficiency of the
perceptive faculties. And he relies on history to prove his affirmation. The
first thinkers remained "adjacent" to sensory perception. Yet soon the Eleatic
school showed, or at least believed, the impossibility of remaining tied to
the sensory. From then on, according to Bergson, philosophy ventured along a
road that leads to a "supra-sensory" world. Situated in it, one would only
seek pure "ideas" in order to explain things.

     Whether perception shows us shadows projected in time of immutable and
eternal ideas--as with the ancients--or else it is believed that similar
essences within ideas are constitutive of things--as with the moderns--
"Philosophy will be a substitution of the concept for what is perceived" (PM).
In this succinct historical journey, he draws the conclusion that he looking
for, with the goal of determining the possibility of arriving at "a unitary
philosophy." He tries to find the error which mines philosophic speculation,
almost since its birth. And it is none other than reverting, so as to obtain
the desired synthesis, to spiritual faculties that are no longer perceptual.
These faculties or functions--Bergson does not distinguish them--
are abstraction, generalization and reasoning. One would have, then, to show
how, starting from such functions, the intended synthesis will result from a
method that goes counter to its objective. And, if the method is erroneous,
the result will be, in the best of cases, fictitious.

     We are not going to pause in detail on how the intelligence abstracts,
generalizes and reasons so as to form the concept, which is going to substitute
or complete the perception and which we already know. We simply recover the
directing lines of his argument. Philosophy seeks to unify and systematize our
knowledge of things. Since perception shows itself insufficient, it must be
complemented; and the only recourse that remains is to proceed by abstraction,
generalization and reasonings; but, since those operations assume an
integration of the resemblances, to the extent that the concept becomes
further afield through progressive generalization, the more the concrete
perception in it is impoverished. And, by proceeding this way, philosophy
falls into a contradiction because, trying to complete the perception, the
method followed calls for "erasing" a multiplicity of perceptions and to
remain with only that considered to signify the group.

     Bergson maintains that the selection of such an "invalidated" perception
displays something arbitrary, and to precisely this arbitrariness he attributes
the origin of the different philosophies and the fights deployed among them,
because "On the terrain of the pure dialectic, there is no system to which
another cannot be opposed" (PM).

     In the Introduction to Metaphysics he had said, concerning the
pretension of establishing the unity starting with concepts:

     "Let us take any of these concepts and let us try to join them to the
     others. Yet depending on whether we start from this one or from that one,
     the union will not be made in the same manner... All will depend on the
     weight we attribute to such and such among the concepts, and this weight
     will always be arbitrary, because the concept extracted from the object
     has no weight, being nothing but the shadow of the body" (PM).

     If the concept symbolizes a property of the object, in order to grasp a
concrete object with concepts, one would have to unite the different
representations; yet since these omit what, according to Bergson, is peculiar
to the object, they will never be able to give us the object itself. And
furthermore, since the representations trail a strong arbitrariness, to obtain
a synthesis one can begin with whichever concept. With this mode of
understanding the procedure of the intelligence, we need not await the
conclusion:

     "Thus there will emerge a multiplicity of different systems, as many as
     there are external points of view on the reality being examined... The
     simple concepts not only have the inconvenience of dividing the concrete
     unity of the object in so many other symbolic expressions; they also
     divide philosophy into distinct schools, where each one guards its place,
     chooses its tokens and deploys for a game with the others that will never
     end" (PM).

     With these affirmations, becoming too categorical, Bergson wishes to gird
philosophy against the illusion of being able to construct a conceptual
metaphysics, which could converge to a principle or concept of the concepts,
from which everything could be deduced and that in a certain sense contains
all. Fidelity to the data makes it difficult to speculate upon questions of
principle because, as he himself confesses in Ecrits et paroles, "The
method that I propose excludes all construction and stops the search at
the precise point where the experience is interrupted" (EP).

     Bergson is going to denounce the ideal of synthesis with his critique of
the systems, which is a continuation of the critique of conceptual knowledge
and of determinism. A critique announced in the Essay that continues in
Matter and Memory and which culminates in Chapter IV of Creative
Evolution with analysis of the systems. In this critique he adds nothing
not already said in regard to his philosophy of the intelligence;
nevertheless, we think it interesting to occupy ourselves with it, though
briefly, for the amplitude and new meaning that his thought acquires from this
perspective.

     The direct connection must be seen in the analysis of the metaphysical
illusions, which the intelligence elaborates following its natural inclination.
Yet while the critique of the idea of nothing terminates with a negative
declaration, decreeing them "flatus vocis," that of the idea of order
continues in a philosophy of nature and in a theory of knowledge, and that of
the possible in an intelligence of future becoming.

     The Bergsonian metaphysics of the two orders prepares the goal of the
critique of intellectualist philosophy, when it shows how the idea of a
unitary order in nature formed in the spirit. We remember the origin of this
idea. In the domain of life as well as in that of the inert, resemblances
appear that cause experience to be repeated and, likewise, underly a possible
generalization, used by the practical spirit concerned with the meaning and
the profound cause that similarity obeys in the domain of the inert or the
vital. By proceeding thus, the two orders appear analogous forming a single
scale. Order for Bergson is essentially necessary, although existentially it is
presented as contingent. Since, by establishing two types of order, one can be
contingent with respect to the other; still some type of order has to exist.
There is no total absence of order. So then, if one posits a general order and
continues to maintain contingency, the latter cannot be established with
regard to the order but instead to reality. It thus results that order in
general is something that might come to be added to being. A similar
disjunction is what Bergson wants to denounce; because, if we separate the
order from the reality, it must be investigated how reality is ordered, now
that this order grounds science and is what the latter extracts from things.

     If order is not inherent in reality itself, one can easily imagine that it
has been introduced due to a cause possessed by an exhausted science. From
then on science and philosophy are given beforehand. They try to discover the
principle of order.

     This whether the "dogmatism" of the ancients or the "relativism" of the
moderns is advocated; that is, whether science situates itself in divine
ideas, or is lodged in transcendental understanding, in both cases they will
believe that a realized or virtual science pre-existed concrete reality.
Somehow this science is contained in things and to know them is to encounter
the "architecture" of the thought whose order they reflect. Such is the
spontaneous philosophy that the understanding reveals and which the majority
of the great systems conserved, complicating them.

     Bergson illustrates these visions with a quick history of the systems,
when he shows how beginning with the idea that nature is one and that it
pertains to one single understanding to know it, the philosophers ended by
encountering, in one form or another, the "natural metaphysics" of the
intelligence, which sees in nature a completed science. This thesis is based
upon the assumption of a unique order, thinkable in terms of the understanding,
and having as an immediate consequence that time does not count or that it adds
nothing positive to being. Because it rests on the principle of causality,
which is summarized in the formula, "everything is given."

     The metaphysics of ideas wanted to justify a physics that ordered nature
into classes, so that the future involves falling of the form into matter or
the effort of matter animated by the form to ascend towards the perfection of
the pure form. In these systems the future only expresses the deficit of
physical being in relation to logical being.

     The advance of science provided classical metaphysics the route to rupture
with the ancient. However, it returned to Greek metaphysics for a double
motive: because, according to Bergson, it follows the same method and because:

     "Extraordinary artists, the Greeks created a type of supra-sensible truth
     and sensory beauty, whose attraction became difficult to resist. From the
     moment when we inclined towards making metaphysics a systematization of
     science we tilted in the direction of Plato and Aristotle. And, once
     within the zone of attraction where the Greek philosophers walked, we find
     ourselves drawn to their orbit" (EC).

     And Bergson continues showing how, despite Descartes' indecision or the
originality of Leibniz and of Spinoza, philosophy continues on the road towards
determinism. But the order of nature, which reflects laws and that the classes
of ancient philosophy cover no longer depends on the ideas, but instead on a
divine understanding who thinks the laws throughout all eternity. And now,
like then, time will be useless and the understanding can know everything, at
least in theory. (For an approximation of the relationship between Bergson and
Spinoza one can see HAUTEFEUILLE. And also the personal letter from Bergson to
Jankélévitch recovered by GILSON, E.)

     Kant, always in Bergson's judgment, is aware of the need to change those
perspectives, when he discovers that the form of scientific knowledge is
relative to human understanding and that, likewise, the material of knowledge
cannot have been ordered from all eternity. In this manner, he opens the road
to a philosophy that ceases to see in nature the development of science and
should seek, to find reality as such, a mode of knowledge different from the
intellectual. But by believing that outside of mathematical knowledge and the
concept there is nothing but sensory intuitions and by making time and space
two analogous coordinates, Kant finds the assumptions anew upon which both
Greek metaphysics, as well as the classical, were erected. He limits them to
awarding to human knowledge the functions that Leibniz and Spinoza has awarded
to the divine understanding. Dogmatism is changed into relativism.

     Once again metaphysics, that which we could call of unitary order, closed
the door with the intelligence to an intuitive metaphysics that would seek
becoming and creation, for the complete experience was the object of a science
which negated the real efficacy of time. However, the theory of knowledge
must recognize the irreducibility of knowing; irreducibility that is founded on
a profound dichotomy and which takes us to the central themes of the Bergsonian
philosophy. The irreducibility of the two orders reflects in the language of
the Essay and in that of Matter and Memory the opposition between
the quantitative and the qualitative, between space and duration, between
necessity and liberty or, in an expression summarizes all of them: between
matter and the spirit.

     Bergson not only denies the possibility of unifying science, but also the
necessity of reverting to a transcendent cause that would give reason to the
vital or the inert order. The cause is immanent in reality and deepening into
life and into matter, we will find the key that provides the explanation which
is sought. The texts concerning the "ideal genesis of matter" and the "meaning
of evolution" have no other goal than to show how one can find, amidst the
deployment of reality, the very order which rules it. Reflection upon the two
orders prepares, we said, the critique of conceptual thought; and at the same
time as denouncing the defect in the previous speculations, opens the road to
a more intuitive philosophy.

     The text concerning the "future becoming of form," located in Chapter IV
of Creative Evolution, has as its goal to refer the analysis that he
had performed in the previous writings to a new image. The central image is
that which Bergson calls the "cinematographic mechanism of thought." His
project, with this new perspective for analysis is to make a joint judgment on
that metaphysics which comes naturally to the intelligence and which in general
terms was allowed to seduce philosophy from the Greeks to the epoch in which
Bergson writes. We can summarize the content and the intention of the
Bergsonian exposition with the formulas that we find in the first pages of the
text that concerns us:

     "There is no form, for form is the immobile and reality is movement. The
     real is continuous change of form. The form is no more than an instant
     taken from a transition" (EC).

     Where does the belief in the existence of the forms or of the ideas come
from, then? From the simple fact that the intelligence attributes to the
elements taken from becoming for representation, a reality superior to the
becoming itself. Bergson, with the comparison of thought to the cinematographic
mechanism, will establish that such an attribution rests upon the incapacity of
the intelligence to apprehend future becoming and will test his affirmation
with a rapid consideration of Greek and of modern thought. With this research
horizon, the critique of the value of conceptual thought reaches its maximum
universality and profundity, because now it does not try to analyze a
determinate concept of the understanding, nor to reveal its insufficiency in a
concrete realm of the real, but instead to confront the future in all its
forms and the only mode that the intelligence has to apprehend a mobile reality
is the photograph. Because:

     "Whatever be the type of coming about (qualitative, evolutionary or
     extensive) the artifice of our perception, like that of our intelligence,
     like that of language, consists of extracting from those varied futures
     the unique representation of becoming in general, the indeterminate
     future, the simple abstraction that tells us nothing and of which we
     barely think" (EC).

     A similar empty form Bergson calls "idea"; it is only the scheme that the
intelligence needs to be able to represent concrete becoming or, keeping with
the Bergsonian comparison, the device that permits projecting the photographs.

     Regarding concrete becoming, the senses and the intelligence capture
"views"; all the instants that one wants, yet vistas that are nevertheless
fixed. So then, if one wants to give the impression of movement to this series
of instants, apprehended in a continuous succession, it is not enough to
juxtapose them and project them on a screen; they must be animated. The
abstract idea of becoming permits the animation. The intelligence connects the
distinct instants under that idea. That is, it orders the different
representations under a common time or, more exactly, brings the distinct
representations to coincide with the unfolding of the phenomena and even
foresee them when the order repeats. But, and here lies the nerve of the
critique, just as the movement that the images simulate is not in them but in
the film's projector, so also the concrete becoming which is represented does
not reflect the becoming itself, but only the movement intuited by thought from
static images, a simulation of future becoming.

     The idea or form is the object of the definitions, whether it be of
things, its determinations or its changes. So then, if we keep in mind that for
conceptual thought the essence--idea--is nothing more than a form realized in a
subject, separate from becoming, and recall that the concept is a non-temporal
representation, it will be seen that conceptual thought leads us to devalue
time, in which the becoming develops, and to focus upon some non-temporal
terms around which the becoming itself turns.

     Bergson is going to dedicate more than 12 pages of his masterwork to
showing to what representation of the real the confidence that the Greeks
granted to conceptual thought leads. Representation of which, furthermore, he
says:

     "It contains nothing accidental, nothing contingent, nothing to induce
     belief in the philosopher's phantasm. It represents the vision that a
     systematic intelligence will give to universal becoming when it is
     contemplated through the vistas taken from time to time of its flow" (EC).

     That is to say, when the intelligence proceeds according to the
cinematographic mechanism. From the moment when thought venture in that
direction, it prepares the road for the Platonic philosophy of ideas and the
Aristotelian of Forms. To move from conceptual thought to the philosophy of
ideas or Forms, it suffices to justify the devaluation of time and to show
that the terms apprehended through concepts refer to realities existing from
all eternity, whether it be in themselves or in a thought which thinks them.

     We shall not evoke, point by point, the Bergsonian synthesis; so
magisterially achieved that Theau situates it among the most beautiful pages
that philosophy has created. Our interest is to underline how, throughout this
historical journey, Bergson shows the successive face of a single error; that
is, the connecting thread of the critique. All his philosophy revolves around
denunciation of the failure into which metaphysics has fallen when it
attempted to define the relation between the objects of the intelligence:
Forms, Ideas, Laws, and duration. From such a perspective, this critique
represents a sort of experimental verification of his theory of the
intelligence.

     Bergson sees the beginning of philosophy in the search for what is beyond
becoming, for the simple reason that the latter "collides" with the habits of
thought, and is either declared unreal, or one thinks that reality should not
change so the spirit ventures in search of the unchanging, the truly
intelligible. And so:

     "Behind qualitative becoming, behind evolving becoming, behind extensive
     becoming, the spirit should search for what is refractory to change: the
     definable quality, the form, the essence, the objective" (EC).

     He deals with bringing things to ideas or, in other words, of resolving
the future in its principal moments. And he continues his analysis so as to
show how, despite these historical vicissitudes, metaphysics fled from
duration, since the different constructions converge to the same result, which
we could summarize in the formula "everything is given" and its corollary,
"time is useless." Modern philosophy could not ignite the renewal of
metaphysics; because, like the Greek, it remained prisoner of the intelligence
and believed that metaphysics comes from the same faculty as physics. They
sacrificed, ancients and moderns, knowledge of duration to the myth of the
unity of knowing. In this way science becomes relative to the understanding
and metaphysics allows duration, the absolute, to escape.

     Bergson does not attempt to offer us a summary of the history of
philosophy, but instead to show the "deep carpentry," the skeleton common to
all the systems, with the intention of demonstrating, from the perspective of
duration, that the intelligence's diverse tries to reconstruct the totality of
reality through thought are condemned to failure, since becoming, lived
duration everywhere overflows the intelligence. In other words, conceptual
thought ignores a complete area of reality, which further for Bergson is the
essential; and he will have to turn to another area form of thought which
finds reason in being as duration. The matter-life dualism requires the
duality of knowing and makes illegitimate the pretension of systematizing
different paradigms into a supreme Science upon which the remainder will
depend.

     Yet despite the rejection of the forms, there is in Bergson a philosophy
of forms. The forms do not exist in themselves; and if they are isolated from
duration, the intelligence may allow them to become tangential at any moment
within duration. In this manner, they acquire a sort of logical eternity; yet
that eternity does not express more than the permanent possibility of a
certain relationship between things and the spirit. The error consists in
thinking of that relational permanence as an existence.

     The forms are taken from concrete becoming, before being "warehoused in
concepts." Because of this and because perception and the intelligence bite
against reality, they have their basis in experience, though their structure
may be artificial and experience cannot be reconstructed on a formal model.
This is to say that, if the structure of the forms derives from the spirit,
the content is drawn from reality.

     We return here to insist upon an idea we already expounded in regard to
the concept. The structure of the form derives from the spirit. But in Bergson
intelligence and matter are constituted in mutual interaction and the general
form of the intelligence is inherent in matter "burdened with geometry." In
other terms, the form is a concept and, if the content of the concept is
extracted from becoming, the representation corresponds to one dimension of
reality, to matter. There is, then, an intelligence that is based on the a
priori form of space, common to things and to thought. It is well not to
forget this aspect of Bergsonian philosophy, for if not, his epistemology
would remain reduced to a relativist pragmatism or to skepticism.

     If philosophy cannot be universal science, nor a synthesis of the
particular sciences, what is it? Bergson shows concern with elaborating a
single philosophy and indicates the direction in which the research
should progress, so as to achieve what it attempts.

     "If in place of elevating ourselves above perception we submerge ourselves
     in it to invigorate it, amplify it... we would obtain a philosophy in
     which nothing is sacrificed of the sense data and above all to which
     others could not be opposed because it includes all" (PM).

     Bergson does not attempt to elaborate such a philosophy; he limits himself
to indicating the prolegomena, and to suggest the direction in which future
metaphysics should progress. If his indications are followed we shall have, in
his own words:

     "A single philosophy that is constituted little by little alongside of
     science and to which all who think of it bring their grain of sand. We
     shall not say: nature is one and we are going to search among the ideas we
     already have, those where we might insert it. We shall say: nature is what
     it is, and since our intelligence, which forms part of nature is narrower
     than the latter, it is doubtful whether some of our actual ideas can
     really encompass it. We shall work, then, to expand our thought; we will
     break our pictures if necessary; but we do not try to reduce reality to
     the measure of our ideas, when it is our ideas which should model
     themselves on reality, should approach it" (PM).

     The texts that we have just cited clearly express Bergson's project. Yet,
what are his conditions of possibility? How should the new philosophy be
elaborated? Will it be a rational, ultra-rational metaphysics?

     Bergson completes his theory of the intelligence, from a critical aspect,
with analysis of the systems. We already said something about its function in
the method and about the necessary collaboration between intuition and the
intelligence to elaborate the philosophy he seeks. But, is a unitary philosophy
simply an aspiration? (We do not intend to make an overall judgment concerning
Bergson's philosophy, but instead to indicate certain problematic aspects that
future research can address.)

     By way of summary, and following the indications of Bergson himself, we
can characterize the new metaphysics as progressive, elaborated through
communication and dialogue, which follows the indications of science. A
metaphysics that utilizes the intuitive method or direct experience in the
search for the unpredictable novelty which pursues the universe in its
continual flux. Susceptible to communicating the intuitions it seeks. A force
to be installed anew in the all and attain coincidence with the principle
--duration--in which all participate.

     The elaboration of such a metaphysics assumes resolving the problem of
communication through an enlarging of direct observation of one's own
consciousness, of the consciousness of the other and of everything that is
conscious in the universe. It also assumes the participation by all beings in
the spirituality, which requires having a rapprochement between the
inert and the living and specifying the cosmological meaning of duration; a
rapprochement that permits proclaiming, "The matter and life that fill the
world are also in ourselves; whatever may be the nature of what is and what is
done, we are in it" (PM). It is a prophetic project, whose realization
transcends history. Because "No matter when the philosopher lives, to any
problem posed they will say the same," or more exactly, try to say it, without
fully succeeding.

     Analysis of the systems corroborates what we just said. Bergson traverses
the history of philosophy and finds that, despite the genial intuitions he in
some philosophers, these ended by congealing them to the benefit of
conceptualization and systematization. As Robinet suggests, Bergson cannot
find in history an intuition of the facts by others. Should not this feedback
lead him to refocus the conditions of possibility for his project of a future
metaphysics?

     The absolute is not given all at once, but instead is revealed from time
to time, in fragile and fleeting intuitions. If one tried to link up these
intuitions, to confront them with what other thinkers reach in moving
progressively toward the elaboration of a single philosophy, which will
never be a synthesis, but progress towards the direct apprehension of that
which is becoming. An absolute that is not beyond the empirical, but instead
which is revealed in the concrete. A metaphysics based on experience, "to which
others could not be opposed because it includes all."

     Bergson does not conclude with a rational explanation of the nature of
that all which is expressed as duration, because that would impede his own
conception of philosophy, but instead with a call to intuition. Rotating the
spirit around itself one can arrive at a direct apprehension of their own
consciousness and thus create with the creative principle. Then she would see
how matter and the life that fill the world emerge from that principle.

     Matter and life for him are opposed realities; yet, just as Bergson poses
the origin of matter beginning with the vital impulse, he might better have
spoken of different rhythms of duration. Matter is an "inversion" of the vital
movement, but he characterizes the inversion as a "relaxation," as an
"abandonment" of the tension and concentration that the life of the spirit
presupposes (EC). This might bring us to suggest an original monism in
Bergson's philosophy, despite its dualist appearance. If there is an initial
monism, to accuse him of pantheism seems to be the immediate consequence.
To respond to this question exceeds the limits of our work. We advance that
Bergson makes all beings participants in the same principle, but this
participation does not identify the beings among themselves, nor them with the
principle. (Among the most distinguished commentators who incline towards
monism in Bergson's philosophy we can cite Jankélévitch,
Barthélemy-Madaule and Mossé-Bastide.)

     If philosophy ought to follow science and traditional science does not
manage to provide some frameworks adequate to the real. So which science will
have to engender the new philosophy? It is a matter of apprehending concrete
being in its continuous movement, and later that science should be able to
apprehend that movement, which furthermore is not quantitative but qualitative.
Will it be biology, psychology, modern mathematics with the progress of the
infinitesimal calculus?

     Bergson, when he speaks of the method proper to metaphysics, indicates
that that will never be a "generalization" of experience, but instead an
"integration"; and elsewhere he says that "metaphysics should proceed through
qualitative integrations and differentiations" (PM). Without explaining how
these mathematically different operations can be conjugated. This formula, of
which only Bergson knows the secret, suggests to us that what he attempts is a
fusion of experience, which does not mean absorption, but instead a co-
penetration of the differences--integration--that nonetheless reflects the
unity of the object of experience. (In this regard, Milet proposes an
interpretation of Bergson's philosophy starting from the model of the
infinitesimal calculus. The difficulty concerns knowing whether this new
calculus will be able to adequately represent the quantitative or qualitative
movement or be a new translation, more approximate but ultimately a translation
of the impossibility of apprehending a continuity with mathematical models.
With this interpretation Milet is opposed to the more traditional commentators
who saw biology, psychology, aesthetic contemplation, even mysticism as the
inspirational model for Bergson's philosophy. See CARIOU.)

     We said that the problem for Bergson is not so much the intuitive capture
of the object as the expression of that intuition, establishing the form of
metaphysics or, in other words, its objectivity. This is the great import of
Bergson to philosophy: to indicate the direction in which it should progress.
Philosophical investigation is different from that of science, which is left
outside the realm of the reality it is necessary to apprehend and formulate.
How? Bergson wants the same precision and rigor for philosophy as for science.
Will the fluid, mobile concepts give that to us? If collaboration is possible,
the progress that Bergson announces will be on the plane of objectivity: to
find language adequate to the entire realm of reality that science does not
reach.

     Bergson constantly denounces geometrical intelligence and the failure of
its pretension to deductively justify changing succession. He wants an
"amplified" intelligence, adapted to the apprehension of what one's reality
is. Intelligible reality, which is in the reach of the philosopher and she can
invoke its help, with the hope that later or sooner it will reveal its deep
structure. Bergson is confident in reality and confident in the capacity of
man to grasp it, although in the existing state it can only be observed that
it overflows everywhere.

     We are not dealing with an ingenuous faith, but one founded on the
intuitions that man obtains through the painful effort of disinterested
search. Despite the difficulty that sympathizing with the thing itself
involves, the weakness of the contact and the impossibility of communicating
it, the philosophy of Bergson is not dramatic. For as he himself says:

     "Intuition, far from leaving us suspended in a vacuum, puts us in contact
     with a series of durations that we should try to follow to the bottom or
     to the top; in both cases we can expand ourselves indefinitely by an ever
     more violent effort. Moving upwards, we go towards a duration that   
     intensifies... The limit will be eternity. Not an eternity of mortality,
     but instead an eternity of life where our duration will be encountered   
     like vibrations in the light" (PM).

     And thus, "Philosophy will have gained an encounter with something
absolute in the moving world of phenomena. Yet we also will gain something
in feeling more enjoyment and more strength... We shall feel ourselves
participants in the great work that is beginning and which is pursued before
our eyes, as if we were our own creators... Humiliated until then in an
attitude of obedience, slaves of who knows what natural necessities, we
flatter ourselves as masters associated with a great Master. Such will be the
conclusion of our study; let us see in it a simple lesson. It might be
preparation for living well" (PM).

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION

     If indeed it is true, as Bergson says, that one is never obliged to make
a book, it is also so that if for a strange reason one decides to fulfill this
task, they will have to begin and to place the final period. In knowledge that
by the road there remain many questions touched only in passing which merited
greater treatment. Even so, we believe we have said the essential regarding
the theory referring to the intelligence. And from this perspective the
present work suggests to us the following conclusions.
     
 Bergson begins his philosophical course concerned with the problem
of time. To treat the essence of this he questions science and the philosophy
of nature and, not finding in them the answer he seeks, he directs himself to
psychology. The selection of psychic activity as the nucleus of reflection
orients his later research. He intuits consciousness as duration, creation,
free choice. This discovery is the germ of his philosophy of the real and, in
parallel, his theory of knowledge.

     From analysis of consciousness he directs the study at life. The history
of evolution shows that life and consciousness are realities of the same order
and both of a psychological essence. Yet just as consciousness is not absolute
creation, so does life not progress as one would wish. It must be performed
amidst a reality of another order and at odds with it, that is, matter.
     
 In correspondence with the duality of the real he postulates two
forms of knowledge that take note, each from its perspective, of that duality.

     The intelligence is the "organ" created by evolution to serve the
individual in the problem of adaptation. That is, it is the form of thought
destined to think and act upon matter. This destiny enables it to adequately
fulfill its mission, but makes it incapable of apprehending the other domain
of the real, that in which being reveals itself as duration.
     
 The justification for this incapacity must be sought in the
hypothesis of the metaphysical genesis of the intelligence. There it is
presented as emerging naturally from the evolutionary process, a form of
thought that life deposits for it to deal with matter. Yet that form is not
something given, but instead is constituted in the spirit-matter interaction.
That interaction engenders what Bergson calls the "geometrical form" of the
intelligence. "Homogeneous space" is the symbolization of that form, is the
scheme for all intellectual representation which permits organizing,
reconstructing experience.
     
 Bergson maintains that knowledge is not a Construction of
the object by the subject, but an organization of the given. He confronts
then, Kant. And it is precisely this form of the intelligence, which we are
going to call the Bergsonian a priori, that allows him to refute the
latter. In this regard, we maintain that:

     a) As opposed to Kant, the a priori in Bergson is a result, the product
of a joint activity that associates the subject and the object in the
cognitive process. Then one can say that in this way, things are made fully
intelligible and the potency of the intelligence effective. Fully intelligible,
because the form is extracted from material reality; matter suggests to the
spirit the idea of space. The intelligence is effective potential because, once
it possesses the form, it can adequately represent everything that has
extension as a property.

     The form emerges from the intelligence's own movement, empowered to
describe the spatiality inherent in things; yet the intelligence, capable of
idealization, will go beyond things to form the concept of homogeneous space,
which now is not in the things. And this concept informs real space and
describes nature through logical or mathematical operations. The
precariousness of science follows, despite its objectivity, because for
Bergson, whenever nature expresses itself in relations of equality, of
similarity, of cause and effect, the intelligence tends naturally to capture
those relations, the relationship being nothing outside of the intelligence
who relates them, and the mode of establishing them is peculiar to human
thinking. To objectify those relationships and construct science, the spirit
subtracts the reality of becoming and represents it as a function of space not
of time. The limited, fragmentary, partial aspect of conceptual knowledge
follows, yet not totally relative to the understanding, because Bergsonian form
is a product of the solidarity of the spirit with the material.

     b) That Bergson tore the veil raised by Kant between reality in itself
and what it is for ourselves, opting for a realism of knowledge, even on the
level of conceptual knowledge; for, if indeed at this level Bergson is in large
measure a formalist, the form of the intelligence suggests to the spirit the
contemplation of material reality. And if the construction of the object by
the intelligence comes configured by that form, since the form is not
arbitrary, we could say that the constructivism of the intelligence is limited
by what the form owes to the real. And even more, Bergson feels oriented by
the internal dynamic of his thought toward a theory of the intelligence and of
the concept where the basis of intelligibility and of the conceptualizable
forms resides more in nature than in thought.

     c) That Bergson transcended Kant less than he could have, given that the
metaphysical hypothesis he establishes to fill the Kantian gap of how
homogeneous space emerges is a hypothesis which is not sufficiently explained
and that is presented as gratuitous. Furthermore, the psychological experience
that he invokes to explain the genesis of the form of the intelligence does not
sufficiently ground the a priori character of the idea of extension,
because experience cannot call up a similar form unless it is already informed
by that idea. In other terms, Bergson does not de-link the a priori from
the natural tendency of the intelligence, the innate.

     d) That further, it becomes debatable whether the intelligence can be
engendered, because the very operations that cause it to emerge in spirit: are
they not already assumed? When one discovers an experience to which the
intelligence, however it is conceived, might be applied before its having
conceived external things, she has not advanced towards the genesis of the
active potential that compares experienced phenomena: she assumes it.

     e) In the denunciation he makes of constructive intelligence, of geometric
reason, Bergson affirms it as the only form of intellection and recovers that
which Kant considered lost to philosophy. Arguing for a metaphysics that
follows the indications of the real and in an era of philosophical skepticism
and scientific positivism, he returns confidence to the human spirit allowing
it to foresee the possibility of attaining the absolute.
     
 This absolute in which everything emerges and participates is an
impulse and not a logos; nevertheless, Bergson is not an irrationalist,
and his reality is cognizable in any direction, so long as it is left to be
manifested, hearing the harmonious melody emitted by the world's display. He
denies that one might predict which notes will comprise the melody, how they
will organize themselves before the melody has concluded. Therefore any
investigation regarding the cause of the order becomes illegitimate and in
vain.
     
 Bergson constantly censures conceptual thought; but not to
deprecate that form of knowledge. The intelligence and its work--science--can
offer adequate knowledge of the static dimension; it can represent, calculate,
predict what the universe reflects as reiteration, as succession, as necessary
determination; in short, everything that may be represented in the form of
law. He does rebel against excessive intellectualism and against the pretension
of considering that the only valid form of knowledge. In order to apprehend
the dynamic dimension of the real, duration, we must break the mathematical
molds and install ourselves in becoming, itself. Since this is the true reality
of which matter is a relaxation, philosophical research must orient
itself in that direction. Bergson seeks an experimental metaphysics, that
attends to what it is doing, in the gerund voice, with the same
precision and rigor as positive science. Yet he does not elaborate the new
metaphysics. He simply indicates the path it should follow.
     
 Such a metaphysics, even having intuition as a privileged organ
cannot, even in Bergson, be elaborated without recourse to the intelligence.
This is because, strange as it may seem, intuition is often obscure and weak.
Only a long and arduous intellectual exercise makes it lucid. And above all,
it saves its light for itself, while not providing a language such as Bergson
seeks, rigorous and cut to the exact measure of things. We believe that this
language is what the philosopher did not find. Recourse to the image, to
metaphor does not resolve the problem of objectivity. And it is in this search
where Bergson can and should be followed.
     
 In this sense Bergson is a milestone in the history of philosophy, a
history that has us join in a ceaselessly renewed effort of reflection to
attenuate the difficulties of thought which seeks to interpret reality with a
growing approximation; a reality that continues to be incommensurable with
thought itself. Difficulties over which Bergson seems to want to triumph by
force of the simplicity of intuition.
     His voice, like all philosophy that uses the reasons of the heart, can
provoke the most varied emotions. For some he will be the unsleeping echo of
the past; for others vague and irrationalist. They will brand him a mystic,
those who prophecy the future. And above all, the Bergson who lives and
breathes reality with the instinct of a contemplative, with the sharp and fine
sensibility of the poet and the artist, and who leaves us, in his work, a poem
to what is and is made and a project for positive philosophy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
WORKS BY BERGSON

     Due to a decision of Bergson himself and since he began to write, around
1889, the Félix Alcan press of Paris undertook the editing of his works;
in 1939, the bookseller Presses Universitaires de France continues the task.
Some of the successive editions entail small modifications that Bergson
himself introduced. We do not believe it is necessary to refer to all of them;
we shall cite the last edition made during the life of the author to which he
gave his approval and that is considered as a definitive text.

     (DI) - Essai sur les données immédiates de la
conscience, P.U.F. 4th ed. 1940.

     (R) - Le rire. Essai sur la signification du comique, P.U.F. 57th
ed. 1941.

     (MM) - Matiére et mémoire, Essai sur la relation du corps
á l'esprit, P.U.F. 1941.

     (EC) - L'évolution créatrice, P.U.F. 62nd ed. 1940.

     (ME) - L'énergie spirLe posible et le réelituelle. Essai et
conferences, P.U.F.
27th ed. 1940

     Contains the following conferences and essays:

     o  La conscience et la vie.
     o  L'ame et le corps.
     o  Le rêve.
     o  Le souvenir du présent.
     o  L'effort intellectuel.
     o  Le cerveau et la pensée.

     (DS) - Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, P.U.F.
33rd ed. 1940.

     (PM) - La pensée et la mouvant. Essai et conferences, P.U.F.
12th ed. 1941

     Contains:

     Introduction (1st part).
     Introduction (2d part).

     o  Le posible et le réel.
     o  L'intuition philosophique.
     o  La perception de changement.
     o  Introduction á la métaphysique.
     o  La philosophie de Claude Bernard.
     o  Sur le pragmatisme de W. James.
     o  La vie et l'óeuvre de Ravaisson.

     All these works were recompiled in a single volume for the centenary
edition, beneath the title of OEUVRES, Paris, P.U.F. 1959; 3rd ed. 1970.

     EP - The correspondence, articles, discussions that Bergson published in
different magazines or permitted their publication were recovered by MOSSE-
BASTIDE under the title: Ecrits et paroles, Paris, P.U.F. 3 vols.
1959.

     ROBINET, with the collaboration of Mossé-Bastide, rummaging in the
public archives and libraries, gathers other diverse writings, orders them
chronologically and along with "Ecrits et paroles" forms a single volume with
the title of Melanges, Paris, P.U.F. 1972. This work remains open while
the search continues.

     To this must be added a series of manuscripts, course notes, personal
letters...whose publication Bergson prohibits in his will. Two unpublished
volumes of those appeared, roughly edited, in the P.U.F.

STUDIES ABOUT BERGSON

     We are not going to create a complete picture of the bibliography about
Bergson; we limit ourselves to those that relate to the present work and which
we have consulted. For a complete bibliography, the works of Bergson as well
as the studies concerning his thought we defer to GUNTER, P. A.; Henri
Bergson: a bibliography, Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling Green
University Ohio, 2d ed. rev. 1986. He arranges the works by chronological order
with brief information regarding each one.

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