The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900-1914

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The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900-1914 Grogin, R. C. University of Calgary Press 0919813305 9780919813304 9780585127613 English Bergson, Henri,--1859-1941--Influence, Philosophy, French--20th century. 1988 B2430.B43G76 1988eb 194 Bergson, Henri,--1859-1941--Influence, Philosophy, French--20th century.

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The Bergsonian Controversy in France 1900 1914 R. C. Grogin The University of Calgary Press

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© 1988 Robert C. Grogin. All rights reserved ISBN 0-919813-30-5 The University of Calgary Press 2500 University Drive N.W. Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4 Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: The Bergsonian controversy in France, 19001914 Bibliography: p. ISBN 0-919813-30-5 1. Bergson, Henri, 18591941 - Influence. 2. Philosophy, French - 20th century, I. Grogin, Robert C., 1935 B2430.B43B47 1988 194 C88-091255-3 No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system, translated or reproduced in any form by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. Printed in Canada

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For Esther

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

ix

Part I Ideas Chapter I. The Revolt Against Mechanism

1

II. "The Philosophy of Today"

21

III. The Occult Revival

37

IV. Creative Evolution

69

Part II Controversies Chapter V. Ancients, Moderns, and Bergsonians

107

VI. The Catholic Revival

139

VII. Rationalists, Anti-Rationalists, and Academicians

175

Epilogue

197

Bibliography

211

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would also like to thank the University of Saskatchewan for a grant which made the publication of this book possible. I am particularly grateful to Professor J. M. Porter, of the Department of Political Studies and Professor L. Stewart, of the Department of History, University of Saskatchewan, for reading my manuscript and offering valuable suggestions for improving it. I would also like to thank Jean Horosko and Jacqueline Fraser of the University of Saskatchewan and Sandy Buker of the University of Calgary Press for helping to prepare the final draft of the manuscript. They were a pleasure to work with. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my wife, Esther, who believed in me and encouraged me every step of the way.

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INTRODUCTION Amid all the intellectual controversies before the First World War in France, none was more intense or bitter than the disputes ignited by the philosophy of Henri Bergson. A brilliant product of the lycée system, Bergson lectured at the Collège de France between 1900 and 1914. As the most charismatic intellectual figure of his day, he was able to communicate his attack on the mechanistic principles of nineteenth-century thought to a public which was increasingly attracted to his lectures. Between 1907 and 1914 he became the most controversial philosopher in the world and the first in the twentieth century to become an international celebrity. In influencing his milieu Henri Bergson brought to many philosophers, writers and students who felt stifled by the climate of their society a sense of liberation and renewal, and a restoration of the spiritual dimension of human thought. He appeared to the generation that came to maturity between 1890 and 1914 as a philosophic liberator and as an opponent of the intellectual establishment. But to many others in that period before the Great War Bergsonianism constituted nothing less than a satanic threat, and its author was vilified as Europe's "organizer of disintegration." Julien Benda at one time is supposed to have said that he would happily have killed Bergson if this was the only way to destroy his influence. What alarmed Bergson's critics were the popular aspects of the Bergsonian voguethe mystical pilgrimages to Bergson's summer home in Switzerland, for example, where locks of his hair at the local barbers were treated as holy relics, and the fact that as late as 1913 he could turn out 2,000 students during a visiting lecture at New York's City College. Henri Bergson was most admired and most hated when he was most original and productive, in the brilliant culture of La belle époque before everything seemed to fall apart during World War I. This tells us a great deal about the life of the mind and the articulation of intellectual values in those last golden years of peace. It is true, of course, that many distinctions came Bergson's way between the wars, the most prominent being his appointment as the first president of the League of Nations committee which eventually evolved into UNESCO, and his winning of the Nobel Prize but these were honours received in recognition of his pre-1914 labours and to a great extent testify that his career was no longer as controversial as it once was. It is also true that Bergson lived until

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1941 and published his last book in the 1930s, but the truth of the matter is that what he wrote and did between the wars when he was for the most part in retirement had little direct bearing on that era. It is for this reason that I have concentrated almost exclusively on the pre-1914 period of his life. What he accomplished then and the controversies and celebrity he managed to generate are absolutely critical to an understanding of that period. Bergson left a very controversial mark on his era and literally hundreds of attempts have been made to examine various aspects of his philosophy. Intellectual historians have made generalizations about Bergson's place in the period before the Great War but they have not gone very much beyond characterizing his work as another example of the "Revolt Against Positivism." Moreover, there is no recent historical study of his thought and influence which attempts to explain why, in the cultural setting of La belle époque, Frenchmen responded to it as they did. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate that Bergsonianism was a major subject of intellectual controversy, and that key debates in this period about science, religion and politics took Bergsonian theory as their starting point. Moreover, I argue that one cannot understand Bergson and his ideas apart from that occult revival of pre-World War I France. The occult revival coincided with Bergson's work and helped shape it, and it is the understanding of his ideas in terms of the occult which has heretofore been neglected by intellectual historians. The other purpose of this book is to provide a solution to the "Bergson problem"i.e., an explanation of why, in the cultural setting of that period, Bergson and his ideas enjoyed such tremendous popularity. This book consists of two parts. In Part One we shall discuss the development of Bergson's ideas from 1889 to 1907 and seek to explain the inspirations for them. Part Two examines the impact of his ideas in relation to the controversies that did so much to help keep his name before the French public. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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PART I IDEAS

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Chapter I The Revolt against Mechanism The Paris Exhibition which opened in 1889 was designed in part to provide both native and foreign visitors with an imaginative display of national purpose and identity. Despite the fact that General Boulanger was elected deputy for Paris in January, the government still contrived to exude a republican confidence in keeping with the occasion. The Eiffel Tower, which was completed in March, became the Exhibition's symbol providing eloquent testimony to French creative and industrial genius, and substance to the belief that France stood poised at the threshold of a new scientific era. In this sense the year 1889the year that Henri Bergson introduced his philosophyitself acquired the value of a symbol; not only was it a year that pointed hopefully towards a progressive future, but it also commemorated the centenary of the French Revolution. Past, present and future seemed to meet in 1889 as Paris was for the first time illuminated by electricity. About to surge into the 1890s the City of Light was quickly becoming the most cosmopolitan city of its kind in the world. The atmosphere of political and artistic freedom it projected was a vibrant one and would soon serve to attract crowds of talented and curious foreigners. The "banquet years" in Paris were replete with new literary and artistic movements, new journals and over seventy newspapers reflecting every shade of political and cultural opinion. In this sense La belle époque, which suggested the beginning of something new, is a better designation for the period until the war, than fin-de-siècle, which carried with it the connotation of decadence and therefore the ending of an era. 1 The cultural hub of the city was the dynamic Latin Quarter. Situated on the Left Bank it encompassed the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, most of the Grandes Écoles and the best of the lycées. Overpopulated and often shabby, the district teemed with French and foreign students whose meeting place was the Luxemburg Gardens. The district also boasted a fascinating mix of radicals and

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conservatives, intellectuals, scholars, politicians, artists and writers, and some of Paris' most picturesque cafés to accommodate them. Their presence in the Latin Quarter provided the city with a cultural and political ferment uniquely Parisian. 2 The Quarter's basic assumptions were anti-rationalist, its atmosphere usually emotional, and its traditions essentially rebellious. For these and other reasons it became a battleground during the Dreyfus Affair. The perpetual bohemians who lived there, writes a recent historian, were rebels who ''protested against the bourgeois, against a social structure based on money, against the increasing uniformity and drabness of existence.''3 In short, anything which they felt represented the system and therefore stifled true creativity. The Latin Quarter, therefore, was intensely antiestablishment and gravitated towards the à la mode in politics and the arts. Because of this its appeal stood in marked contrast with the ethos of the Third Republic and the external image it tried to project in 1889. The underlying philosophy of the Republic in 1889 was a highly optimistic and rational one. The reigning positivist orthodoxy inherited from the Second Empire declared its unbridled faith in the power of experimental science to challenge all traditions, beliefs and institutions, and to hold them up to the pure light of reason. It was optimistic because it believed that nothing lay outside the analytic purview of the scientific methodneither the psychology of human beings, nor the dynamics of society and government. Applied rigorously to any of these areas, even the most deeply hidden truths would yield their secrets. In essence positivism rejected religious teleology and idealist metaphysics and substituted a law of development based on observed phenomena. Only knowledge produced by the scientific method of analysis, the positivists maintained, was reliable. Furthermore, in a century dominated by positivism, natural science was raised to the level of a determinist metaphysics and gradually assumed the status of a new religionscientism. Ernest Renan, who best represented this sectarian intolerance, was confident that science had indeed replaced religion. In The Future of Science which appeared in 1889the same year that Nietzsche announced the death of GodRenan argued that science contained the destiny of mankind (although with a few reservations in the preface). Convinced of the omnipotence of the scientific method of analysis, and persuaded by the historical importance of material forces that the power of the intelligence was more important than that of the spirit, Renan insisted that only science could penetrate the mysteries of the physical world: "Science is a religion, science alone will henceforth make the creeds, science alone can solve for men the eternal problems, the solution of which nature imperatively demands."4 Evidence that science in some respects had already become a religion was provided in a situation redolent of Galileo. The Nobel Prizewinning chemist, Henri Moissan, who claimed to have manufactured synthetic diamonds, was forced to publicly recant and to declare instead that an error had been made during his experiment.5

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Nineteenth-century rationalism owed its dominant position largely to the successful development of mathematics. Certainly since Newton it was possible to take a causal view of all natural phenomena and to express this causality in mathematical terms. Mechanical causality was proclaimed by scientists to be the absolute ruler of matter and mind. Not only was the cosmos endowed with a mechanical regularity, but all living things were explicable in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry. The world no longer held mysteryMarcelin Berthelot had announced its banishment from the universeindeed, no extra-physical principle was required to explain anything about the development of life. Moreover, following mechanism to its determinist extremes, a mechanist like Thomas Huxley insisted that it was theoretically possible to predict the future functioning of the material world by mathematically charting the position and velocity of each of its parts at any given moment: It is no less certain that the existing world lay, potentially, in the cosmic vapor, and that a sufficient intellect could, from the knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapor, have predicted, say, the state of the fauna of Great Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the vapor of the breath on a winter's day. 6 The world-view of mechanism was therefore a static one, allowing for no change or progress; a world in which freedom and growth were considered mere illusions. The mechanistic view of the world was often bolstered by materialism, "the metaphysics of those," wrote Alfred Binet, "who refuse to be metaphysicians."7 Extreme materialists like Ernest Haeckel, whose highly popular book The Riddle of the Universe appeared in 1899, argued the belief that nothing exists except matter and that material agencies are responsible for everything. Those aspects of reality which could not be reduced to mathematical formulae or written off as blind products of material forces were treated as mere subjective impressions of the human mind. Even man was viewed as an offshoot of this mechanical order, deprived of any ultimate reality: The deep idea of the individual had become dimmed. I accepted the monist and mechanist hypothesis in the strictest sense and believed that everything was bound by 'Laws', and I assumed that this world was an unchanging series of causes and effects for which science was about to provide a perfect explanation.8 The mechanistic view of life could only be reinforced by the ideas of Darwin which, by 1889, had entered into general circulation. While it is true that

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Darwinism did not receive nearly the same welcome in France as it did in Germany, nevertheless it did enjoy the greatest influence on the intellectual climate of the period. It also contributed to the general assault upon religious belief. According to Darwin evolutionary progress is effected by the mechanical evolution of environment capriciously selecting for survival completely accidental variations. Religious-minded people had little to rejoice in the picture of evolution that Darwin presented since his theory seemed to eliminate design from nature. The universe now appeared to be an unconscious machine rather than a living system guided by a purposeful intelligence. It is difficult to imagine a "cult of science" in the nineteenth century without a Darwinian component. Traditional religious belief was also undermined by the advances in biblical criticism and anthropology. Robertson Smith's Religion of the Semites appeared in 1889, and the first two volumes of Frazer's The Golden Bough were published a year later. Works of this kind lent support for the rationalist thesis that science was to emancipate man from religion as religion had once emancipated him from magic: "The Middle Ages subsumed all spheres of knowledge under theology; our age ranges them under science. The Middle Ages lived by authority; we by liberty." 9 Intellectual spokesmen for the Republic realized that the weakening of religious institutions had created a moral void, and that only a secular, democratic ethic could fill it. "Who then instructs France on the French patrie"? asked Ernest Lavisse in 1885. "It is not the family where there is no longer authority, nor discipline, nor normal instruction. It is not society. It is up to the school to tell the French what France is. It says it with authority, with persuasion, with love."10 Twelve years later and less optimistically, Emile Durkheim expressed his alarm at the growing suicide rate which, he felt, was a symptom of the declining moral health of modern France. In his classic study of the subject he concluded that the social exigencies that helped produce the suicide rate "result not from a regular evolution but from a morbid disturbance which, while able to uproot the institutions of the past, has put nothing in their place."11 In neither case did Lavisse or Durkheim acknowledge that the success of science might bear some responsibility for the "morbid disturbance.'' On the contrary, Durkheim, in a long career sponsored by the Ministry, evangelized for the "new" knowledge of sociology and made it quite clear that Man did not kill himself because of the amount of knowledge he possessed but ''because of the loss of cohesion in his religious society."12 The republican, academic elite were not in a struggle against their intellectual surroundings but other men of Bergson's generation were, and for them the consequences of mechanistic science were all too apparent. They saw clearly that a worship of scientific method and the complete detachment from all but

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intellectual considerations had been substituted for a devotion to religious faith and the needs of the heart. In 1888 a foreign observer of France, F.W.H. Myers, drew attention to what he called the moral discouragement of the country. One of the founders of the British Society of Psychical Research and a seminal figure in the nineteenth-century study of the mind, Myers was alarmed by the general state of decadence which he felt permeated so much of French life and culture. On the eve of the Paris Exhibition of 1889 he expressed his concern with the "disenchantment" of a country whose spiritual energy was rapidly ebbing before the onrush of science. 13 A large section of the French literary elite in the 1880s and 1890s agreed with him. The expansion of the practical intellect at the expense of faith and morality was a dominant theme among a growing number of French writers. Paul Bourget, for example, whose very popular Le disciple appeared in 1889, felt that science and the moral life were diametrically opposed. He was expressing a general sense of bereavement when he wrote: It is probable that in the final bankruptcy of hope to which science is leading us, many of these souls will sink into a despair such as Pascal would have sunk into had he lost his faith . . . Life will be unbearable with the knowledge that there is no more hope of understanding it, and that the same sign of fruitless question hangs over the horizon of man.14 This sense of loss was also expressed by Anatole France. "Why are we sad"? he asked in 1889, "We have eaten the fruit of the tree of science and the taste of ashes remains in our mouths." Science has made us discard our faith and the new industrialism and urbanization have corroded human relationships: "Who will bring us a new faith, a new hope, a new charity.''15 The new rationalized society, which was an example of social progress to the political and academic establishment, was found wanting by men who felt oppressed by its utilitarian demands. More than forty years after he launched his famous attack against mechanism, Henri Bergson continued to inveigh against the tyranny of the practical intellect which produced it: "Mankind lies groaning, half crushed beneath the weight of its own progress." Writing on the final page of his last book, Bergson insisted that men must decide once and for all "whether they want to go on living."16 Many young people of what Henry Bérenger called, "the new generation of 1890," had already decided. Anatole France's call for new inspirations found an echo among students like Paul Bourget, Edouard Rod and Paul Désjardins, who were drawing "Catholic conclusions," and from fellow students Pierre Lasserre and Maurice Pujo, later of the Action Française, who were alarmed at what they felt was a growing moral crisis. Bérenger explained the change in attitudes in terms of a natural righting of a cultural equilibrium which was upset when the positive mind abused its victory.17

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Young writers felt especially constricted by the successes of naturalism and realism. In the naturalist novel which was at its height in the 1880s, reality was ground in environmental factors as opposed to those found in the inner nature of the soul. Emile Zola, the most prominent writer of naturalist novels, welcomed science as a support for his literary viewpoint. Writing under the influence of the great physiologist, Claude Bernard, Zola claimed for the novelist the function of a biologist of society, and argued for the application of the scientific methodthe observation and classification of human relationshipsto creative writing. 18 He also recognized the close identification of literature with science and progress. "The Republic will be naturalistic," he wrote, "or will not be."19 The reaction of naturalism had been growing since at least the mid-1880s when the symbolist movement was born. Symbolism received its official designation from Jean Moréas in 1886 and the second Vogue appeared in 1989. Avoiding precise meanings in their literature the symbolists sought instead to evoke moods and impressions, the inner life of the mind. They made their appeal to immediate experience, relying on dream and symbol to convey reality. One of the dominant influences on modern literature, symbolism brought back mystery in the world of ideas and probably did more than any movement in the arts to create what Léon Blum called, the "anarchical mysticism" of the day.20 In helping to change the intellectual atmosphere of La belle époque, symbolism provided an antidote to naturalism and the scientific schema which inspired it. Paul Claudel dated his conversion from 1886 when he read Rimbaud for the first time: "For the first time these books made a crack in my materialist person and gave me a vivid and almost physical sense of the supernatural."21 This sense of the supernatural is critical for understanding the milieu within which Bergsonism emerged. The belief had grown in the 1880s, spurred on by symbolism's success and by the need to readjust to the decline of traditional religious beliefs, that the world still held mystery and a supernatural dimension that the mechanistic world picture did not permit. This "flight from reason," as it is often called, took a respectable turn towards psychical research, but also took an occult direction into hypnotism, mysticism, satanism and astrology. Anatole France, however, was lumping them all together when he insisted that spiritualism "with its poltergeists and ouija boards" came into vogue in society because naturalism had become fashionable in literature.22 Books with occult themes began appearing in the mid-1880s with the movement's journals, and cafés rooted in the Latin Quarter. It had certain natural affinities with the artistic and literary trends of the district, notably symbolism, although certain symbolists such as Gustave Kahn regarded the occultists as an embarrassment and attempted to distance their movement from them. Nevertheless, occultists, symbolists and conservative Catholic writers shared a

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critical aversion to rationalism generally and an aesthetic detestation of naturalism specifically. These themes, for example, were argued forcefully by Edouard Schuré who penned the period's most popular occult classic, The Great Initiates, in 1889. Schuré sought to rehabilitate the religious spirit of his countrymen by demonstrating the similarities between Christianity and other ancient religions, and the relationship between their leaders. His message was inspirationalhe assured troubled people who felt ground down by materialism, that religion was stronger and more unified than its enemies. 23 It was through a critique of naturalism that many writers and critics could attack the mechanistic interpretation of the world. The year that witnessed the birth of French symbolism also saw the appearance of Vicomte Eugène-Melchoir de Vogüé's, Le roman russe.24 Scholar and aristocrat, he sought not so much to destroy science and deny its victories but, like his close friend Ferdinand Brunetière, to relegate it to its proper domain. His translation of the Russian novelists became a vehicle for castigating what he perceived to be the moral damage done by materialism in France. The appeal of the Russian novel lay in its dramatic and unselfconscious religiosity in stark contrast to what readers in France had been exposed to for so long. Brunetière, who had first to reverse his earlier conversion to Darwinism, also lashed out at the naturalist novel and then more famously announced his new spiritual allegiance by attacking the "bankruptcy of science."25 Still another distinguished literary critic and one of democracy's severest commentators, Emile Faguet, went further and in his Dixhuitième siècle26 attacked the rationalist tradition of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists whom he held responsible for democracy. As a literary elite emerging so conspicuously in the 1880s and early 1890s, these men had many things in common. They all, of course, diagnosed the intellectual development of their day as a religious and moral crisis of some magnitude. Most were Catholics, and even those who were not (like Pujo and Rod) felt that the resurgence of the faith was indispensable in countering the influence of determinism and materialism, and in filling the metaphysical vacuum they had left. Furthermore, these men were intensely nationalistic and right-wing and in most cases were anti-Dreyfus during the Affair. Lemaître, de Vogüé, Brunctière, Bourget, Faguet and Maurice Barrès were all members of the League of the French Fatherland. Finally, their criticism of the pretensions of science, indeed, of the rationalist tradition generally, was perceived by the republican and academic elite to be, as in fact it was, a broad attack on the intellectual bases of French democracy. It was this anti-rationalist critique with its distinctly political overtones that really makes the revolt against mechanism a problem in the pre-1914 decline of liberalism. Once most of its members reached the French Academy after 1894 (the year Bourget was chosen), this conservative elite became an influential one. As an antiestablishment elite they bore an intense

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psychological and moral resentment against intellectualism and rationalism, industrialism and urbanism, republicanism and secularismall the things we loosely term modernity. But they also bore a special animus toward the dominant politicians and academics who, they felt, best represented these things. This becomes evident when we examine the intellectual debates after 1895 concerning educational reform and the restructuring of the "New Sorbonne." 27 Almost to a man they opposed reform in education with the same esprit de parti with which they had fought revision during the Affair, and in both cases they singled out as rivals basically the same academics and politicians who pushed for change.28 The rivalry and suspicion were returned. The science and technology displayed in 1889 was felt by many republicans to be intimately associated with liberalism and social progress. Many leading politicians of the Third Repubic were themselves men of scientific background, men who would have held with Léon Gambetta that the locomotive was republican.29 Therefore, criticisms of science so endemic after 1889 were usually regarded by republican spokesmen as thinly-veiled anti-democratic assaults on the intellectual bases of French democracy.30 Science for its part was not immune from self-criticism and self-doubt. While the advance of science in the nineteenth century was eulogized by scientists and positivists alike as an inexorably progressive movement historically predetermined to achieve a universal triumph over superstition, poverty and disease, a new breed of scientist was emerging that questioned both the inevitability of that progress, and science's ability to answer all questions put to it. Often accusing their clerical adversaries of a static lack of vision, many scientists nevertheless came to doubt that the great discoveries of their century would ever be surpassed. A good example of this was the advice Gabriel Lippmann gave to his students at the Sorbonne. A Nobel Laureate in physics, Professor Lippmann assured his students on the very eve of the revolution in physics that this branch of science was a thoroughly exhausted subject and that nothing more could be expected from it. Furthermore, innovations like the first automobile, the submarine, the dirigible and the electric light were all but ignored by the learned societies of the day.31 Professor Lippmann's doubts were, of course, embarrassingly premature. The revolution in physics which began so dramatically in 189596 with the discovery of xrays and radioactivity, ushered in an unprecedented period of scientific advance and fired the imagination of even the public with the power and possibilities of science. The new, mysterious rays emitted so spontaneously from uranium were seen to penetrate matter itself. Just as mysteriously they proceeded independently of chemical form and of external energy sources. This shocked the scientific imagination of the day and shook the faith of scientists in their own "laws" as nothing else did in the nineteenth century. It was so revolutionary because it challenged the law of the conservation of

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energy and the law of the immutability of elements, the latter one of the cornerstones of French science established by Lavoisier. The new physics also chipped away at the classical picture of a static universe composed of fixed and permanent atoms and molecules. A few years later the quantum theory introduced an element of indeterminacy within the order of nature, adding its contribution to the growing scientific movement which asserted philosophically that the empiricism of the sciences yields no final truth. A nondeterminist physics was gradually taking shape which created significant doubts about mechanical causation and which therefore struck at the very heart of mechanistic science. 32 The empirical discoveries made in physics between 1895 and 1905 were paralleled to a great extent by new ideas in the philosophy of science. Self-doubts among scientists and philosophers concerning the infallibility of science had been gathering momentum since the 1870s. Therefore, while it remained true that science continued to limit the area of the miraculous, a counter-movement in ideas challenged the smug pretensions of modern science to know all of reality. The latter trend corresponded to two broad themes of nineteenth-century French philosophy: the critique of natural science and the reaction against mechanism, and the growing emphasis on a more "spiritualist" approach to reality. Not all scientists were, of course, devotees of positivism. Many were embarrassed by its arrogant claims, its obsessive certainties and its lack of objectivity. Positivism, wrote Paul Janet, "could render very important services if it contented itself with being a philosophy of the sciences, instead of trying to be all of philosophy."33 This view was shared by many scientists who took a new look at the empirical and philosophical foundations of their subject and like Charles Richet, a Nobel Laureate in medicine, came away believing that science was "terribly incomplete."34 According to R. M. Abérès, the "crisis of universal reason" began in the 1880s and 1890s, when the ''professors," as he called them, placed the positive use of reason in question.35 And there is good reason to believe that the crisis in contemporary thought was indeed begun by professors, especially those of physics, mathematics and philosophy. In the 1890s it was the theoretical physicists who formed the radical wing of science. According to Arthur Koestler this was, and still remains so, because more than anyone else "physicists have been forced to recognize the limits of physical explanations and the possibilities of other levels of reality beyond physical causation."36 It seemed then only natural and timely that the theoretical physicists and mathematicians should spearhead the critique of science and parallel theoretically the revolutionary discoveries made in the laboratory. It was

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physicists and mathematicians like Henri Poincaré, Pierre Duhem and Edouard LeRoy who laid down the principles of what came to be known as French Conventionalism in the generation before the Great War. Poincaré in particular was one of the most influential expositors of science and the scientific method in France until his death in 1912. In such key books on the philosophy of science as The Value of Science and Science and Hypothesis, Poincaré presented the point of view that many of the most general principles of theoretical science were merely conventional definitions depending on human capriciousness. Scientific theories are then not merely summaries of data, nor ideas deduced from axioms, but are largely artificial constructions. And those constructions often depend on the intuitive nature of the scientific imagination. This is what Poincaré meant by his famous dictum: "Scientific formulae are not true; they are convenient." "Now what is science?" he asked in 1905, "It is before all a classification, a manner of bringing together facts which appearances separate, though they were bound together by some natural and hidden kinship. Science, in other words, is a system of relations." 37 Physical laws, then, are more or less probables, in that they never offer the guarantee of absolute necessity. Poincaré raised an even more important question about science for Bergson's generation: "Does it teach us the true relations of things?'' This he answered with an unequivocal, no: I think we may go farther; not only science can not teach us the nature of things; but nothing is capable of teaching it to us and if any god knew it, he could not find words to express it. Not only can we not divine the response, but if it were given to us, we could understand nothing of it; I ask myself even whether we really understand the question.38 The idea that the claims of science are inherently limited and that there is much in existence that one could leave to metaphysics (or even to religion) was one of the cornerstones of the Conventional School. Indeed, it became the property of an entire generation of scientists and philosophers. Pierre Duhem, for example, agreed with Poincaré that science was merely a set of approximations, and since physical science was always in a state of becoming, anything like mathematical exactitude in physics was therefore impossible.39 Furthermore, the view that mathematics, the very bedrock of mechanical certitude, was not as reliable a scientific tool as was traditionally thought was a view shared by many thinkers of La belle époque who, like Duhem, sought to synthesize the areas of mathematics and philosophy. Mathematician-philosophers of this revisionist school, like Jules Tannery, Gaston Milhaud, Edouard LeRoy and Joseph Wilbois, repeatedly attacked the heretofore imperial position of mathematics and mathematical-determinism in the physical sciences. Wilbois, who was a Catholic like Tannery, Duhem, and LeRoy, and a Bergsonian and a Catholic modernist like LeRoy, went so far as to denounce the "mathematical

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illusion" which he felt was one of the causes of the "moral sickness" plaguing France. 40 In this sense the movement in the philosophy of science closely paralleled the anti-naturalist movement in literature. Revisionism in the philosophy of science taught the pre-war generation to doubt those things in science about which it felt most certain. It was now seen, for example, that science could only elucidate certain aspects of reality while final truths remained beyond its reach. Reality, moreover, was not static, certain and determined, but actually lay in process and change. The older mechanistic science had narrowed man's response to the world by restricting his exercise of freedom and choice. Revisionists spoke the same language of objectivity as their predecessors but they now acknowledged the creative role of the individual and his intuition in amassing scientific knowledge. This could only lend substance to the growing philosophical revolt which was ultimately led by Henri Bergson against mechanistic determinism. Philosophers could now more easily contend that free will was not an illusion and that the time for a fresh orientation towards the modern world had come. The crisis in contemporary thought was thus the result of two clashing empiricisms, what one historian of philosophy called in a memorable way, "The philosophy of yesterday and that of today."41 The fundamental opposition lay between a philosophy that emphasized an objective, experimental science based on external observation where rationalism dominated, and a subjective, mystical contingence where anti-intellectualism and the idea of life dominated.42 Revisionist ideas in science so critical for understanding the "philosophy of today" and the crisis it helped to engender, were bolstered all along by the work of the spiritualist school of philosophy, of which Bergsonism was a main component. The spiritualist philosophers in the nineteenth century who prepared the theoretical bases for the attack against mechanistic determinism were for the most part trying to seize the spiritual continuum of life which science ignored. The new spiritualism, which in so many ways came to be associated with the work of Bergson, viewed reality as a free, creative and spontaneous process, the keys to which were intuitional rather than intellectual. The spiritual philosopher recognized the autonomies of body and soul and asserted that the faculties of the latter were clearly superior to the properties of the former, especially since they transcended death itself. To sustain such a new approach, which claimed to bring philosophy more closely in touch with reality, mechanism had to be attacked, its postulates had to be proved false, and it had to be relegated to its own sphere in the physical world, the only world it was truly capable of comprehending. It seemed then, as it does now, only natural that the philosophers who spawned the spiritualist movementFélix Ravaisson, Jules Lachelier and Emile

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Boutroux, to mention only the more prominentshould help spearhead the critique of science and forge a new orientation towards the modern world. Spokesmen for religion to a certain extent triedlike Brunetière in the "bankruptcy of science" debatebut they were frankly emotional and, given the anti-clerical climate of the Third Republic, rather defensive and therefore content merely to carve out a somewhat shallow niche in which they could be secure. It was left basically to the philosophers to take up the slack. They could do this because like religion philosophy surveyed the whole of existencemind, consciousness and free willand not just the physical world like science. Like religion it attempted to create a view of life as a whole. Furthermore, as something resembling a "secular priesthood" (later critics of the University voiced this charge repeatedly), the leading philosophers of the University of Paris could contend with their mechanistic adversaries on their own ground. They possessed intellectual credentials sufficient to deflate the claims of mechanistic science in terms that carried prestige. For example, the sharp changes which took place in French philosophy in the nineteenth century were effected by academics of a decidely mathematical inclination. This was as true of the philosophers as it was of the physicists. Certainly since Descartes there had been a close affinity between the mathematical and philosophical spirits. French philosophers were for the most part deeply interested in mathematics, as Descartes and Pascal had been. Indeed, it was often the subject they studied first. 43 This was particularly true of Bergson, who as a student at the Lycée Condorcet in the 1870s won four prizes in mathematics and physics, and whose first publication was a solution of a mathematical problem.44 The spiritualist philosophers were for the most part associated with the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the citadel not only of anti-mechanism but also of classical instruction and, according to its enemies, intellectual elitism. It was at the Ecole Normale that the young Bergson imbibed the spiritualist philosophy for the first time.45 Bergson seldom acknowledged specific influences on his intellectual development but spoke rather of antecedents, recognizing a kinship with inspiring precursors. In so doing he willingly placed himself in the spiritualist tradition of French philosophy. Bergson, for example, did not object to having his philosophy characterized as a "spiritual realism" forged by such noteworthy philosophers as Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson and Jules Lachelier.46 The keynote for French spiritualism was sounded by Félix Ravaisson as early as 1838 in his De l'habitude.47 In it he demonstrated through an examination of habit that, as Bergson put it, "mechanism is not sufficient to itself: it is, so to speak, only the fossilized residue of a spiritual activity."48 We gain our knowledge of reality, said Ravaisson, from "immediate experience," from an

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introspective knowledge of the self. In Ravaisson's ideas, Bergson distinguished two different ways of philosophizing: The first proceeds by analysis; it resolves things into their inert elements; from simplification to simplification it passes to what is most abstract and empty. Furthermore, it matters little whether this work of abstraction is effected by a physicist that we may call a mechanist or by a logician who professes to be an idealist: in either case it is materialism. The other method not only takes into account the elements but their order, their mutual agreement and their common direction. It no longer explains the living by the dead, but seeing life everywhere, it defines the most elementary forms by their aspiration toward a higher form of life. It no longer brings the higher down to the lower, but on the contrary, the lower to the higher. It is, in the real sense of the word, spiritualism. 49 Furthermore, Bergson indicates that in examining French philosophy of nineteenth century Ravaisson discerned a significant change in its direction: It is not unusual for the mind to turn first in the direction of materialism and even to imagine it is persisting in that direction. It seeks quite naturally a mechanical or geometrical explanation of what it sees. But the habit of remaining in that attitude is only a survival of preceding centuries. It dates back to an epoch in which science was almost exclusively geometry. What characterizes the science of the nineteenth century, the new undertaking it attempted, is the more concentrated study of living beings. Now, once on this ground, one can, if one sees fit, still continue to speak of pure mechanics; yet one is thinking of something else.50 By 1867, in his Rapport sur la philosophie en France au XIXme siècle, Ravaisson was able to look to the future and predict a new philosophic epoch characterized by what he termed a "spiritualist realism":51 Such is the doctrine set forth in the last part of the Rapport. The visible universe is presented to us as the external aspect of a reality which, seen from within and grasped in itself, would appear to us as a gratuitous gift, as a great act of liberality and love. No analysis can give an idea of those admirable pages. Twenty generations of students have learned them by heart.52 Even though Ravaisson never taught at the Ecole Normale his ideas were very much au courant in the philosophy courses of the school. Bergson himself testified to Ravaisson's tremendous influence at the Ecole Normale,53 as did the

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philosopher, Léon Brunschvicg, who maintained that Ravaisson's ideas had the greatest influence on the young Bergson. 54 Jules Lachelier enjoyed no less an influence at the Ecole Normale than Ravaisson. He was a professor of philosophy there until 1876 but, according to Paul Vidal de la Blache, the Professor of Geography, his course outlines continued to circulate among the students ''from hand to hand like a breviary."55 In 1871 Lachelier had written a landmark book in the spiritualist movement, Du fondement de l'induction.56 The book was a highly influential attack against scientism and determinism and an argument for the essential contingency of nature, themes which Lachelier argued with legendary force in his classroom. The future Bergsonian, Lionel Dauriac, was a positivist until he encountered Lachelier as a teacher at the Ecole Normale. It was Lachelier who revealed for him the spiritual element of life which deterministic science could never hope to grasp.57 His work served to inspire Bergson in the same way. Bergson is absolutely clear on this point: I have not had the good fortune of being his pupil, but I should nevertheless consider him as my teacher. I have been devoted to him since my earliest youth, and throughout my entire career I have cherished a fervent admiration for him together with a profound gratitude. I was still, in fact, on the college benches when I read his thesis on Le fondement de l'induction.58 Bergson studied philosophy for one year under Léon Ollé-Laprune, and for two years under Emile Boutroux. OlléLaprune, like most of the faculty a former normalien, assumed his position in 1875 and quickly established himself as an apostle of spiritualist ideas. He was also something of a propagandist for Roman Catholicism. In a revealing memoir of his student days at the Ecole Normale, Romain Rolland remembered that Ollé-Laprune ended each of his lectures with a defense of the Catholic Church.59 In his De la certitude morale60 which appeared in 1880, Ollé-Laprune argued the belief that man was capable of finding the truth through the exertion of his will. The book was yet another anti-determinist text which insisted that through "action," which he equated with the moral act, man could take complete possession of his life. More than any other Catholic philosopher he helped draft the theoretical framework for Catholic modernism (Maurice Blondel was his student and disciple). Bergson credited him with playing a major role in the renaissance of religious thought. The greatest influence upon Bergson's intellectual development at the Ecole Normale was Emile Boutroux. Dominique Parodi has gone so far as to say that

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Boutroux's famous book, De la contingence de lois de la nature, 61 caused Bergson to doubt science. The two men are certainly linked in the minds of their contemporaries.62 The central philosophical problem for Boutroux, as for all spiritualist philosophers, was determinism against free will. Anticipating his brother-in-law, Poincaré, he demonstrated how hypothetical science really was, and that in formulating scientific laws man's free will exists to shape both his character and his destiny. For Boutroux the scientific method is suspect since it fails to deal with process and change, individuality and purpose, the very things that constitute reality. According to Boutroux, the general idea which emerges from a study of contemporary thought is that, "man is more or less what he believes himself to be."63 It certainly would appear that Boutroux, who came as close as anyone to being a mentor to Bergson, was instrumental in at least getting Bergson to make a decisive commitment to the study of philosophy. Bergson once told A.D. Sertillanges that when he was a student he was at first indifferent to philosophy. He had been told at the Lycée Condorcet that he was uniquely equipped for mathematics, and that when he entered the Ecole Normale he continued to cultivate the subject with a passion.64 It was this talent for mathematics and a brief interest in Spencer that misled many biographers into thinking that Bergson began as a positivist and a materialist. These labels are, however, unfair as Bergson himself pointed out years later: I never believed in those doctrines. They wanted to construct my soul externally, with small balls animated by certain 'laws', in each case with measurable and calculable elements in the shape of those that reveal physicochemical phenomena. That could never enter into my mind.65 Bergson left no doubt that his spiritualist views were formed at the Ecole Normale, and that Emile Boutroux helped shape them. It is not difficult to see how Boutroux could exert such an important influence on students like Bergson. Unlike OlléLaprune who was a somewhat dull lecturer, Boutroux was as highly gifted a teacher as his own mentor, Jules Lachelier, whom he succeeded at the Ecole Normale.66 Not only did he exert an inspirational influence on his students but he also exercised a similar influence over academic circles. He seems to have left the stamp of his spiritualist views on a whole generation of philosophy students, not only by the considerable force of his personality, or by the popularity of his books, but also by virtue of his substantial presence on agrégation and doctorate juries.67 Spiritualist philosophy

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and, by extension, Bergsonism became in Boutroux's hands a distinctly normalien philosophy. As a school of philosophy, the spiritualists defined the essential philosophic problem of their milieu as the relation of mechanistic science and determinism with the free act. They all emphasized the fundamental contingency of nature and devoted their energies to capturing the essential character of process, continuity and change as the basic elements of that reality. In doing so, the spiritualists sought a view of life which would rehabilitate that which was stifled by mechanismthe emotional and volitional in man, and the freedom and choice of the individual. The other thing which strikes one immediately about Lachelier, Boutroux and Ollé-Laprune are their conservative political and Catholic views. Those views put them a bit out of step with their more republican colleagues at the Ecole Normale, but very much in tune with the views held by the literary and scientific groups we have mentioned. The groups converged at the Ecole Normale. Brunetière, for example, took up a position at the Ecole Normale in the 1890s, and Jules Tannery, a close friend of Boutroux, was the school's director of scientific studies. 68 It was these groups which led the campaign against mechanistic science, and which helped prepare the ground for a religious revival in France. In Henri Bergson they would find their most articulate and influential spokesman.

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Footnotes 1. See Franklin L. Baumer on this point. Modern European Thought. Continuity and Change in Ideas 18001950 (New York: MacMillan, 1977), 36970. 2. Jean Emile Bayard, The Latin Quarter Past and Present, trans. Percy Mitchell (New York: Brentano's, 1926). 3. Joanna Richardson, The Bohemians: La Vie de Bohème in Paris 18301914 (London: MacMillan, 1969), 174. 4. Ernest Renan, The Future of Science (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1891), 97. The book was actually written in 1848, and the preface just before it was published. 5. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Dawn of Magic (London: Anthony Gibbs and Phillips, 1963), 11. Moissan always maintained privately that he had not made an error. 6. Quoted in Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: The Modern Library, 1944), 44. 7. Alfred Binet, The Mind and the Brain (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1907), 202. 8. Paul Claudel, "My Conversion," Colosseum 2, no. 8 (1934): 261. 9. Ernest Lavisse, in Walter Kotschnig and Elined Prys, eds., The University in a Changing World: A Symposium (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 30. This theme which linked science, progress and the freedom guaranteed by liberal democracy can be found in the work of most of the Third Republic's intellectual spokesmen. In this connection see Gustave Lanson, L'Université et la société moderne (Paris: A. Colin, 1902), and the essays of Céléstin Bouglé, Alfred Croiset, and Frédéric Rauh, in Céléstin Bouglé, ed., La nation armée (Paris: F. Alcan, 1909). 10. Ernest Lavisse, Questions d'enseignement national (Paris: A. Colin, 1885), xxvi. 11. Emile Durkheim, Suicide (New York: The Free Press, 1951), 369. The first French edition dates from 1897. 12. Ibid., 169. 13. F.W.H. Myers, Science and the Future Life (London: MacMillan, 1893), 76126. For a general view of decadence in France see K.W. Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964). 14. Quoted in Myers, Science and the Future of Life, 88. 15. Anatole France, "Pourquoi sommes-nous tristes?" in L. Carias and G. Le Prat, eds., Oeuvres complètes illustrées de Anatole France (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 19251935), 7:22. 16. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Claudesley Brereton (New York: Henry Holt, 1935), 306. Published originally as Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (Paris: F. Alcan, 1932). 17. Henry Bérenger, La conscience national (Paris: A. Colin, 1898), 9495. 18. Emile Zola, The Experimental Novel and Other Essays (London: Cassell, 1893). Appeared originally in 1870. Many French intellectuals paid tribute to Claude Bernard as "the high priest of determinism." See J.M.D. Olmstead and E. Harris Olmstead, Claude Bernard and the Experimental Method in Medicine (New York: Collier Books, 1961); also Claude Bernard, Introduction à l'étude de la medicine expérimentale (Paris: Baillière, 1865); and Henri Bergson, "The Philosophy of Claude Bernard," in The Creative Mind (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946).

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19. Eugen Weber, Paths to the Present: Aspects of European Thought From Romanticism to Existentialism (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1960), 128. 20. Léon Blum, "La prochain génération littéraire," Revue de Paris 1 (1913): 529. 21. Claudel, "My Conversion," 262. 22. France, "Pourquoi sommes-nous tristes?", 256.

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23. Edouard Schuré, The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, trans. Gloria Rasberry (West Nyack: St. George Books, 1961). From its appearance in 1889 to the 1961 edition, The Great Initiates went through 220 editions. Its publisher has estimated that, counting translations, it has been read by between three and four million people. The French edition, furthermore, continues to sell roughly 3,000 copies annually. 24. Eugène-Melchoir de Vogüé, Le roman russe (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1927). 25. For this whole controversy see Harry W. Paul, "The Debate Over the Bankruptcy of Science in 1895," French Historical Studies 5, no. 3 (1968): 299327. 26. Emile Faguet, Dix-huitième siècle; études littéraires (Paris: H. Lecène et H. Oudin, 1890). 27. See Chapter V. 28. They also formed an important element in the Catholic revival, and as Academicians helped elect Bergson to the French Academy in 1914. 29. For example, Marcelin Berthelot and Auguste Scheurer-Kestner were chemists, and Paul Painlevé was a mathematician. 30. This was clearly indicated in a speech delivered by Henri Brisson, president of the Chamber of Deputies, at a now famous banquet honouring Marcelin Berthelot in 1895. Brisson offered a toast "to science, to liberty, to justice, and to the Republic that incarnates them," and warned that the critcisms directed at science were actually attacks against liberal democracy. "Banquet offert à M. Berthelot," Revue scientifique (April 13, 1895): 46674. This view was given some thrust when, during the Dreyfus Affair which followed, Brunetière insisted that intellectualism and individualism were twin ''parents of anarchy,'' and that "in a democracy the intellectual aristocracy is the least acceptable of any." At the same time, in the French Academy, de Vogüé defined the coup d'état as "a rather brusque police action." Edouard Herriot, In Those Days (New York: Old and New World Publishing Co., n.d.), 14243. 31. Pauwels and Bergier, The Dawn of Magic, 1012. The authors cite some interesting examples of scientific obscurantism. Not only was a heavier-than-air machine proven mathematically impossible by the astronomer, Simon Newcomb, but there was the case of a scientist dismissed from his position at the Smithsonian Institute for maintaining that the internal combustion engine could propel a flying machine. 32. See Sir James Jeans, Physics and Philosophy (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1958), 10525; Sir William Cecil Dampier, A History of Science and its Relations with Philosophy and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 369431. 33. Paul Janet, La crise philosophique: MM. Taine, Renan, Littré, Vacherot (Paris: G. Baillière, 1865), 9899. 34. Preface to J. Maxwell, Phénomènes psychique (Paris: F. Alcan, 1903). 35. R.M. Albérès, L'Aventure intellectuelle du xxe siècle (Paris: A. Michel, 1959), 19. On this and related points see the collection of essays in John Weiss, ed., The Origins of Modern Consciousness (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965). In particular, Eugen Weber's essay, "The Secret World of Jean Barois: Notes on the Portrait of an Age." 36. Arthur Koestler, The Challenge of Chance (London: Hutchinson, 1973), 179. 37. Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science (New York: Dover, 1958), 137. 38. Ibid., 138. 39. Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. P. Wiener, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954). Both Duhem and Poincaré questioned the existence of the atom as a material-mechanical reality. See Henri Poincaré, "Sur la théorie cinétique des gaz," Revue générale des sciences 5 (1894): 51321.

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40. Joseph Wilbois, "L'Ésprit positif," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 10 (1902): 86. See also Edouard LeRoy, "Science et philosophie," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 7 (1899): 375425, 50362, 70831; Jules Tannery, Science et philosophie (Paris: F. Alcan, 1912); Gaston Milhaus, Essai sur les conditions et les limites de la certitude logique (Paris: F. Alcan, 1898). 41. B. Jacob, "La philosophie d'hier et celle d'aujourd'hui," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 6 (1898): 170201.

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42. Dominique Parodi, La philosophie contemporaine en France (Paris: F. Alcan, 1925), 47273. 43. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, History of Modern Philosophy in France (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1924). 44. Henri Bergson, "Solution d'un problème mathématique," Nouvelles annales mathématiques 17, no. 2 (1878): 26876. 45. Bergson was admitted to the Ecole Normale in 1878, as was Jean Jaurès, Gustave Belot, Charles Diehl, and the future Cardinal Alfred Baudrillart. Among his other contemporaries were Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Gustave Lanson and Georges Dumesnil, who had entered two years before, and Emile Durkheim and Pierre Janet, who entered a year later. Roméo Arbour, Henri Bergson et les lettres française (Paris: José Corti, 1955), 2829. For Bergson's family background see Louis M. Greenberg, "Bergson and Durkheim as Sons and Assimilators; The Early Years," French Historical Studies 9, no. 4 (1976): 61934. 46. Isaak Benrubi, Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson (Neuchatel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1942), 53, 56, 57. Among his other favourites were Plotinus and Rousseau, the latter being "one of the two or three great men he liked most." Ibid., 46. 47. Reprinted in Revue de métaphysique et de morale 12 (1894): 150. Maine de Biran may have pioneered the movement but it seems clear that Bergson only studied him late in life and received his ideas indirectly through Ravaisson and Lachelier. See Philip Hallie, Maine de Biran: Reformer of Empiricism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 197. 48. Henri Bergson, "The Life and Work of Ravaisson," The Creative Mind (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 275. Appeared originally as "La vie et les oeuvtes de M. Félix Ravaisson-Mollien," Comptes rendus de l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques 1 (1904). 49. Ibid., 281. 50. Ibid., 282. 51. Félix Ravaisson, Rapport sur la philosophie en France au XIXme, 2nd ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1885). Bergson considered Ravaisson an "artist" as well as a philosopher of the first rank, and the Rapport the best book of its kind in France. Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson, 82. For a thorough discussion of Ravaisson, spiritualism and its influence on Bergson, see Dominique Janicaud, Une généalogie du spiritualisme français (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969). Bergson's spiritualist antecedents have also been chartered very carefully by Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Roots of Bergson's Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943). 52. The Creative Mind, 284. 53. Ibid. 54. Léon Brunschicg, "Le bergsonisme dans l'histoire de la philosphie," Les nouvelles littéraires (December 15, 1928): 1. Félix Ravaisson (18131900) never taught at the Ecole Normale. He was Inspector General of Higher Education until his retirement in 1880. 55. Paul Vidal de la Blache, Discours de M. Vidal de la Blache prés de l'Académie a l'occasion de la mort de M. Jules Lachelier (Paris: Imprimerie de Fermin-Didot, 1918), 23. Another spiritualist philosopher whose ideas remained alive at the Ecole Normale long after his departure was Alfred Fouillée (18381912). Fouillée's whole career represented an attack on mechanism, "the most impoverished and most fragmentary conception of the world." L'Évolutionnisme des idée-forces (Paris: F. Alcan, 1890), 291. From his first book, La liberté et le determinisme (1872), Fouillée argued that conscious ideas were in reality idée-forces exerting an inherently appetitive power which sought to manifest themselves in the material world. This is what he meant when he said, "continuity is reality." Liberty was just such an idée-force and therefore had the power to realize itself in the world. Bergson in referring to the anti-determinist philosophers called Fouillée ''one of the ablest" of them all. Time and Free Will (New York: Harper, 1960), 160. 56. Jules Lachelier, Du fondement de l'induction. 2nd ed. (Paris: F. Alcan, 1896).

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57. Lionel Dauriac, "La philosophie au collège," Critique philosophique, n.s., 1 (1885): 17. 58. Letter to Xavier Léon, May 28, 1932, in Mélanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 1503. See also Bergson's "La philosophie française," Ibid., 11721173. Bergson, finally, dedicated Time and Free Will to Lachelier.

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59. Romain Rolland, Le Cloître de la rue d'Ulm (Paris: Albin, Michel, 1952), 137. In a somewhat biased view, Rolland said that Ollé-Laprune wanted "to train clerical professors like himself" (p. 20). When in 1880 Ollé-Laprune was suspended from his position at the Ecole Normale for having attended a religious meeting of a dissolved congregation, the students (who were somewhat anti-clerical) demonstrated on his behalf. Pierre Jeannin, Ecole Normale Supérieure; livre d'or (Paris: Office française de diffusion artistique et littéraire, 1963), 91. 60. Léon Ollé-Laprune, De la certitude morale (Paris: E. Belin, 1880). 61. Emile Boutroux, De la contingence des lois de la nature (Paris: F. Alcan, 1898). The debate among Bergson's biographers over Boutroux's influence is really one of emphasis; Jacques Chevalier and Fernand Vial acknowledge the influence but do not think it decisive. On the other hand, Ben-Ami Scharfstein and Dominique Parodi think it paramount. As Scharfstein points out, however, Parodi's book was read and approved by Bergson. See Jacques Chevalier, Bergson (Paris: Plon, 1926), 4647; Fernand Vial, "Henri Bergson, Spiritual and Literary Influence," Thought 16 (1941): 243; Parodi, 259; Scharfstein, 11. 62. Georges Michelet, "La science et l'esprit scientifique," Revue de philosophie 4 (1904): 122. 63. Preface to Rudolph Euken, Les grands courants de la pensée contemporaine (Paris: F. Alcan, 1911), viii. 64. The conversations with Sertillanges took place a few weeks before Bergson's death in 1941. The only teacher he mentioned in those reminiscences was Boutroux. A.G. Sertillanges, Avec Henri Bergson (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 9, 30. For Bergson's love of mathematics, see Frédéric Lefévre, "Une heure avec Pierre Janet," Nouvelles Littéraires (March 17, 1928): 1. 65. Sertillanges, Avec Henri Bergson, 10. Bergson also gained a much deserved reputation for his mastery of the classics. Edouard Tournier, Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the Ecole Normale, cited Bergson as one of the "rare students who had proposed decisive emendations and corrections of Greek texts which had been supposed to be corrupt." H.B. Dunbar, "The Impact of the Ecole Normale Supérieure on Selected Men of Letters" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1961), 208209. 66. For Boutroux's unique abilities as a teacher see Le cloître de la rue d'Ulm. Rolland once referred to Boutroux as "the new enchanter," the very kudo that Bergson himself received years later. 67. Dunbar, "The Impact of the Ecole Normale Supérieure on Selected Men of Letters," 271, 376. The prestige of university philosophers in the Third Republic was enormous. They were an elite whose ranks supplied the lion's share of France's Inspector Generals of Higher Education. Raivaisson was one, and Lachelier another. 68. Bergson referred to Tannery as "the most acute of Fechner's critics." Time and Free Will, 67.

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Chapter II "The Philosophy of Today" Graduating from the Ecole Normale in 1881, Bergson assumed his teaching duties at the beginning of a decade in which, as we have indicated, many of his contemporaries were trying to generate an attack against mechanism and a new orientation towards the modern world. Bergson spent most of the 1880s forging his own attack against mechanism and continued to consistently enlarge upon it throughout his long and distinguished career. The attack was the one issue that most groups of Bergson's reading and listening audience could rally around. It was also the most soundly argued side of Bergson's work, and eventually became the most lasting achievement of its author. After Bergson, L.P. Jacks has maintained, mechanism would never be the same. 1 Like so many of his contemporaries in philosophy, science and literature, Bergson was presented with a materially enclosed world which was moved by purely mechanical and mathematical laws; a world which did not seem to allow for moral values or spiritual forces. The revolt against mechanism which Bergson led for a time represented the rejection of that world. Bergson's intellectual mentors at the Ecole Normale had supplied him with a fresh philosophical approach in which he steeped himself and within which he would include his first important books. In this sense the spiritualist school, indeed, the critics of mechanistic science generally had been struggling throughout the nineteenth century to be the "philosophy of today." Through Henri Bergson's efforts they would achieve their apotheosis. Throughout the 1880s Bergson worked on his main thesis, that book from which all the others seem to follow, Time and Free Will,2 which he finally published in 1889. It was at this point, with what would become his seminal book, that Bergson for the first time seriously projected himself into the world of French philosophy.

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In Time and Free Will Bergson claimed for philosophy a wider sweep. Knowledge attained by passively contemplating a permanent, unchanging realitywhat John Dewey called, "the spectator theory of knowledge"was the traditional path to truth. For Bergson and for all spiritual philosophers this quest for truth was far too intellectual an affair. Reality was not static and immutable, it was dynamic and mobile, and its fluid concepts could only be attained, not by weighing, criticizing and arguing, but by recourse to more immediate forms of experience. The first question Bergson addressed was the relationship between the psychic realm of the unconscious and the phenomenal world regulated by reason. The problem for Bergson was how to construct a new metaphysics which could penetrate reality beyond the confining limits of mechanistic science. This accounts for the negative tone of so much of his work and explains why Bergson's epistemology was grounded in a critique of reason itself. To prove that life is far deeper than the positivists would admit, and more attainable than the scientists would allow, Bergson argued against rationalism, often passionately, from basically one approach: what rationalism cannot do and what it cannot appreciate. To gain insights into these problems he drew upon several sources: the "spiritual realism" so in vogue at the Ecole Normale and its introspective method, and the discoveries made in his own day in depth psychology, which recognized the power latent in the subconscious mind. One of the early keys which professional philosophers and psychologists used to unlock the secrets of the unconscious and provide them with a new model of mind, was the empirical use of hypnotism. Taine and Ribot, Janet and Richet, all made judicious use of it as an experimental tool. So did Bergson. From 1883 until the appearance of Time and Free Will, Bergson is known to have participated in many hypnotic sessions. With one session in particular he seems to have carved for himself a permanent place in the literature on the subject. Bergson and an assistant examined the case of two boys who had been credited with extraordinary gifts of telepathy. Bergson was able to prove that this was not the case, that the subjects had actually achieved an unusual degree of sensitivity of the sense organs (hyperaesthesia) under hypnotic suggestion. 3 For a long time in the nineteenth century hypnotism was held in contempt by the scientific community. As late as 1874 Dechambre, in his Medical Encyclopedia, declared hypnotism to be a condition that did not exist.4 Nevertheless, hypnotism and its relation to mental phenomena came into its own in France in the 1880s. Its medical possibilities were seen as early as 1882 by Ambroise Liébeault and Hippolyte Bemheim who subsequently formed the celebrated Nancy School. Hypnotism also gained wide attention and publicity because of the sensational atmosphere surrounding Charchot's experiments at

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the Salpêtrière. Théodule Ribot and Pierre Janet, both former students of Charcot and the leaders of the so-called "L'École de Paris," remained linked with the Salpêtrière and drew many of their conclusions from its work. 5 Ribot was the first leader of this school and the first occupant of the Chair of Experimental and Comparative Psychology established at the Collège de France in 1888. The outlets for this group included The Society for Physiological Psychology and the Revue philosophique which published its conclusions. F.W.H. Myers who had direct links with this school called it "perhaps the most vital, the most distinctive nucleus of modern French thought," and hoped that its work would lead to the spiritual revival France needed so badly.6 Hypnotism provided these pioneers in modern psychology with what Henri Ellenberger calls the ''first model of the human mind as a double ego": a conscious, but limited ego, the only one the individual is aware of, and a deeper, subconscious ego which is the fountain of creativity.7 It was also in the 1880s that the work of F.W.H. Myers became better known in French psychological circles. With its emphasis on suggestion as a powerful factor in the whole theory and practise of hypnotism, the ideas of Myers were tied very closely to his views on telepathy, spiritualism and other supernormal phenomena. Together with his colleagues at Cambridge University, Henry Sidgewick, William Barrett and Lord Rayleigh, Myers helped found the prestigious Society of Psychical Research in 1882. During an era when it seemed that psychical research would become a recognized branch of psychology, Myers' contribution to the nineteenth-century study of the mind cannot be underestimated. He had a following not only in Great Britain, but also in France, Germany and the United States.8 The idea which brought him so much attention was his discovery in 1886 of what he called, the "subliminal self." William James hailed this discovery as "the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science."9 For Myers, the subliminal self embraced everything that took place beneath the threshold of consciousness: sensations, thoughts and emotions, which for the most part lay buried. They form themselves, he said, into a complex and coherent psychical system which thinks, feels, remembers and wills on its own accord. However, it is not a completely separate psychic entity; it often influences our conscious self and together with it forms a larger self.10 As a theory of personality the idea of the subliminal self was closer to the French idea of L'Inconscient than it was to later Freudian psychology. The "Ecole de Paris" posited a static subconscious, comprising habits and memory, and generically containing all organized knowledge; and a dynamic subconscious which was in a latent state of incubation, and which was the source for the creative and inspirational work of human beings. The similarities with Myers' theory of mind are obvious and should not surprise us. Myers and his French

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opposites were close colleagues in the Society of Psychical Research. 11 However Myers went further than the French in endowing the subliminal self with an almost mystical power of the supernatural. Not only could this subterranean stream of consciousness weave fantasies, communicate symbolically with the conscious mind, and serve as a fountainhead for creative genius, but it was also endowed with supernormal faculties. It was the deeper source of telepathy (a word coined by Myers), and through an hypnotic appeal to its hidden recesses, he even felt that man could communicate with the spirit world: Beneath the threshold of waking consciousness there lies, not merely an unconscious complex of organic processes, but an intelligent vital control. To incorporate that profound control with our waking will is the great evolutionary end which hypnotism, by its group of empirical artifices, is beginning to help us attain.12 In France, Pierre Janet at the Collège de France and Charles Richet at the Sorbonne worked along parallel lines and tried to provide a scientific basis for the study of consciousness. Some of the earliest experiments in extra-sensory perception and mental suggestion at a distance were carried out by Pierre Janet in the mid-1880s. In the celebrated "Léonie Case" he claimed to have hypnotized the subject at a distance by telepathically willing the entrancement. In all there were some twenty-two distance experiments of which, Janet claimed, sixteen were successful.13 Charles Richet, a close friend of Bergson, carried out similar experiments with hypnosis and thought transference. Often called the "Father of metapsychics" he was certainly the outstanding personality in French psychical research. In experiments reaching back to the 1870s, Richet accumulated enough evidence to concur in the existence of a subliminal self (which he called "automatisme psychique") although he did not think that Myers proved his case for survival.14 Emile Boutroux, for one, did not have such reservations. He had no doubt that 1886 represented a pivotal year in modern psychology. For Boutroux, Myers had unlocked the doors to "the beyond that is within," that heretofore inaccessible region extending far beyond the threshold of the unconscious. "The subliminal self may put us in communication," he said, "not only with beings that are like or inferior to ourselves, but with superior existences, if the possibility of such existences is once established.''15 The empirical "evidence" that accumulated at the end of the nineteenth century for the existence of psychic phenomena coincided with the revolution in physics. Like radioactivity, it provided a set of "facts" that simply would not fit

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in with the mechanistic-materialistic theory of the universe. As the philosopher, H.H. Price has pointed out: We must conclude, I think, that there is no room for telepathy in a materialistic universe. Telepathy is something which ought not to happen at all, if the materialist theory were true. But it does happen. So there must be something seriously wrong with the materialistic theory, however numerous and imposing the normal facts which support it may be. 16 Moreover, the belief in psychic phenomena was to a great extent the natural byproduct of an age of materialism. C.G. Jung, himself a tireless explorer in the occult, felt that it was "the inevitable consequence of intellectual enlightenment. It was not a recrudescence of obscure superstitions, but of an interest in its essence scientific, an intense desire to direct the searchlight of truth on to the dark chaos of facts." Myers, Sidgewick, Richet and the others typified for Jung "the reaction of the human mind against the senseless and desolating materialistic view."17 The discoveries in modern psychology lent substance to the growing conviction that men's actions were not wholly explicable in terms of causal determinants. As such, the new psychology represented the antithesis of mechanistic theories of life which could never really account for or explain the mind of man. In turning to Bergson's Time and Free Will we can see its author's debt to these new theories of mind and better appreciate the compatibility of his philosophy with what was already becoming in 1889 the dominant zeitgeist of the period. Drawing upon the introspective tradition of Maine de Biran and Ravaisson, Bergson's stated object in Time and Free Will was to examine the relationship of determinism and free will. His purpose was to draw a distinction between time and consciousness on one hand, and space and matter on the other, and by so doing, to make us confront the direct reality of the inner life, the "immediate data of consciousness." The method he used throughout is introspective because this was one of the chief instruments of the psychologist in 1889.18 William James, who approached the problem of free will in a similar way, explained introspection as "looking into our minds and reporting what we there discover."19 What Bergson and James discovered introspectively in their quest for the roots of free will were psychic states of consciousness. This meant sensations, desires, emotions and volitions. Bergson began with an examination of the intensity of these psychic states and mechanism's inability to measure and understand them. This world of psychic states, "the stream of consciousness," was an inner, spiritual world peculiar to man. There was simply no correlation between psychic states of the unconscious and the material entities of the external world.

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Therefore, the means by which determinists measured material facts in the phenomenal world could not be employed in the psychic world. What was needed here was a realization of the intrinsic uniqueness of this stream of conscious life, and a new method of cognition to understand it. What made psychic states a reality so different from the material world was their quality of intensity. There is a clear distinction that Bergson made between the quantitative differences that could be applied only to magnitudes, namely space and matter, and the qualitative differences that represented the intensity of psychic states. If there is confusion between the two then our intellect is at fault because it is more at home with spatial concepts and enjoys making concrete distinctions. It therefore analyzes psychic states such as fear, anger and joy in the numerical and spatial terms it is accustomed to, and assigns them a magnitude they do not possess. 20 Bergson was speaking of two kinds of reality. In the one, the external world (the static), material entities exist outside of each other and the intellect views them numerically, juxtaposing them in space so as to better analyze them. Bergson accepted this as valid since the elements constituting the spatial world are arranged simultaneously. The idea of number implied, for Bergson, the simple understanding of a multiplicity of similar parts and objects which we distinguish by the position they occupy in space.21 Now when we are dealing with material objects which we can arrange in space and analyze mathematically, we have one kind of reality; this reality, he said, was "conceived by the human intellect and thus enables us to make sharp distinctions, to count and to abstract, and perhaps also to speak."22 But conscious states represent another kind of reality (the dynamic) which cannot be numerically counted and analyzed. This is so because psychic states are in themselves pure quality and bear a special relationship with each other: States of consciousness, even when successive, permeate one another, and in the simplest of them the whole soul can be reflected. We may therefore surmise that time, conceived under the form of a homogeneous medium, is some spurious concept, due to the trespassing of the idea of space upon the field of pure consciousness.23 In other words, consciousness is composed of psychic states and sensations that dynamically permeate one another. They compose our personality, our self, and elude the understanding of language and analysis which can only deal with the concrete and spatialized. Furthermore, the self represents not mathematical time, the time of the scientists, but real time (durée); not objects strung out in space like so many beads, but a "succession without distinction," an "interconnexion and organization of elements, each one of which represents the whole and cannot be distinguished or isolated from it except by abstract thought." Duration is a fluid continuum, pure becoming, what Bergson calls "pure heterogeneity."24

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This psychic continuum constitutes real duration and therefore time is reality itself. Confusion arises, said Bergson, when mathematical time, perfectly legitimate in its own sphere, is applied mistakenly to the world of consciousness. Mechanistic science and its offshoots in psychology (associationism and psychophysics) cannot hope to grasp the essence of things themselves because by thinking with their intellect they create a conceptualized universe which can only be measured in mathematical time. Their use of symbolic language misleads them into giving a fixed form to fleeting sensations, by isolating them, forgetting that "in the human soul there are only processes." 25 Aiming his shafts directly at the heart of mechanistic science, Bergson insisted that its physicists cannot measure duration in the traditional way because science can only cope with the physical and spatial, being intrinsically unable to cope with time and motion. For example, mathematics, the lingua franca of science, always places itself at the extremity of an interval. The mathematical equation cannot capture the interval itself since that interval is duration and motion "which are mental syntheses and not objects."26 Mathematics, therefore, can only express the static and the finished, while it misses the essence of life itself.27 Drawing upon the insights of contemporary philosophy, Bergson pursued the dichotomies of time and space one critical step further. Writing three years after the discovery of the subliminal self, Bergson said that the two kinds of time correspond to two levels of conscious life: the external self and the deeper "fundamental self." The external self maintains an everyday contact with the physical world and the environment it relates to, and is thus "better adapted to the requirements of social life in general and language in particular."28 Because it helps to order our place within the world of nature our consciousness prefers it, and so loses contact with the fundamental self. This is unfortunate since real time, duration, finds its creative matrix in the fundamental self, that inner world whose states are in the process of melting into each other like the notes of a melody, and forever changing and enduring. When this fundamental self is ignored, we neglect our deeper individuality. Bergson was saying, as had Myers and all the French introspective philosophers before him, that we are whole free human beings only when we act with our entire selves and when we let our personalities speak for us. In our daily lives we are creatures of routine and habit, in thrall to ready-made ideas, and we are so because we have everthing to gain by being so. Bound as our intellect is to the service of practical needs, the personal price for relating and performing well in the everyday worldbeing "conscious automatons"is a high one, but one that most men out of laziness and indolence are willing to pay. We often delude ourselves into thinking that we act freely, but later we realize that we did not because for some reason we did not exercise our will. The decision to act in a truly free way is, however, extremely difficult

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and requires a great effort of will, ''In a word, if it is agreed to call every act free which springs from the self and from the self alone, the act which bears the mark of our personality is truly free, for our self alone will lay claim to its paternity." 29 In other words, the free act arises when the self, reflecting the whole personality and all of its past experiences, forces its way to the surface of consciousness piercing the outer self of habit and ready-made ideas, and takes a decisive action.30 This is why mechanistic determinism will never appreciate true freedom or understand the essentials of reality. The real self which is freedom's center completely escapes the idea of mechanical law or determination. The determinist who "takes refuge in the past or the future" cannot grasp the free act of a dynamically changing personality. Mechanistic science cannot appreciate a reality which is a psychic continuum, a self in a constant state of becoming, because it is inherently incapable of dealing with anything but the mathematical, the static and the spatial, and consequently it tries to represent duration symbolically. Since science cannot penetrate to the core of being Bergson substituted a nonscientific mode of cognition in its place, or rather beside it, because he always insisted that he was not rejecting science but merely extending it. For Bergson, language was too limited to convey reality31 and so the new cognitive approach to the real came through introspection and intuition. Bergson felt that the source of being could be discovered by looking within, by descending into ourselves and by introspectively grasping one's inner states which are in a constant state of change. It is obvious that freedom is a difficult thing to achieve because the moments when "we thus grasp ourselves are rare, and that is just why we are rare free."32 The cognitive use of the intuitional was raised by Bergson and left hanging in Time and Free Will but he expanded on this question in 1903 in his essay, "Introduction to Metaphysics."33 The essay is an attempt to establish the validity of intuition as a new cognitive tool. As such, it is a companion-piece to his first book. Bergson believed that intuition was his main contribution to philosophy rather than just another building-block of his philosophy. One of the major ways of philosophically knowing a thing, Bergson said, was the mode of entering directly into the thing and attaining the absolute. Intuition is that faculty in the human mind which shares with instinct an immediacy of relation to life and which shares a reflective power with intelligence. Through its exercise, Bergson says, man may know things which do not come to him through the use of analytic reason. For Bergson, the absolute can only be given in an intuition and never by analysis. What is required to "know" something is an "effort of imagination":

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We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, that is, common to that object and to others. Analyzing then consists in expressing a thing in terms of what is not it. All analysis is thus a translation, a development into symbols, a representation taken from successive points of view from which are noted a corresponding number of contacts between the new object under consideration and others believed to be already known. 34 There is only one reality, Bergson insisted, which we intuitively seize from within; where concepts fail to penetrate into duration, intuition succeeds. It places itself in the flux of duration, into the very thing one is studying. Here is what Bergson himself called the "idée maîtresse" of his philosophy, the main lines of which were drawn in 1889: the intuition of duration.35 Not content to merely define reality, Bergson advanced a method of grasping it. Not for nothing has a recent historian of philosophy called Introduction to Metaphysics "the Discourse on Method for modern antirationalism."36 What Bergson did in Time and Free Will was to analyze time in a unique way. He contrasted time as we think about it, the spatialized conception of linear time that science employs, with time as we really experience it, the time of psychic states, the so-called "stream of consciousness." This psychological or real time he called duration. The pivotal idea here is the dynamic continuity of introspective experience. The flow of psychological states that makes up our deeper selves is so dynamic that each of its moments introduces an element of novelty missing in the past. When science tries to measure this stream of experience it fails because it is not using the proper tools. The intellect it employs will never really understand the real "life" of our true selves because it artificially conceptualizes what cannot be isolated and measured in a scientific way. Only a special effort of introspection can do this. If you want to know reality, Bergson said, you must immerse yourself in the flux of duration intuitively. This intuition of duration is the major idea that emerges from Time and Free Will and Introduction to Metaphysics. What Bergson was calling for in this formative period of twentieth-century philosophy was a "fresh method of thinking."37 For him it was a question of breaking a habit that men had acquired over the millenia; of giving all their attention to the external world, and regarding "dreaming," "imagination,'' and ''inspiration" as just so much escapism. Bergson was calling men to look within to the barely explored terrain of the mind and the self, and promising them a release from "intellectual and verbal bondage."38 The call was an inspirational one, an

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appeal which remained characteristically Bergsonian until 1914. Time and Free Will would be regarded by that and later generations of devotees as the modern era's first "manifesto against intellectualism." René La Senne, the philosopher, claimed that Time and Free Will "has become one of those breviaries where the spirit will always find itself again in its purity." In a similar vein, T.E. Hulme remembered the "physical sense of exhilaration," the "sudden expansion," the ''giddiness that comes with a sudden lifting up to a great height,'' he experienced in reading Time and Free Will for the first time. The book made Charles Du Bos think of Corot and "the tenderness, humility and respect" that linked the efforts of the two men. 39 While Bergson developed his idée maîtresse in the 1880s, another of his attacks against mechanism evolved concurrently with it. He also addressed himself to the "intellectual and verbal bondage" he found contained in the everyday world and the curative that society employed to remedy the problem. The attack he made against mechanism in this instance came in the form of a new theory of the comic which ultimately found its way into print in 1900. Laughter was a modest but well-argued essay on why we laugh. The product of years of reflection, it was nevertheless sharpened and tested, as were all his ideas, by experimentation in the classrooms in which he taught.40 Like many of the Catholic writers and critics of La belle époque, Bergson was alarmed at the utilitarian demands made on the individual by the new rationalized society. "The truth is," he wrote, "this idea of regulating life as a matter of business routine is more widespread than might be imagined."41 In the interest of greater social efficiency and progress man's freedom, Bergson felt, is in the main restricted. The question for Bergson was, then, what ensures the preservation of our humanity in the midst of mechanical societies? Social life decrees, said Bergson, that man live within a certain set of rules; that he constantly adapt his thought and actions to the shifting exigencies of society. The danger comesand here he was echoing the clear warning of Time and Free Willwhen the individual allows himself to be bullied by the external factors of mechanized society and more important, lulled into "the easy automatism of acquired habits," and an acceptance of ready-made ideas. This, Bergson said, constitutes the greatest threat to our humanity. "This deflection of life towards the mechanical is," he wrote, "the real cause of laughter."42 The social significance of the comic is rooted in a mechanical rigidity of "body, mind and character" which menaces society and threatens to upset the delicate balance between "tension and elasticity," two forces which society has brought into play. "This rigidity is the comic," Bergson argued, "and laughter is its corrective."43

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For Bergson, the comic type who best reflects this mechanical rigidity is the professional man: the judge, doctor, soldier and businessman. He is more than just a man who is a creature of routine and habit; he is a man tightly confined into "the rigid frame of his functions" who through the unique codes and jargon dictated by his calling is "incapable of talking like ordinary people." Holding himself aloof from his fellow man, the professional is guilty of what Bergson calls ''professional callousness." As such, he reflects the egotistical inhumanity of people who belong to "small societies formed within the bosom of society at large." This professional inelasticity is distrusted by society as both a sign of ''eccentricity" and as an example of "separatist tendencies." Laughter, then, is a kind of "social gesture": 44 By the fear which it inspires, it restrains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and in mutual contact certain activities of a secondary order which might retire into their shell and go to sleep, and, in short, softens down whatever the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical inelasticity.45 As other examples of the mechanically inelastic and eccentric in life, and therefore the comic, Bergson cited the gestures of a speaker that have become repetitive, the man shot out of a cannon, the members of a masquerade ball, the antics of circus clowns. They all become comic at that point when they cease to be human and become automatic and imitative of life. We laugh, Bergson said, "everytime a person gives us the impression of being a thing." In other words, "the attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine."46 Applying this to society as a whole, Bergson employed the basic dichotomies he used so effectively in Time and Free Willthe static and the dynamic, and the idea of the two selves in which they are grounded. There is on one hand "the quiet humdrum life that reason and society have fashioned for us" the static outer shell of everyday life, habit, routine and mechanical pedantry. On the other hand, just below the surface there exists the dynamic, spontaneous, true self of the individual in all his potential freedom.47 For Bergson it is a clear case of the "mechanical encrusted upon the living." But society does not accept this mechanization of life passively; it "avenges itself for the liberties taken with it" through its corrective use of laughter. As a social therapeutic (and once again he is being entirely consistent with the main themes of Time and Free Will) laughter is not the product of conscious reflection but a spontaneous act which is designed both to correct and humiliate that which inhibits the full expression of our humanity.48 Laughter, therefore, answers to the social needs of society and the individual.

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This was Bergson's message to a generation which felt ground down by mechanism and sought the weapons to resist and overcome it. Bergson could tell them to laugh at the very mechanism and inelasticity in themselves. He had apparently not only diagnosed the affliction of mechanism on society, he had also prescribed an antidote. By the turn of the century Bergson had succeeded in not only subjecting the philosophies of his day to a thorough examination and criticism but had also, once his ideas on intuition had matured, substituted for the older philosophical approaches a well-reasoned and radical approach of his own. Before 1900 only a small group of intellectuals and students who read Bergson's books were aware of this. 49 One can speak less of a self-conscious reaction to Henri Bergson before 1900 than of a recognition. Bergson's name was years away from becoming a catch-phrase and he had not as yet created an audience of the hopeful and curious, let alone tapped it. The history of ideas in the 1890s bore witness to the fact that a talented newcomer had made an auspicious, provocative debut in an esoteric field, producing a set of tightly-reasoned works which were original in quality and which in terms of style and method, departed from the usual fare of their day.

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Footnotes 1. L.P. Jacks, The Revolt Against Mechanism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934). 2. H. Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F.L. Pogson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960). Published originally as Essai sur les données immediates de la conscience (Paris: F. Alcan, 1889). 3. Henri Bergson, "De la simulation inconsciente dans l'état d'hypnotisme," Revue Philosophique 22 (1886): 52531. The experiment is discussed in Michel Sage, Le sommeil naturel et l'hypnose (Paris: F. Alcan, 1904), 13435; it was also discussed as late as 1932 in C.E.B. Roberts, The Truth About Spiritualism (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1932); and again, more critically in D.H. Rawcliffe, Occult and Supernatural Phenomena (New York: Dover, 1959), 8586. 4. Joseph Jastrow, Fact and Fable in Psychology (London: MacMillan, 1901), 228. 5. Bergson also followed Charcot's experiments closely. See Matter and Memory (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950), 109, 143, 156. For a brief description of the "Ecole de Paris" see Georges Dwelshauvers, La psychologie française contemporaine (Paris: F. Alcan, 1920), 127; and M. Reuchlin, "The Historical Background for National Trends in Psychology: France," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1, no. 2 (1965): 11523. 6. F.W.H. Myers, Science and a Future Life (London: MacMillan, 1893), 118. 7. Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 168. 8. Myers, a classicist by training, was nevertheless a true pioneer in the systematizing of psychology: "He recognized the existence of obsessive thoughts, delusions, voices, visions and impulses, and that they could be psychologically treated. He showed that one stratum of the personality signals to another by means of symbolism; and he defined hysteria as a 'disease of the hypnotic stratum.'" G.N.M. Tyrell, The Personality of Man (London: Penguin Books, 1946), 26. 9. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Mentor Books, 1958), 188. Myers' life work is embodied in Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (New Hyde Park: University Books, 1961). Gardner Murphy, one of the movement's chief critics, calls it "the central classic of Psychical research." 10. Myers, Human Personality, 15. 11. Janet, Ribot and Richet were corresponding members of the Society for Psychical Research, as were Freud and Jung, and Bergson after 1909. 12. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 14 (189899): 107. There is much in Myers' view of the creative function of the unconscious that recalls the views of the Romantics; namely their interest in the irrational as a possible source of creativity in life and art, and a new appreciation of the full personality of the individual. Much of the romantic awareness of the self passed into the introspective method of Maine de Biran and then into the spiritualist tradition of Ravaisson and Lachelier. See P. Mansell Jones, French Introspectives from Montaigne to André Gide (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970), 4256; also Dominique Janicaud. Une généalogie du spiritualisme française (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969). 13. Janet reported on these experiments in papers read before the Society of Physiological Psychology in Paris in 1886. Myers was in attendance and Charcot chaired the meeting. It would also appear that Sigmund Freud was there too. Pierre Janet, "Note sur quelques phénomènes de somnambulisme," Revue philosophique 21 (1886): 19098, and "Deuxième note sur le sommeil provoqué à distance," Revue philosophique 22 (1886): 21223. See also George Devereux, ed., Psychoanalysis and the Occult (New York: International Universities Press, 1953), 5. For Janet's ideas see Automatisme psychologique (Paris: F. Alcan, 1889).

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14. Richet left no doubt that Myers was a close and inspirational colleague. "We passed long hours together," he wrote, "in discussing that terrible science that I have called 'La Métapsychique," a science immersed in dreamland. We tried to reduce it to order and to bring it up to the standard of the older sciences, which am more positive because they are more ancient and more approachable." The Natural History of a Savant, trans. Oliver Lodge (London: J.M. Dent, 1927), 9091. Other books by Richet are Our Sixth Sense, trans. Fred Rothwell (London: Rider, 1928) and his greatest book, Thirty Years of psychical Research (New York: Macmillan, 1923). 15. Emile Boutroux, The Beyond That Is Within, trans. Jonathan Nield (London: Duckworth, 1912), 26. This was originally a lecture given at the Institut psychologique de France, March 28, 1908. 16. H.H. Price, "Psychical Research and Human Personality," Hibbert Journal 47 (1949): 109. 17. C.G. Jung, "The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits," Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research 31 (1921): 7576. 18. It is a descriptive technique still in use. A subject recalls a certain situation he found himself in, or a problem he was confronted with, and he is asked to describe what has gone through his mind while the events were occurring. 19. Bergson and James shared a great deal of the period's philosophical history: both inherited a contempt for mechanism and a zeal to rescue the freedom which mechanism stifled; both contributed to the concept of studying the human personality as a functioning whole; both wrote seminal books on mysticism and religion; and both participated in, and contributed to, the movement in psychical research. 20. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 174. 21. Ibid., 7677. 22. Ibid., 97. 23. Ibid., 98. 24. Ibid., 104. Nowhere can we get a better appreciation of the world of duration, he says, than in the dream-state: "Here we no longer measure duration, but we feel it; from quantity it returns to the state of quality; we no longer estimate past time mathematically." (26). 25. Ibid., 131. 26. Ibid., 120. 27. Ibid., 9284, 23236. Bergson blamed Kant's influence for much of the identification of science with reason, and science as the only possible cognitive form of knowledge. He also saw it as having an inordinately mechanistic impact on psychology. 28. Ibid., 128. 29. Ibid., 17273. 30. Ibid., 16970. Myers called this development of the free act, the "subliminal uprush," and used it to explain the origins of genius. Bergson called it "a great solemn crisis" and in one of the most mystical and irrational moments in all of his work, he said that the free act is made "in defiance of what is conventionally called a motive, and this absence of any tangible mason is the more striking the deeper our freedom goes." 31. In large part it accounts for his brilliant reliance on image and metaphor to transmit his insights: "Comparisons and metaphors will here suggest what cannot be expressed." The Creative Mind 48.

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32. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 231. 33. Bergson, "Introduction to Metaphysics," in The Creative Mind, 187237. Published originally as "Introduction à la Métaphysique," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 29 (1903): 136. 34. Ibid., 190. 35. Letter to Harold Hoffding, La philosophie de Bergson (Paris: F. Alcan, 1916), 160. 36. Albert William Levi, Philosophy and the Modern World (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1970), 65. 37. La philosophie de Bergson, 161.

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38. Jacks, The Revolt Against Mechanism, 60. 39. René La Senne, "L'Infuence de la philosophic bergsonienne en France," Revue de Paris 39, no. 2 (1932): 827; T.E. Hulme, "Notes on Bergson," I, The New Age 9 (1911): 587; Charles Du Bos, Extraits d'un journal, 19081928 (Paris: J. Schiffrin, 1928), 43. 40. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: MacMillan, 1911). Published originally as two articles entitled "Le rire," Revue de Paris 7, nos. 23, 24 (1900): 51244, 75998; 8, no. 1 (1900): 14679. Bergson's first lecture on this subject, "Le rire: de qui rit-on? Pourquoi rit-on?." was given at the Lycée Angers in 1884. A review of it appeared in Moniteur du Puy-de-Dôme, 11 Feb. 1884. It also appears in Mélanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 31315. Roger Shattuck points out that Alfred Jarry heard Bergson expound these views in the classrooms of the Lycée Henri IV in the 1890s. The Banquet Years: The Arts in France (18851918) (New York: Doubleday, 1961). 129. 41. Bergson, Laughter, 48. Like Marx, Bergson had an insight into the tension latent between the individual and mechanized society, and like Freud he came close to saying that civilization exacted a high price from the individual in terms of the instinctual and natural. 42. Ibid., 19, 34. 43. Ibid., 21. 44. Ibid., 17679. 45. Ibid., 20. 46. Ibid., 58, 29. 47. Ibid., 15859. Bergson at various points applied the related dichotomies of matter and soul, and the physical and the moral to draw the same distinction (28, 51). He expanded these views in his final book when he discussed open and closed societies and open and closed morality and religion. The roots of morality lay in the social discipline exacted by the closed morality of society, and the spirit of love and charity that surges up to meet it from open morality. The first is the morality based on the habitual and the automatic, the second is the natural expression of freedom and humanity. The two not only coexist but are mutually interdependent. By extension he represents open religion as the dogmatic and ritualistic elements of traditional faith, and closed religion as the mystical expression of the heart. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (New York: Henry Holt, 1935). 48. Bergson, Laughter, 19798. 49. The set of reviews which greeted his first work, modest though they were in number, confirm this. The critics regarded Time and Free Will as "novel" and "daring," and lauded its author for his "originality," his "profundity'' and for the natural gifts used in sustaining an interesting thesis. And yet nothing he wrote before 1900 drew the fire of the polemicist or the rhapsodic adulation of the faithful. Nevertheless, the recognition and awareness of a new talent can be perceived before 1900. Lucien Herr, ''Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience," Revue critique n.s., 30 (1890): 517; Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, "Henri Bergson: Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience," Revue philosophique 29 (1890): 519; Georges Lechalas, "Le nombre et le temps dans leur rapport avec l'espace," Annales de philosophie chrétienne 23 (1890):516.

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Chapter III The Occult Revival The change in public mood of the pre-1914 generation was reflected in the passionate desire to reject the logical categories of the past, to relinquish false gods, and to substitute for both any sensational and enervating doctrine of change, as long as it was "new" and somehow glorified the mystical and volitional strivings of man. In his novel, Jean Christophe, Romain Rolland brilliantly captured the mood of this generation, a generation showing all the signs of "the fatigue of reason": The reason of humanity was exhausted. It had just made a gigantic effort. It was overcome with sleep, and, like a child worn out by a long day, before going to sleep, it was saying its prayers. The gate of dreams had reopened; in the train of religion came little puffs of theosophy, mysticism, esoteric faith, occultism to visit the chambers of the Western mind. 1 It was a generation, he wrote, "desirous rather of action than of understanding, hungry rather for happiness than for truth. It wished to live, to grasp life, even at the cost of a lie."2 According to Léon Blum, writing in his early role as a literary critic, there formed within the new literary generation a cultural movement that was antithetical to the scientific direction then dominating French culture. At the center of this movement was a religious emotion and a quest for the mystical. As Blum notes, they were "avid for that which reason cannot seize." This "new romanticism" was characterized by "the effort of the individual to free himself from logical constraints and natural necessities'' and "posed the world as a mystery before which the liberty of man is insatiable and unlimited." According to Blum, this generation scorned the external world of reality and all attempts to reproduce it with exactitude.3

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To the writers of this generation the occult 4 was often both a means of achieving a greater artistic freedom, and a vehicle for dethroning the dominating, materialistic intellect from its pride of place. The traditional religious outlet failed to satisfy their mystical propensities because Christianity seemed to favour social ethics at the expense of the supernatural, and because it was all-too-often associated with the establishment. For writers who sought spiritual and mystical instruction the old religious orthodoxy appeared as narrow as the materialist orthodoxy. "It's the dogmatic side of a religion that's founded in futility," says Jean Barois in Martin du Gard's novel: "But the religious emotion is a very real thing andbelieve me, my dear Dalierit's sheer nonsense to deny its reality."5 Like the hero of Jean Barois, Bergson recognized that the individual needed something besides social ethics as a guide and inspiration; he understood that "the craving for religious experience" would always be there and would go on expanding as time passed. As he told an interviewer in 1914, the religious feeling, "is the sense of not being alone in the world, the sense of a relationship between the individual and the spiritual source of life."6 According to Anatole France it was therefore only natural that youth become mystical, since it had to believe in something: Our contemporary literature oscillates between a brutal naturalism and an exalted mysticism. We have lost faith, and still wish to believe. We are overwhelmed by the depressing majesty of physical laws. We seek after mystery. We summon all the magic of the East; we throw ourselves wholeheartedly into psychical research, the last refuge of the marvelous, which astronomy, chemistry and physiology have driven from their domain. We are either in the mud or in the clouds. There is no middle ground.7 To an establishment intellectual like Emile Durkheim who was so apprehensive about the moral health of modern society, the growing penetration of occult ideas in both the fashionable world and artistic society was a sign of malaise no less symptomatic of illness than the rising suicide rate: "The anarchist, the aesthete, the mystic, the socialist revolutionary, even if they do not despair of the future, have in common with the pessimist a single sentiment of hatred and disgust for the existing order, a single craving to destroy or to escape from reality."8 Escape from an uncongenial and dreary everyday life is, of course, an important clue to understanding the popularity of occult ideas in pre-war France. J.K. Huysmans, who dabbled in satanism and whose novel A rebours (1884) was a milestone in the occult revival, suggested that there was a very mundane need to believe in the supernatural, "To find compensation for the horror of daily life, the squalor of existence, the excremental filthiness of the loathsome age we live in."9

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The occult movement in France had its roots in the spiritualist revival of the 1850s. Spiritism, 10 as it is often called in France, made its appearance as the first occult movement to consciously offer itself as a religious alternative to the scientific materialism of the day. Delivering the eulogy at Alan Kardec's funeral in 1869, Camille Flammarion, soon to be one of France's leading astronomers and popularizers of science, hailed spiritualism as "the most efficacious antidote to the leprosy of atheism which seems to be particularly the malignant degenerative element in this epoch of transition."11 The modern occult revival began in 1884 with the appearance of Huysmans' sensational novel, A rebours,12 which Arthur Symons called the "breviary of decadence." Its amoral and thoroughly strange hero, Des Esseintes, pursued an anti-social and decadent life that did much to create the period's image of the decadent aesthete in revolt against a conventional, bourgeois society. The vogue for magic and the occult that A rebours helped to foster was also furthered by the formidable Madame Blavatsky who introduced her ideas to Paris in 1884. That year also saw the publication of the enormously popular Le vice suprême, by Joséphin Péladan, a book which went through twenty editions by 1900.13 The home of the occult was basically the Latin Quarter where the movement formed an integral part of Bohemia and where the cabarets resounded daily to the incantations of hieratic poetry.14 Artists and writers were able to utilize the occult as a powerful weapon against the bourgeois establishment Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud were all fascinated by the occult.15 Writers and occultists, symbolists and decadents were often members of the same hermetic groups. The occultists Joséphin Péladan and Stanislas de Guaita, for example, and the writers Maurice Barrès and Paul Adam were all officers of the "supreme council" of the Martinist Order. Furthermore, writers like Paul Bourget, Victorien Sardou and Sully-Prudhomme often attended seances and were completely convinced of the authenticity of the phenomena they had witnessed.16 The search for meaning, the attempt to get at the deeper questions of life and to find something that explained the totality of human experience, manifested itself in the great popularity of hermetic beliefs. Astrology, alchemy, Cabalism and ritual magic, and the new "religions" of spiritism, satanism, theosophy and neo-Buddhism all came into their own by the early twentieth century.17 According to Jules Bois, a journalist by trade and an occultist by inclination, Paris was teeming with these occultist faiths. In his often fascinating tours of the occult underworld he discovered that Paul Adam communicated with evil spirits, that the musician Augusta Holmes received messages from the beyond, and that writers like Jules Claretie, Paul Bourget and François Coppée witnessed apparitions. He also informed his Catholic readers, with some relish, that the Luciferians had conferred the tiara of Lucifer on the new anti-Pope.18 One very alarmed Catholic critic estimated that the new occult religions numbered no less

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than 20,000 adherents in Paris alone. "The number of spiritistic circles is enormous," wrote Charles Richet, "there is not a town which does not possess one." 19 Writers and artists were also looking for pre-Christian, non-European inspirations, hence their quest for Indian, Persian and Egyptian spiritual values: Behind Lorrain the Magi advance, their eyes on the stars, the Rosicrucians, Cabalists: Péladan and Paul Adam who write under the influence of the planets; Papus, Guaita, Jules Bois who officiates seductively in Egyptian rites at La Bodinière; to these initiates, everything has a hidden meaning, an esoteric explanation.20 The most famous hermetic society of the period was the Order of the Golden Dawn which achieved a unique synthesis of hermetic knowledge and magical techniques. Founded in England in 1887 it reached its peak in the 1890s under the leadership of Samuel MacGregor Mathers, a former member of the Rosicrucian Society. Members of the order included Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stoker, Sax Rohmer, Arthur Machen and W.B. Yeats. Mathers' wife, Mina, was Henri Bergson's sister. She was a former art student in London who was instrumental in initiating Yeats into the order.21 In 1899 Mina and the order caused something of a sensation in Paris when they staged a theatrical performance at La Bodinière Theatre, called the Rite of Isis. Jules Bois was on stage to explain the ancient cult to the fashionable audience. The Paris correspondent of the Sunday Chronicle reported that Mina achieved a great success. Rivaling her brother in popularity at least for the moment, she "completely won their sympathy by her graceful attitude and dignified manner. More than that, she is very handsome, she has a beautiful oval face with large black, mysterious eyesand beauty always tells in Paris." In gratitude for the performance the ladies offered bouquets of flowers and the gentlemen threw wheat on the altar.22 Given the prevalence of hermetic groups and the popularity of "esoteric Christianity," it is not at all surprising that the period could accommodate mystics of all sorts. Moreover, many of the now recognized classics in modern mysticism were written in the same era.23 It was a period, warned Marcelin Berthelot, in which mysticism had returned to the offensive against science. Mysticism was given a big boost in England by the popular Bampton Lectures of Dean Inge at Oxford in 1899. William James also aroused great interest in the subject when he gave the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1901. James elaborated on his ideas of potential forms of consciousness and told of his

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experience under the influence of nitrous oxide. Evelyn Underhill, a former member of the Golden Dawn and a great mystic in her own right, helped Christian mysticism reach a wider audience with her Mysticism (1911) which is still one of the best surveys of the subject. 24 The vogue for mysticism was even greater in France where Catholic tradition encouraged a positive attitude toward the subject. Many of the figures so prominent in the Catholic revival of the early twentieth centurylike Albert Farges, Marcel Hébert and Henri Brémondpublished studies of Christian mysticism between 1890 and 1914. The most popular of these books, Des grâces d'oraison, appeared in 1901 and was authored by a Jesuit, Augustin Paulain. Paulain drew heavily on the works of the great Christian mystics and on the testimonies of literally hundreds of Frenchmen who claimed to have mystical experiences.25 Mysticism also got a sympathetic hearing before the French Society of Philosophy. One whole meeting of the society in 1905 was devoted to the development of the mystic states of St. Theresa. There were over twenty-five university professors in attendance and papers were read by Emile Boutroux, Henri Delacroix, André Lalande, Gustave Belot and Maurice Blondel. The discussion seemed to be weighted in mysticism's favour.26 Mysticism not only supplied the Catholic revival with one of its stimulating currents, it also contributed to the later popularity of Bergsonism. A full generation before The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (a book written in defence of the mystical tradition), Bergson had established his credentials not as a mystic, but as a philosopher of mysticism. In his books and lectures he always tried, he said, "to develop a taste for the internal life." Moreover, Bergson had the true romantic, mystical contempt for the industrial and urban character of modern society. Mechanization and industrialism, he felt, cannot bring happiness to mankind: The continual craving for creature comforts, the pursuit of pleasure, the unbridled love of luxury, all these things which fill us with so much anxiety for the future of humanity . . . all this will appear as a balloon which man has madly inflated, and which will deflate just as suddenly.27 Like Nietzsche he believed that what was needed was a moral regeneration which could only be spearheaded by mystic heroes, "geniuses of the will," he called them, who are completely indifferent to worldly pleasures and riches and distinct from the common herd:28

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Founders and reformers of religions, mystics and saints, obscure heroes of moral life whom we have met on our way and who are in our eyes the equals of the greatest, they are all there: inspired by their example, we follow, them, as if we were joining an army of conquerors. They are indeed conquerors: they have broken down natural resistance and raised humanity to a new destiny. 29 Like so many students of mysticism Bergson had always been struck by the experience of the mystics who, despite the distance of time and place, drew similar conclusions from their inner experiences.30 Bergson was one with the mystics when he maintained that there was a unity in time as well as space and that all events and entities "flow" into one another. Like the mystics, Bergson felt that time is "a seamless garment" in which man continually makes arbitrary seams and separation lines. Time and Free Will and Introduction to Metaphysics, whatever else they may be, are books about mysticism. Along with other classics of that generation Bergson posited a philosophical-intuitive system of introspection related to other forms of the occult. Very much in the mystical tradition Bergson optimistically asserted that at least some men can gradually perfect themselves and that ultimate truth is knowable to them via the "inner way." In Bergson's case it complements a philosophy built on the affirmation of the genuine freedom of the will and man's positive ability to cooperate in his own salvation. As such, it answered the profound need of men in this period who wished to look within at things which they regarded as eternal and who searched for a more personal spirituality, and it lent support to an occult movement which desired and worked for change and was willing to experiment in new modes of existence.31 Given the mystical propensity of so many French writers and their very strong rejection of Naturalism, it is not hard to see why so many of them turned towards Bergsonism as a means of achieving artistic freedom, and as a means of subordinating their art to mystical ends. It explains why so many writers appeared at his lectures at the Collège de France as if worshipping at a hermetic altar. It is not an exaggeration to say that Bergson's lecture hall was a shrine to many, and attending his lectures an almost obligatory pilgrimage.32 The writer Georges Matisse cynically remarked that many of Bergson's "believers" had not read his books "but in order to be a Christian the faith suffices; it is not useful at all to know the testaments."33 Bergson's mystical philosophy to a great extent developed the metaphysics implicit in symbolism. His ideas, so brilliantly couched in poetic, analogical language, acted like a magnet on the writers of the pre-war generation. In so many ways prepared by the earlier success of symbolism, many writers after 1900

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succumbed to what one critic called the "romantic virtuosity" of Bergson's books and lectures. 34 The philosopher, Jules de Gaultier, said that Bergson used "the magic spell of language" to create illusion and J.H. Rosny-Ainé more critically felt that the charming spirit of Bergsonism was "so unseizable that it often fails to seize itself."35 Nevertheless, to the symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck, Bergson was not only "a great writer and a great artist," but "the greatest thinker in the world.''36 Tancrède de Visan, the symbolist critic and former student of Bergson, heralded Bergson as the ''Fichte of a generation," and in the kind of remark reserved for special intellectuals in France, called him the "conscience of an intellectual moment."37 Bergson was important for this literary generation, Romain Rolland said, because he appeared as a liberator, as "a great intellectual poet" who not only had a great impact on his time, but who also collaborated with it. Bergson's thought was "daughter of the hour that passes," the "hour of the profound soul, of joyous enthusiasm and intellectual youth."38 Always sensitive to the charge that he was doing irreparable harm to the scientific tradition, Bergson insisted that his mystical philosophy was not merely an appeal to an inner and profound life, but also an attempt to "re-erect the bridge, broken down since Kant's day, between metaphysics and science."39 What Bergson was trying to do in large part in the generation following 1889 (and this only becomes clear with the appearance of Creative Evolution in 1907) was validate esoteric ideas through empirical and rational means. This was why he rejected the more extreme forms of the occult in favour of the empirical methods of psychical research. According to his brother-in-law, MacGregor Mathers, Bergson was not the least bit interested in magic: "I have shown him everything that magic can do and it has had no effect on him."40 Nevertheless, psychical research was every bit as much an integral part of the occult revival as mysticism, spiritualism or magic, and despite attempts to claim a special distinction for it, it was generally recognized as a branch of the occult by the researchers themselves: The mystic finds knowledge by the inner way; well and good; but he must not try and force his way upon us. We also have our inner light, and for us it is right to try the outer way. Both are legitimate and each should tolerate the other. The hill of Zion is one, but there are different methods of approach.41 It was Bergson's originality over the course of many years to try and synthesize science and mysticism and in so doing to construct an optimistic and holistic view of a universe which was more perfectly integrated with man. The mystical "geniuses of will" were not only summoned to conquer, but the cosmos, so dynamic and creative, was the "machine for the making of gods":42

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Joy indeed would be that simplicity of life diffused throughout the world by an ever-spreading mystic intuition; joy, too, that which would automatically follow a vision of the life beyond attained through the furtherance of scientific experiment. 43 Bergson made his contributions to psychical research at a time when science was re-examining its foundations and when the revolution in physics had just begun. It also came at a time when psychology was very much in the public eye. Théodule Ribot had estimated that upwards of 10,000 books, reports and articles on psychology had been published between 1896 and 1900 and the process showed no sign of abating.44 When Bergson began to contribute to the movement in the 1890s he joined some of the most glittering scientific figures of his generation in the battle for recognition and intellectual respectability. It was a battle for a fair trial that F.C.S. Schiller once called, "the Dreyfus Case of science."45 The men involved in psychical research shared a common claim to at once confront the heretofore accepted truths of conventional science and at the same time to apply science's methodology to the solution of problems usually reserved for religion. Despite the scientific and technological breakthroughs of the nineteenth century, the victory of science and materialism as the final arbiters of human destiny was not a total one. The universe was not nearly as comfortable and tidy as some scientists boasted. The march of science from Dalton's discovery of the atomic theory of matter in the early 1800s to the revolution in physics of the 1890s appeared relentless, but the materialist view of man revealed discrepancies between theory and observation. Persistent claims continued to be made in the nineteenth century by intelligent men, often themselves scientists, for such unexplained psychic phenomena as the intercession of spirits, telepathy and clairvoyance, which they had either witnessed during their work with subjects under hypnosis or with psychic mediums. Having succeeded for the most part in banishing the supernatural in the eighteenth century the scientific establishment was most adamant in preventing its re-emergence in some pseudo-scientific form. The investigators who sought to establish the reality of psychic phenomena therefore did so at their own peril, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century.46 They were usually greeted with ridicule and scorn and the partial loss of their reputations. Nevertheless, the dramatic claims of those who had either experienced psychic phenomena directly or who had professionally observed them, could not be ignored for long. There was a prestigious minority of scientists who were willing to risk their reputations and challenge the prevailing dogmatism of science, because for many of them both the religious and the mechanistic views of the universe were inaccurate and inconvenient, and simply incapable of probing into the deeper questions of life. For this group of scientists, who would eventually form the psychical research movement, the system badly needed reform.

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When the formal scientific societies did grant a hearing to the pioneers of psychical research it was either because of their well-earned reputations won in more conventional areas of research, or because of the tenacious lobbying of science's most important figures who themselves were interested in the new line of inquiry. For example, Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolution, helped persuade the sceptical British Association for the Advancement of Science to permit the physicist William Barrett to read a landmark paper on thought-transference in 1876. The Association grudgingly allowed the heresy to be aired but only in its anthropological section and then it turned around and suppressed publication. 47 The situation was a bit more encouraging in France where the Academy of Sciences accepted a prize endowment which encouraged psychical research. The Fanny Emden Prize, as it was called, was worth 3000 francs and was awarded biennially to "the best work on suggestion, hypnotism, and physiological actions likely to be exerted from a distance upon the human organism in general."48 Furthermore, some of the most prestigious academics in philosophy, science and psychology at the University of Paris were closely associated with psychical research and were more successful in involving the University in their pursuits than were their British opposites. Bergson and Janet at the Collège de France and Richet and Ribot at the Sorbonne pursued their interests in psychical research without in any way compromising their standing in the academic community.49 Nevertheless, the University was ambivalent about the value of psychical research. Even though many of its leading academics were prominent contributors to the psychical research movement, and while they received their share of recognition in the academic community they also drew no small share of criticism and sometimes even contempt. It was said, for example, of N. Vaschide, the Director of the Laboratory of Pathological Psychology at the Sorbonne, that "he feared the ill-natured remarks of his fellows at the University."50 Moreover, according to Henri Massis, Bergson's popularity was often associated with "occultism'' and "table-rapping" by many of the same academics.51 On the other hand, more than one series of seances was held at the Sorbonne itself. What fired the imagination of the psychical researchers was their sense of standing at the threshold of a revolutionary era. "We are in the pre-Newtonian, possibly the pre-Copernican, age of this nascent science," wrote Oliver Lodge in 1905, "and it is our duty to accumulate facts and carefully record them for a future Kepler to brood over."52 It is through following these psychic facts, said William James in 1909, "that the greatest scientific conquests of the coming generation will be achieved."53 Maurice Maeterlinck, writing in 1913, felt that the twentieth century would end with discoveries in the psychic sciences as important as those of Newton and Laplace in the astronomical world.54 Like Jung and James, Kant and Einstein, Bergson believed that the great discoveries of the

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twentieth century would be in the realm of the spirit. He ended a lecture on dreams before the Institut général psychologique in 1901 on a prophetic note: To explore the innermost depths of the unconscious, to work in what I have called earlier the substratum of consciousness, that will be the main task of psychology in the century that is dawning. I do not doubt that wonderful discoveries await it there, as important perhaps as were in the preceding centuries the discoveries in the physical and natural sciences. That, at any rate is the promise that I make, the wish that I express in closing. 55 The other thing that began to draw these men together was the revival of spiritualism and the need at once to rescue it from the great popular clamor it excited (and the often fraudulent exploitation of it) and to validate scientifically its unique phenomena.56 The first systematic attempt to scientifically examine psychic phenomena began with the creation of the Society for Psychical Research (S.P.R.) in 1882. Formed by a small group of Cambridge University academics it attracted to its ranks members of many smaller societies, most of which had been formed in the 1870s.57 Like the members of the scientific societies of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the founders of psychical research were often objects of derision and in the popular imagination in both cases they were linked with, and lampooned as, astrologers and alchemists. The psychical research societies were formed not by eccentrics but by men of impeccable academic and, in the English case, religious credentials. The Cambridge Ghost Society, which was the immediate precursor of the S.P.R., had been created by Edward White Benson, a future Archbishop of Canterbury, and by other prominent clergymen in the Church of England. Furthermore, the original founders of the S.P.R. were William Barrett, a physicist, Henry Sidgwick, a philosopher, and F.W.H. Myers and Edmund Gurney who were classical scholars. With the exception of Barrett, they (and Frank Podmore who joined soon after) were all the sons of clergymen.58 The humanistic background of so many of the early figures in psychical research may have prompted their inordinate concern with the evils of materialistic philosophy and their need for spiritual nourishment which traditional religion no longer provided. Their interest in telepathy and survival of the soul was an attempt once and for all to find some thing to refute materialism. At times their concern about the potentially calamitous effect of materialism seemed to border on the obsessional:

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Unless psychical research . . . can discover facts incompatible with materialism, materialism will continue to spread. No other power can stop it; revealed religion and metaphysical philosophy are equally helpless before the advancing tide. And if that tide continues to rise and to advance as it is doing now, all the signs point to the view that it will be a destroying tide, that it will sweep away all the hard-won gains of humanity, all the moral traditions built up by the efforts of countless generations for the increase of truth, justice and charity. 59 The religious background of so many of these men and their concomitant interest in psychical research are yet another indication of the crisis of faith which colours this whole era. With traditional religion in obvious decline, and the influence of science increasing and casting doubt on everything religious people felt most certain about, the movement in psychical research provided a new outlet of expression and a unique chance to synthesize the best of the two traditions. This crisis of faith witnessed a transfer of moral and intellectual energy from devotion to the Christian faith to the search for a new "Religion of Humanity" whose ideological underpinnings could be supplied by the scientific discoveries of psychical research. F.W.H. Myers had counted on psychical research providing a scientific basis for a spiritual revival. Nowhere does the promise of a Religion of Humanity and the idea of progress that underlay it gain greater expression than in these words of Camille Flammarion written as the new century opened: One perceivesone can presagethat the religion of the future will be scientific, will be founded on a knowledge of psychical facts. This religion of science will have one great advantage over all that has gone before itunity. Today a Jew or a Protestant cannot believe in the miracle of Lourdes, a Musselman hates 'the dog of a Christian,' a Buddhist cannot accept the dogmas of the Western world. Not one of these divisions will exist in a religion founded on the general scientific solution of psychical problems.60 For Flammarion, if we can just scientifically demonstrate the survival of the human personality after death, "it will give humanity a progress superior to any she has et received by the general evolution of all the other sciences together."61 In their belief that they were helping to usher in a new age of faith the early psychical research societies addressed themselves to the questions of telepathy and survival. If these things could be empirically tested and confirmed, then the dogma of materialism could be more clearly disproved.

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Telepathy, which Ernest Jones has called "the most 'respectable' element in the field of occultism," preoccupied many of the early researchers as far back as the 1870s. As much as anything else it was something that could help shore up the new Religion of Humanity and help establish the validity of the survival hypothesis. For such scientists as Barrett, Flammarion and Crookes, and such philosophers of mysticism as Bergson and Delacroix, language was "a clumsy instrument of thought," as Barrett put it. It was a system of symbols and thus a fundamental element of the material system. Telepathy was viewed not merely as a new stage in the evolution of language, but as something that could unite human beings. It is a faculty, wrote G.N.M. Tyrrell, "shared in the further regions of the self, because there is there a unity of selves of which the surface consciousness knows nothing." 62 Telepathy more than anything else demonstrates that we are "members of one another." In establishing what Barrett called the "solidarity of the race,'' telepathy lends support to the perennial claim of the mystics that the human spirit stretches beyond the confines of the mortal self and that human beings are intrinsically one. Many researches concluded that telepathy was neither abnormal nor even unique; indeed, it was something going on between people all the time. This was the point made by Bergson before a meeting of the S.P.R. in 1913: If telepathy is a real fact, it is a fact that is capable of being repeated indefinitely. I go further, if telepathy is a real fact, it is very possible that it is operating at every moment and everywhere, but with too little intensity to be noticed, or else it is operating in the presence of obstacles which neutralize the effect at the same moment that it manifests itself.63 Many of the philosophers and psychologists at the end of the nineteenth century contributed to a classical discussion as to whether the individual unconsciously retained a cumulative record of all the memories of his entire life. Freud and Janet held that the individual did, and so did Bergson. Lecturing on dreams one year after the appearance of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, Bergson argued that sleep involves our entire being and that "the fullness of our mental life is in our dreams." The dream-state, that ideal world of duration, provided a direct link between the world of sensation and the totality of the memories of our entire life. "We live outside ourselves," he said, "but sleep brings us back inside ourselves."64 Furthermore, it is especially to deep sleep that Bergson directed researchers to look for the sources of telepathy. In what was his first official recognition of the S.P.R. since his allusion to its work in 1886, he lauded the society for its zeal in systematically collecting data on dreams and telepathy.65 But Bergson was a philosopher not a psychologist and so while he could try and direct the attention of experts to the study of the unconscious for the data of telepathy, he went no further in that direction himself"I stop at the threshold of the mystery," he said, at the end of his lecture in 1901.66

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Bergson's presidential acceptance speech before the S.P.R. in 1913 revealed his feelings at being something of a learned amateur among professionals: I have seen nothing myself, I have examined nothing myself. How is it then that you have come to choose me to succeed the great and eminent men of science and letters who have occupied in turn the presidential chair, most of whom, while universally recognized for their knowledge and ability, have also been men whose minds were particularly pre-occupied with the study of these mysterious phenomena? . . . You felt from afar the interest I was taking in your researches, you perceived me, across the two hundred and fifty miles of space which separated us, attentively reading your Proceedings and following with keen curiosity your work. 67 Bergson pictured himself as an "inferior officer" at the head of a "valiant regiment." Nevertheless, as a philosopher he felt that he had something to contribute to the observation and sifting of testimonial evidence which, he felt, should not be confined exclusively to the physical sciences. Employing the theses of Time and Free Will, Bergson argued that the experimental method of sciences relies on mathematical calculation and measurement as its ideal; but "it is of the essence of mental things that they do not lend themselves to measurement." Hence it is quite futile to study it in the manner of physical, chemical or biological fact. There is no principle of consciousness, he said in the Huxley Lecture of 1911, that can be mathematically deduced.68 That being the case, physical research should take from physical sciences precisely what it needsexperimentation and observationand no more. It must also learn to rely on the methodology of the social sciences and humanities. Just as testimony becomes an indispensable instrument of history so too can the testimony of psychic experiences. What Bergson was doing was explaining and endorsing the approach the S.P.R. had followed since its inception, a technique that stood ''midway between that of the historian and that of the magistrate." The investigator records the testimony of people having psychical experiences, assembles them as so many historical documents, and submits them to critical analysis. Finally, "you proceed to a kind of judicial inquiry; you examine the witnesses, confront them with one another, and weigh the value of their evidence."69 On this basis, Bergson said, ''I am led to believe in telepathy, just as I believe in the defeat of the Invincible Armada. My belief is not the mathematical certainty that the demonstration of Pythagoras' theorem gives me . . . but it is at least all the certainty that we obtain in an historical or judicial matter."70 In other words, Bergson was saying that the scientific method cannot really accredit or give evidence of psychic phenomena. Psychic phenomena are ontologically different from material phenomena and must be ultimately recognized and detected by methods other than scientific ones.

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The first authoritative study that employed the historical-judicial approach and the most influential of its kind, was the survey conducted by Myers, Gurney and Podmore between 1883 and 1886. It was called Phantasms of the Living, 71 and was a massive work that systematically collated the testimony of hundreds of people who had had psychic experiences. The report established, at least for members of the society, the reality of such psychic phenomena as clairvoyance, apparitions of the dead, precognition and, above all, telepathy. One historian of the society has called it the "manifesto" of telepathy.72 The book was enormously influential. In France Emile Boutroux felt that it proved by experience the reality of the subliminal self and helped make 1886 a turning-point in our understanding of man.73 In 1899 Camille Flammarion conducted an inquiry of his own directly modeled on Phantasms of the Living and designed to be its successor. Flammarion, who examined virtually all the celebrated psychic mediums of the day in his Paris home, invited letters from people who had had psychic experiences in telepathy, premonitory dreams and communications with the dead. His stated object was "to discover if the soul of man exists as an entity, independent of his body, and if it will survive the destruction of the same." He received 4,280 replies out of which 1,824 people responded that they had had such experiences. Flammarion concluded that the soul, admittedly endowed with faculties still unknown to science, did exist independent of the body.74 Surveys were by no means the exclusive method in assembling the relevant data of psychical research. Other, more scientific techniques were used, such as card-guessing experiments (Richet helped pioneer their use in 1885), the examination of patients under hypnosis, and above all, the use of seances, which as a vehicle for penetrating the world of the supernatural was so widely prevalent during the period. Until the Great War the seance promised great results and most of the prominent scientists of the day were at one time or another invited to attend one and to directly observe and analyze the "manifestations" of psychical phenomena. Many scientists, of course, could not be moved to attend and lend their names to what they deemed frivolous nonsense. When Thomas Huxley was invited to participate in a seance in 1869 he replied that an earlier exposure to a medium had proved to him how utterly fraudulent spiritualism really was: But supposing the phenomena to be genuinethey do not interest me. If any body would endow me with the faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and curates in the nearest cathedral town, I should decline the privilege, having better things to do.75

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Huxley was expressing the common fear among many scientists that attempts would be made during a seance to fool the witnesses. This was the reason Henri Poincaré refused to attend the long series of seances with the most famous medium of the day, Eusapia Palladino. More prudent than the other scientists and psychologists who did participate, Poincaré claimed that he was too certain in advance "that he would be taken in." 76 As for Bergson, he certainly shared some of Poincaré's anxieties about the theatricality of the seance. He acknowledged that often there was trickery and fraud in seances but on the whole things occurred in them that were so extraordinary in nature that they defied rational explanation.77 While Bergson's professional interest in hypnosis and mental suggestion can be traced back to the 1880s, his decisive commitment to psychical research was made in 1900. In that year he joined the newly-formed Institut psychologique internationale, along with Janet, Cesare Lombroso, Richet and William James, and the Institut général psychologique, a society that also included Liébault, Fouillée, the educators Louis Liard and Ferdinand Buisson, Léon Bourgeois and Madame Curie.78 Whether it was as an observer of an experiment with hypnosis or as a participant in the seance, Bergson lacked the credulousness that so afflicted Flammarion, Wallace and the others who appear to have accepted the validity of virtually everything they observed. This was despite the fact that he correctly viewed himself as a learned amateur. He was a keen observer, always trying to establish the veracity of the medium or the sensitive, always asking professional questions and supplying rational answers wherever possible. Bergson was a difficult person to fool, a witness always cautioning his colleagues to go slow.79 A good example of his professional detachment and objectivity can be seen in the series of seances he attended with Eusapia Palladino. The famous Italian medium had submitted to tests in Rome, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, London and New York, in fact wherever there was a formal society interested in psychical research.80 In 1885 she had been examined by the S.P.R. in Cambridge in twenty seances and caught cheating. From this and other fiascos she always seemed to bounce back. Despite a slightly tarnished reputation she was invited to Paris in 1905 by the Institut général psychologique. In what was to be her most lengthy and popular examination, she was tested in forty-three seances which were conducted between 1905 and 1908. She was examined at various times by a distinguished company of physicists, psychologists and physiologists who included Professors Richet, Ballet, Courtier and Madame Curie of the Sorbonne, and D'Arsonval, Perrin and Bergson of the Collège de France. On several occasions Bergson and Madame Curie were the controllersthey held Eusapia's hands to insure against cheating. Bergson was only present during six of the seances (in

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1905 and 1906), but witnessed the full gamut of the "phenomena" that made the medium famous: levitations, tablerapping, furniture-moving, flying objects and flashing lights. 81 When asked about his impressions in an interview a few years later, Bergson revealed a certain ambivalence about the whole thing. Commenting on the reality of the phenomena Bergson said: I have experimented little myself and it is difficult to render an opinion in this matter . . . However, it is at least possible to speak of certain spirit phenomena and particularly those which the celebrated medium Eusapia Palladino produced. Unfortunately, I did not assist at all the seances . . . but the observations I have made have not completely convinced me . . . As for my colleagues, they have not been any more moved than I.82 Bergson alluded to fraudulent procedures of Palladino but remarked on certain phenomena she producedlike levitationswhich, he felt, remained unexplained: "I believe that it is wise to reserve judgement and to say: there is doubt."83 Bergson was not quite accurate about his colleagues' disappointment with Palladino; Richet, D'Arsonval and Courtier were actually impressed with what they had seen and the final report, cautious as it was, tilted slightly in the medium's favour.84 While Bergson's professional interest in psychical research was constant and enthusiastic one nevertheless comes away from the record with the feeling that the role played by the philosopher in the gathering of evidence and in seances was something less than a creative one. He was certainly not at ease in the Palladino tests. He only attended six of them and he was not even present when the commission presented its report in 1908. Clinically examining patients and mediums and extracting important insights from them was simply not his métier. As we have seen, Bergson admitted on more than one occasion that his contributions to the clinical end of psychical research were minimal. His real contributions, the things that earned him an invitation to join the S.P.R. in 1909 and eventually the election to its presidency, lay elsewhere. As a philosopher, Bergson was not as comfortable in the laboratories of psychical research as he was in the classroom, the library and the discussion group85the world of ideas generally. And it was in that world, as a theoretician for one branch of the occult movement, that Bergson built his reputation. In keeping with his vocation as a philosopher, Bergson made one of the period's truly original contributions to psychical research with an impressive theoretical answer to the perplexing problem of survival. Matter and Memory,86 the second of three major works published before World War I, was a key element of Bergson's career-long effort to provide new metaphysical and psychological insights that could grasp both man and world in a total reality.

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In Time and Free Will Bergson had distinguished between the unique spiritual world of man and the external material world peculiar to all life-forms. He had developed some basic metaphysical views on time, space, and the psychic nature of reality. Matter and Memory above all argued for the independence and survival of the human spirit. Following in the steps of his spirtualist mentors and in conjunction with virtually all of the contemporary spiritualist philosophers, Bergson tried to demonstrate that the human spirit was immortal. As such, Matter and Memory is part of a general revolt against a mechanical and materialistic conception of reality which, if true, leads to the futile attempt to try and annihilate thought. Carrying his work in Time and Free Will a step further Bergson, in Matter and Memory, addressed himself to the problem of the relation between matter and spirit. Like all of his books, Matter and Memory is an attack on some of the classical and contemporary orthodoxies of the nineteenth century. Modern rationalism since the seventeenth century had re-defined the medieval distinction between the corrupt world of matter and the eternal world of the spirit, by making matter eternal and immutable and demoting spirit to the level of subjective metaphysics and superstition. The nineteenth century scientist felt that there was no world other than this one, and he tried to explain everything, including life, mind and thought in terms of matter and mechanism. In asserting the realities of spirit and matter Bergson tried to restore the balance between the two that had been the cornerstone of medieval philosophy. In doing so he dissented from some of the classic answers to the mind-body problem, namely psychophysical parallelismthe doctrine that for every psychical process or phenomena there is a corresponding or reciprocal physical processand he attacked the theory of memory of Taine and Ribot which borrowed so heavily from British associationist psychology. 87 For Bergson, Descartes was not the real villain in perverting the knowledge of man as a spiritual creature. True, he was the father of psychophysical parallelism ("one thinks in terms of metaphysics, but one lives and acts in terms of physics"), but with his "profound sense of reality" Descartes left a place for free will in the world, even if he was inconsistent in doing so. Even Spinoza and Leibniz did not represent the soul as a simple reflection of the bodyor as Leibniz put it, "Everything goes on in souls as if there were no body, and everything goes on in the body as if there were no soul.'' The people who completed and hardened Cartesian parallelism were the eighteenth and nineteenth century mechanistic materialistsLa Mettrie, Helvetius, Cabanis, Broussais, and Moleschottand it was their errors that Bergson felt obliged to correct. For the materialists there can be no thought without the brain and it was impossible that thought be tied to anything but the brain. For example, Pierre Cabanis, the doctor who had treated Mirabeau, believed that thought was the result of "secretions" in the brain analogous to the liver's secretion of the bile. This point was

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reaffirmed later in the nineteenth century by, among others, the Dutchman, Jacob Moleschott, who was known for his cryptic statement, "no phosphorous, no thought." 88 For Bergson man was not just an elaborate piece of machinery, and it is absurd to believe that two such radically different entities as a material body and an immaterial mind interact with each other in perfect harmony. How can human thought, which has none of the qualities of matter, proceed from the material brain? The key to the answer, Bergson maintained, can be found in the phenomenon of memory and in the real role the brain plays in the life of the mind. His point of departure is his doctrine of imagesimages meaning perceived facts. The world of matter is the system of these images with the human body a privileged center of the whole. Bergson defined perception as the result of the reciprocal action of our body with a system of images.89 Rejecting both the idealist and realist theories of matter, Bergson said that perception does not give us knowledge, but the conditions necessary for action. To support this point Bergson examined the physiological aspects of the perceptual process, i.e., reflex actions, development of the nervous system, and functions of spinal cord and brain. Between spinal cord and brain he found not a difference in kind but a difference in degree. Responses in the spinal cord are immediate and automatic; in the brain they take time and admit indetermination. Rather than being the source of consciousness, "the brain is no more than a kind of central telephonic exchange," a depot where perceptions are communicated to motor mechanisms.90 In other words, the function of the brain is secondary; it is an organ of limitation so far as the mind is concerned. Since consciousness is always oriented towards dealing with practical solutions, the brain plays a filtering role, blotting out material irrelevant to our earthly activities and material environment, and preventing the mind from being overloaded by extraneous information. "The brain appears to us to be an instrument of analysis in regard to the movement received," Bergson said, "and an instrument of selection in regard to the movement executed.''91 However rapid perception may be it still takes time and therefore involves memory. There is no perception which is not full of memories, and it is memory which reflects the full range of man's consciousness. In reinstating memory in perception Bergson tried to determine "the point of contact between consciousness and things, between the body and spirit." Memory, Bergson said, takes two forms: one is habit-memory, like the habits of bodily exercise, or lessons learned by heart. This memory is incorporated into one's present for its useful effect. Habits formed in this way are massed in the body; for Bergson, they do not represent the past, they merely act

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it. The second form that memory takes preserves the totality of one's past. It survives in independent, spontaneous recollections, so many memory-recordings in which the whole of our past survives "with all the detail of its events localized in time." This "pure" memory Bergson called "the memory par excellence." 92 What, then, is the nature of memory and its relation to the brain? The school of Taine and Ribot held that memories were stored in the brain, which registered impressions; loss of memory was explained by lesions or the destruction of the relevant brain cells.93 Bergson challenged this theory by arguing that memory is not a question of mechanically registering impressions; in the case of injury-induced memory losses the lessons of aphasia-victims teach us that a sudden emotional jolt can bring back memories which otherwise seemed lost. The memories may remain intact but the capacity to recall them is missing. Injuries to the brain will not destroy memories, Bergson alleged, but rather cause "a break in the continuous progress by which they actualize themselves."94 This obviously could not occur if memories were stored in the brain itself. For Bergson there are many levels of consciousness, "a thousand repetitions of our psychical life," ranging from the plane of action to the plane of pure memory. To bear this out Bergson turned to recognition, the process by which past and present come into contact with each other. We will understand the true relation between brain and memory when we appreciate that it is the memories which spontaneously go to meet the perception. Active recognition progresses from within outward to the perception aided by the high degree of tension in consciousness and the effort of attention which serves to insert memory-images in perception. Memory, which Bergson equates with duration, is not a regression but a progress from past to present. A person's past is essentially powerless but potentially it might act, and when it does it gnaws its way into the present, a present represented by the consciousness we have of our body, a present "which interests me, which lives for me . . . that which summons me to action."95 Since it is memory that conducts the past into the present and can contract moments of duration into a single duration, "memory must be, in principle, a power absolutely independent of matter." "If then," Bergson said, ''spirit is a reality, it is here in the phenomenon of memory, that we may come into touch with it experimentally.''96 Consequently, it is a mere illusion to think that memory can be derived from a function of the brain. Pure perception places us within matter and it is into spirit that we penetrate by means of memory. Furthermore, it is the mystical method that Bergson advanced to distinguish between the two; he asked us to look within and introspectively seek and grasp experience at its source, and restore to intuition its original purity to "recover contact with the real."97 When we pass from pure perception to memory, we abandon matter for spirit.

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Bergson's view of freedom required that the mind be of time and not of space. The truly intense life he called for is only sustained by the organization of memory and matter, the past and the present: Thus, whether we consider it in time or in space, freedom always seems to have its roots deep in necessity and to be intimately organized with it. Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds, and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom. 98 What Bergson did in Matter and Memory was to challenge older views of the nature of memory which mechanically linked memory with the brain. Pursuing his insights of Time and Free Will one step further, Bergson showed that memory is of time, and the body is of space. This being the case Bergson equated memory with spirit and showed that spirit can exist independently of the body. Placing Bergson's career and work within the context of late nineteenth century occultism and remaining cognizant of his special enthusiasm for psychical research, we can better understand the importance of Matter and Memory, his most difficult book. Matter and Memory was not merely a negative attack on the mechanistic orthodoxies of the nineteenth century. It was also an attempt to supply basic answers to questions which preoccupied occultist and mystical thinkers in the period, and at the same time offer to religious people answers that accorded with the time-honoured precepts of Christian faith. The whole thread running through Bergson's work and through the revolt against mechanism generally is that reality is fundamentally a spiritual activity. As previously indicated in this chapter, Bergson and his colleagues were interested in creating a spiritual revival as a prerequisite for a new Religion of Humanity, or at least for a regenerated Christianity. Bergson was not just demonstrating his vast knowledge of psychology and physiology to further develop his metaphysics and epistemology of change. He was trying to come to terms with the key spiritual and philosophical questions of his daysoul and freedom, immortality and mindand he spent the rest of his life elaborating on the key insights contained in his first two books. An example of what is meant here is the subject of telepathy and survival, the reality of which is the real theme of Matter and Memory. Bergson never explicitly maintained, as Jung did, that there was a collective unconscious or a group mind, but his whole theory of mind strongly suggests that individuals could communicate without physical means, and therefore by implication they were already potentially connected with each other. This is the meaning of

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Bergson's line, "the past is preserved by itself, automatically." At a deeper level of reality we are all linked. Certainly he drew conclusions from his theory of mind that support the telepathy thesis. Telepathy, he felt, was operating all the time and everywhere "but with too little intensity to be noticed." This is so because the brain, in narrowing our vision to the present, cuts us off from the past and inhibits the full expression of telepathy. 99 Moreover, the Bergsonian theory of mind furnished the occult revival and the Catholic revival, within which Bergsonian ideas loomed so large, with a theoretical argument for immortality. If memory exists independent of the brain, not only is the reality of the spirit established, but its survival of bodily death is also established. This theme, originally argued in Matter and Memory, was repeated and expounded continuously throughout Bergson's career. He made it clear, for example, in the Huxley Lecture of 1911 that if memory is independent of brain then ''preservation and even intensification of personality are not only possible but even probable after the disintegration of the body."100 And as a psychical researcher he went further: ''If there is a beyond for conscious beings, I cannot see why one should not be able to discover the means to explore it. Nothing which concerns man is likely to conceal itself deliberately from the eyes of man."101 At the end of the lecture "The Soul and the Body" given under the auspices of Foi et vie in 1912, Bergson once again indicated the probability of the survival of the soul, a probability which for him was a certainty: But if, as I have tried to show, the mental life overflows the cerebral life, if the brain does not translate into movements a small part of what takes place in consciousness, then survival becomes so probable that the onus of proof falls on him who denies it rather than on him who affirms it.102 Quoting Spinoza after the lecture, Bergson told his friend Isaac Benrubi that "we are eternal." His interview that same year (1912) with Herman Bernstein centered on this very question of immortality: The mind represents a country and the brain is only one of its provinces. The work done by the country is immensely wider in scope than that done by the province. The death of the brain is a probability. But I have found that the mind goes on living after the brain has died. From this I concluded that the mind survives the body. I cannot say definitely that the mind is immortal, but there is a strong probability that it is.103 After 1896 the professional response to Bergson and his ideas grew in a subtle but significant way. This period brought the first few insights into the meaning of the man, the first realization that he was breaking new ground. After 1896 we can see the first, albeit tentative, historical assessments of Bergson's

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relationship to his milieu. For the first time we find the word "new" used to delineate not just a single book, but all of what Bergson had been saying since 1889. 104 But it was particularly the men of psychical research who understood him best. No less than the academic philosophers they worked along parallel lines with Bergson, rubbed shoulders with him at conferences, discussion groups and laboratories, and were preoccupied with the same problems that he grappled with. They always recognized that Bergson was one of theirsthat he was one of the truly original theoreticians of psychical research. This is what Charles Richet meant when, in dedicating a book years later to Bergson, he paid tribute to him as "the most profound thinker of modern times."105 By 1903 Emile Boirac, the Rector of the Dijon Academy and one of France's most important psychical researchers, recognized Bergson along with William Crookes and Oliver Lodge as one of the great figures of that field.106 This recognition of Bergson's originality and genius also came from a figure no less imposing than BergsonWilliam James. After reading Matter and Memory James sent Bergson a copy of his Harvard lecture on immortality ''in which," James said, "it may amuse you to see a formulation like your own that the brain is an organ of filtration for spiritual life." Writing to Bergson in 1902 James expressed his feeling that Matter and Memory was a revolutionary landmark in our knowledge of the mind: It is a work of exquisite genius. It makes a sort of Copernican revolution as much as Berkeley's 'Principles' or Kant's 'Critique' did, and will probably, as it gets better and better known, open a new era of philosophical discussion. It fills my mind with all sorts of new questions and hypotheses and brings the old into a most agreeable liquefaction. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.107 The recognition of Bergson's work and originality and his obvious philosophical skills came gradually after 1889 and eventually won him an appointment to teach at the Ecole Normale in 1898. The "new era of philosophical discussion" that William James had predicted, began in 1907 when Bergson published Creative Evolution, a book of such explosive popularity that it completely overshadowed Matter and Memory. Nevertheless, Matter and Memory and Time and Free Will remain neglected classics that still contribute to our knowledge of mind and the personality of man.

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Footnotes 1. Romain Rolland, Jean Christophe, trans. Gilbert Cannan (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), 10: 482. 2. Ibid., 399. 3. Léon Blum, "La Prochain génération littéraire," Revue de Paris I (1913): 52930. 4. I am using the term "occult" in this sense: the occult is a body of hidden and rejected knowledge which is beyond "normal" human understanding and incompatible with, indeed, in opposition to establishment ideologies. As a philosophical system of theories and practises, occultism, which includes magic, alchemy, astrology, theosophy and spiritualism, promises its eager initiates the attainment of the higher powers of mind and spirit heretofore unknown to ordinary men. But the occult also attracts to itself rather like a large planet much unpopular or rejected thought out of step with the prevailing orthodoxies of the day. In this sense, vitalism and mysticism become companions of the larger occult movement, sharing with that movment an aversion to the current attempt to explain man and the universe by recourse to purely physical laws. While it is true that a special place has always been accorded to mysticism in the Catholic Church, nevertheless, mystics often can be found in occult groups. They are usually lumped together by their contemporaries who view them, correctly I think, as beginning from a common inspiration, a consciousness of a beyond, and who see them employing similar language and methods to give to their initiates powers unknown to ordinary men. For a bibliography of occult literature in France see the monumental work by Albert L. Caillet, Manuel bibliographique des science psychiques ou occultes (Paris: L. Dorbon, 1912), 3 Vols. 5. Roger Martin du Gard, Jean Barois, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking Press, 1949), 305. Like Barois, the quest of Huysmans, Bourget, Maeterlinck and others ended in a conversion to Catholicism. 6. Louis Levine, "Bergson Sees Great Future for American Philosophy," The New York Times, Mag. Section, 22 Feb., 1914, 4. 7. Anatole France, "Sous les galeries de l'odéon," Le temps 19 Jan., 1890, in Oeuvres complétes illustrées de Anatole France (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 19251935), 7: 256. 8. Emile Durkheim, Suicide (New York: The Free Press, 1951), 370. 9. Quoted in Colin Wilson, The Occult (New York: Random House, 1973), 352. 10. "Spiritism" is the French equivalent of English "spiritualism," but with a reincarnationist component. Spiritualism, as used in France, denotes a system of belief in opposition to materialism. It is in the English sense that I am using the term in this chapter and consequently I use the term "spiritualist" throughout. 11. Camille Flammarion, Mysterious Psychic Forces (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1909), 30. Alan Kardec was the father of spiritualism in France and the country's leading reincarnationist until his death. He was also the founder of the popular journal, La revue spirite (1858), the official journal of the spiritualist movement. 12. J.K. Huysmans, A rebours (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1884). 13. Péladan was one of the most influential occult figures of the era. For the origins and development of the occult movement in France see James Webb, The Occult Underground (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Co., 1974). 14. Erik Satie, for a time a pianist at the Chat Noir where the waiters dressed as academicians, composed music for the Rosicrucians and for Péladan's dramatic works. Webb, The Occult Underground, 182.

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15. The occult, however, was not exclusively anti-establishment. During this period freemasonry made its greatest penetration in the political and commercial establishment. Gordon Wright maintains that by 1900 virtually every Radical deputy in the Chamber was a Mason. Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times: 1760 to the Present (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1960), 300. See also Eugen Weber, Satan franc-maçon (Paris: René Juillard, 1964). 16. Paul Bourget, "Deux séances chez Mrs. P," Annales des sciences psychiques 5 (1895): 6575. For Sully-Prudhomme see "An Important Adhesion," Light 22 (1902): 185.

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17. Ellic Howe, Urania's Children (London: William Kimber, 1967). Novels with the occult themes of spirit communication, reincarnation, satanism and mysticism abounded in La belle époque. Many occult reviews appeared as well, like La Voile d'Isis, Echo du merveilleux, Le lotus bleu and L'Etoile, to mention the more popular. 18. Jules Bois, Le satanisme el le magie (Paris: L. Chailley, 1895) and Les petites religions de Paris (Paris: Flammarion, 1894). Huysman's equally sensational novel, Là-bas, which appeared in 1891, was largely responsible for the belief that the existence of satanical cults was widespread in France. 19. Mgr. Baunard, Esperance (Paris: Poussielgue, 1892), 92; Charles Richet, "Faul-il étudier le spiritisme?" Annales de sciences psychiques 15 (1905): 10. 20. Paul Morand, 1900 A.D. (New York: William F. Payson, 1931), 149. 21. Ellic Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order, 18871923 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 200-201. There was always a tendency for occultists to organize themselves, first in orders or lodges, often with journalistic outlets, then into federations which periodically held congresses. Paris was alive with these groups. A "Syndicate of Occultism," for example, was formed in 1911 and sought to unite all persons engaged in any branch of occult research. It promised to promote books, articles and conferences on the occult. Its founder, H. Cabasse-Leroy, was Laureate of the Academy of Medicine. "Occultism in France," Light 31 (1911): 219. A major occult congress was held earlier in Paris in 1907. All principle occultists from Paris and the provinces attended. Papers were read, speeches delivered and officers elected. Pierre Piobb, L'Année occultiste et psychique (Paris: Henri Daragon, 1907), 286. 22. Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 201. 23. For example, F. Von Hugel, The Mystical Element of Religion (London: Dent, 1908); Richard M. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness (New York: Causeway Books, 1974). Published originally in 1900; Henri Delacroix, Études d'histoire et de psychologie du mysticisme (Paris: Alcan, 1908); William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: The New American Library, 1958). Originally the Gifford Lectures of 1901. See also W.H. Dyson, Studies in Christian Mysticism (London: James Clarke & Co., 1913), and Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946). 24. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spritual Consciousness (London: Methuen, 1962). 25. Augustin Paulain, Des graces d'oraison (Paris: Beauchesne, 1901). The author also drew on his own mystical experiences. By 1931 the book had gone through ten editions in French. 26. Bulletin de la société française de philosophie, 7 (January, 1906). 27. H. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (New York: Henry Holt, 1935), 292. 28. Ibid., 301, 59. 29. Ibid., 42. See also Evelyn Underhill, "Bergson and the Mystics," The English Review 10 (1912): 51122, and A. Mories, "Bergson and Mysticism," Westminster Review 177, no. 3 (1912):68789. 30. Louis Levine, "Bergson Sees Great Future for American Philosophy." C.D. Broad who was sympathetic to the mystics and Bertrand Russell who was not, were also struck by the similarities of the mystics' experiences. See C.D. Broad, Religions, Philosophy and Psychical Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 3; and Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (London: Longman's Green, 1925), 9f.

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31. For these and other reasons, some critics have tried to link Bergson to the Jewish mystical tradition and specifically to the Kabbala, which is the central literary classic of modern occultism. Certainly the Bergsonian and Kabbalistic views of man, so popular in the late nineteenth century, proceed from the same assumptions: that man lives a highly routinized, mechanical life, mundanely bound by the rhythms of his body and by habits of reaction and perception. He is a man who blindly seeks pleasure and avoids pain, and it is only the rare man who, through the proper instruction, can overcome this, break the outer crust of habit and enter into a higher spiritual awareness. Bergson once acknowledged that he had taken instruction in Hebrew, but was quite clear in maintaining that he had ignored the Kabbala. Nevertheless, critics have insisted that the connection exists. See Henri Serouya, "Bergson et la Kabbale," Revue philosophique 149, no. 3 (1959): 32124; Aimé Pallière, Bergson et le judaisme (Paris: F. Alcan, 1932); Vladimir Jankelevitch, "Bergson et le judaisme," Mélanges de philosphie et de littérature juives 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaries de France, 1957), 6494; and André Joussain, "Bergson et la pensée juive," Ecrits de Paris (September 1955): 7581. 32. See Chapter V. 33. G. Picard and G.L. Tautain, "Enquête sur M. Henri Bergson et l'influence de sa pensée sur la sensibilité contemporaine," La grande revue 83 (1914): 747. 34. René Berthelot, Un romantisme utilitaire (Paris: F. Alcan, 1912), 62. The connection between Bergson and symbolist poetry is discussed by Marcel Raymond in Albert Béguin and Pierre Thévanaz, eds., Henri Bergson: essais et témoignages (Neuchatel: La Baconnière, 1943), 28586. See also Tancrède de Visan, "La Philosophie de M. Bergson et le lyrisme contemporaine," Vers et prose 21 (1910): 12540; Jean Blum, "La philosophie de M. Bergson et la Poésie symboliste," Mercure de France 73 (1906); and Maurice Blanchot, "Symbolism and Bergson," Yale French Studies 2, no. 2, (1949): 6366. 35. Jules de Gaultier, Revue philosophique 69 (1910) 48; Picard and Tautain, "Enquête sur M. Henri Bergson et l'influence de sa pensée sur la sensibilité contemporaine," 559. 36. Frédérick LeFevre, "Une heure avec Maurice Maeterlinck," Les nouveues littéraires (April 7, 1928): 8. Bergson's favourite writers were Maeterlinck, Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget and especially Maurice Barrès. To Bergson, Barrès was "a remarkable writer," "a musician in words." Herman Bernstein, Celebrities of Our Time (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for the Library Press, 1968), 149. This series of interviews was published originally in 1924. 37. Picard and Tautain, "Enquête sur M. Henri Bergson et l'influence de sa pensée sur la sensibilité contemporaine,"321. 38. Ibid., 517. The question of Bergson's influence on this or that writer is an idle one and really lay outside the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that Bergson and many contemporary writers worked along parallel lines, both reacting against mechanism in one case and Naturalism in the other, and influencing each other in highly complex ways that can never be completely sorted out. The "Proust problem" is the best case in point; the question of Bergson's supposed influence on Proust's an is still as controversial as it is unsolved. Proust clearly denied any influence and admitted only affinities, which is only natural in men sharing the same cultural milieu. That there was inspiration is probable and that Bergson helped Proust cultivate a taste for philosophy in his lectures which Proust attended is also probable. See Marcel Proust, Letters of Marcel Proust (New York: Random House, 1949), 197, 405. See also Robert Dreyfus, Sourvenirs sur Marcel Proust (Paris: B. Grasset, 1926), 289; and Léon Pierre-Quint, Marcel Proust: sa vie son vie (Paris: Kra, 1924). 39. In Bergson, Mélanges, 494. 40. Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 113. Interestingly, Bergson's sister claimed that some of their "tiresome relatives" were into magic, and years later Bergson's daughter turned to the occult herself. 41. J. Arthur Hill, Spiritualism: Its History, Phenomena and Doctrine (London: Cassell, 1918), 199. 42. Bergson, The Two Sources, 306. 43. Ibid.

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44. Cited in Jan Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras: Europe in 1900, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 417. 45. Hereward Carrington, Modern Psychical Phenomena (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1919), 81.

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46. An early example of this was the Mesmerism movement in France. The French Academy of Medicine only allowed Franz Mesmer to explain his theory of animal magnetism after it was ordered to do so by the government. As early as 1784, one of Mesmerism's chief practitioners, and the father of modern hypnosis, the Marquis de Puységur, claimed that his patients demonstrated under hypnosis unique psychic powersthat they understood and responded to his unspoken thoughts. The first Royal Commission to investigate Mesmerism's claims did so in 1784 (Benjamin Franklin was one of its members), and issued a negative report. A second commission was appointed in 1826 and after an almost six year investigation it reversed the earlier conclusion. It affirmed the reality of the hypnotic state and certain psychic phenomena which often attended it. The Academy, however, refused to approve the report. In 1837 yet another commission was appointed which brought in a completely negative report. On Mesmerism and its founders see Vincent Buranelli, The Wizard from Vienna (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1975); and Margaret Goldsmith, Franz Anton Mesmer: A History of Mesmerism (New York: Doubleday, 1934). Nevertheless, despite the fact that Mesmerism and its disciples appeared discredited, the movement gained enormous popularity between 1830 and 1850. Because it did, and because of its claims to have completely substantiated the existence of telepathy, something which helped spiritualism gain a positive reception in Europe, one historian of the movement has called it the focal point of nineteenth century occultism. Ronald Pearsall, The Table Rappers (New York: St. Martins Press, 1972). 47. Harry Price, Fifty Years of Psychical Research (London: Longman's Green & Co., 1939), 65. Even more important was the work of William Crookes. One of the more important scientists of the nineteenth century (and a member of the Golden Dawn), Crookes had helped to pioneer in Psychical research since the 1860s. When he claimed that his research tended to show that telepathy should be the starting point of scientific research, "the fundamental law, as I believe it to be," he elicited nothing but the incredulity and ridicule of the scientific world. On the other hand, his discovery of the element thallium and the invention of the Crookes tube and the radiometer earned him a knighthood in 1897, the presidency of the British Association itself in 1898, and the Nobel Prize in 1907. Brian Inglis, Natural and Supernatural: A History of the Paranormal from the Earliest Times to 1914 (London: Abacus, 1979), 484. See also Rosalind Heywood, The Sixth Sense (London: Penguin Books, 1978). Other scientists pursued parallel careers; Oliver Lodge and Lord Rayleigh, for example, were scientists of great reputation who were, like Crookes, pioneers in psychical research. They struggled to get the proper hearing for their research, underwent the same opprobrium, and ultimately were knighted; and in Lord Rayleigh's case, awarded the Nobel Prize for more conventional research. 48. Émile Boirac, Our Hidden Forces (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1917). 49. Charles Richet was the best example of this. Hailed by many as the "Father of metapsychics" and "the great French apostle of the movement to rehabilitate experimental occultism," Richet nevertheless retained his academic respectability through his more conventional work on allergies and won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1913. French academics interested in psychical research had at least one outlet for their conclusions their English colleagues could not quite matchthe prestigious Revue philosophique, a journal founded in 1878 and which reflected the close link between psychology and philosophy in this period and to which most of the psychical researchers contributed. 50. Eugène Osty, Supernormal Faculties of Man (London: Methuen, 1923), III Like its English counterpart the French scientific establishment was very ambivalent about "occultist" research and experiments and often could be extremely hostile to its practitioners. For example, while the Academy of Science gave a decent hearing to Hyppolite Baraduc on thought photography, it responded differently to the introduction of Edison's phonograph in 1878; when the first recording was being played before the distinguished gathering, one of the scientists rushed forward and seized the demonstrator by the collar, "Wretch," he cried, "we are not to be made dupes of by a ventriloquist." Camille Flammarion, The Unknown (New York: Harper, 1900), 3. 51. Henri Massis, Évocations: Souvenirs 19051911 (Paris: Plon, 1931), 86. 52. Introduction to J. Maxwell, Metapsychical Phenomena (London: Duckworth, 1905), ix. 53. William James, "The Confidence of a Psychical Researcher," American Magazine (1909): 599. 54. Maurice Maeterlinck, The Unknown Guest (New Jersey: University Books, 1975), 335.

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55. Henri Bergson, The World of Dreams, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), 5758. Given originally as a lecture before the Institut général psychologique and published as "La rêve" in the Bulletin de l'Institut général psychologique 1, no. 3 (1901): 97102. 56. Spiritualism seems to have ignited the greatest interest and made the most dazzling converts in the English-speaking world. This was especially true in the United States where the modern revival began in 1848 and where it listed among its faithful, William Cullen Bryant, Horace Greely, James Fenimore Cooper and William Lloyd Garrison. Slater Brown, The Heyday of Spiritualism (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1970). In Great Britain, D.D. Howe, by all accounts the greatest psychic medium of the nineteenth century, drew to his seances people like the Brownings, Bulwer-Lytton, Thackeray and John Ruskin. Even Queen Victoria dabbled in table-rapping. Pearsall, Table Rappers. Spiritualism became popular in France in the 1850s. Victor Hugo became convinced of its phenomena in that decade, and the French dramatist, Victorien Sardou, caused a stir in the 1860s when he claimed that the departed souls of cultural geniuses like Rembrandt and Beethoven migrated to the planet Jupiter where they constituted a superior race of beings. Nandor Fodor, An Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science (New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1974), 33334. To the older spiritualist journals of the 1850s and 1860s like Revelations d' outre-tombe, L'Avenir, and Kardec's La revue spirite were added new ones in the 1890s: Le spiritism, Le progrès spirite and Revue scientifique et morale du spiritism. The movement also organized itself into the Fédération spirite universelle and the Allan Kardec Circle. The Italians were not immune to the spiritualist rage. Marconi once gave a seance with King Victor Emmanuel in attendance, and Garibaldi, at another seance conducted by Cesare Lombroso, was so disturbed by what he witnessed that he cried out, "Let me go! I wish to retain the full consciousness of my faculties." "Garibaldi A Spiritualist," Light 28 (1908): 28. 57. It absorbed people from the Cambridge Ghost Society (1851), the Pyschological Society (1875), the British National Association of Spiritualists (1878), and the Phantasmological Society of Oxford (1875). Price, Fifty Years of Psychical Research, 48. The S.P.R. helped spawn branches in the U.S., France, Italy and Germany. The English S.P.R. nevertheless remained the most prestigious, influential and well-financed of all the societies. Members of the other societies were, in most cases, corresponding members of the S.P.R. Freud and Jung, Janet, Ribot, Richet, Hans Driesch and William James collaborated closely with it in the examination of psychic mediums, read papers at its annual meetings and often were elected officers to its executive board. Richet, Flammarion, James and Bergson were all at one time presidents of the S.P.R. One critic referred to the close liaison between the French and English researchers as the "Entente Cordiale" for psychical research. "Recent Researches in France," The Occult Review 3, no. 8 (1906): 77. 58. William James and Josiah Royce who helped found the American Society for Psychical Research in 1884 also had strong religious backgrounds. James' father, Henry James, Sr., was a lecturer and author of several books on the relation between man and God, and the leading American disciple of the religious mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg. Andrew J. Beck, Introduction to William James (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 8. 59. William McDougall, "Presidential Address" to the American Society for Psychical Research in January 1923, quoted in Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism (New York: Amo Press, 1975), 26162. One psychical researcher in France went so far as to blame science and materialism for the brutality of the Great War. It "committed this violence upon reason," he wrote, "and denied all that makes for the moral grandeur of mankind. It accepted the lie that there is nothing else in the universe but matter such as we know it: there is no soul, no intelligence; there are only reactions. The great scientific dogma was therefore that the cause of all things exists in this matter, which is reduced by a last analysis to the indivisible, indissoluble, eternal atom." L. Chevreuil, Proofs of the Spirit World, trans. Agnes Gray (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1920): 2. 60. Flammarion, The Unknown, xii. 61. Ibid., vi. 62. G.N.M. Tyrrell, "Religion and Psychical Research," Church Quarterly Review 143 (1946): 48.

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63. Henri Bergson, "Presidential Address" (May 28, 1913), Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 68 (1913): 160. Bergson's view was shared by many people interested in occult phenomena. Alfred Fouillée, the founder of French solidarist philosophy, felt that telepathy was not contrary to scientific data and, in fact, rather commonplace. "Télépathie et télégraphie sans fil," Bulletin de l'Institut général psychologique 4 (1904): 31618. Jean Jaurès, a former classmate of Bergson and student of Boutroux, also believed in telepathy as well as second sight and telekenesis. Not only can "the brain radiate and act far beyond the limits of the human organism," he wrote, but "there exists in us an 'unknown self' capable of exerting a direct action upon matter, of lifting a foreign body with an energetic will, just as if it were its own body, of piercing by a look the opacity of walls, and of gathering from afar and through space the unexpressed thought of another 'self.''' Jean Jaurès, De la Réalité du monde sensible (Paris: F. Alcan, 1891), 358. 64. Bergson, The World of Dreams, 31. In this lecture and again in his classroom in 1911 when he lectured on his theory of personality, Bergson claimed that his views on the unconscious expression of repressed wishes and fears were compatible with those of Freud. Jules Grivet, "Cours au Collège de France. La théorie de la personne, d'après Henri Bergson," in Mélanges de philosophie 85152. 65. Freud hoped that psychoanalysis might be able to solve the problems of telepathy and like Bergson, he referred to "the incontestable fact that sleep creates favourable conditions for telepathy." Sigmund Freud, "Dreams and Telepathy," The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 3 (1922): 283. In a letter to Hereward Carrington, Freud once said that "If I had my life to live over again I should devote myself to psychical research rather than to psychoanalysis." Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 3: 392. Nevertheless, I would think Freud and Bergson metaphysically incompatible. Freud was saying that empirical and scientific research would discover the material causes (biological, chemical, physiological) of those phenomena that we have now only understood through their psycho-analytic manifestation. Freud still remained in the scientific and material tradition; Bergson would not be. 66. Bergson, The World of Dreams, 57. 67. Bergson, "Presidential Address," 157. 68. Henri Bergson, "Life and Consciousness," in Mind-Energy (London: MacMillan, 1920), 4. This was originally the Huxley Lecture, delivered at the University of Birmingham on May 29, 1911. 69. Bergson, "Presidential Address," 160. Just as one studied travellers' tales in earlier centuries so too can statements about life on the other side be studied to supply evidence of the spirit world. Bergson's idea was endorsed by Oliver Lodge who sought to communicate with his son who was killed in World War I. Oliver Lodge, Raymond; or Life and Death with Examples of the Evidence for Survival of Memory and Affection After Death (London: Methuen, 1916), 191. 70. Bergson, "Presidential Address," 161. 71. Edmund Gurney, F.W.H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living (London: Trubner, 1886). 72. Inglis, Natural and Supernatural, 383. This sort helped to convince Oliver Lodge not only of the importance of telepathy, but of the reality of survival it helped to prove. Oliver Lodge, Science and Religion (London: J. Johnson, Holborn Hall, 1914), 2425. See also his Why I Believe in Immortality (London: Cassell, 1928). 73. Emile Boutroux, The Beyond That is Within (London: Duckworth, 1913), 12. 74. Flamrnarion, The Unknown, 477. In a later work he was bothered by the number of souls that might theoretically make up the "invisible population"; unless one wanted to admit reincarnation of most of them, one had to conclude, he felt, that most souls evaporated in the cosmic ether, and survival went only to those "thinking beings who have the consciousness, of their psychical existence," Flammarion, Mysterious Psychic Forces, 439. 75. Ibid., 290. Nevertheless, five years later Huxley attended a seance along with Francis Galton and Erasmus and Charles Darwin. Galton had been impressed by the "phenomena," Huxley extremely sceptical, and Charles Darwin had been left feeling uneasy by the whole thing. Inglis, Natural and Supernatural, 309.

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76. Réné Guénon, L'Erreur spirite (Paris: Les Editions Traditionelles, 1952), 83. Hugo Munsterberg, Professor of Psychology at Harvard and one of the chief debunkers of Psychical research, claimed that scientists actually made poor witnesses at seances. Accustomed to breathe in an atmosphere of trust the scientist is trained to be sceptical of evidence, not people. He would never dream that anyone would actually tamper with the evidence: "The scientist lives in the certainty that anyone who enters the temple of science considers truth the highest godhead." Hugo Munsterberg, "My Friends the Spiritualists," The Metropolitan Magazine 31, no. 5 (1910):561. 77. Isaac Benrubi, Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson (Neuchatel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1942), 21. 78. Bergson's interest in psychical research is traced in C. Pemot, "Spiritualisme et spiritisme chez Bergson," Revue de l'enseignement philosophique 15, no. 3 (1964): 123. This is really the only article of its kind, although it never attempts to integrate Bergson into the occult revival of the period. Of the between 4000 and 5000 pieces written on Bergson it is incredible how few understand his importance in occultism. The officers of the S.P.R. have an understandable advantage, see H.H. Price, "Henri Bergson," Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 46 (1941): 27176. See also Léontine Zanta, "La posizione del Bergson di fronte agli studi psichici,'' Luce e ombra 9, no. 2 (1911): 7172. 79. His participation in the laboratory discussion of the Institut général psychologique bear this out. See "Groupe d'études des phénomènes psychiques," Bulletin de l'Institut général psychologique 4, no. 1 (1904): 2831; and "Groupe d'études des phénomènes psychiques; Les courbes respiratoires pendant l'hypnose," Bulletin de l'Institut général Psychologique 5, no. 2 (1905), 15564. 80. Hereward Carrington, Eusapia Paladino and her Phenomena (London: T. Wemer Laurie, 1909). 81. Jules Courtier, "Rapport sur les séances d'Eusapia Palladino à l'Institut général psychologique, 19051908," Bulletin de l'Institut général psychologique 8, no. 56 (1908): 415546. 82. G. Meunier, Ce qu'ils pensent du merveilleux (Paris: Albin Michel, 1910), 8485. 83. Ibid., 85. Madame Curie gave a similar answer some years later. "I know nothing about it," she said, "I have assisted, yes, in a small way at seances; I have often seen manifestations which can be those of psychic forces, such as tables being raised, etc.; but I was always a simple spectator." The famous scientist said that she never studied the phenomena scientifically and so could not give an opinion. Paul Heuzé, Les morts vivent-ils? Enquête sur l'état présent des sciences psychiques (Paris: La renaissance du livre, 1921), 14041. 84. Théodor Flournoy felt that the academic positions of the observers imposed certain social responsiblities upon them; namely, the duty to avoid encouraging superstition and the exploitation of the unknown by unscrupulous elements of the lowest strata of society. That is why, he said, "while recognizing the reality of the facts, they affirm so positively that these facts have no scientific certitude." Théodor Flournoy, Spiritism and Psychology (New York: Harper & Bros., 1911), 273. Many people in the occult world were disappointed in not getting the positive endorsement of psychical phenomena that they had hoped for. Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, assailed the timidity of the report as a "momument of ineptitude." Conan Doyle, History of Spiritualism, 328. 85. It is a little known fact about Bergson's career that he was a member of the "Thirteen Club." This was an exclusive club of thirteen members which met on the thirteenth of each month to discuss psychic matters. Richet was a member, and so was Eugène Osty, the Director of the Institut métapsychique internationale. It almost certainly included Emile Boirac, Flammarion and the other great names of French psychical research. Harry Price, Search for Truth (London: Collins, 1942), 137. 86. Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: MacMillan, 1950). Published originally as Matière et mémoire: essai sur la relation du corps avec l'ésprit (Paris: F. Alcan, 1896).

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87. Psycho-physical parallelism was the subject of a paper Bergson read before the International Congress of Philosophy at Geneva in 1904. Bergson seemed so out of step with tradition that Alain, who was present, said it scandalized the audience: "I was the only one to defend him, at first by discussing it in the corridors, and then later by giving an account which earned me the favour of Bergson." Alain, Correspondance avec Élie Halévy (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 407. For Bergson's paper see "Le paralogisme psycho-physiologique," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 12 (1904): 859908. 88. For some of the basic texts of this kind of materialist thought see Pierre Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme (Paris: Crapart, Caille et Ravier, 1802), Francois Broussais, L'Examen des doctrines médicales (Paris: J. Moronval, 1816); and Jacob Moleschott, La circulalion de la vie (Paris: Germer-Baillière, 1866). 89. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 8. 90. Ibid., 19. 91. Ibid., 20. 92. Ibid., 95. 93. Théodule Ribot, Les maladies de la mémoire (Paris: Baillière, 1881). 94. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 160. 95. Ibid., 176. 96. Ibid., 81. 97. Ibid., 241. 98. Ibid., 332. 99. Bergson, "Presidential Address," 160f. When the inhibiting mechanism functions badly, Bergson says, telepathy will at times "pass through as contraband." 100. Bergson, "Life and Consciousness," 27. 101. Ibid., 28. 102. Bergson, "The Soul and the Body," Mind-Energy, 5859. He repeated this before the S.P.R. in 1913 in almost the same language: "The more we become accustomed to this idea of a consciousness which overflows the organism, the more natural and probable we find the hypothesis that the soul survives the body." When we come to view "the mental life as much more vast than the cerebral life, survival becomes so probable that the burden of proof comes to lie on him who denies it rather than on him who affirms it." "Presidential Address,'' 171. Camille Flammarion completely endorsed Bergson's theory of mind and quoted at great length from Matter and Memory and Bergson's Foi et vie lecture. See Death and Its Mystery: Before Death, 3537. Émile Boutroux did as well. See his William James, trans. Archibald and Barbara Henderson (New York: Longman's, Green, 1912), 8386. C.D. Broad also took Bergson's view seriously as a sound theoretical answer to one of psychical research's difficult problems. Broad's remarks on this subject are quoted in Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954), 16. 103. Bernstein, Celebrities of Our Time, 149. Bergson argued essentially the same theme, with basically the same language, in his lectures at Columbia University in 1913, which prompted one American critic to call him "the most revolutionary philosopher of the day because he believes that man has a soul." See "The Bergson Lectures," Columbia Alumni News 4, no. 26 (1913): 39799; and H. Addington Bruce, "The Soul's Winning Fight With Science," American Magazine 87, no. 3 (1914):25.

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104. The recognition of Bergson's mastery of his trade is apparent from the few reviews that greeted each of his first two books. Gustave Belot and Victor Delbos of the Sorbonne, for example, both lauded Bergson for his great originality. Delbos praised Bergson for his "marvelous faculty of psychological analysis," and Belot recognized that Bergson had "drawn the lines of a new spiritualism" which carried not only an obvious philosophical importance but a potential moral significance as well. Victor Delbos, "Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l'ésprit, par Henri Bergson," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 5 (1897): 353; Gustave Belot, "Un nouveau spiritualism," Revue philosophique 44 (1897): 183. See also Samuel Alexander, "Matière et mémoire,'' Mind 22, no. 24 (1897): 57273; Georges Lechalas, "Matière et mémoire

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après un nouveau livre de M. Bergson," Annales de philosophie chrétienne, n.s. 25 (1897): 14664, 31434; François Pillon, "Matière et mémoire," Année philosophique 7 (1896): 19092; and Louis Weber, "Matière et mémoire,'' Mercure de France, 23, no. 7 (1897): 15052. 105. Charles Richet, Our Sixth Sense, trans. Fred Rothwell (London: Rider, 1928): 5. 106. Boirac, Our Hidden Forces, 120. 107. James to Bergson, December 14, 1902, in William James, The Letters of William James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 2: 179. At the beginning of his lectures at Columbia University, Bergson paid a similar tribute to James: "If America had produced only William James, she would have made a sufficiently great contribution to the world in the domain of philosophy and psychology . . . He may be said to have brought philosophy from heaven to earth. In this respect, James may be compared to Socrates. He brought philosophy closer to life." "The Visiting French Philosopher," Literary Digest 46 (1913): 461.

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Chapter IV Creative Evolution The validity of the classical mechanistic system of science was generally taken for granted during the nineteenth century. If there was a debate over any question at all it was over the meaning and apparent implications of the system for other branches of science. "It seems to me," wrote Lord Kelvin in 1884, "that the test of 'Do we or not understand a particular subject in physics?' is 'Can we make a mechanical model of it?'" 1 The challenge to the authority claimed for classical mechanism and an alternative approach to it were supplied by Immanuel Kant at the end of the eighteenth century. Originally intended to provide yet another justification of Newton's results, Kant's epistemology grew to include serious reservations about the theory of understanding in the eighteenth century. It was Kant's basic thesis that the cognitive structure of experience is imposed upon nature rather than discovered in it. This served to endow mind with qualities missing elsewhere in nature and created a gulf between mind and matter on the basis of consciousness which invited Idealists and others to investigate the relation between consciousness and the material world. The Cartesian separation of mind and matter was now brought into serious question and the psychology of sensory perception, for so long held in abeyance, was subsequently opened to direct scientific study. Revolutionary ideas in science and its philosophy often take decades to incubate and it was nearly a full century after Kant's insights that philosophers and scientists began to pursue the questions opened up by the great German philosopher. That Kant's ideas emerged at all in the latter half of the nineteenth century followed not merely from their eventual digestion but also from the serious questions raised by scientists themselves about the traditional, mechanistic approach to nature. Specifically this meant that Darwinism had by the closing quarter of the century, in the very natal hour of the revolution in physics, become mired in confusion and riddled with controversy.

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If towards the end of the nineteenth century Darwinism began to falter it was not because the idea of evolution was seen to lack merit; on the contrary, most enlightened people realized that Darwinism had, based on the fossil evidence, made evolution an established scientific fact and permanently altered the way in which man viewed his place in nature. But if Darwinism had indeed become akin to a religion then the theory of natural selection was something that could be substituted for a creator. It was over the merits of this theory that the first cracks of doubt occurred. Natural selection was designed to explain why and how species evolve and change. It asserted that variations in evolution are the products of time and circumstance, of blind chance, not in the sense of being totally capricious (although it is often hard to avoid this conclusion) but in the sense of being completely devoid of a preconceived plan. If natural selection was true, as the Darwinists so adamantly insisted, then design in nature would be forever banished from the universe. But the theory remained just that, an idea that was intrinsically flawed precisely because it remained unproven, and because it raised more questions than it could answer. This is what Charles Richet meant when he said "That mechanism governs the world is not doubted . . . But nothing is explained by mechanism." 2 Darwinists could not agree on a common definition of what constituted fitness for survival and, more important, they ran aground on the idea of continuous variations in the creation of new species. Genetic changes, totally unrelated to the organism's needs, environment or well-being were supposedly produced in a random, accidental fashion. In this hit-andmiss way (which on the surface seems so unscientific) life-forms, it was argued, will sometimes degenerate and disappear and at other times they will evolve in a highly sophisticated and progressive direction. In either case there is nothing teleological about the directions taken. Unlike evolution itself this theory was undemonstrable and worse from the standpoint of the Darwinists, it was successfully attacked as early as the 1860s. The attack sufficiently shook Darwin, who already had his own doubts about random variations, so that before his death in 1882 he again turned towards the Lamarckian theory of evolution to help account for variations in nature.3 Darwinism gained something of a reprieve in 1900 when, acting quite independently, De Vries, Tschermak and Correns simultaneously rediscovered the work of Gregor Mendel. It was De Vries who coined the word "mutations" to describe sudden genetic changes but while this neo-Darwinism (Darwinism and Mendelism) breathed new life into the understanding of minor hereditary variations, it still failed to account for evolution itself.

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We completely overlooked the differences between the modification of species by adaptation to their environment and the appearance of new species: we just threw in the word 'variation' or the word 'sports' . . . and left them to 'accumulate' and account for the difference between the cockatoo and a hippopotamus. 4 Nevertheless, De Vries and his colleagues had given their fellow Darwinists a boost in morale and a somewhat intolerant certainty in their struggle with the Lamarckians and vitalists despite the fact that contingency in Darwinism continued to bother biologists well into the twentieth century. In a presidential address to the British Association in 1914, William Bateson, one of the leading Darwinists of the day, shocked his audience by saying that "to us Darwin no more speaks with philosophic authority."5 Nor was Bateson unique in this attitude. Despite the fact that the mechanistic theory was in the ascendancy J.S. Haldane was struck by the fact that vitalism, no matter how discredited it might be, persisted in cropping up in scientific debate. It did so with good reason. "The mechanistic theory of heredity," he said, "is not merely unproven, it is impossible'': As a physiologist, I can see no use for the hypothesis that life, as a whole, is a mechanical process. This theory does not help me in my work; and indeed I think it now hinders very seriously the progress of physiology. I should as soon go back to the mythology of our Saxon forefathers as to the mechanistic physiology.6 Evolutionary ideas had a much more difficult time achieving an official place in French academic circles than in English ones. If the Huxley-Wilberforce confrontation of 1860 helped to objectify the movement for evolution's acceptance, an earlier encounter between Georges Cuvier and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1830 served to frustrate the development of those ideas in France for at least fifty years. From his dominant position as one of France's most prestigious scientific figures Cuvier battered, ridiculed and ultimately destroyed Saint-Hilaire's evolutionary theories and his reputation as he had once destroyed those of Lamarck's.7 As a result, discussion of evolutionary ideas among French scientists ground to a near halt until the late nineteenth century. As late as the 1880s and long after Cuvier passed from the scene his ideas continued to pervade the atmosphere of the Sorbonne.8 The acceptance of evolutionary ideas in France and the injection of Mendelism into the Darwinian current came at precisely the moment when the revolution in physics acknowledged that mechanistic materialism need not be the only creed consistent with the scientific outlook. Ever since the early years of

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the century physicists have been gradually forced to consider consciousness as an integral part of the structure of physics and to recognize that the language of the physical sciences is incapable of understanding the world outside our experience. This is what eventually led Sir James Jeans to write a somewhat premature epitaph for mechanism in the 1930s: In particular, mechanism, with its implications, has dropped out of the scheme of science. The mechanical universe in which objects push one another about like players in a football scrimmage has proved to be as illusory as the earlier animistic universe in which gods and goddesses pushed objects about to gratify their own caprices and whims. 9 In criticizing reductionist theories which shrink the universe to a system of colliding atoms obeying immutable laws, Henri Poincaré humorously indicated that God, in contemplating this world, would have the same sensation as he would in the presence of a game of billiards.10 Many physicists, moreover, moved from the results of the new physics to a decidely mystical view of the universe: We all know that there are regions of the human spirit untrammelled by the world of physics. In the mystic sense of the creation around us, in the expression of art, in the yearning towards God, the soul grows upward and finds the fulfillment of something implanted in its nature. The sanction for this development is within us, a striving born with our consciousness or an Inner Light proceeding from a greater power than ours. Science can scarcely question this sanction.11 Even Max Planck was forced by his discoveries to move in a mystical direction: The entire world which we apprehend through our senses, is not more than a tiny fragment in the vastness of nature, whose laws are in no way affected by any human brain . . . It is considerations of this kind, and not any logical argument, that compel us to assume the existence of another world of reality behind the world of the senses; a world which has existence independent of man, and which can only be perceived indirectly through the medium of the world of the senses, and by means of certain symbols which our senses allow us to apprehend.12 Revolutionary patterns of thinking among physicists help to explain why so many of them were apologists for religion, like James Jeans and Arthur Eddington, and interested in psychical research and spiritualism, like Crookes, Lodge, Zollner, Schiapperelli and Flammarion.

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The inner weaknesses of the Darwinian evolutionary picture and the inevitable questioning of mechanism surfaced coincidentally when the idea of decadence took root in France, and when many people were persuaded that scientific rationalism subverted traditional value systems. The promise of material and intellectual progress which fit in so nicely with evolutionary theories was, by the 1890s, no longer the stirring argument it had once been. Max Nordau's book, Degeneration, written in large part as a criticism of the neo-Romantic temperament, created a sensation in 1893, and pessimistically assured and persuaded many that civilization had reached a corrupt and incurable impasse. Just as the Darwinian idea of the struggle for existence seemed to take on the colour of its political and economic surroundings so too did the self-questioning of Darwinists and their critics over natural selection mirror the uneasiness of spirit and the new self-doubts of modern society. The triumph of evolution as a "faith" in the nineteenth century carried with it the implication that man was no longer a unique being in the divine world-order. This was, of course, disturbing to many religious people, but to many who regarded themselves as enlightened "progressives" the idea that man grew materialistically, purposelessly and by chance on an evolutionary scale was an emancipation from the bleak superstition of the past. The Jesuit biologist, Robert de Sinéty, once noted that the spiritual impoverishment of Darwinism was precisely the thing which guaranteed its success. 13 Yves Delages, Professor of Biology at the Sorbonne, admitted that he converted to evolutionist ideas for philosophical reasons: Whatever may befall this theory in the future, Darwin's everlasting title to glory will be that he explained the seemingly marvellous adaption of living things by the mere action of natural factors without looking to a divine interpretation, without resorting to any finalist or metaphysical hypothesis.14 Scientists like Charles Contejean, Alfred Giard, Félix le Dantec, Marcelin Berthelot and Paul Painlevé all used evolutionary ideas to celebrate the replacement of religion by science.15 "We were intellectually intoxicated with the idea," wrote George Bernard Shaw, "that the world could make itself without design, purpose, skills, or intelligence: in short without life."16 The barren theories of organic evolution, so hostile to the settled convictions of the previous era, had singularly failed to explain the enigma of human consciousness. At the same time the new psychology of Nietzsche and Freud, Le Bon, Sorel and Bergson, argued increasinglyalmost as a backlash against mechanistic thinkingthat the truly important elements of the individual's mental life did not occur on a conscious level, that man was not the rational creature

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that the old psychology made him out to be, and that the distinguishing feature of the human being was not his automatism but his use of free will to achieve ever greater expression of thought. Furthermore, Darwinism conveyed a pessimistic view of naked struggle and suffering, a world of instinct and animality that many in La belle époque found objectionable. "Our universe," wrote Emile Meyerson, "is not mute, cold, colourless; it is sound, heat, colour." 17 Mechanism simply failed to satisfy the spirit of man. Nowhere are the shortcomings of mechanistic science stated more passionately than in the words of Alfred North Whitehead: Science can find no individual enjoyment in Nature; science can find no aim in Nature; science can find no creativity in Nature; it finds mere rules of succession. These negations are true of natural science. They are inherent in its methodology. The reason for this blindness of physical science lies in the fact that such science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. It divides the seamless coator, to change the metaphor into a happier form, it examines the coat, which is superficial, and neglects the body, which is fundamental . . . The disastrous separation of body and mind which has been fixed on European thought by Descartes is responsible for this blindness of science.18 A so-called "process philosopher" himself, Whitehead realized that in the twentieth century there was a basic spiritual hunger for purpose and creativity and for what he called the fundamental concepts of activity and process. All things change, he maintained repetitively, and both the new physics and biological vitalism best understood this, since both had a genuine faith in the cosmic process. Whether one defines the intellectual problem of the new era as a struggle between reason and faith or between the rational and the irrational or, as Franklin Baumer puts it, "being and becoming," the period witnessed, Cournot once said, a mighty effort "to reintegrate man in nature." That this effort took the direction of vitalism as well as Darwinism is explained by the questions natural selection left unanswered and by the recognition that science could never hope to discover rationally everything about nature; that there was, after all, what Meyerson called "the presence of a residual element of irrationality in nature, which in the end defies us." Vitalism seemed to offer a way out of the mechanistic culde-sac into which nineteenth-century science had led, and an alternative approach to nature that incorporated that "residual element of irrationality.'' Vitalism appeared as a clear alternative to the mechanistic status quo. And despite the most strenuous efforts on the part of more orthodox scientists to silence what J.S. Haldane called ''outspoken vitalism," the vitalistic alternative kept cropping up.

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Investigations in mechanistic biology since the eighteenth century failed to unveil the mainspring in the clock, the fundamental substance or principle which formed the basic category of existence in the universe. The life force was a metaphysical answer to everything that mechanism failed to explain, or for which a mechanical explanation could not be found: "the 'vital principle' may indeed not explain much, but it is at least a sort of label affixed to our ignorance, so as to remind us of this occasionally, while mechanism invites us to ignore that ignorance." 19 For the vitalist the life force is an elemental universal force immanent in nature which purposefully strives to fulfill itself. It is neither mind nor matter but a psychic energy capable of willing and knowing and ever striving in the course of evolution to manifest itself at once in matter and in human beings as consciousness. For the vitalist life is taken in its biological manifestation as the paradigm of being, and the only end in the course of nature is change and growth itself. The world is a continual process of development towards greater variety, novelty and possibilities. Evolution for the vitalist is then the key to a new cosmology, a creative process directed not from the outside like the God of the theologians but from within by a dynamic force so unique and all-pervasive that it will always elude the application of mechanical modes of understanding. Along with other, popular voluntaristic ideas like "libido," "will to power," and ''collective unconscious," vitalism is an attempt to supply a new and rather mystical view of the volcanic energy behind living things. It served to endow the most sensitive members of the pre-1914 generation with a new anti-rationalist vocabulary and the conviction that the motive force behind human action evaded the power of logical thinking. According to vitalism, and despite its scientific veneer, the motor-force of the universe is a mystical one and consequently vitalism became a pseudo-scientific companion-piece of the occult movement.20 Bergson's vitalism was part of a long and established tradition in nineteenth-century France which could be traced from the country's spiritualist philosophers who found mystical ideas so congenial. Paul Joseph Barthez and Marie François Bichat helped establish vitalism among French biologists, and they in turn were influenced by their great contemporary, Jean Baptiste de Lamarck.21 Bergson's élan vital was directly anticipated by Jean Marie Guyau's "expansion of life" philosophy which admitted only spontaneity and novelty in nature, and the term itself was used first by André Lalande (in 1899) in a book that Bergson admitted influenced him.22 Bergsonism therefore represented tendencies long in evidence. In 1907 Bergson gave his full answer to mechanism, determinism, and conventional rationalism in his Creative Evolution, a book which carried the vitalist tradition in France to its fullest expression. Creative Evolution appeared at a time when the search for new intellectual and artistic alternatives was reaching its pre-war peak. The exaltation of the primitive and irrational, and the elements

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of savagery and passion which characterized the beginnings of Expressionism, Futurism and Neoprimitivism in the arts were matched in speculative thought by Nietzsche's passionately written philosophy of irrationalism, and by Georges Sorel's creation of the social myths of violence and aggression. In 1898 the Mercure de France started issuing Nietzsche's complete works, and into the soil of France already prepared by the popularity of anarchistic ideas the Nietzschean notions of dynamism and the elevation of instinct above reason took root. Creative Evolution became as popular as it did because it satisfied a number of vague but urgent longings. Like Freud's attempt to penetrate the unconscious which also belongs to this period, Creative Evolution reinforced one recurring line of European intellectual life by exalting the irrational as the dynamic force behind human existence. Bergson's ideas on time and duration, mind and body, matter and spirit which came from his earlier books now assumed a special appeal since it could now serve as "a philosophical rallying cry for those who wished to feel that in exerting their wills and manifesting their creativity they were conforming to a deep-running cosmic impulse, irresistible in its compulsion." 23 Bergson had, after all, been exploring the areas of spirit and creativity, free will and consciousness since the 1880s and had achieved more than a measure of success in his native country. Now by employing one of the key concepts of the last one hundred years, namely, "Evolution," he became an international celebrity. "It is a sign of the times," wrote the historian of philosophy, Harold Hoffding, "that every philosopher today must take a position with regard to the concept of evolution."24 This shift to biology took place after Bergson wrote his Introduction to Metaphysics in 1903, which synthesized his previous ideas. It was occasioned by his desire, he said later, to turn to the examination of a "new order of facts" as a way of perfecting his insights of a dozen years.25 This new preoccupation was reflected in his lectures at the Collège de France in the years between 1903 and 1907. In his Saturday course, for example, Bergson spent two years (19041905 and 19051906) exploring Herbert Spencer's biology and psychology. In his Friday course he prepared the ground for Creative Evolution by lecturing on subjects such as the "Evolution of Theories of Memory" (19031904), the "Evolution of the Problem of Liberty" (19041905), and the year before the book's publication (19061907) he was discussing the "Theories of Will."26 What Bergson attempted in those years was nothing less than the reconstruction of the theory of progress and evolution and the development of its metaphysical implications. In order to do this he borrowed from that contemporary movement which had been running in a parallel direction with him for more than a generation, i.e., the vitalist tradition.

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Bergson had indeed travelled a long way from his days as a lycée student in the 1870s when his intellectual tastes ran to mathematics and physics. Even at the Ecole Normale he had been somewhat of a mechanist in his thinking and his fellow students suspected him of being materialistic. 27 He had been subject to the influence of Herbert Spencer in his student days, but between his graduation in 1881 and 1900 Bergson had challenged and repudiated the enthusiasms of his youth by evolving a new philosophy of time and duration. By the early 1900s Bergson looked at biology in a new light in a further bid to oust the mechanistic philosophies from their stronghold on "truth." What he now found unsatisfactory about Spencerian evolution was the weaknesses of its method. "The usual device of the Spencerian method consists," said Bergson, "in reconstructing evolution with fragments of the evolved." Spencer erred by referring the highly complex to the very simple. Therefore, "having imitated the Whole by a work of mosaic, he imagines he has retraced the design of it, and made the genesis."28 By being a prisoner of his own mechanical conceptions, Spencer missed the fluid reality of evolution and made the ''cardinal error'' of taking "experience already allotted as given, whereas the true problem is to know how the allotment was worked." Bergson was to substitute for this mechanical, reductionist system of evolution one that was emergent in spirit and which based itself on a vitalist principle of nature. In his introduction to Creative Evolution Bergson tried to develop a sense of continuity among his books by restating his ideas on time and duration, freedom and change. He was really summarizing his work of almost twenty years when he said that "duration is the continuous progress of the past which swells as it advances," that "our personality shoots, grows and ripens without ceasing," that it is not only new but unforeseeable, and that the history of an individual can never repeat itself: "The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new."29 Organized bodies change and grow, then, without interruption, "one in the first instance, and afterwards many." Life, said Bergson, "manifests a search for individuality as if it strove to constitute systems naturally isolated, naturally closed." With Bergson, organic evolution came to resemble the evolution of a consciousness, one of the leit-motifs of Bergsonian philosophy. Each and every species has this history of development, he said, a record of unbroken continuity and perpetual change between the evolution of the embryo and that of the complete organism. Like the evolution of embryos, the evolution of living beings "implies a continual recording of duration, a persistence of the past in the present, and so an appearance, at least, of organic memory."30 Therefore, the present state of living bodies cannot be explained in terms of what happened in the preceding instant. This is why a mathematical formula cannot subject evolutionary phenomena to a comprehensive treatment

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because "all the past of the organism must be added to that moment, its heredityin fact, the whole of a very long history": 31 Continuity of change, preservation of the past in the present, real durationthe living being seems, then, to share these attributes with consciousness. Can we go further and say that life, like conscious activity, is invention, is unceasing creation?32 Mechanism fails to provide us with answers to biological problems because organic evolution, evolving like a consciousness by pressing its past against the present to create new forms of consciousness, is "incommensurable with its antecedents." Evolution, therefore, cannot be analyzed into parts and then reconstructed anymore than consciousness can. The mechanistic conception of evolution cannot explain the continuity of life, the connecting interval between past and present anymore than a mathematical formula can. It sees life as an ensemble of parts to be added up but in reality "life is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines." Life is transformation and translation. If all were indeed given, he said, a great intellect could calculate past, present, and future.33 Bergson also found teleology (finalism) inadequate. A product of the practical intellect teleology implies that life obeys a pre-established plan to be realized. Like mechanism, it supposes that all is given and so is an "inverted mechanism" that "holds in front of us a light with which it claims to guide us, instead of putting it behind. It substitutes the attraction of the future for the impulsion of the past."34 Succession and movement, too, remain a mere appearance and yet alternatives to mechanism must be teleological to a certain degree since teleology, unlike mechanism, is not a doctrine of fixed outlines but allows for spontaneity and so will never be definitively refuted. Therefore, Bergson asserted, his own theory will be teleological to a certain extent. This teleology will be of the external rather than the internal kind. Which is to say that living beings are ordered with regard to each other rather than made just for themselves. Bergson insisted that ''finality is external or it is nothing at all."35 There is, he claimed, a "common impetus" behind us rather than a "common aspiration" before us and therefore "it would be futile to assign to life an end, in the human sense of the word." Here is where teleology errs: ''to speak of an end is to think of a pre-existing model which has only to be realized." It would mean that all is given and that by reading the present one could determine the future. Only when we realize that "life progresses and endures in time" can we glance over the road already travelled, "mark its direction, note this in psychological terms and speak as if there had been pursuit of an end."36

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While mechanism insists that evolution occurs "through a series of accidents added to one another," Bergson said that it is rather "the continuation of one and the same impetus, divided into divergent lines of evolution." But how, Bergson asked, are we to account for the variation of living beings and the persistence of their type? The several attempts made in solving this problem (neo-Darwinism, Orthogenesis, and neo-Lamarckism) are unable to explain satisfactorily why the same small variations in, for example, the structure of vertebrate eyes and in the eyes of the mollusks have occurred in the same order on two independent lines of evolution if they were purely accidental. Both separated from the parent stem long before the appearance of the complex eye and developed independently along a line of evolution involving thousands of variations. Bergson said that this hereditary change is a definite direction which develops into a complex machine and must be related to "some sort of effort," an effort common to most representatives of the same species, an effort independent of circumstances, inherent in the genes rather than in their substance alone, and an effort assured of being transmitted to their descendents. That effort is the vital principle (élan vital). 37 In searching for the roots of élan vital we must ultimately return to a primitive totality, "to that little mass of protoplasmic jelly which is probably at the root of the genealogical tree of life." Here the individual is at one with everything else and united by invisible bonds. If there is finality in the world, then, "it includes the whole of life in a single indivisible embrace."38 It is the original impetus of life, he said, a dynamic and creative agency which is not merely the force from which life springs, but also the impetus which passes through successive generations of living organisms which span the gaps between those generations. Variations in evolution are not, as the Darwinists maintain, accidental; on the contrary, the vital impetus is the fundamental cause of variations and mutations, which in turn endlessly create new species.39 Although species increase their divergence from the common stock as they evolve, they may also at certain points evolve identically, as did the eyes of the vertebrates and mollusks. In fact, Bergson said, they must do so if the hypothesis of a common impetus can be accepted. That life evolves the way it does depends, said Bergson in developing his cosmology, on two series of causes: the dynamic élan that life bears within itself, and the impediments and obstacles that life encounters from inert matter. For Bergson the pattern of evolution is not unilinear progress but rather life is a tendency, a movement whose impetus is divided among the divergent directions along which it develops. Adaptation in itself can explain nothing about the general directions that evolution might take or even about the movement of life itself, but only about the "sinuosities" of that movement. Pushing forward in an ever broadening and divergent stream of productivity evolution remains

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inventive, adaptive, renewing itself constantly, and creating as it progresses "not only the forms of life, but the ideas that will enable the intellect to understand it, the terms which will serve to express it." 40 For Bergson the two terminal points in evolution are intelligence and instinct. Man, whom Bergson defined as homo faber, uses the faculty of intelligence to make tools and to master his environment. Because intelligence calculates, invents and fabricates, it deals only with solids. With language as its greatest contrivance, intelligence points toward consciousness, inasmuch as consciousness signifies hesitation or choice. Through science, intelligence will penetrate the mysteries of the physical world and translate life to us. Instinct, on the other hand, learns things without having "known" them. It operates immediately and often unconsciously upon the world, using tools rather than making them. "Instinct is sympathy," Bergson said, and "if this sympathy could extend its object and also reflect upon itself, it would give us the key to vital operationsjust as intelligence, developed and disciplined, guides us into matter." For intelligence is turned toward matter while instinct is turned toward life.41 Intelligence can teach us a great deal about the world of space and matter, but only intuition can penetrate into the very inwardness of life, the world of duration. By intuition Bergson meant "instinct that has become disinterested, selfconscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and enlarging it indefinitely."42 It is intelligence which has freed intuition from its practical uses, and enabled it to free itself from instinct. The two are therefore dependent on each other, with intuition closely allied to the vital impetus, and therefore a creative gift without equal in nature. From this point of view consciousness appears as the motive principle of evolution, a "consciousness launched into matter" which releases it from the subjection to physical law. Like intelligence and instinct, spirit and matter are mutually interdependent. This is why, among conscious beings, man comes to occupy a privileged place. It is only with man that consciousness really breaks through and sets itself free. In revising the doctrine of evolution Bergson has recast it in spiritualistic terms: The whole history of life until man has been that of the effort of consciousness to raise matter, and of the more or less complete overwhelming of consciousness by the matter which has fallen back on it . . . It was to create with matter, which is necessity itself, an instrument of freedom, to make a machine which should triumph over mechanism.43

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There is no plan involved here since life transcends finality and other categories and since the evolutionary process manifests a radical contingency. Furthermore, in creation "there are no things, there are only actions," and that "centre" from which creation explodes is common to other planets as well. This centre is not a "thing" but a dynamic tendency, ''a continuity of shooting out,'' and this creative process Bergson equated with God: "God thus defined, has nothing of the already-made; he is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely." 44 In one of the most dramatic and memorable passages in all of his work, Bergson wrote: As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself, so all organized beings, from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an over-whelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.45 What Bergson did in Creative Evolution was to challenge the scientific and philosophical interpretations given to evolution in the nineteenth century by Darwin, Spencer and others. For Bergson the mechanistic theory of Darwin failed to satisfy the spirit of man, while the evolutionism of Spencer was far too pessimistic and therefore "evolutionism only in name." Neither system explained the emergence of new and complex organic types, nor the process of growth and adaptation they underwent. For Bergson the only answer to the riddles left unanswered by mechanistic biology was vitalism. Only vitalism could account for novelty in the evolutionary process. The vital impulse, or élan vital, as he called it, is the original impetus of life, the creative agency which propels organisms through their evolutionary path causing variations and mutations which in turn endlessly create new species. Unlike the mechanistic biologists, Bergson's emphasis throughout is on creativity and novelty, freedom and consciousness. Before Creative Evolution was issued, Bergson had already achieved the status of a public figure in his own country. After 1907 he became the most popular philosopher of his day (190714) and one of the few to gain an international reputation in his own lifetime. Curiously enough, only a few copies were sold in the six months following publication, but then the storm of interest came and made it the continuing "smash hit" of the decade. By 1914, the French

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publisher Félix Alcan had issued sixteen editions of Creative Evolution. 46 Even before 1914 his work stimulated a torrent of books and articles interpreting or criticizing his ideas. Librarians estimated that by 1912 no less than 417 books and articles on Bergson had appeared and that by the war, parts of all of his works had appeared in translation in almost all major languages.47 Bergson was now deluged with correspondence from all over the world asking for explanations of certain details of his work; he was also showered with hundreds of invitations to speak, but he declined most of them. In France itself, where intellectuals formed the heart of the controversy, André Gide remarked on the "capital importance of this book, through which philosophy can again escape."48 As far away as China, Paul Claudel could write from the French consulate at Tientsin that as an artist he was repelled by Bergsonian evolution,49 and in the United States William James would greet the book ecstatically. "O my Bergson, you are a magician," he wrote to the author, and lauded him for producing "the divinest book that has appeared in my life-time'' and a book which was "destined to rank with the greatest works of all time."50 The reaction was far-flung but the real tumult was in Paris. The philosopher could now expect everything from a mob greeting each of his classes to Hindus prostrating themselves before his summer home near Geneva.51 The appeal of Creative Evolution lay at several levels. One appeal was immediate and superficial, the impact of which was felt by a public hungry for the novel idea and the provocative catch-phrase. "Its charm," wrote George Santayana, "lies in the relief which it brings to a stale imagination, an imagination from which religion has vanished and which is kept stretched on the machinery of business and society."52 This greater public would no doubt think it "knowledgeable" to sprinkle its conversation with Bergsonian catch-phrases, confusing as it did a label like élan vital with the philosophy itself. But the greater appeal of Creative Evolution and what was by 1907 a virtually completed Bergsonian philosophy lay in its revolt against reason. It came to a generation which had always expected, and certainly hoped for, revolutionary discoveries affecting the nature of things and the nature of knowledge. However much he denied it later, Bergson called his generation to turn away from the restrictions of a logical thought which could only distort truth and to give themselves instead to an immediate, intuitive grasp of truth in a world that had to be felt and experienced to be really known. Creative Evolution inspired his readers with an appreciation of the tremendous importance of this lifea cosmos which was free and changing and which creatively transcended everything. Moreover, "the universe is presented as an expression of life, not life as an expression or by-product of the universe."53 Or as a contemporary put it: "Bergson has re-established the communications between the world and us."54

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Where the empirical evidence for this reversal was may have been beside the point. One need only "feel" Bergson's work to appreciate him. It was the more mystical and popular aspects of Bergsonism that bothered so many of Bergson's contemporaries. Jules de Gaultier was very critical of the fact that Bergson's points of view were not really philosophic, but more in the nature of mystical and religious preoccupations. He created his following, de Gaultier said, by placing philosophic means in the service of ends which are the antipodes of philosophy. His philosophy constructed a "notion" of free will that cannot fail to attract the "spiritualist believer" who ingenuously finds this notion necessary to maintain human life. 55 According to the American philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy, what the public wants most from its philosophers is an experience of initiation; what it is initiated into is often a matter of secondary importance. Men delight in being ushered past the guarded portal, in finding themselves in dim and awful precincts of thought unknown to the natural man, in experiencing the hushed moment of revelation, and in gazing upon strange symbolsof which none can tell just what they symbolize. The need for a sort of philosophic Eleusinia is recurrent among the cultivated classes every generation or two . . . And it cannot be denied that Bergson's is the most Eleusinian of contemporary philosophies.56 The philosophy of Bergson could now appeal to the widest possible audience, an audience prepared to ignore Bergson's real philosophical importance for the conclusions they so avidly sought. How attractive it now was for people, wrote T. E. Hulme, "to be assured on thoroughly respectable authority that there is a chance of immortality and that they have a free will."57 It could appeal to this audience because it could offer something for almost everyone. It accepted and altered the statements of physical science; it left room for psychological speculations; it appealed to those who longed for a moral and spiritual presence in the universe; and finally, it left to the mystics the power of attaining the absolute. Furthermore, Bergson's mystical philosophy had yet another strength in that it was impervious to refutation. As Bertrand Russell observed, it simply did not depend upon, nor could it be refuted by, logical argument. Russell added that when it is shown that the philosophy is weak and unsupportable or self-contradictory, "we have only shown that it does not appeal to the intellect; if the intellect is in fact misleading, as Bergson contends, it is useless to employ it against him": His imaginative picture of the world, regarded as a poetic effort, is in the main not capable of either proof or disproof. Shakespeare says life's but a walking shadow, Shelley says it is like a dome of many coloured glass, Bergson says it is a

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shell which bursts into parts that are again shells. If you like Bergson's image better, it is just as legitimate. 58 Bergson's own explanation of his popularity is revealing since it would seem to bear out the criticism of the above critics. He too admitted that his was not a closed philosophical system resting its case on logical persuasion but rather a series of insights based on experience, illuminating what the reader wishes to be illuminated: Allow me, then, to say that the spread of what men agree to call "Bergsonism" is due simply to this; the initiated see, and the uninitiated divine, that they have here to do with a metaphysic moulded on experience (whether exterior or interior); with an unpretentious philosophy determined to base itself on solid ground; with a doctrine that is in no sense systematic, that is not provided with an answer to every question, and that distinguishes different problems to examine them one by onea philosophy, in short, capable like science of indefinite progress and advance towards perfection. Each of my books has cost me several years of scientific research; and each of them issues in no vague generalities but in conclusions which are able to throw light on some one aspect of very special problems. This, I repeat, is what men perceive, dimly or distinctly, when they become adherents of this philosophy.59 Just where could one find these adherents? Bergsonism's appeal also lay on an occult level. Among the first wave of Bergsonians who published their work after 1907 were some of the key figures in the mystical movement. They were a group of individuals, many of them academics, who constituted one important wing of the occult movement and who were prepared to make Bergson's mystical intuition the dominant fabric of their entire philosophies. I am using the term "Bergsonian" here to designate those people who displayed a fairly consistent intellectual sympathy with Bergsonian philosophy; some tried to synthesize their ideas with it and sometimes augment it while others merely tried to associate their own philosophy with it. Whatever the case, their reaction to Bergsonism did not follow merely from an interpretation of basic texts but also from their acceptance of the sometimes anti-intellectual, always intuitive and mobile spirit of that philosophy and from the fact that once they had accepted the meaning and importance of Bergsonism, they could graft it onto what were presumably their original biases. Whether it was occultists, syndicalists, Catholics or society women they would, in the final analysis, accept Bergsonism on their own terms. The occultists in many respects constituted the most extreme wing of the reaction because of the intensity and consistency of their allegiance to Bergsonism (or their definition of it), and because of their acknowledgement of an irrational

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kinship between themselves and what they regarded as the philosphy of intuition and mobility. Among the personal and professional contacts Bergson maintained, many were mystics and philosophers of mysticism; friends like Georges Dwelshauvers and Henri Delacroix, or devoted former students like Joseph Segond and Joseph Baruzi, and men like Alphonse Chide and Albert Bazaillas, who regarded themselves loosely as disciples of Bergson or who were regarded as such by their contemporaries. 60 These people were viewed as a vital part of the Bergsonian "movement" in those few years before the war. They exalted the irrational by worshipping at the altar of Bergsonism, by imposing no limitations on their mysticism, and by insisting that no impersonal intellectualism could hold any answers for man. Instead, like Albert Bazaillas, Professor of Philosophy at the Lycée Condorcet, they urged all those Frenchmen after 1907 who wished to commune with the eternal movement of spiritual life to immerse themselves in Bergsonism.61 This baptism was necessary, it was reasoned, since only Bergsonian thought could be characterized "as a religious doctrine of transcendence, as a monist doctrine of intuition, as an evolutionist doctrine of becoming, as a pragmatic doctrine of spirituality, as a rationalist doctrine of creative action."62 One had to immerse oneself in that rich thought that had purified philosophy, grasp its intuitive truths and thereby its understanding of the whole tempo of existence. Bergsonian intuition has shown how false mechanistic science is and has shown us the real perceived directlya reality which is "becoming beyond an logic." With Bergson, "movement has found its courage, and, taking leave of Reason, gives itself up to its own essential nature, which consists above all in caprice. Proteus is God."63 The mystics seemed to view Bergson as a prophet. They maintained that he was the first to perceive the world as it really was and then showed everyone else the way. For the mystic the real world was often that of aesthetic experience, particularly music, where one was called to find the consummation of Bergsonian intuition in a dissolution of personality: Here is a world of the irrational, dedicated to absurdity, where nothing recalls to us objectivity of certitude, where contradiction is the rule, where there is no impulse to which Imagination does not give encouragement, for she reigns there supreme, clearseeing and subtle, in the place of the methods and traditions of thought.64

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Many contemporaries felt that Bergson was using his poetic inspiration in order to recapture the symphonic movement of reality and they nearly all responded to his work by employing an aesthetic vocabulary. 65 "Music is the art of all creation," Georges Sorel wrote to Benedetto Croce, "and Bergson understands it the best."66 However extremely the mystic might have defined the art of music, it was for all of them the very quintessence of humanity, a world that few could understand as well as Bergson. Bergson, after all, had prompted this kind of response by consistently employing aesthetic imagery and examples throughout his work. For example, the inter-penetrating notes of melody were used by Bergson to illustrate duration while consciousness was likened to "an invisible musician playing behind the scenes."67 Bergson on more than one occasion was fond of comparing his own philosophy to the music of Debussy. Very often that aesthetic world could become the world of the mystics where intuition was the profound fundamental state and where a knowledge of Bergsonian ideas could help penetrate the mystical secrets.68 This was a perfectly legitimate translation and extension of Bergson's ideas. The mystics and philosophers of mysticism were intellectually bound up with the philosopher who urged his generation to take heart in attaining an absolute that was there for the grasping. Their reference to Bergsonian ideas were natural, almost scriptural allusions to strengthen their cases. Bergson for his part endorsed their work before meetings of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques.69 It was precisely this sort of stance that prompted C.G. Jung in 1912 to say that "we ought to be particularly grateful to Bergson for having broken a lance in defense of the irrational."70 It would be too much to say that writers on the subject of mysticism found their ideas by reading Bergson but he did seem to provide their predispositions with a stimulus that helped nurture them. More than anything else the fact that Bergsonism was fashionable helped their ideas to develop and flower. It is no accident that the men we have been discussing published most of their work after the appearance of Bergson's Creative Evolution. Because of Bergson they were made bolder in their attempt to break completely with intellectualism without fear of reprisals from the intellectual community. Only after reading Bergson would they have the courage to take the step William James made: For my part, I have finally found myself compelled to give up the logic, fairly, squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality . . . Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it.71

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The atmosphere produced by Bergson's mystical philosophy accounts for the enthusiastic gushing which Creative Evolution received. These enthusiasms were almost always lacking in substance even when they came from otherwise intelligent and respectable people. Hence Paul Gaultier could credit Bergson with having "opened the enchanted gardens of the internal self to us," and Léontine Zanta could say that he "opened the windows to the internal world." Gabriel Marcel thanked Bergson for awakening in him "the feeling of inner expansion," and Charles Du Bos was grateful because Bergson had established contact with ''a certain internal current." These remarks are all too typical of literally hundreds made during the period and testify to the fact that many people react to a mystical philosophy in a mystical way. 72 Bergson's work provided pre-1914 France with something more substantial than "atmosphere." Creative Evolution is the centerpiece of Bergson's holistic philosophy of life. It is a synthesis of mystical and scientific themes which, by introducing mystery and divinity in the contemporary world, satisfied the religious aspirations of cultivated people, and which appealed to those who felt debased by the implication that they were little more than free-floating molecules lacking free will.73 Bergson's philosophy was an optimistic, dramatic affirmation of a life which eternally progresses and endures in time and in which, as he says in his last book, man is the material "for the making of gods."74 Because vitalistic ideas had for so long been in vogue in occultist circles (and in France generally), occultists had long been prepared to accept a philosophy such as Bergson's. Many psychical researchers devoted a great deal of time to experimenting with "human radiations" in an attempt to register the elusive vital force which they thought was externalized by human beings. Hyppolite Baraduc, for example, claimed to have invented a machine (the Biometer) which could record this mysterious force.75 Baraduc and the others recognized the kinship between themselves and Bergson's ideas, and the universal appeal of a monistic philosophy: We experience a sort of mysterious fascination in the presence of the sublime immensity of this thing which unrolls itself ceaselessly, without end and without beginning, in the infinity of space and time . . . he atoms and nebulae, bodies and consciousness, joys and sorrows, loves and hates . . . The spectacle of this eternal evolutionwhere everything is becoming and nothing persistsrocks you and cradles you with the magic rhythm of the ocean, whose billows each in turn become individualized and scintillate a moment in the light of day, only to be engulfed a moment later in the obscure abyss of the Sublime All. It is splendid!76

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Consequently, their references to Bergsonian ideas were natural, and given his enormous prestige, almost scriptual allusions to strengthen their cases. "According to the masterly demonstrations of Henri Bergson," wrote Eugène Osty, "man is a psychic being developing from birth to death to the rhythm of world-evolution. He is not today what he was yesterday or what he will be tomorrow. His emotional and intellectual stages cannot be foreseen by reason." 77 Bergson's attempt to supply a mystical test for truth also had a political impact on his contemporaries. There was in the period before the war no greater intellectual assault upon the rationalist bases of French democracy than Bergsonian vitalism. Here then is a clue as to why so many people who welcomed Bergsonism so enthusiastically were critics of democracy. Bergson's critique of rationalism is by its very naturethough not by intentan attack on liberalism's underlying theory of mind.78 Liberalism asserted that through the exercise of his reason man was capable of selfimprovement and, therefore, society rested upon a rational, scientific base. The revolt against mechanism which Bergson for a time led, and its new interest in the unconscious as a deeper source of creativity and freedom, challenged the sovereignty that liberalism invested in the conscious mind and its view that the freedom of the individual could only come about by emancipating him from the irrational. However much he tried to deny it, Bergson attacked the rationalist tradition by preferring action to reason and by calling men to participate mystically in the very stream of life and share in the creative principle of the universe. There is therefore some substance to Bertrand Russell's claim that the main impact of Bergson's philosophy is a conservative one, and that "it harmonized easily with the movement which culminated in Vichy."79 Russell was referring to the neo-Romantic connection between philosophical irrationalism and violence in politics, and to the fact that the political credentials of many Bergsonians (but by no means all) were rightwing, with several, such as Henri Massis and Jacques Chevalier, joining the Vichy cabinet in the 1940s. The attack against liberal democracy and the rationalist tradition was part of a larger conservative critique of modernity. It included a rejection of modern civilization as a whole because it degraded man and robbed life of its humanity and spiritual truth. A mystical "life-philosophy" like Bergsonian vitalism appeared, like other forms of the occult, as a cultural reaction to the oppressiveness of industrial and technological society. It appealed to those who felt debased as individuals by the implications of the organization and bureaucratization of human relationships. And yet vitalism's appeal was not entirely a negative one. While its progenitors were highly critical of urban and industrial civilization, the ideas of Creative Evolution and the life force with their emphasis on incessant mobility and becoming were nevertheless a true reflection of the new, dynamic world and the modern consciousness born of it. This was a major attraction of

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vitalism and helps us further to appreciate Bergson's popularity among conservative intellectuals. Darwinism on the face of it seemed very much in tune with the idea of progress and the modern world. The conservative classes were justified in hating Darwinism since it was all-too-often used by democrats and socialists alike to attack social privilege. Darwinists like Huxley and Spencer, Le Dantec and Caullery, could normally be found in the progressive camp where their challenge to the pretensions of the traditional Church further served to undermine the authority of the ruling class. In France evolutionists were generally supporters of the Republic and advocates of educational reform. 80 Bergsonian vitalism, therefore, appealed to men who related to the vanishing traditional order because it could be used to attack the deterministic and materialistic foundations of Darwinism (and Marxism). It also allowed them to be critical of the new, mobile society and its intellectual underpinnings, while at the same time remaining just as "modern" as their enemies. But we shall make a serious error if we confine Bergson's appeal to a coalition of conservative intellectuals and Catholics. An intuitional and vitalistic philosophy was also bound to appeal to the far left, or at least to the syndicalist element of it. Like the conservatives, the syndicalists exalted the intuitional over the intellectual, recognized the unconscious as the dynamic source of creativity, and called for a moral regeneration of society by an all-out assault on the materialistic foundations of liberal democracy. The romantic mood shared by both political extremes was something Bergsonism could easily "harmonize" with. Syndicalists shared with at least a few other socialists a demand for forward movement and a belief that the habit of conceptual thought enfeebles and paralyzes the will. "If we reflect too long," said Victor Griffuehles, "we shall never accomplish anything." The anarchist, Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers, felt that Bergson was a great philosopher because "he raised himself against intellectualism, the geometric conception of life."81 Many syndicalists in this period were expressing their disillusionment with traditional Marxism, which by the turn of century had grown too intellectual, narrow and "scientific," the static expression of socialist intellectuals. A revolutionary faith had somehow yielded to the liberal, democratic and evolutionary spirit. How then does one rejuvenate a socialism grown too mechanical and dogmatic? In an atmosphere where irrationalism flourished the answer lay in adapting socialism to the new intellectual conditions. Georges Plékhanov, arguing from the traditional Marxist position, struck out at this revisionism in an article on Creative Evolution published in 1909. Bergson was guilty, he said, of an "intellectual sterility" and the idea of élan vital was nothing more than a "mystical idealism" designed to appeal to the religious. He lamented its

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seduction of "certain theoreticians of French syndicalism," in an obvious reference to Georges Sorel. "It is impossible," he concluded dramatically, "to fall any lower." 82 The natural similarity between mystics and Bergsonism was absent in the syndicalist reaction and therefore had at times to be artificially created. And so, whereas the occultists absorbed much of the heart of Bergsonian philosophy, the syndicalists appropriated its externals. No positive syndicalist reaction had been formed toward Bergson until after 1907 although the leading theoretician of the movement, Georges Sorel, had been sufficiently impressed with his work to write in the socialist journal L'Ere nouvelle in 1894 that Time and Free Will was "like a vigorous tree growing amidst the desolate steppes of contemporary philosophy.83 Sorel was something of an enigma in the philosophical discussions of the period. He was intensely antiintellectual, usually pro-Bergsonian, and often (especially after 1910) anti-Semitic. In 1910 when he privately remarked that he viewed mysticism as "a trait truly characteristic of the Jewish mentality,"84 he was expressing a not unsympathetic remark since his brand of syndicalism borrowed heavily from mystical and intuitive doctrines. For this reason he could be prophetic enough to see Time and Free Will as causing a revolution in the ideas of its time. But as one critic of the movement has indicated, the other leading revolutionary syndicalistsHubert Lagardelle, Edouard Berth, J.B. Sévérac, and P. Oliveronly discovered Bergson much later, in fact only after Creative Evolution had been published. Only then would they call Bergson's élan vital the "brother" to their élan ouvrier and talk of the Collège de France as "collaborating" with the Bourse du Travail. Céléstin Bouglé maintained that only after that did the syndicalists come to constitute the ''Bergsonian Left."85 In 1911, the chief organ of revolutionary syndicalism, Mouvement socialiste, published several responses to a modest questionnaire circulated among the leaders of the movement regarding the influence of Bergson's philosophy on contemporary thought and on their own thought and the reasons for it. The questionnaire was prompted by the editor's belief that Bergson's philosophy was a considerable event in the history of thought, a philosophy which seemed to be at the apogee of the intellectual movement and which therefore "forced its attention on us."86 Most important of all, the editor's felt that the revolutionary syndicalist attitude toward traditional socialist dogmas "was allied" to the Bergsonian attitude toward intellectual philosophy: "One finds in both the same anxiety to press near to reality and the same mistrust with regard to formulas."87 Most of the answers to the questionnaire defined the relationship of the Bergsonian and revolutionary syndicalist movements in this way. One maintained that "Bergson's works caution us about science, and help us against being

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crushed under the mass of scientific data, and retrieves for us analytically, the integral sense of life.'' 88 Another heartily endorsed Bergsonian anti-intellectualism in its struggle against the "rational faith;"89 still another welcomed Bergson's discrediting of "irreligious rationalism and atheism": I have almost completely adopted the philosophy of M. Bergson, because it coincides with a vague but strong tendency in my thought, which goes in the same direction as Bergsonian philosophy: the deliverance from tyrannical, tormenting, sterile rationalism.90 Although most of these men seemed to agree, Sévérac said, that as revolutionary syndicalists they formed the "Bergsonian Left" just as Marxists had formed a "Hegelian Left," this analogy was only a rhetorical one. Their very silence on what this meant indicated how contrived their reaction to Bergson was. To say that the two movements shared a common spirit proved nothing. Bergson had never written about class war, political parties, social revolution, or direct action in the form of the general strike. Hence the key themes of Bergsonian philosophy in their external aspect had to be rephrased to suit an activistic social philosophy. The most popular anti-intellectualist philosophy of its day had to be made "to justify the intuitions of the syndical instinct."91 This is to say that Georges Sorel and the other theoreticians, rather than being Bergsonians, merely borrowed and altered in syndicalist form the Bergsonian vocabulary whenever and wherever it suited them. This is not to say that they were not genuinely enthusiastic about Bergson's ideas; to Sorel, for example, Creative Evolution would always remain Bergson's key book, a work which he felt would be ''as important in the history of philosophy as the Critique of Pure Reason."92 Although he rejected Bergson's epistemology, Sorel had always been very responsive to Bergson's "anti-intellectualism" and to his intuitive theories to profit from them. But the fact that Sorel was impressed with certain aspects of Bergson's philosophy did not make him a disciple. "Let us not exaggerate," wrote one critic, "Sorel was not suddenly touched by the Bergsonian grace. Bergsonism corresponded to several profound leanings of his mind. Sorel, anti-intellectualist and mystic, was a Bergsonian before Bergson."93 These "leanings" manifested themselves in Sorel at different stages of his career and so shaped his attitudes towards Bergson. Between 1906 and 1910 Sorel was preoccupied with the philosophical bases of social problems. After 1910 he turned his concern to those elements of Bergsonian philosophy which were favourable to religious experience.94 Between 1906 and 1910 Sorel tried to do several things with Bergson's ideas. He tried to employ them as basic arguments for his own ideas in social

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philosophy and in the process to give to Bergson's ideas a sense of social immediacy. "The true place of M. Bergson's philosophy is in social studies," he wrote in a long essay of 1907, "above all in those which are relative to the present time. These studies are, in effect, based on the knowledge of human groups that launch themselves on revolutionary paths, by reason of free determinants." 95 By using Bergsonian terminology and concepts as a key, Sorel hoped that Bergson's main ideas on undivided movement, the static and the dynamic, and the ideas on personal liberty would shed some light on the understanding of socialism. In the introduction to his Reflections on Violence he had said: The mind of man is so constituted that it cannot remain content with the mere observation of facts, but always attempts to penetrate into the inner reason of things. I therefore ask myself whether it might not be desirable to study this theory of myths more thoroughly, utilizing the enlightenment we owe to the Bergsonian philosophy. The attempt I am about to submit to you is doubtless very imperfect, but I think that it has been planned in accordance with the only method which can possibly throw light on the problem.96 Sorel tried to equate Bergson's stages of biological growth with the development of socialism, a process growing through several levels of social determinants. The initial level is described as the one where the masses act without thinking and are moved by the pressure of custom and the terror of despotism; the second level is one of capricious, oligarchic rule; the third level, which interests us today is "a level whose revolutionary determinants are at once free and stable because they depend upon the profound consciousness of people who do not pretend to raise themselves above the popular condition. It is just of this liberty that Bergson's philosophy treats."97 Sorel frankly admits to applying a Bergsonian idea when he says that: These men may be deceived about an infinite number of political, economical, or moral questions; but their testimony is decisive, sovereign, and irrefutable when it is a question of knowing what are the ideas that most powerfully move them and their comrades, that most appeal to them as being identical with their socialistic conceptions, and thanks to which their reason, their hopes, and their way of looking at particular facts seem to make but one indivisible unity.98 Sorel, then, envisioned the development of socialism in fluid terms for even though that development passed through several phases its movement could not be spatialized into a series of concrete stages but had to be grasped intuitively in its entirety as an uninterrupted flow to be fully understood.

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How does one grasp socialism intuitively? One must regard it, according to Sorel, as a "body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments that correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against modern society." The value of myth embodied in the general strike does not depend upon any actual attainment of declared ends but rather on the movement itself. Thus no real program of action is necessary. Sorel applied what he called the "global knowledge" of Bergson's philosophy to make his point: Strikes have engendered in the proletariat the noblest, deepest, and most moving sentiments that they possess; the general strike groups them all in a coordinated picture, and, by bringing them together, gives to each one of them its maximum of intensity; appealing to their painful memories of particular conflicts, it colours with an intense life all the details of the composition presented to consciousness. We thus obtain that intuition of Socialism which language cannot give us with perfect clearnessand we obtain it as a whole, perceived instantaneously. 99 The whole of socialism is then concentrated in the drama of the general strike. No room is left to the "reconciliation of contraries" or to the "equivocations of the professors." Only one interpretation of socialism would then be possible. ''This method,'' he says, "has all the advantages that 'integral' knowledge has over analysis, according to the doctrine of Bergson."100 But what of utopia? Utopia, Sorel said, is the mechanical work of theorists, an intellectual product opposed to myth, just as the mechanical and static in Bergsonian philosophy are opposed to the living and the dynamic. Georges Guy-Grand, a disciple of Sorel and something of an historian of the syndicalist movement, indicated in 1911 that Sorel was borrowing certain conceptual antinomies in Bergsonian philosophy and applying them to the dichotomies of his own theories.101 Whereas a myth prepares a people for action to destroy the existing system, utopias are utilitarian and social and will "always direct men's minds towards reforms" which will repair the existing system. Furthermore, Sorel said that myths are beyond refutation since they are "identical with the conviction of a group, the expression of these convictions is the language of movement," and since they are "unanalysable into parts that could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions."102 In other words, like Bergson, Sorel distinguished between the "dynamic" myth and the "static" utopia and like Bergson, he substituted movement for structure as the best means for realizing his goals. Reality was to be found in the movement toward these goals, not in the goals themselves.

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Sorel sought a confirmation of his ideas in Bergsonian philosophy but he did not accept it completely. His one great reservation concerned the role the individual was to play in shaping his own reality. Bergson had said that "to act freely is to regain possession of oneself, it is to replace oneself in pure duration." Although Sorel may have accepted Bergson's belief in the intuitive comprehension of one's own reality, he never felt that one could discover it by placing oneself in the vital flux of duration. 103 Since Sorel believed that Bergson lacked the conception of myth, Sorel felt that he could not appreciate the existence of those entities separated from the stream of duration and which expressed themselves creatively through a scientific and social knowledge: To say that we are acting, implies that we are creating an imaginary world placed ahead of the present world and composed of movements that depend entirely on us. In this way our freedom becomes perfectly intelligible . . . These artificial worlds generally disappear from our minds without leaving any trace in our memory; but when the masses are deeply moved it then becomes possible to trace the outlines of the kind of representation which constitutes a social myth.104 What did Bergson think about all of this? Privately, he made it quite clear that while he sympathized with several aspects of socialism and while he considered the syndicalists as necessary, he insisted that he could never consider himself "a promoter of syndicalist theories." On the other hand, he recognized that "without a doubt there was a certain accord between my conception of movement and that of Georges Sorel, the greatest theoretician of syndicalism."105 He also said that he sympathized with Sorel's anti-intellectualism and admitted that they both shared a "certain parentage" insofar as neither pretended to divine the future but rather insisted on the contingent in life. Where the two parted company, Bergson felt, was over Sorel's belief in historical materialism which implied a determinism of economic circumstances, something which Bergson found incompatible with his own doctrine of Creative Evolution. Moreover, Bergson fully understood that Sorel was "utilizing'' those things in Bergsonian philosophy that he needed and "understood admirably,'' but as for what Bergson called "the new and the audacious" in syndicalism, it was purely Sorelian and had nothing to do with his own ideas.106 Bergson understood, then, what the other syndicalists knewthat he and Sorel could travel a great distance together intellectually but that Sorel was in no sense of the word a disciple nor was he even decisively influenced by Bergson. Nevertheless, as Bergson was the first to admit, "no one better understands what I have said than he."107 Like Bergson, Georges Guy-Grand made it absolutely

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clear that while Sorel applied bits of Bergsonian philosophy to sociology and political economics, he was definitely not a disciple. "He had begun his research before M. Bergson's philosophy was known," he wrote, "and he is too profoundly original to depend on any master." After 1910, Sorel turned his concern to those elements of Bergsonian philosophy which were favourable to religious experience. In struggling against the Cartesian spirit of rationalism in the world Bergson's philosophy, Sorel said, was "very favourable to the essential principles of Christianity." Edouard Berth agreed and saw Bergson's success signifying "the end of Cartesian and encyclopedic rationalism; it signifies the victory of religious and moral tendencies; it signifies the triumph of a mystical and tragic conception of life." 108 Another syndicalist saw its tremendous impact lying on its "impression of religiosity and mysticism." According to Sorel: The success of his books means above all that there exists Pascalian orientations in the elite of contemporary society; on the other hand, his philosophy of multiple orientations makes them precise and increases their efficacity; so, in part thanks to M. Bergson, Pascal bids fair to become the great director of the present century. If this judgment is exact, we must presume that the propounders of the modern soul will submit to the influence of M. Bergson more strongly than they had submitted to the influences of Taine or of Nietzsche.109 While Bergson's mystical snythesis of science and metaphysics succeeded in animating the intellectuals of the political extremes, it also served to inspire those scientists and philosophers of science who like Bergson belonged to the vitalist tradition. J.A. Thomson, Professor of Natural History at the University of Aberdeen, reviewing Creative Evolution for Nature in 1911, felt that the time was ripe for a closer cooperation between philosophy and science. Bergson's being a metaphysician, he said, was not a hindrance since his appreciation of the complexities of evolution could provide us with a new philosophy of life. "Nature-poetry" may not be biology but it is a very important complement to it and no one understands this better than Bergson. "The man of the time," Thomson maintained, "is Henri Bergson."110 In the same year d'Arcy Westworth Thompson in his Presidential Address before the Zoologists of Britain praised Bergson saying, "the hypothesis of the vital principle . . . has resurged as a real and urgent question, as the greatest question that can present itself to the biologists.''111 In France Louis Weber had credited Bergson with having produced "a positive theory of life and a new method of comprehension."112 In 1908 Emile Meyerson had placed Bergson's profound discoveries alongside the great

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discoveries of the world which are made by "soundings cast into pure duration." 113 However, one man's metaphysics is often another's poison, and those mechanistic biologists, at least those few who did not completely ignore Bergson, had serious reservations about "biological philosophy." There may have been in the very sparse scientific reaction to Creative Evolution a reluctance to credit a philosopher with a substantial achievement in biology. For example, one critic viewed the book as "a purely metaphysical attraction," while another dismissed it as ''a philosopher's profession of faith."114 When Isaac Benrubi asked one of the deans of French biology, Maurice Caullery, about Bergson, he was simply told that Bergson lacked the scientific spirit.115 Mechanistic biologists who were in the ascendancy in the early part of the century could, of course, easily dismiss a vitalist thesis especially one conceived by a philosopher. But a few biologists found it difficult to ignore a popular vitalist and turned their full scorn on what they regarded as an illicit and presumptuous intrusion into the real temple of science. Sir E. Ray Lankester, for long a dominant figure in early twentieth-century British science, attempted to stigmatize Bergson in 1912 in an attack bearing somewhat racial overtones. Bergson had been introduced to the British public the year before as a "great French philosopher." Lankester, in a statement dripping with venom, replied that "to the student of the aberrations and monstrosities of the mind of man, M. Bergson's works will always be documents of value. But it is an injustice as well as an inaccuracy to speak of their author as 'great,' or 'French,' or a 'philosopher.'"116 There was more here than a little anti-Semitic pique. Lankester indicted the entire "fraternity" of metaphysicians who, like Bergson, were guilty of a "light-hearted perversion of the facts." In the same volume, Sir Hugh S.R. Elliot pursued this attack against Bergsonian metaphysics even further. Reminding his readers of Newton's warning''Physics beware of metaphysics"Elliot denounced metaphysical systems as unscientific, obscure and mischievious. "Just as certain phases of religous belief are based on perverted sexuality," he wrote, "so it appears probable that metaphysical systems may often have a similar foundation."117 Moreover, he said with some finality, "I repudiate all attempts to explain the universe." The most important biological scientist who was not himself a vitalist but who nevertheless could not dismiss Bergson was Fdlix Le Dantec, Professor of Embryology at the Sorbonne. Described by one student as being a materialist and an atheist, Le Dantec had tried to demonstrate that life was only the product of some specific chemical combination. One observer would facetiously wonder why no American university had not staged a public debate between these two men "who represent the extremes of modern French thought." Le Dantec accused Bergson of an over-indulgence in imagination at the sacrifice of

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objectivity and of "abandoning himself to his dream of imagining that he is mobility itself." 118 We defy the sensation of movement when we are still, he said, "that is to say, in the case where the mobility that I observe is my proper individuality." And so if Bergson thinks he seizes the absolute of movement he has "imagined an evident error.'' Bergson's work, then, was of a poetic interest, the method of which "flatters our inveterate taste for mysticism."119 And yet for all his criticism, Le Dantec tried to identify himself with Bergson, a testament to Bergson's tremendous impact: ''We are both whirlpool passengers and without importance; I believe that each of these two whirlpools has influenced the movement of the other; and nevertheless we have sometimes encountered each other."120 Le Dantec's response plunged Bergson into the "deepest perplexity" and prompted one of his few rebuttals of the period when he flatly asserted that there was not the slightest rapport between the two men. After this Bergson was content "to let truth triumph, in spite of all the attacks."121 After the publication of Creative Evolution, Bergson was increasingly placed on the defensive especially when his ideas entered into the intellectual and religious controversies of the period. When Émile Borel, Professor of Mathematics at the Sorbonne, criticized Bergson for substituting "something" for intellect and subordinating it to instinct,122 a charge Bergson would respond to all his life, he made one of his rare public clarifications of the period. He said that he has simply tried to show that, When we leave the realm of mathematics and physics to enter that of life and consciousness, we must make our appeal to a certain sense of life which cuts across pure understanding and has its origin in some vital impulse as instinct, although instinct is quite a different thing. Who is the real anti-intellectual, Bergson asked. He is the man who "seeking to induce philosophy to be no more than a systematization of the science . . . would guide it gently towards the point where it had no choice other than that between an indefensible dogmatism and a resigned agnosticism, two roads to bankruptcy." The true anti-intellectual is the man who cannot or will not recognize the limitations of the intellect in always attaining the real. If Creative Evolution drew any conclusion, Bergson said, it was "that the human intellect and positive science, wherever they are concerned with their proper object, are verily in contact with the real and penetrate more and more profoundly into the absolute."123 There is, then, a balance to be struck between philosophy and science, intelligence and intuition, each complementing the other.

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Henri Bergson, a philosopher of mysticism and a theoretician of the occult, was something more substantial than an isolated academic writing learned articles for professional journals. From his highly influential chair at the Collège de France he was uniquely positioned to lead the attack against mechanistic science and to transmit occult ideas on mysticism and vitalism to the public at large. From this platform of respectability Bergson could transmit those ideas to the public in terms that carried prestige, and in the process, enter into some of the major controversies of the period.

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Footnotes 1. William Thomson, Notes of Lectures on Molecular Dynamics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1884), 132. 2. Charles Richet and René Sully-Prudhomme, Le problème des causes finales (Paris: F. Alcan, 1907), 140. 3. "The classic stumbling-block of the Darwinian theory," wrote Arthur Koestler, in a succinct and often amusing account of the controversy, was the evolution of the vertebrate eye. How could random variations produce such a sophisticated array of harmonious components? "I remember well the time," wrote Darwin, ''when the thought of the eye made me cold all over.'' Quoted in Arthur Koestler, Janus. A Summing Up (London: Pan Books, 1978), 174. 4. George Bernard Shaw, Preface to "Back to Methuselah," in Bernard Shaw Complete Plays With Prefaces (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963), 2: xvii. 5. Quoted in Arnold Lunn, The Revolt Against Reason (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1951), 115. 6. J.S. Haldane, Mechanism, Life and Personality: An Examination of the Mechanistic Theory of Life and Mind (London: John Murray, 1921), 60-61. Published originally in 1913. 7. Robert E. Stebbins, "France," in Thomas F. Glick, ed., The Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), 11767. 8. Lucien Cuénot, L'Évolution biologique: les faits, les incertitudes (Paris: Masson, 1951), vivi. For this mason it was difficult to get a French scientist to make a translation of Darwin's work, and it accounts for the almost total silence surrounding Darwinism in the learned societies of France. T.H. Huxley called this the "conspiracy of silence" in France and Darwin struck out at what he called the "horrid unbelieving Frenchmen." Stebbins, 122. On the other hand, the matter of Cuvier's influence should be handled with caution. Remy de Gourmont claimed that in the 1890s Darwin was highly fashionable at the Sorbonne. Remy de Gourmont, Selected Writings (Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press, 1966), 214. Translated and edited by Glenn S. Bume. Nevertheless, evolutionary ideas gradually made converts in France especially among social scientists and philosophers, and where by 1900 the evolutionary position (although not necessarily the Darwinian one) had clearly become the dominant approach in French biology. 9. James Jeans, The New Background of Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1934), 46. 10. Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis (New York: Dover, 1952), 164. 11. Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 32728. Elsewhere Eddington wrote: "The actuality of the world is a spiritual value. The physical world at some point (or indeed throughout) impinges on the spiritual world and derives its actuality solely from this contact." Arthur Eddington, "The Domain of Physical Sciences," in Joseph Needham, ed., Science, Religion and Reality (New York: MacMillan, 1928), 211. 12. Max Planck, "The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics," in The New Science, trans. W.H. Johnston (New York: Meridian, 1959), 156. Published originally in 1931. Einstein always maintained that the revolution in physics really began with James Clerk Maxwell in the 1870s: "Before Clerk Maxwell, people conceived of physical realityinsofar as it is supposed to represent events in natureas material points, whose changes consist exclusively of motions . . . after Maxwell they conceived physical reality as represented by continuous fields, not mechanically explicable . . . This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and fruitful one that has come to physics since Newton." Quoted by Henry Margenau, "Einstein's Conception of Reality," in P.A. Schlipp, ed., Albert Einstein: PhilosopherScientist (New York: Harper, 1959), 253. More recently, Erwin Schrodinger, one of the original contributors to the formulation of quantum mechanics, moved to embrace a rather mystical view of the universe that he identified with the "perennial philosophy" of Aldous Huxley. Erwin Schrodinger, Mind and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).

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13. Robert de Sinéty, "Un demi-siècle de darwinisme," Revue des questions scientifiques 67 (1910): 538, 480513. 14. Yves Delage, L'Hérédité et les grands problèmes de biologie générale (Paris: Schleicher, 1903), 204.

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15. Harry Paul, "Religion and Darwinism: Varieties of Catholic Reaction," in Thomas F. Glick, The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, 421. 16. Shaw, Bernard Shaw. 17. Emile Meyerson, Identify and Reality (New York: Dover, 1962), 291. 18. Alfred North Whitehead, Nature and Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 193 4), 66. 19. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1944), 4849. Published originally as Évolution créatrice (Paris: F. Alcan, 1907). This point is more or less echoed by Haldane: "The mechanistic hypothesis has been the only one of the two which seemed inherently capable of helping us positively in the details of biological investigation; and yet this hypothesis is unmistakably a failure in relation to biological investigation as a whole; and the vitalistic theory, if one can call it a theory, is only a way of registering this failure, and does not help us to a real understanding." Mechanism, Life and Personality, 64. 20. For some of the links between vitalism and mysticism, see Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism. A study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness (London: Methuen, 1962), 2643. 21. See Victor Grégoire, "Le mouvement antimécaniste en biologie," Revue des questions scientifiques Ser. 3, 8 (1905): 385416. 22. See Jean Marie Guyau, L'Irreligion de l'avenir (Paris: F. Alcan, 1886), and La genèse de l'idée de temps (Paris: F. Alcan, 1885); see also the letter of Alfred Fouillée to Guyau's son, Augustin, on his father's originality and importance in the history of ideas. Augustin Guyau, La philosophie et la sociologie d'Alfred Fouillée (Paris: F. Alcan, 1913), 202. See also André Lalande, La dissolution opposée à l'évolution (Paris: F. Alcan, 1899), and Bergson's Creative Evolution, 269. A parallel tradition existed in Germany where, following in the footsteps of Schopenauer and Nietzsche, Hans Driesch, Professor of Biology at the University of Heidelberg, carried vitalism to its highest peak in modern times. Hans Driesch, The History and Theory of Vitalism (London: MacMillan, 1914). Driesch dubbed the life principle, "entelechy," a term he borrowed from Aristotle. 23. H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler (New York: Scribner's, 1962), 25. 24. Harold Hoffding, La philosophie de Bergson (Paris: F. Alcan, 1916), 87. 25. Mercure de France, 93 (1911): 413. 26. Henri Bergson, Écrits et paroles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 1: 222, 234; 2: 259. 27. Jacques Chevalier, Henri Bergson (New York: MacMillan, 1928), 4445, 48. 28. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 396. 29. Ibid., 14. 30. Ibid., 23. 31. Ibid., 24. 32. Ibid., 27. 33. Ibid., 4344. 34. Ibid., 45.

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35. Ibid., 47. 36. Ibid. This was why Bergson rejected precognition. He once wittily remarked that if he really knew what the successful play of the next year would be he would write it himself. "Le possible et le réel," Mélanges, 1325. This was originally a lecture Bergson delivered at Oxford University in 1920. 37. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 97. 38. Ibid., 50. 39. Ibid., 97. Bergson felt that the neo-Lamarckians were on more solid ground in arguing that the cause of variation is an effort on the part of the varying organism of a psychical character.

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40. Ibid., 114. 41. Ibid., 194. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 288. 44. Ibid., 271. 45. Ibid., 295. During World War I Bergson saw fit to define the struggle in terms of his own philosophy. From his position as President of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Bergson described German history as "the continuous clang of militarism and industrialism, of machinery and mechanism, of debased moral materialism." The issue in the war was clear: on one side could be found barbarism and material force, "the mechanization of spirit" which reduced people into things; on the other life, the ''spiritualization of matter" and "the power of creation which makes and remakes itself at every instant." For Bergson, Germany was the home of soulless barbarism, while France represented the unfoldment of the life-force. The Meaning of the War, trans. H. Wildon Carr (London: Fisher Unwin, 1916), 33, 3638. Appeared originally as "Discours sur la signification de la guerre," Séances et travauc de l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques 183 (1915): 13968. 46. In that same year Time and Free Will had reached its fourteenth edition and Matter and Memory its eleventh. J. Bricourt, Revue du clergé francais (1914): 452. 47. A. Ruhe and N. Paul, Henri Bergson (London: MacMillan, 1914), 49. 48. André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, 18891927 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 1: 233. 49. Letter from Paul Claudel to André Suarès, 25 July 1907, in André Suarès, André Suarès et Paul Claudel, correspondence, 19041938 (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 106. 50. William James, The Letters of William James (Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 2: 290, 294. 51. He could also expect colourful visitors at his Paris home. One such guest was the Polish philosopher, Vincenty Lutoslawski, who tried to prove that Bergson was the unconscious reincarnation of Adam Mickiewicz. Bergson remained unmoved by the idea but was, as always, the perfect host. Isaac Benrubi, Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson (Neuchatel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1942), 15. 52. George Santayana, Winds of Doctrine (New York: Harper, 1957), 18. 53. Underhill, Mysticism, 27. 54. Paul Gaultier, La pensée contemporaine (Paris: Hachette, 1911), 54. 55. G. Picard and G.L. Tautain, "Enquête sur M. Henri Bergson et l'influence de sa pensée sur la sensibilité contemporaine," La grande revue 83 (1914): 754. 56. A.O. Lovejoy, "The Practical Tendencies of Bergsonism," International Journal of Ethics 23 (1913): 25455. 57. T.E. Hulme, "Bax on Bergson," The New Age 9 (1911): 329. 58. Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Bergson (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1914), 24, 36. 59. Letter of Henri Bergson to F. Vandérem, 27 February 1914, in Le figaro (29 Feb, 1914), 1.

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60. Benrubi called Dwelshauvers, who was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Brussels, "one of the first apostles of Bergsonism in France and in Belgium," and Bergson thought a great deal of him. Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson, 4445. For an extreme statement on intuitionism see George Dwelshauvers, "De l'intuition dans l'acte de l'ésprit," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 16 (1908): 5565. Henri Delacroix, later a Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne, was one of the most important philosophers and historians of mysticism in the early part of the century until the 1920s. Delacroix left no doubt that he regarded Bergson's as one of the seminal minds in French thought. "Maine de Biran et l'école medico-psychologique," Bulletin de la société française de philosophie (June 19, 1924): 52. See also H. Norero, "Les études de M. Delacroix sur la mysticisme," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 17 (1909): 70332. 61. Albert Bazaillas, Musique et inconscience (Paris: F. Alcan, 1908), 314.

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62. Joseph Segond, L'Intuition Bergsonienne (Paris: F. Alcan, 1913), 9. 63. Alphonse Chide, Le mobilisme moderne (Paris: F. Alcan, 1908), 259. See also Joseph Baruzi, Le rêvue de siècle (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1904). 64. Bazaillas, Musique et inconscience, 314. 65. André Joussain, "L'Idée de l'inconscient et l'intuition de la vie," Revue philosophique 71 (1911): 488. 66. Letter from Georges Sorel to Benedetto Croce, 20 March 1920, in "Lettres de Georges Sorel à Benedetto Croce," La Critica 28 (1930): 90. 67. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 147. 68. Henri Delacroix, Études d'histoire el de psychologie du mysticisme (Paris: F. Alcan, 1908), 41. 69. See for example, "Rapport sur un ouvrage de Albert Bazaillas: musique et inconscience," Séances el travaux de l'Académie des sciences morales el politiques 169 (1908): 71920, and "Rapport sur un ouvrage de Henri Delacroix: études d'histoire et de psychologie du mysticisme," Ibid., 171 (1909): 67071. 70. C.G. Jung, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), 7: 283. 71. William James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longman's Green, 1912), 212. 72. Léontine Zanta, "Un hommage féminin à Henri Bergson," Les nouvelles littéraires (November 17, 1928), 9; Paul Gaultier, La pensée contemporaine, 82; Gabriel Marcel in Thomas Hanna, ed., The Bergsonian Heritage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 125; Charles du Bos, Journal, 19211923 (Paris: Corrêa, 1946), 58. 73. It seems to answer Eduard Von Hartman's earlier prediction of a new universal religion for the modern epoch based on a synthesis of "pantheistic and monotheistic evolution." "The religion of the future," he wrote, ''will be a pantheistic monism . . . or an impersonal immanent monotheism of which the divinity has the world, its subjective manifestation, not outside itself, but in itself." La religion de l'avenir (Paris: Librarie Germer Baillière, 1876), 174. 74. The comparisons with the work of Teilhard de Chardin are obvious and striking. Both belonged to the same intellectual milieu, the vitalistic trend in biology and the spiritualist school in philosophy. Moreover, their chief works, Creative Evolution and The Phenomenon of Man, deal not only with the related themes of evolution and spirit, but occupy similar places with respect to the occult revivals of their day, even though the two men personally were not for the most part regarded as occult figures. Teilhard's posthumous position vis-à-vis the occult revival of the 1960s and 1970s is now recognized by at least a few people but Bergson's influence on the pre-1914 occult movement is barely understood. What Mircea Eliade said in a perceptive essay about the reasons for Teilhard's popularitythat he was "revealing the ultimate sacrality of nature and life" by bridging the gap between science and faithcould most certainly be said about Bergson as well. Mircea Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 13. It is difficult to say just how important the Bergsonian stimulus might have been in the case of Teilhard de Chardin. The young Teilhard read Bergson as late as 1912 and was impressed with the book. "I remember clearly having read Creative Evolution with avidity at this time. But although I didn't very well understand at this period what exactly Bergson's durée meantand in any case it was not sufficiently convergent to satisfy meI can see clearly that the effect of these passionate pages on me was merely, at the right moment and in a flash, to stir up a fire that was already burning in my heart and mind." Quote in Nicholas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit (New York: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960), 10. In the short-run the inspiration was there, but how great and lasting the spark was, is, and must remain, a matter of conjecture, since Teilhard had little more to say on the matter himself, and since his biographers have tended to play down the connection between the two men. Nevertheless, the careers and popularity of the two, even though they belong to different historical periods, eloquently testify to the importance of vitalistic philosophy in the twentieth century and its occult implications.

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75. Jules Bois, Le Miracle moderne (Paris: Ellendorf, 1907), 4445 Baraduc was not alone. Other researchers who made similar claims were Dr. Joseph Maxwell, Dr. Louis Favre, and Albert de Rochas. There may be some value to Santayana's belief that "to be so occupied by vitality is a symptom of anemia." Winds of Doctrine, 19. 76. Théodor Flournoy, Spiritism and Psychology (New York: Harper, 1911), 327.

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77. Eugène Osty, Supernormal Faculties of Man (London: Methuen, 1923), 64. Osty was the Director of the Institut metaphysic internationale. See also Camille Flammarion's flattering remarks about Bergson in Death and Its Mystery: After Death (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923), iii. Occult journals always reviewed Bergson's books sympathetically, highlighting the importance of the philosopher's ideas, and often quoting him as a source of occult wisdom. See, for example, "La philosophic de M. Bergson" and "M. Bergson et la métapsychie," Annales des sciences psychiques 23 (1913): 29, 188, and "Consciousness in Living Matter," Light 31 (1911): 274, and ''The Mystery of Dreams," Light 34 (1914): 581. 78. It is clear from the testimony of his friends that Bergson was sincerely Republican and democratic. Nevertheless, he was realistic about democracy's weaknesses in a large urban and industrial society. Like Rousseau, he felt that there was only one true republicSwitzerlandand that democracy could only flourish in small, confederate states. Benrubi, Souvenirs de Henri Bergson, 4849. 79. Bertrand Russell, A History of Modern Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), 791. 80. See Chapter V. 81. Nevertheless, he said, young people did not need Bergson to convince them that life is movement, evolution and beauty, anymore than they needed him to free them from the dogmas of a corrupt science. Picard and Tautain, "Enquête sur M. Henri Bergson et l'influence de sa pensée sur la sensibilité contemporaine," 557. In the same survey, Georges Guy-Grand, the syndicalist, felt that Bergson had failed to show us the possibility of a mode of metaphysical knowledge, namely intuition, but that his criticism of a certain kind of rationalism and intellectualism seemed definitive, and gave him the greatest chance of taking his place in the line of great philosophers. Ibid., 75657. Ramsay MacDonald's response to Bergson was more balanced and measured: "Intuition and instinct are nearer to reality than the intellect. They are really life itself, moving in man, and felt by man. Intellect makes experience definite only by narrowing views. But Bergson assigns no useless or merely hampering role to the intellect . . . Bergson would assign an important role to the intellect, Sorel throws it over altogether." Syndicalism (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1912), 18-19. See also Graham Wallas, The Great Society (New York: MacMillan, 1923) and the long discussion of Time and Free Will in Jean Jaurès, De la réalite du monde sensible (Paris: F. Alcan, 1891), 12760. 82. Georges Plékhanov, "Sur 'l'Évolution créatrice,' d'Henri Bergson," trans. Jean DePrun, Pensée n.s. no. 80 (1958): 107. 83. Georges Sorel, "L'Ancienne et la nouvelle métaphysique," in D'Aristote à Marx (Paris: M. Rivière, 1937), 16768. 84. Benrubi, Souvenirs de Henri Bergson, 47. This labelling of racial "mentalities" was not untypical of the period. Albert Thibaudet, like Sorel quite sympathetic to Bergson's achievements, linked him with the other Jewish luminaries of French cultureProust and Montaigne. Jewish blood, he maintained, produced "their singular feeling for the flux of things," they reflect "the mobility, the restless soul of Israel, of those tents . . ." Albert Thibaudet, "Marcel Proust and the French Tradition," in Justin O'Brien, ed., From the NRF (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 116. Published originally in 1923. 85. Céléstin Bouglé, "Syndicalistes et bergsoniens," Revue du mois 7 (1909): 40316. Bouglé's opinions must be handled with caution. He was a Durkheimian and an anti-Bergsonian and so might have indulged in a bit of hyperbole with this article. On this subject see also John Bowditch, "The Concept of élan vital: A Rationalization of Weakness," in Edward Meade Earle, Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951). 86. J.D. Sévérac, "Enquête: influence de la philosophié de M. Bergson," Mouvement socialiste 29 (1911): 18283, 26768, 27071; 30 (1911): 12023, 26669; 31 (1912): 6264. 87. Ibid., 29, 182. 88. M. Dévolvé, Movement socialiste 29 (1911): 268. 89. G. Palante, Ibid., 27071.

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90. H. Draghicesco, Movement socialiste 30 (1911): 26667. 91. Céléstin Bouglé, "Syndicalistes et bergsoniens," 47.

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92. Georges Sorel, "L'Évolution créatrice," Mouvement socialiste 22 (1907): 257. 93. P. Perrin, Les idées sociales de Georges Sorel (Algiers: Angelis, 1925), 24. 94. Pierre Andreu, "Bergson et Sorel," Les études bergsoniennes 3 (1950): 48. 95. Mouvement socialiste 22 (1907): 275. There were only a few attempts like Sorel's to apply Bergsonian evolutionism directly to the history of human development. They all failed to be-come a "social Bergsonism" because mystical vitalism was lacking in a mechanical proven thesis which could be applied to society. One cannot construct a science of society by merely equating élan vital and Creative Evolution with human élan and creative progress. See Joseph Wilbois, Devoir et durée. Essai de morale social (Paris: F. Alcan, 1912); and Georges Aimel, "Individualisme et philosophie bergsonienne," Revue de philosophie 12 (1908): 58293. See also an earlier attempt, Charles Boucaud, "L'Histoire de droit et la philosophie de M. Bergson," Revue de philosophie 4 (1904): 299, 306. 96. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950), 53. 97. Mouvement socialiste 22 (1907): 27576. 98. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 145. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid., 140. 101. Georges Guy-Grand, La philosophie syndicaliste (Paris: B. Grasset, 1911), 37. 102. Reflections on Violence, 58. One of Sorel's disciples, Edouard Berth, equated Sorel's views on production with Bergson's idea of the "profound self" and the philosophy of production with Bergson's philosophy of creation. Edouard Berth, Les méfaits des intellectuels (Paris: M. Rivière, 1914), 243, 251. According to Georges Guy-Grand, this was typical of all the syndicalists. They defined production, he wrote, as the internal and profound self in society. The superficial self of society could be found in its legal and judicial formalism, which citizens react to only insofar as they are social atoms. Guy-Grand, La philosophie syndicaliste, 38. 103. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 5556. 104. Ibid. 105. Benrubi, Souvenirs de Henri Bergson, 20. 106. Gilbert Maire, Bergson, mon maître (Paris: B. Grasset, 1935), 217. 107. Jacques Morland, "Une heure chez M. Bergson," L'Opinion, 4 (1911): 241. 108. Picard and Tautain, "Enquête sur M. Henri Bergson et l'influence de sa pensée sur la sensibilité contemporaine," 123. 109. Ibid., 119. 110. J.A. Thomson, "Biological Philosophy," Nature 86 (1911): 475; see also "Professor Bergson's Biology," Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society 19 (1913): 7992.

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111. Quoted in Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Roots of Bergson's Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 79. A number of other vitalists have acknowledged their debt to Bergson in this century. For example, see Lloyd Morgan, Emergent Evolution (London: Williams and Norgate, 1923), Oliver Lodge, "Balfour and Bergson," The Hibbert Journal 10 (1912): 290307, William McDougall, Body and Mind (London: Methuen, 1911), and Modern Materialism and Emergent Evolution (London: Methuen, 1929). 112. Louis Weber, "L'Évolution créatrice," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 15 (1907): 62324. 113. Myerson, Identity and Reality, 286. Meyerson considered Bergson part of a long line of great creators in the domain of pure philosophical thought. See "Dans la lignée des grands créateurs," Les Nouvelles littéraires (December 15, 1928), 1. 114. Marcel Hérubel, "L'Évolution créatrice," L'Année biologique 15 (1910): 532; F. Péchoutre, Ibid., xv. 115. Benrubi, 51. Bergson felt that in France there was no "true biology," which was why the scientific community "considered any adversary of mechanism as a clerical." Ibid., 92.

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116. Preface to Sir Hugh S.R. Elliot, Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson (London: Longman's Green, 1912), viii. 117. Ibid., 205. 118. Félix Le Dantec, "La biologie de M. Bergson," Revue du mois 4 (1907): 231. 119. Ibid., 233. 120. Ibid. 121. Benrubi, Souvenirs de Henri Bergson, 84. 122. Émile Borel, "L'Évolution de l'intelligence géometrique," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 15 (1907): 74754. 123. Henri Bergson, "Apropos de l'évolution de l'intelligence géometrique," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 16 (1908): 3032.

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PART II CONTROVERSIES

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Chapter V Ancients, Moderns and Bergsonians Bergson began his teaching career at the Lycée in Angers in 1881. Two years later he received an appointment as Professor of Philosophy in the Blaise Pascal Lycée at Clermont-Ferrand, where he remained until 1888. While at Clermont-Ferrand Bergson published his first book, an edition of extracts from Lucretius, with a critical examination of the poet's text and philosophy. 1 It was also at Clermont-Ferrand that Bergson first displayed his unique gifts as a teacher of philosophy and it was here, during his "spiritual retreat," that he first thought through the main lines of his philosophy.2 That Bergson was a spell-binder as a teacher long before his arrival at the Collège de France is clear from the testimony of a generation of students who sat at his feet and worshipped what one student called "the enchanter."3 Each lecture was a dramatic occasion for his audience with Bergson exuding a charismatic presence. Not that he was a dynamic lecturer; he spoke slowly, clearly and surely, in a well-modulated and harmonious voice, seldom using notes and always displaying a brilliant use of images and comparisons. One student, in fact, felt that there was something singularly British about the measured clarity of his delivery. He was more poet than orator, a man using a personal charm and magic to take possession of his listeners. Philosophy in Bergson's hands became something experienced, and students left his room as if in a dream.4 In 1888 Bergson taught briefly at the Collège Rollin and in 1889 received an appointment at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV. As Albert Thibaudet, a former student of Bergson, pointed out more than fifty years ago, the "Republic of Professors" were essentially the professors of philosophy, the "elite of the University clergy." The Bergsons and the Lévy-Bruhls were the "eternal Socrates" of a unique system which boasted a true philosophical program of studies on the lycée level. Because a list of their students read like a roll-call of the future cultural and political elites of France, the lycée professors had just as

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much influence on their eras as their colleagues at the Sorbonne. According to Thibaudet it was here, at one of the leading lycées in Paris and not at the Collège de France that Bergson first found his public and his disciples. 5 Bergson's former students confirm this. Julien Luchaire, a future Inspector of Public Instruction, was struck by the number of disciples Bergson made at Henn IV.6 He probably had in mind Henri Delacroix, who would become a Sorbonne professor, as would the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and also the future academicians André Chaumeix and Mario Roques, Emile Lubac and Désiré Roustan who would write books on psychology directly inspired by Bergson's ideas, and the writers Joseph Baruzi, Louis Aubert and Gaston Rageot.7 Rageot went a bit further than Luchaire and in a bit of hyperbole claimed that "we all become Bergsonians." At the baccalaureat, the license, and the aggregation, he wrote, "every dissertation was only a badly chosen piece of Bergson."8 All would have endorsed the report made by Inspector General Évellin who visited one of Bergson's lectures in 1889: This young man of scarcely twenty-nine years was incontestably the most distinguished of our provincial professors called to Paris last October. His lecture is a marvel of composition and dialectic. Facile and clear of word, sympathetic accent, thought sure of itself and having a penetrating finesse; this master has everything needed to seduce and gradually elevate to his level, a listener formed by the young elite.9 The majority of the graduates of the Ecole Normale were sent out to the lycées to teach, research and write. They were expected to avoid all involvements in regional or national politics. In this sense, Bergson was somewhat typical of the majority of the normalien professors. He quietly spent the years 1881 to 1898 gradually enhancing his reputation as a teacher and philosopher, producing two major works in the processTime and Free Will in 1889, and Matter and Memory in 1896. In 1898 Léon Ollé-Laprune died and Georges Perrot, the Director of the Ecole Normale, invited Bergson to return to his alma mater as maître de conférences. The appointment was ideal for the school, one critic observed, since Bergson, a "philosopher pure-bred," was one of the school's most distinguished and productive graduates, and because he would fit perfectly into the place where the "cult of the elegant word" reigned supreme.10 Bergson assumed his post at the Ecole Normale at a difficult moment in the school's history. The Dreyfus Affair was turning in favour of revision and the government was bringing the whole reform movement in higher education to a head. Bergson participated in neither movement, and yet his very silence and non-involvement in the important issues of the day became important in determining subsequent reactions to him when he reached the Collage de France.

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The faculty of the Ecole Normale generally ranged politically from democratic-republican to socialist. Monarchy, aristocracy and Catholicism could call on very little support in the school. Catholic and conservative academics like Gaston Boissier, Léon Ollé-Laprune and Ferdinand Brunetière, who were among the very few anti-Dreyfusard faculty, belonged to an ever diminishing minority. 11 The younger generation of Ecole Normale faculty, those born in the 1850s and 1860s, were without exception republicans. Professors like Charles Andler, Joseph Bedier, Gustave Lanson and Gabriel Monod, provided the Dreyfusard cause with a good deal of its leadership. The outstanding exception was Bergson, one of the few normaliens not to fall under the spell of Lucien Herr, the legendary socialist librarian. Nevertheless, Bergson did have a view of the scandal, albeit a private one. The aspect of the Dreyfus Affair which disturbed him the most was the injuries inflicted on the French nation itself. Because of it, Bergson never counted himself an ardent Dreyfusard but rather blamed both sides for the harm being done to national unity.12 His outwardly neutral attitude was typical of Bergson, who remained detached from all political and social developments within and outside France, at least until the First World War. The other thing which put Bergson somewhat out of step with many of his colleagues was the fact that he did not share their anti-clericalism which had become more vocal during the Affair. It is difficult to imagine Bergson receiving the same adulation from conservative Catholics in later years if he had been an outspoken anti-clerical, socialist and Dreyfusard in the 1890s. At any rate, the fact that he did not hold popular opinions within the Ecole Normale seems to have been completely ignored by his colleagues. The other issue which more directly challenged the Ecole Normale was the reform movement in higher education which had been gathering momentum since 1871. The government brought this movement to a head by creating a Commission of Inquiry, under the presidency of Alexandre Ribot, to examine the problems of education in France. The Ribot Commission, as it came to be called, held public hearings for three months in the spring of 1899, at which time it received almost 200 depositions from people in education and from a few ''personalities." The report it subsequently submitted formed the basis of the Reform of 1902.13 Arguments before the Commission about the curriculum brought into public view the battles between the so-called Ancients and Moderns which had been brewing for a generation. The criticisms of the latter were directed at the elitist nature of classical education and especially at the failure of culture génerale to impart a sense of reality to students.14 In turning to educational reform the

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majority of academics along with other liberal and left republican politicians and intellectuals made a conscious effort to replace the void they felt had been left by the rejection of Catholicism with a secular ethic befitting a modern democracy. Classical education, according to Gustave Lanson, was a pre-democratic, aristocratic instruction imposed on a democratic society. One could make instruction more democratic by making it more practical. French was no longer the universal language, he insisted, and Frenchmen should stop living in a world of dreams. Instead, they should turn their attention to meeting the needs of students who seek careers in industry and commerce. 15 The Ancients countered by arguing that classical studies were part of the national patrimony, that they were instrumental in preparing a governing elite, and that they produced superior individuals and good citizens. It was only natural that the Ecole Normale, which trained so many of the professional elite of modern France (including many leading Moderns) would particularly offend the reformers. They saw it as an undemocratic institution of special privilege devoted to an outmoded and very narrow classical ideal. Its heavily cloistered atmosphere recalled too much of the Old Regime and it encouraged an elite whose function could easily be absorbed (and eventually would be) by graduates of the Sorbonne. The Ecole Normale was therefore under great stress until its reorganization in 1904. Bergson was one of the few academics who did not appear before the Ribot Commission in 1899. Nor did he speak out in 1904 when the Ecole Normale was merged with the Sorbonne. Nevertheless, Bergson's views on the subject of a classical education had been a matter of public record since 1895. At that time he had come out strongly for a classical education mixing it with an attack on the folly of taking the "science" of sociology seriously.16 Both points would do much ten years later to endear him to many of the conservative critics who were attacking the "New Sorbonne." In the 1890s the only credentials Bergson was establishing were those of an original philosopher, and the only discussions and debates he was participating in were those in his classroom and in his books. As we have seen, that decade brought the first appreciation of Bergson's philosophy and its ground-breaking importance. Dominique Parodi, a philosopher himself, a fellow normalien (class of 1890) and a future Inspector General of Education (1918) pointed out in concluding a review of Bergson's essay on the comic that his thought has "a very great influence on contemporary speculation and is regarded very highly by whoever interests himself in philosophy."17 This point was echoed by Théodore Steeg, a future Minister of Education, who was moved to comment on Bergson's "brilliant and rapid career," a career forged by highly original books and a popular lecturing style. Those books, he wrote, exercised a considerable

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influence on contemporary philosophy." 18 Furthermore, Bergson was seen becoming "a master of tomorrow,"19 and furnishing the transition from "the philosophy of yesterday," to "the philosophy of today.''20 These reactions, in addition to the reviews of Bergson's books in the 1890s, were important because they indicate that long before the popular vogue for Bergson began, he had ''arrived." This recognition had first been formally registered with his appointment to the Ecole Normale, then again in 1900, when he was invited to teach at the Collège de France. One year later he was chosen to fill the vacant seat of Félix Ravaisson at the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.21 When Bergson began teaching at the Collège de France the report of the Ribot Commission was being debated. Two years later it was transformed into the Reform of 1902, in which the classics were de-emphasized in the curriculum of higher education. Between 1898 and 1904 the reformers carried on a successful and unimpeded movement for educational change. Aided by their successes in the Dreyfus Affair, they were self-confident, well-coordinated, and more than ever identified themselves with the Republic. They had, said an Academician, "the durable title to speak in the name of French thought and by virtue of this right, lecture our government."22 If this success did not settle into a protracted self-satisfaction it was because there was always a large body of changing opinion to contend with and at times carefully monitored; these attitudes belonged to the youth of the Sorbonne, the Grandes Ecoles and the lycées of Paris, theirs being an influence as important as it was unpredictable. And if their allegiances were shifting in this period it was because they were a generation of youth in ferment. Students between 1890 and 1905 were aware of their dissatisfactions and frustrations but they had as yet not been provided with a stimulating set of options. If rebellion and commitment had not yet dramatized the clash between generations before 1900 it may have been because the Dreyfus Affair had called both old and young intellectuals to examine their principles in light of the relationship between the individual and his society. The controversy had siphoned off enough discontent and positively committed the men of the 1890s to a set of republican ideals. And yet with the ideological clash over, that society which had remained relatively unchanged beneath the swirl of the Affair and which in so many ways had been assaulted by the Dreyfus generation still remained what it had been for decades: bourgeois and materialistic, prosperous and static, and optimistically believing in a future governed by scientific laws. Whether it was the wreckage of the Dreyfus Affair or the exasperation with the old inertia of society or whether it followed from the perpetual crisis situation in foreign affairs France after 1900, while it seemed as stable as it had been in the decade of the 1880s, was nevertheless not as sure of itself or of its stability.23

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It was probably this uncertainty and confusion among the youth of France which prompted the many questionnaires on their state later in the decade. 24 And perhaps because of this confusion, French youth increasingly listened to the mounting attack upon the previous century, listened to the call for new heroisms and new elites, and listened to the new solutions provided by Henri Bergson and others to the problems of God and spirit, science and evolution, state and society. Perhaps it was the nationalist revival in France which more than anything else transformed the political atmosphere in Paris, and which helped to wean many university students away from the generation of Dreyfusard faculty. During the battles of the 1890s the University seemed very modern while the classics appeared to be so "old fogeyish." Faculty struggles seemed to be the right ones. Until 1905, public school teachers, the so-called "Army of the Republic," seldom referred to la patrie or to Alsace-Lorraine. It was also common knowledge that the Internationale was sung (unopposed) in the lobbies of the Ecole Normale.25 Furthermore, teachers at all levels of the system made it a practise to avow their internationalism publiclythe battle for modern languages being one aspect of itand their humanitarianism. After 1905 it was these ideas that became old-fashioned in students' eyes and when the word Alsace-Lorraine was used in the School of Political Science or in the Law School, it evoked applause, while praise of things German produced hisses and catcalls.26 This was obviously a manifestation of the new nationalism as was the waning prestige of foreign languages and the comeback staged by classical French literature. The political milieu in France had changed radically and youth along with it. Paul Hyacinthe-Loyson said of them that ''they have for their major premise, instinct, for their minor premise, intuition, and for conclusion, a blow of the fist."27 The man who now assumed his duties at one of Europe's most prestigious universities, and who was on the eve of becoming an international celebrity, was for many an unlikely prospect to lead a movement in ideas. Jacques Chevalier remembered him as a "méditatif," living quietly at the Villa Montmorency in Paris, cultivating his bullfinch roses and spoiling his two cats, all the while breathing something like "the atmosphere of eternity."28 The picture seems to fit a retiring academic who shuns publicity, avoids participating in the dramatic events of the day, and who would never think of cultivating a following. And yet Bergson had few peers in exciting audiences and in creating disciples. Writing from the same vantage point as Chevalier, Giovanni Papini remembered a different Bergson whom he met at the Second International Congress of Philosophy in 1904. Papini recalled a man who possessed "a very strong, internal life," one who was "cunning as a pioneer and hardy as a conqueror." Papini recognized in Bergson "the prophet of a metaphysical revolution."29

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Besides Bergson there were other and equally appealing lecturers in the university community who might have seemed likelier candidates for celebrity and controversy. The most popular among them and therefore Bergson's potential competition were Ferdinand Brunetière, Abbé Alfred Loisy, and Emile Durkheim. Julien Luchaire called Brunetière, "the greatest university orator that I have ever heard and perhaps the greatest in all the genres of eloquence." 30 Brunetière lectured brilliantly and passionately, his class consistently filling the great amphitheatre at the Sorbonne. Edouard Herriot called him a "revelation," a man "who hoped to become the Cuvier or the Darwin or the Haekel of literary history.''31 His earlier attack on the ''bankruptcy of science" served as something of a standard for the late nineteenth century revolt against scientism and positivism. But unlike Bergson he substituted little of intellectual value in its place, and it is therefore hard to see how he could have become the "prophet of a metaphysical revolution" that Bergson did. Furthermore, Brunetière was quite reactionary in his politics and during the Dreyfus Affair heavily committed himself to the anti-Dreyfusard camp, becoming one of the few academic members in the League of the French Fatherland. This served to tarnish his reputation and reduce his following. Brunetière died in 1906 just as Bergson's popularity was about to soar. Abbé Loisy was one of the pioneering figures in the Catholic modernist movement in France. His book, L'Évangile et l'église, appeared in 1902 and created a storm of controversy. A year later the Holy Office condemned five of his books. This only served to make his books runaway bestsellers, which often sold for double and treble their original price. It also made him a great celebrity in Paris which he was able to exploit from his position as Professor in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. His lecture room at the Sorbonne was crowded with intellectuals when he spoke. Alphonse Aulard attended one of his lectures and claimed that Loisy held his audience spellbound.32 And yet Loisy's attempts at biblical exegesis were hardly able to appeal to more than a narrow audience. Furthermore, Loisy proved to be a reluctant prophet. He left his post at the Sorbonne saying only that "he didn't want to disturb the consciences of Catholics and that he needed the repose and silence after all the noise."33 Neither Brunetière nor Loisy ever really had a chance of competing with Bergson for the allegiance of students. If Bergson had any real competition in that decade before the First War, it came from Emile Durkheim, the Professor of the Science of Education and Sociology at the Sorbonne. Derisively called by his critics, the "imperial regent" of the Sorbonne, Durkheim gave to his friends and enemies alike the impression that he was the prophet of a newly born religion. Even as a student, "he felt himself called to something other than mere teaching: he must teach a doctrine, have disciples

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and not just students, play a role in the social reconstruction of a France wounded in defeat." 34 Durkheim as a teacher was a prophet armed. His lectures were rallying points for supporters of Dreyfus, and it was known that he had been instrumental in persuading Jaurès to change his mind about the Affair. His closest friends were militant socialists, and were involved with Jaurès in the founding of L'Humanité. The Durkheimians were a very cohesive group who, during the turbulent years between the Affair and the First World War, often matched the belligerency of their enemies. From 1886 to his installment at the Sorbonne in 1902, Durkheim and other sociologists were sponsored by a succession of Ministers of Education. In each case they had been attracted by Durkheim's Republicanism, but more important, by his desire to fill the void of Catholic orthodoxy with a secular morality based on science.35 Durkheim was by far the strongest authoritarian figure in the University with the largest and most dedicated entourage. Before working with Durkheim and becoming a candidate in sociology one had to undergo a strict examination in which one was tested for the proper scientific orthodoxy by the master himself. To his detractors this must have represented the prevalent doctrinal intolerance which stifled individual expression and new ideas and exposed Durkheim to the charge of constructing an "occult dictatorship."36 Etienne Gilson, no less a critic of the Sorbonne than his contemporaries, nevertheless cautioned us to remember that the charges were overdone, that Durkheim and his colleagues "may well have told us how, in their opinion, we should think, but not one of them ever presumed to tell us what we should think."37 Bergson and Durkheim became the two most popular academics of the day in France, and were regarded by their contemporaries as opposite poles in the university community. The intrinsic rivalry between them probably went back to their student days at the Ecole Normale. Whereas Bergson represented the finest example of the normalien tradition, Durkheim did not. While Durkheim always retained a certain loyalty to the Ecole Normale, he nevertheless disdained its literary preoccupations and its emphasis on culture générale. Unlike Bergson, Durkheim had a difficult time with Latin and literature, and regarded much of the school's course material as a waste of time. When he graduated he ranked only one from the bottom of his class.38 Durkheim, then and later, abhorred the littérateurs in philosophy so characteristic of the normalien tradition. He felt that they were intellectuals who carefully avoided any exactitude or scientific analysis in their work and who opted instead for the novel thing that is well said. There was no need for these people to make appeals to reason, but rather, to satisfy the popular literary and sensational tastes of a wider audience. From the early 1890s Durkheim struck out at what he called the "dillettante philosopher," the man who was only concerned with erecting his own individual system of thought, and who forgets that he is working in a collective enterprise with other

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philosophers. According to Durkheim, dilettantism was a superficial, intellectual anarchy which could only lead to sterility in thought. 39 That dilettantism in philosophy was a growing danger was indicated, he felt, by the converts being made among the younger students of the subject: "If we compare theses subjects passed before the Faculty of Paris in recent years, we will find it impossible to discern in them a common tendency. Each philosopher works apart, as if he were alone in the world and as if philosophy were an art."40 Between Bergson and Durkheim there was a very basic intellectual animosity. At the center of it was Durkheim's unqualified rationalism. There was nothing in reality, Durkheim insisted, that one was justified in considering beyond the scope of human reason. Secondly, mysticism to Durkheim was a sin against intelligence. He aptly pointed out that people from time to time amuse themselves by destroying their eyes so that they may be able to see better.41 For the most part, and much to Durkheim's credit, he ignored Bergson and refrained from attacking him personally despite the fact that some of his most vicious critics, like Charles Péguy and Henri Massis, were either Bergsonian disciples or sympathizers. And yet like other Sorbonne academics, he was uneasy with the whole commotion caused by Bergson's ideas. He was especially bothered by what appeared to him to be the insidious influence that Bergsonism, and ideas like it, had on the intellectual youth of France. This became clear in a series of lectues he gave on pragmatism at the Sorbonne in late 1913 and early 1914. At a moment when Bergson was a candidate for the French Academy, Durkheim lashed out at the Bergsonian attack on logical thought. Bergson seemed to be the dilettante philosopher par excellence, the man who could cavalierly say anything he wanted to about matter and spirit, freedom and determinism, but who never had to "prove" anything through the empirical use of evidence.42 There was more here than the intrinsic rivalry between popular academics holding widely divergent views about intellectualism, religion, and the pretensions of sociology. The difference between the two men, and the attacks upon them made by their disciples represented in microcosm the clash of Bergsonism with the educational establishment. There was a clear gulf separating the Sorbonne from its rival, the Collège de France. The Collége de France seemed more spontaneous and innovative (at least where philosophy was concerned). The Sorbonne faculty, particularly the Durkheimians, viewed the Collège de France as the source of much of the hostility towards rational philosophy, modern languages, and sociology. Céléstin Bouglé, for example, felt that if the Sorbonne had a dominant tendency "it was rationalism," and that if anything threatened this spirit, "it was the Bergsonian

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intuition emanating from the Collège de France." 43 Moreover, the staunchest enemies of sociology and pedagogy were housed there. For example, Jean Izoulet, Professor of Social Philosophy at the Collège de France, once lashed out at Durkheim's brand of sociology in a famous attack: "The requirement that M. Durkheim's sociology be taught in 200 Normal Schools in France is the gravest national peril which our country has known for some time."44 It was also common knowledge that Pierre Janet, Professor of Experimental and Comparative Psychology at the Collège de France, once assured Durkheim that the study of sociology was certain to lead one to insanity.45 The desire of students to jettison the conventional fetters of nineteenth-century thought sometimes took the shape of a physical flight from the symbols of that system. For many of the students of the early 1900s, to go from the Sorbonne to the public lectures at the Collège de France of Henri Bergson was to shed one century for another. At the Sorbonne many students and intellectuals thought they could see the inner citadel of the system, the place where the sovereignty of reason and the cult of science and progress had been carried to an extreme; the place where the faculty normally functioned like a secular priesthood maintaining the prevailing dogmatism. To be sure, the Sorbonne stimulated some students but it also frustrated many others producing a whole chorus of students with a sometimes genuine, sometimes irrational sense of grievance, and students who would express their dissatisfaction by crossing the street to the Collage de France after 1900, and by openly attacking the Sorbonne after 1906. The faculty of the Sorbonne represented what one historian has called the "prevailing dogmatism"the sovereignty of secular rationalism, the absolute value of science, and the admiration for German methods.46 If there seemed to be a common doctrine binding the Sorbonne faculty it was probably, as Etienne Gilson has written, "A radical defiance of all that which is socially conceived as a constraint from which to be liberated."47 Anxious young people were simply being told that "metaphysics was dead,''48 that all hopes of what Raissa Maritain called "unsuspected discoveries'' were being deliberately frustrated by the very men who were supposed to be a source of inspiration for them.49 These were men, in fact, who as professional philosophers "had lost all hope in philosophy."50 In a famous attack against the Sorbonne, Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde charged that philosophy, once the queen of the humanities at the Sorbonne, was now in the hands of men who were anti-philosophicalEmile Durkheim who hated the subject, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl who studied savages, George Dumas who examined lunatics, and Victor Delbos who also taught psychology but who began each course by explaining cynically why he would never do psychology.51 These charges were given a certain thrust when it was learned that Ernest Lavisse, just as much a symbol of the Sorbonne as Durkheim, had addressed a group of incoming normaliens with the words: "You are now

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leaving the hands of the distinguished humanists, whose lessons you must now forget in order to become scientists." 52 Once again Durkheim's role was critical. He was cast by his enemies as the high priest of rationalist orthodoxy, a figure who incarnated the and intellectualism of the Sorbonne. Many students in these years before the war were consciously examining their spiritual roots and seeking a new set of stimuli with which to revitalize their Catholic faith in an age grown too materialistic. They were not encouraged but rather repelled by Durkheim's prescriptions. When they sought new spiritual certainties, Durkheim told them that they were obsolete.53 When they begged for clarification of the concept of religion, Durkheim assured them that religion was merely a way of individually feeling the force that the group distributes to its members that the belief in God was actually "a naive homage to the great social being."54 This would help to account for the picture Gilson drew of himself and his contemporaries as so many friends of metaphysics "wandering in the desert of scientism."55 Many of these people formed the vanguard of the Catholic revival before 1914 and shared with Henri Massis the conviction that this situation was more than a pedagogical crisis over programs and methods, that it was at bottom a moral crisis.56 The Sorbonne Professor in those years never showed any appreciation of this. Consequently, the charges that "they had carried scientific dogmatism, positivism and mechanism too far" and that "their materialism, was arrogant and excessive'' were only recognized and admitted by those involved after 1914:57 "formulas were so absolute and tyrannical of claim that the critique of intellectualism professed by M. Bergson, was, for many young spirits, a kind of liberation."58 This insight was absent before 1914 and because it was few on the Sorbonne faculty could have diagnosed the ailment let alone admit that there was one. The students would have to look elsewhere: ''We had just made an accounting of an that our professors had given us as provision for life's journey . . . and we saw that what we held in our hands was but death and dust."59 The exasperation with the Sorbonne turned to open attack in 1906 with the published criticism of Charles Péguy, an ardent Dreyfusard, and perhaps the best representative of the Dreyfusard generation in transition. He was generally viewed by the participants in the attack against the Sorbonne as their precursor.60 The attack also coincided with the sudden growth of Bergsonian ideas and the personal popularity of their author. This was a critical development for understanding the controversial figure Bergson became. Péguy's attack was directed basically at the Sorbonne and its faculty. His quarrel was with what he called the "modern intellectual party," the democratic elite led by the Lavisses and Durkheims, who for a generation or more had been deliberately undermining God, Army and country through their extension of

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secular education and their suppression of classical and Christian learning. On the ruins of the réel country (pays réel) they were constructing a secular metaphysic based upon the worship of absolute, omnipotent man. 61 This intellectual elite was dangerous because in tyrannically shaping the modern secular state those in intellectual positions wished to introduce a "government of minds." Conducting themselves like a prefectoral corps, seeking to rule under the name of pedagogy and sociology, they regimented the young in Prussian fashion literally exercising a "mental, intellectual, moral and civic tyranny."62 The intellectual party had become the secular priesthood of a new state cult. Péguy's condemnation of the Sorbonne as the pillar of a corrupt and pernicious system and his personal attack on the democratic elite as enemies of the people, became the property of the anti-democratic and conservative elements in France which would hereafter regard his attack as one of the most inspirational beacons of the period. It was Péguy's attack which ushered in the crisis of the New Sorbonne. Attacks were soon forthcoming from people who had, in some cases, originally been blooded in the Dreyfus Affair. Typical of this group were Charles Maurras, Pierre Lasserre and Gilbert Maire of the Action Française, who now found another battlefield upon which to attack the Republic. Less radical than this group, but no less critical, were students like Pierre Leguay, the Maritains, and especially Henri Massis, who along with Gabriel Tarde's son, Alfred, penned the period's most massive and widely discussed attack upon the Sorbonne.63 Mounting criticism was also heard from most of the forty Academicians who felt that it was time for traditional French culture to stage a comeback, and finally from elements of the French press which delightedly aired the entire struggle and kept the public informed. In other words, as a recent historian had indicated, there were four types of critics of the New Sorbonne, as it was consistently called until the war. One type was Catholic and like Péguy condemned the pernicious growth of secularism as the enemy of Christian values. A second type was intensely antisocialist and viewed most of the faculty as being too far to the left. A third type was what the Sorbonne faculty called littératures, people who were alarmed at the spread of the scientific spirit into the traditional areas of the humanities. The fourth group was drawn from the right-wing Action Française which saw in the Sorbonne the reflection of alien cultural values and the chance to strike a blow against the Republic.64 Bergsonian disciples and sympathizers were prominent in all groups, including the Action Française. The most vehement critics of the Sorbonne could be found on the far right. Charles Maurras, the most influential figure on the French right in his day, was also the most vitriolic in his personal attack on the University faculty: . . . falsification of history, comedy of criticism and veritable carnival of philosophy, given by the Criosets, the Monods, the

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Reinachs, the Aulards, the Lévy-Bruhls and the Seignobos . . . I do not despair of once again seeing the eminently just, moral and reasonable spectacle that the novelist Camille has formerly given to Falisques: these masters who betray, we will lay them all bare, we will bind their hands strongly behind them, then we will deliver them a whipping to avenge the youth that they tried to ruin. 65 The newspaper of the Action Française struck out relentlessly at what it called "The Dreyfusard University against patriotism" and "the professors of desertion." At the same time, Pierre Lasserre, the literary critic of the Action Française, complained about the Jewish and, above all, the Protestant element in the University. The "Jewish oligarchy," he wrote, has made itself master of sociology; the ''Protestant oligarchy'' has mastered history and philosophy; together these "imbecilic savages" have produced nothing less than a "moral scandal."66 While it was true that the Action Française would furnish Bergson with his most outspoken opposition when he was a candidate for the French Academy, it was also true that at least one member of the organization, Gilbert Maire, was a Bergsonian. He was a highly visible critic of the Sorbonne and no less vicious in his attack than Lasseffe or Maurras.67 Maire called the attack against the Sorbonne "the insurrection of the best minds of our time against the pretensions, the barbarism, the Sorbonnic despotism" of the University.68 Like most of the critics of the Sorbonne, Maire singled out certain faculty members for personal abuse. The right especially felt that the leading professors had used the Affair to ascend to their present positions. Maire accused Céléstin Bouglé, for example, of being an unprincipled arriviste, the title of whose biography could read, "From Montpellier to Paris via Dreyfus."69 But worse than being intellectually dishonest, according to Maire, Dreyfusards like Seignobos, and Lavisse, Georges Perrot, Charles Andler and Gustave Monodall Protestantswere men of "Huguenot prejudices" and therefore not French. Rather than being an exception at the Sorbonne, they had become the rule, and part of a growing elite of non-Catholics who were natural "enemies of France" and "against la patrie."70 Furthermore, either forgetting or totally disregarding the fact that Bergson was Jewish, Maire accused Jewish professors like Durkheim, Frédéric Rauh and Gustave Bloch of "a lack of aptitude" to serve France.71 Maire maintained that sociology in the hands of Durkheim, its "grand priest," was a Jewish science, a theory of the subordination of the individual to society, or, as he put it, a way in which "to speak Hebrew to the 'social being.'"72 Another landmark attack on the Sorbonne came from the future academician, Henri Massis, and from Alfred de Tarde. Writing under the pseudonym of Agathon, they authored the period's most thorough and revealing

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critique of the Sorbonne's deficiencies. Agathon made several basic criticisms of university education: first, that it overemphasized the scientific method at the expense of the humanities; second, that it slavishly followed German models of eruditiona criticism which no doubt reflected the nationalistic bias of the authors; and third, because it wished to place itself in the modern current, and because of the democratic need to elevate the mediocre and eliminate the individual, it systematically denigrated general culture. Singling out teachers like Gustave Lanson and Charles Seignobos for special scorn, Agathon charged that students in their classes were receiving merely bibliographies and instructions in methodology. They were being provided with little of cultural value. 73 From the very beginning of the crisis of the Sorbonne, Bergson had been held up as an example of everything the Sorbonne lacked. For Charles Péguy, an ardent Dreyfusard and one of the chief Bergsonians in France, the Sorbonne represented intellectualism, the antithesis of truth. But through the ministry of "a great philosopher," Henri Bergson, "we have taken a certain view of reality, a direct view, seized immediately." Bergsonian intuition seemed to be the antidote for the mechanistic tyranny of the Sorbonne which stifled true thought.74 Similarly, Pierre Leguay, who was a student at the Sorbonne, felt that only Bergson, "the greatest and most original of contemporary philosophers," could restore metaphysicsso abused at the Sorbonneto its rightful place. Bergson answered to the needs of his time, he wrote, "by teaching in the face of the establishment."75 The greatest champions of Bergson, vis-à-vis the Sorbonne, were Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde. Applying a very Manichaen definition to the academic struggles of the day, they drew a distinction that was prevalent during the period. The real struggle, they wrote, was between the esprit de géométrie, represented by the Sorbonne, and the esprit de finesse, the true spirit of French culture, ably represented by Henri Bergson at the Collège de France.76 For Agathon, the esprit de géométrie was identified with secular rationalism, Cartesianism and positivism; it shunned general culture and emphasized scientific methods. The esprit de finesse, on the other hand, emphasized the spontaneous, the intuitional and metaphysical, and was responsible for all that was best in classical culture. Bergsonian philosophy was an integral part of the latter tradition emphasizing as it did an intuitional approach to philosophical problems. Bergson was an acknowledged enemy of sociology and an ardent defender of the humanities. Through his efforts, Agathon pointed out, he had created a philosophical renaissance. Knowing this, Agathon charged, the Sorbonne had contrived to keep Bergson from teaching there.77 Some of the most prestigious opposition to the Sorbonne came from the French Academy where the controversy came to be defined as a "crise de

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français." The Academicians called for the restoration of the old classical curriculum because it was indispensable for the writing of good French. In 1911, when the controversy reached its peak, members of the French Academy created the League for French Culture under the presidency of Jean Richepin. The League's membership was basically conservative and included thirty-six out of forty Academicians and three-fourths of the Institute as well as Péguy, Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, Jules Lemaître and Maurice Barrès. It also included Henri Bergson. 78 The League repeatedly made the point that the Sorbonne, in applying the Reform of 1902, had suppressed general culture and perverted the exercise of French composition. The decadence of taste, composition and style in writing the language was due not only to the "barbaric" flight from Latin but also to the "pseudo-scientific catechism" of the professors who rather than have the students write forced them instead to passively "amass, class, and accumulate beautiful notes and beautiful cards."79 Le Temps added its voice to the growing chorus of criticism by accusing the Sorbonne faculty of constituting an authoritarian and intransigent "coterie," which in dismissing student complaints as a "noisy fad," ran the risk of definitively discouraging them. The young, it insisted, "want to think, reflect, feel. They have ideas, feelings and they are methodically condemned to rummage amid old papers."80 In other words, the Sorbonne, according to its critics, was simply not doing its job. It had failed to provide to its students "real" philosophy, metaphysics, or anything of a spiritual nature. It was Henri Bergson who did provide students with what was missing at the Sorbonne; his ideas could now be used against what so many students and intellectuals liked to call, "the official doctrine of the University.'' As a new approach to philosophical problems, Bergsonian philosophy was advanced by students as a substitute for the static intellectualism they received from their teachers at the Sorbonne. The students could not use that philosophy to refute the ideas of their teachers but by reaching out for Bergson's ideas as an answer for so many of their problems they were able to ignore the doctrinal rigidities of their masters.81 With those ideas Bergson could open new, mysterious vistas for the willing initiates who crowded his lecture hall hoping to be shown new discoveries, fresh ways of thinking, and original approaches to reality. The young people felt, wrote Raissa Maritain, that Bergson had restored metaphysics to its proper place, and he was able to assure them that they would be able to attain the Absolute and ''know what is."82 With Bergson, a renaissance in metaphysics now seemed possible, especially to the students for whom "the invincible idea of truth" had been frustrated at the Sorbonne.83 With Bergson, mystic intuition had staged a comeback and had stirred in the hearts of many who now flocked to hear him "the hope that a revelation would be given."84 With Bergson, freedom and idealism had found their vindication. And this renaissance was not occurring at the Sorbonne but at

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the Collège de France, in sessions which evoked in Bergson's audience "the feeling of inner expansion." 85 In penetrating ever deeper into the core of being, Bergson significantly "conferred youth on whatever he touched." According to Etienne Gilson, ''Bergson did just that. He did it under our very eyes, in our presence, in such a simple way that we were surprised not to be able to do it ourselves, introducing us to a new world as he himself was discovering it step by step."86 Raissa Maritain said that the philosophy of Henri Bergson signified to many people the passing away of winter and the coming of spring.87 Situated just across the Rue Saint-Jacques from the Sorbonne but separated from it by "a mountain of prejudice and distrust" was the Collège de France. Here, where lectures were open to the public, Bergson lectured almost constantly between 1900 and 1914.88 He would lecture twice a week: on Fridays at 5:00 p.m., his most frequented course, where in accordance with college rules he would treat a new subject each year; and on Saturdays at 4:00 p.m., a course he devoted to an explanation of texts.89 The Friday course was both attractive to the public and personally important to Bergson because in it he had the chance to articulate, to clarify, and to publicly transmit and test the ideas contained in his books to a live audience. Consequently his course was a medium for his ideas, his books almost texts for those who sought a deeper understanding of what Bergson was saying in lecture. For example, between 1901 and 1904, Bergson delved more deeply into the problems covered in Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory as he lectured on the subjects of time and memory. In 1904 he altered the process slightly by lecturing on a subject (i.e., the evolution of the problem of freedom) related to his future book, Creative Evolution.90 He would continue to elaborate on the themes of that book until the war. To the Collège de France now came the first groups of students and intellectuals. Perhaps the initial impetus for this movement was provided by that group of students who had sampled Bergson first hand before 1900, either through his books or through his lectures at the Lycée Henri IV and Ecole Normale. It might have been this group which Théodule Ribot, Janet's predecessor at the Collège de France, had in mind in 1899 when he remarked that Bergson already counted "many enthusiastic disciples among the young."91 Not so anonymous was Charles Péguy, for whom "philosophy began with Henri Bergson,"92 an attitude forged when Péguy discovered Bergson at the Ecole Normale. Péguy was at least one man who introduced his many friends to the blessings of Bergson's lectures and philosophy. His discovery now became theirs as well. In a city like Paris where most of the leading intellectuals knew each other, a word from several of their own was enough to provoke a curiosity to investigate things together. One of these groups clustered around the young Jacques and Raissa Maritain, the pair encouraged originally by Péguy, and who in turn encouraged Ernest Psichari and Henri Massis.93 As a group, they would become a vital part

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of the Catholic revival later in the decade. Another group gathered around Péguy directly, using the offices of Péguy's journal, the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, as a depot in which to gather before striking out to the Collège de France. This group consisted of Daniel Halévy and Julien Benda and the syndicalists Georges Sorel and Edouard Berth. Once the people of both groups allowed their own ideas time to mature, once they strengthened their confidence in Bergsonian philosophy or, as the case often was, allowed their dissatisfactions to harden and cast off the spell of Bergson, they would form the body of the reaction to Henri Bergson. But to the lectures also came many kinds of individuals, men and women among them who would soon carve out reputations of their own: the future art critic Henri Focillon and the poetess Anna de Noailles, the future existential philosophers Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel, and publicists like Jérôme and Jean Tharaud. 94 Sitting amidst this intellectual elite were students from the Sorbonne, and clergymen. After the publication of Creative Evolution in 1907 society women made their appearance. To the "odors of the crowd"95 lampooned by Paris journalists were now added what serious students called "the blasphemous scents" of fashionable women.96 By 1910 Bergson's room at the Collège de France, Amphitheatre VIII, had become one of the "elegant places" in Paris. Attracted by the prestige and notoriety of what had already become one of France's famous names, rather than by any profundity of ideas, it became very fashionable to go to Bergson's lectures. Servants would be dispatched ahead to occupy seats for their mistresses, who would arrive later, parking their carriages in a long line before the doors of the Rue Saint-Jacques and the Rue des Ecoles. It was these ''Five o'clock Bergsonians"97 or "snobinettes'' as they were often called, who made up the popular reception of Bergson, representing as they did a wider non-academic public. Because of them, jostling and crowding, fainting women and fighting over seats became commonplace after 1910. The room had 375 seats but the audience, some of whom actually crawled through the windows, usually numbered roughly 700. The suggestion was once made to transfer the lectures to the larger hall at the Sorbonne but the college's assembly voted against it. Because the public filled the room consistently it became increasingly difficult for students to obtain seats. By 1914, angry students would present a petition to the school administration protesting the crowding and getting one section of the room reserved for themselves. There was also a rowdy element which indulged itself before Bergson arrived at five o'clock. Flooding in two hours early to make certain they got seats, the crowd was forced to listen to the lectures of Bergson's predecessor in the room, Professor Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, the political economist, who lectured at 3:15 p.m. Gilbert Maire reported the following scene, which was all too typical: Leroy-Beaulieu: "Today, gentlemen, I will only treat briefly . . ." Audience: "Bravo! Bravo!" (Cries from everywhere)

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Leroy-Beaulieu: "The classic doctrine of credit of which it is useless to insist . . ." Audience: "Don't insist! Don't insist!" Leroy-Beaulieu: "Perhaps it would be useful to clarify certain ideas (shaking with indignation) still obscure." Audience: "Useless. Useless" At the end of the lecture he recieved what Maire called a "cruel ovation." 98 That rowdyism disappeared the moment Bergson made his appearance at five o'clock sharp. A hush would fall over the room as Bergson quietly approached from the back of the amphitheatre and sat down behind his desk. Then, at once absorbed in his subject, Bergson would elaborate on the main themes of his philosophy with a perfection of delivery which was nothing less than spellbinding and which completely involved his audience in the intellectual experience. Here is how Etienne Gilson described the scene: Under a broad bare forehead, above the aquiline nose of his race and a tightly compressed mouth, his limpid eyes were ceaselessly on the alert, concentrated upon the inward vision that his words sought to communicate. Standing, always speaking without notes and in a language whose only function seemed to be that of effacing so that his thought alone would stand out, our teacher held us under the same spell that Socrates' listeners knew in olden days and that only the music of pure intellect can create.99 Bergson had the ability to inspire his audience for hours on end without firing them, without anyone thinking of taking notes, an audience which would "hold their finger tips together, high up before him, to show that they were clapping silentlysince applause at lectures was not the custom."100 The almost emotional involvement with his lectures is the key to understanding his classroom magic. A foreign visitor to his lectures was struck by the fact that his ideas insisted on "being lived," that his lectures were like "laic masses," his audience like so many ''worshippers":101 There is something distinctly religious about the atmosphere which pervades the Collège de France, Room VIII on Fridays between five and six P.M. . . . I shall never forget one evening, when, suddenly during a lecture, the electric light went off. Bergson, with perfect composure, pronounced the simple words, "Let us not bother ourselves with such contingencies," and went on with his lecture. Not a word, not an exclamation

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came from the throng packed almost to suffocation in the hall . . . It gave the impression of a multitude kneeling in prayer in the obscurity of a Church. 102 This triumph of technique, its originality, and the value it gave to image and metaphor had always been part of what made the Collège de France "the house of Bergson" but which exposed Bergson to the professional charge of being an "artist." The term artist meant his mastering "the means of expression at his disposal so thoroughly that he was able to present as valid something which, seen coldly and rationally, is invalid."103 Sorbonne professors had been uneasy about this as early as 1897104 and later with Frédéric Rauh ("this is a philosophy of art'')105 and Paul-Louis Couchoud, who recognized the danger that such a gift could not guarantee immortality for one's ideas ("One is not effective through success but rather on the margins of it.'')106 The term "artist" was also used to describe Bergson "with a kind of half-sneer" at the Philosophical Congress of 1911, held at Bologna.107 This fusion of technique with idea which was anathema to the academic philosopher nevertheless captured Bergson's audience and many came away from the lectures as if they left a "concert-room after Mozart" or "moved in the same way that Debussy's music transformed them aesthetically and emotionally."108 To Gabriel Marcel, Bergson was "the Corot or Vermeer of the interior universe," and to Péguy he became "a spring-finder . . . the switch of the hazel tree turns in his fingers." The journal L'Opinion, which published many of the important attacks on the Sorbonne, had no doubt that Bergson was "one of the greatest literary artists of this time."109 For much of the society element the appeal of the lectures might have been held by the display Bergson provided: rather than being taught anything, they might have just been entertained. It was something that Bergson was sensitive about and not quite sure of: Almost everything that has been written about my course and my audience is absolutely false. Perhaps some society people do come, but in a small minority. Besides, there are some people of fashion who are very serious. I have known some; I know some now. Why should we be surprised? People like philosophy. Technicians, professors, doctors and former students who come to the lectures at the Collège de France are just as serious as the small group of students in philosophy.110 At the same time, when Academician Emile Faguet confessed that he did not understand Bergson's work at all, Bergson responded that "most of my listeners are in exactly the same position as good M. Faguetwithout his frankness."111

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With Bergson, philosophy for the first time became "news" and "news which was so pressing that it had to be got out before a certain edition." 112 T.E. Hulme expected that one day he would "see the newsboys running along the street with the flaring placards, 'Secret of the cosmos discovered: special interview.'"113 Hulme, who was a Bergson enthusiast, even felt that Bergson, anticipating the kind of varied audience he was increasingly going to attract, seemed to adjust his lectures accordingly in order to get the widest response.114 Therein lay Bergson's ability not only to create an audience but to hold and sustain it until he was ready for retirement, to be many things to as many people as possible. Bergson, a recent critic has alleged, ''was acutely aware of his Janus image: with care and deliberation he constructed it, completed it, and affirmed it."115 This Bergsonism was something he could fashion out of both his lectures and his written work in three major ways: first by constantly attacking the mechanistic conception of the world and thus tapping one of the chief grievances of his milieu; secondly, by substituting for it an intuitive, mystical approach to that reality that mechanism failed to grasp; and finally, by synthesizing everything he had said and written before 1907 and shrouding it in an optimistic, scientific cloak which he borrowed from that nineteenth century he attacked but was nevertheless a part. As we have seen, Bergson was in vogue with a certain section of high society and an inspiration for at least a small bloc of young and eager advanced students. On the basis of a very professional survey, The Binet Report, made just after the publication of Creative Evolution, we can better determine Bergson's remarkable influence on French youth in the period before 1914.116 This survey was made in 1907 by Alfred Binet, co-founder of L'Année psychologique and a pioneer in intelligence testing. It sought to inquire into the state of philosophy teaching in French lycées and colleges by circulating a questionnaire to 300 lycée and college teachers. One hundred and three responded and the results were published in L'Année psychologique in 1908. The Binet Report sought to illuminate many areas, among them the philosophical tendencies of teachers and the interests of students, the nature of the influence that teachers of philosophy exert on their students, the intellectual and moral outlook of the new student generation relative to the old, and the scholarly preparation of the faculty.117 The Binet Report showed that Bergson's ideas prevailed over all others among both faculty and students questioned.118 One school reported that "four professors here have adopted them without reserve and made them the soul of their teaching."119 Binet even felt that the hostility of many professors to Bergson's philosophy was also indicative of its success.120 Some teachers complained of the attraction Bergsonism exerted on the students and of the way in which it threw them into "a curious state of indecision."121 Others said that their students were "conquered by the charm of the style and the ingeniousness of the

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thoughtto the point of becoming disciples." 122 The students, they reported, generally scorned positive science: "For them, as for their master, philosophy begins where science leaves off."123 This attitude towards philosophy at the expense of the scientific spirit was shared by many of the teachers themselves. One-third confessed to a "philosophical opportunism" by inclining towards a spiritualist philosophy,124 pleading ''the rights of ignorance" when admitting a lack of scientific background.125 Several teachers went so far as to condemn formal logic.126 The Binet Report seemed to suggest that the anti-intellectual tendencies uncovered by the inquiry could lead to a dangerous disregard of the importance of scientific research. Because the warning came from Alfred Binet, and because Bergson had been so directly involved in the testimony, the Report could not be disregarded by him or by his educational system. Almost by association and certainly by implication, Bergson was being held responsible for certain anti-intellectual tendencies in French life. With the controversy over his ideas beginning to break over his head Bergson attempted to explain his position and defend himself immediately against the charge of anti-intellectualism. He became extremely sensitive to the antiintellectualist label and took great pains to dispel it. When Binet gave an oral, preliminary presentation of the Report to the French Society of Philosophy in late 1907, the usually calm Bergson became as emotional as he ever would in giving his most elaborate defense against the charge. Bergson claimed that he had never condemned science nor subordinated it to metaphysics. "Where, when, in what terms," he asked, "have I ever said anything of the sort? Can anyone show me, in all that I have written, one line, one word, which can be interpreted in this way?"127 Bergson insisted that in no modern scientific doctrine was positive science set higher than in his own. All of his researches, he said, had "no other object than to bring about a rapprochement between metaphysics and science and to consolidate each by means of the other without sacrificing anything in either, after having in the first instance clearly distinguished them one from another."128 The Sorbonne's reaction to the rising star of Bergson was an uneven one. Generally speaking, the institution was rather cool toward him. In view of what Bergson had written between 1889 and 1907, and in light of the attacks made by Bergsonians against the Sorbonne after 1906, this was to be expected. On one level there was criticism by individual professors not as impersonal nor as unqualified as Durkheim's had been but reflecting the ambivalence of the Sorbonne philosophers towards Bergson. Those who published critical articles on Bergson's work after 1890 were of two minds in forming their reactions to him; on the one hand, they responded positively to Bergson, the philosopher formed

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in the school of positive science, which he neither scorned nor sacrificed. This Bergson they could live with and like Léon Brunschvicg, who exerted a tremendous influence at the Sorbonne, they would always acknowledge his professional skills and acclaim his originality. 129 They would also, like Paul-Louis Couchoud, envision a brilliant future for Bergson ("the doctrine of M. Bergson . . . is the womb of a future metaphysic"),130 or at the extreme, express an intellectual sympathy with his intuitive approach to philosophical problems.131 Through the 1920s Sorbonne professors like Georges Fonsegrive and André Lalande would continue to credit Bergson with supplying philosophy with some of the needed remedies against the abuses of intellectualism.132 Because they could receive him in this way they accepted him as a worthy colleague in the field they shared. For example, one of the few forums in which they would confront Bergson directly and personally were meetings of the French Society of Philosophy. Here, in discussions over questions often posed by Bergson like "psycho-physical parallism and metaphysics," the definition of terms in the philosophical vocabulary, and the place of philosophy in secondary school education, the members could raise and then grapple with the outstanding problems of their discipline.133 Once questions were raised in this intellectual retreat, a very cordial explanation of positions was exchanged, usually followed by questions and elucidations. The proceedings were based on a mutual respect among colleagues with Bergson (or anyone else) never attacked and rarely even sharply criticized. All present at these meetings merely sought a rather moderate clarification of ideas. When the philosophers of the Sorbonne did turn their criticism towards Bergson, it was directed at two things: at what they called the philosophies of feeling and will which threatened to inflict havoc on the rationalist tradition, and at what they disapproved of in the popular interest surrounding Bergson (especially when it was directed at them), the thing which gave his ideas a somewhat unprofessional tinge. They all seemed to be saying, as Brunschvicg was, that being a philosopher meant being a rational philosopher, that when one philosophized one did so with one's whole mind and that therefore there could be no philosophy of feeling and will, since "rational philosophy is philosophy itself."134 Reality can then only be explained by rational principles and not by any final appeal to life itself, or to the will, or to intuition.135 To think otherwise, to seek startling revelations in a new approach to philosophy spearheaded by Henri Bergson, was to run the risk of developing "egotistic feelings" in people, making them look within for their essential truths rather than to "the ultimate court of appeal" of clear thought.136 The philosophy which claims to grasp the conditions of spiritual life will be popular and influential precisely because it will "respond to the desires of the crowd."137

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The popular clamor of Bergson's peak years (190714) which coincided with the crisis of the New Sorbonne prompted the institutional disapproval of the Sorbonne. Jean Wahl has said that it was not very good for anyone's career in 1907 to be caught publishing an article in favor of Bergson, or worse, to label oneself a Bergsonian. 138 Furthermore, it was only rare academics like Brunschvicg and André Lalande (neither of whom were under attack in these years) who were at pains to explain away the popular reception as just so much "Bergsonism" and who cautioned that one should not confuse the man with the movement which was making so much use of his name.139 One student reported on "the animosity that the faculty conceive for Bergson. It is a pleasure to note, during some lecture, or during some thesis defense, the unfavorable allusions to 'outside influences,' in general, and to those of this great thinker, in particular . . . They take in their pontifical way, a magnificent contempt and an incomprehension for other ideas."140 The Sorbonne faculty felt itself under siege between 1906 and 1914 and defended itself as best it could by lashing out at what it felt was a well-orchestrated attack of right-wing reactionaries. Like their enemies they organized a league of their own, the Friends of Modern Culture, composed of a very large number of academics from the University and the major lycées of Paris. At almost every pedagogical conference the debate broke out between what the press called the "knights of Latin" and the "Jacobins of the Sorbonne." It was in this spirit of combat that the "official" disapproval of Bergson's ideas came to be registered. Each annual report of the Dean of the Faculty of Letters of the Sorbonne was at heart a justification to faculty of the splended role the school was playing in French life. However, when the attacks against the institution appeared to become a movement, it became obvious that the faculty had gone on the defensive. The attack on Bergson's insidious influence in France came at a meeting of faculty held on November 4, 1909, and was delivered by the Dean, Alfred Croiset, who had ironically helped sponsor Bergson's candidacy to the Collège de France a decade before.141 Having fully digested The Binet Report of 1908, Croiset built his speech around a defense of the spirit and methods of science, and the alarming rise of mystical and irrational ideas which presented a danger to students by diverting them from a proper study of the sciences: Undoubtedly the irrational forces of the soul have a role to play, and it would be absurd to deny it. But they also have their limits and faults, which must not be forgotten. Their affirmations are obscure, confused, full of inward contradictions, and they practically collide with each other in conflicts that they seek to resolve. Intuition can suggest prospects of genius, but it can also result in absurdity and folly. Instinct and feeling

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are admirably movers of human will, but as capable of error and crime as they are of heroism. Action is by itself the blind movement of life, and if it is true that it judges itself by its results, it is no less certain at first sight that these results have a strong, variable quality, and afterwards that they can be appreciated by reason. On the whole, a control is necessary. Without criticism, without the confrontation of thought with itself and with reality, without scientific reason, man can only advance by accident. 142 Although these new forces believed themselves in possession of the Absolute, and brought back "oracles" to help us attain it, Croiset said, we must remember that they were old and neglected ideas only currently in vogue, and like all such intellectual fads, ephemeral and bound to disappear. Nevertheless, while they were in fashion, they may temporarily succeed in eroding youth's traditional faith in reason and science.143 Croiset never mentioned Bergson by name in his speech but it was understood whom he held responsible when he attacked the intuitional and the instinctual, and attainment of the Absolute, and the insidious effort of these ideas on youth. We know that Bergson privately was very disturbed by this speech, as he had been by The Binet Report, and he proposed to refute Croiset's attack publicly at the first opportunity. The opportunity apparently never arose.144 What the critics of the Sorbonne had accomplished in the end was to raise a controversy which reached the public and somewhat tarnished the image of the University, and one that succeeded in provoking a senatorial examination of their complaints. A Commission of the French Senate met in 1911 and examined the whole "crise de français" and the effects that the Reform of 1902 had had on higher education. Its discussion mirrored the debates between the Ancients and the Moderns with the majority of Senators supporting the latter position and giving the Reform of 1902 a vote of confidence. The discussions of the Commission also reflected the extent to which the Sorbonne held Bergson and his ideas responsible for the attack against it. The University was ably defended on the Commission by Eugène Lintilhac who left no doubt about who or what was responsible for the malicious campaign against the Sorbonne. Behind the "coalition of the discontented," he warned his colleagues, there can be found "an offensive return of anti-rationalism."145 The attack against the New Sorbonne peaked in 1911 and, perhaps because of it, the perceptions the Senator held were somewhat paranoid and even demonic. This anti-rationalism is clever enough, he warned, to assume the mask of philosophy "which enable people to disguise their dilettantism or impressionism."146 This is a rebellion of malcontents, agents of a "delayed romanticism," and enemies of

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the critical and historical method. This is then a movement of dark intent, dedicated to the dismantling and eventual destruction of the rationalist tradition as it is embodied in the University. But what makes the critics of the Sorbonne especially dangerous is the fact that they also attack from a prepared doctrinal position which, emanates from the most powerful and most subtle brains of our time. I am speaking of that philosophy which is known under the name of intuition in France pragmatism in America. You know that it is steeped in scorn of rationalism and its antiquated methods, that it insinuates that the supreme instrument of knowledge is a certain élan of the spirit, that it revives the mysterious élan of life of which it seeks to attain the secret, the first leap it will take in ridding itself of the formal measure of reasonable thought. 147 Bergson, he continued, was the "eminent author" of this movement which, whatever Bergson's original intent was, had developed in a demagogic direction.148 The report was warmly received by the Senators, particularly of the left and center, especially when it defended Croiset, Lavisse and Lanson, and the scientific spirit they represented. By 1912 Bergson had the educational and even the political establishment ranged against him. He drew their fire, as we have indicated, because too many of the more visible enemies of the Sorbonne were self-proclaimed Bergsonians. The intellectual position of those enemies was essentially Bergson's and it was almost always at odds with that held by establishment academics. Critics of the Sorbonne also argued from a political and often anti-democratic position. Céléstin Bouglé, for example, felt that Richepin's League, which had co-opted so much of the campaign against the Sorbonne, had a reactionary smell and that the whole opposition camp was "nauseously infecting the political milieu."149 At the same time Alphonse Aulard, the Sorbonne's historian of the French Revolution, warned the public not to be taken in by seemingly innocent polemics about the French "soul" or by the wistful nostalgia for a Mediterranean civilization buttressed by Latin and Greek: The real complaint against the Sorbonne, that which united against her so many different passions, is not, whatever else may be said, either literary or pedagogical. It is political. It is religious. She has against her conservatives and clericals of every shade . . . She is a rallying point for those who want to subject youth to the old political and religious dogmas.150 Bergson, of course, did not share the political views of the "conservatives and clericals" and therefore must have felt uncomfortable in the company of

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what Sorbonne defenders saw as an insidious and well-orchestrated attack of right-wing reactionaries. Nevertheless, he was a member of Richepin's League, albeit a silent one, and while he may have regretted the more excessive attacks made by his disciples he never made a move to repudiate them. Both the Bergsonian vogue and the crisis of the New Sorbonne would continue relatively unabated until the outbreak of the war with the two negatively reacting to each other, yet inexorably linked.

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Footnotes 1. Extraits de Lucrece, avec commentaire et notes (Paris: Délagrave, 1884). 2. Joseph Desaymard, "M. Bergson à Clermont-Ferrand," Bulletin historique et scientifique de l'-Auvergne ser. 2 (19101911): 207. 3. Gilbert Maire, "Les années de Bergson à Clermont-Ferrand," Glanes 2 (MarchApril 1949): 20. 4. Dauphin Meunier, "Une leçon de M. Henri Bergson en 1886," Le Figaro, 21 Feb., 1914, 3. 5. Albert Thibaudet, La république des professeurs (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1927), 14148. 6. Julien Luchaire, Confession d'un français moyen (Paris: Editions du Sagittaire, 1943), 47. 7. Rose-Marie Mossé-Bastide, Bergson éducateur (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955), 4041. 8. Gaston Rageot, "Henri Bergson," Le Temps, 2 July, 1911, 3. 9. Quoted in Mossé-Bastide, Bergson éducateur, 39. 10. L. Bélugou, "M. Bergson à L'Ecole Normale," Mercure de France 26 (1898): 858. 11. R.J. Smith, "The Ecole Normale Supérieure in the Third Republic: A Study of the Classes" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1967), 9495. 12. Gilbert Maire, Bergson, mon maître (Paris: B. Grasset, 1935), 15859. 13. Commission de l'Enseignement, Chambre des Deputées, session de 1899, Enquête sur l'enseignement (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1899). 14. Phyllis H. Stock, "Students versus the University in Pre-World War Paris," French Historical Studies 7, no. 1 (1971): 93110. 15. Gustave Lanson, L'Université et la société moderne (Paris: Armand Colin, 1902), 78. Chapter I originally appeared in 1902. 16. Henri Bergson, "Le bon sells et les études classiques: discours prononcé lors de la distribution du Concours général, 30 Juillet 1895," Mélanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 36072. It would not be until 192223, during yet another debate on educational reform, that Bergson would speak out passionately on behalf of the classics. Before meetings of the Académie des Sciences et Politiques he would make it clear from his standpoint that the future of higher culture in France was intimately involved in the decline of the classics. That decline had set in with the Reform of 1902. Drawing upon his vast experience as a teacher, he maintained that those students who had received Greco-Latin culture in their educations were clearly superior products of the system to those who did not. The latter group were culturally impoverished, he insisted, while only the former had learned to speak and to write French perfectly. His proposal was to have the lycées set up two distinct programs: a classical education "for those who exhibit the French mind to the eyes of the world," and a practical but elevated education "for those who will develop the richness of the country." Melanges, 1378. 17. Dominique Parodi, "Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 9 (1901): 2366. 18. Théodore Steeg, "Henri Bergson," Revue universelle 12, no. 1 (1902): 15.

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19. L. Bélugou, "Au Collége de France: cours de MM. Th. Ribot, Bergson, Izoulet," Mercure de France 15 (1898): 575. 20. B. Jacob, "La philosophie d'hier et celle d'aujourd'hui," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 6 (1898): 170201. 21. In the academic year 189798 Bergson temporarily replaced the ailing Charles Lévêque, Professor of Greek and Latin Philosophy at the Collège de France. Bergson had been chosen at Lévèque's suggestion. In 1899 Bergson had applied for the chair of Modern Philosophy at the Collège de France left vacant by the death of J.F. Nourrisson. Gabriel Tarde was chosen instead. In early 1900 Charles Lévêque died and Bergson was chosen to fill his position by a unanimous vote of the College's General Assembly. Mélanges, 417. In 1904 Gabriel Tarde died and Bergson was finally chosen to fill the chair of Modern Philosophy.

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22. Paul Thureau-Dangin, quoted in François Maury, "L'Elite intellectuelle et la démocracie," Revue bleue 1, ser. 5 (May 21, 1904): 642. 23. Jacques Chastenet, La France de M. Fallières (Paris: Fayard, 1949), 345. 24. Ibid. 25. Alvan Sanborn, "The New Nationalism in France," Forum and Century 51, no. 2 (1914): 13. 26. Ibid., 16. See also Eugen Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France, 19041914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), particularly chapter VII. 27. Quoted in Sanborn, "The New Nationalism in France," 21. 28. Jacques Chevalier, "Henri Bergson," Les Nouvelles littéraires (August 4, 1928): 7. 29. Giovanni Papini, "Mes rencontres avec Bergson," Les Nouvelles littéraires (December 15, 1928): 3. 30. Luchaire, Confession d'un français moyen, 6869. 31. Edouard Herriot, In Those Days (New York: Old and New Publishing Co., n.d.), 84, 120. 32. W.F. Lonergan, Forty Years of Paris (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907), 313. 33. Ibid. 34. Georges Davy, "Emile Durkheim," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 6 (1920): 183. 35. Terry N. Clark, "Emile Durkheim and the Institutionalization of Sociology in the French University," Archives européenes de sociologie 9 (1968): 44. 36. Gilbert Maire, Bergson, mon maître (Paris: B. Grasset, 1935), 149. 37. Etienne Gilson, The Philosopher and Theology (New York: Random House, 1962), 40. 38. Harry Alpert, Emile Durkheim and his Sociology (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), 21. 39. Emile Durkheim, "L'Enseignement philosophique et l'agrégation de philosophie," Revue philosophique 39 (1895): 12147. 40. Emile Durkheim, "La philosophie dans les universités allemandes," Revue internationale de l'enseignement 13 (1887): 437. 41. Cited in Céléstin Bouglé, "L'Oeuvre sociologique d'Emile Durkheim," Europe 22 (1930): 283. 42. Emile Durkheim, Pragmatisme et sociologie (Paris: J. Vrin, 1955). Bergson for his part, felt that Durkheim was "a doctrinaire too careless of the facts," and he recalled their student days together with a trace of contempt: "I have always thought that he would be an abstraction-monger. I was not so mistaken. With him, one never encountered a fact. When we told him that the facts were in contradiction with his theories, he would reply: 'The facts are wrong.'" Jacques Chevalier, Entretiens avec Bergson (Paris: Plon, 1959), 34.

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43. Céléstin Bouglé, Humanisme, sociologie, philospohie: remarques sur la conception française de la culture générale (Paris: Hermann, 1938), 55. The Collège de France, however, was not the exclusive home of the intuitional. Its most popular lecturer before Bergson was the historian of science, Pierre Levasseur. He was an avowed positivist who lectured at the school from 1892 to 1903 to overflowing audiences. 44. Cited in Bouglé, Bilan de la sociologie française contemporaine (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1935), 168. 45. Clark, "Emile Durkheim . . . ," 66. 46. Jacques Chastenet, La France de M. Fallières (Paris: Fayard, 1944), 206. 47. Gilson, The Philosopher and Theology, 32. 48. Ibid., 118. 49. Raissa Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together (New York: Longman's, Green, 1942), 82. 50. Ibid., 67. 51. Agathon, L'Esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne (Paris: Mercure de France, 1911), 93. 52. Le Temps, 25 Oct., 1910.

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53. Henri Massis, Evocations (Paris: Plon, 1931), 60. 54. Maire, Bergson, mon maître, 141 55. Gilson, The Professor and Theology, 119. 56. Massis, Evocations, 139. 57. Georges Fonsegrive, L'Evolution des idées dans la France contemporaine (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1917), 156. 58. Ibid. 59. R. Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together, 7980. 60. Stock, ''Students . . . ," 99. 61. Charles Péguy, "De la situation faite au parti intellectuel dans la monde moderne," Oeuvres en prose, 18981908 (Paris: Gallimard, 1959). 62. Charles Péguy, "De la situation faite au parti interectuel dans la monde moderne devant les accidents de la gloire temporelle," Oeuvres en prose. 63. Agathon, L'Esprit. This edition contains the original articles which appeared in L'Opinion on July 23, August 13, and September 17, 1910. It also includes many responses to the attack. 64. Terry N. Clark, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 19094. 65. Preface of Charles Maurras, in Pierre Lasserre, M. Alfred Croiset, historien de la démocratie athenienne (Paris: Nouvelle Librarie Nationale, 1909), xv-xvi. 66. Pierre Lasserre, "La doctrine officielle de L'Université," Mercure de France 75 (1908): 49091. 67. Maire's father had been the librarian at Clermont-Ferrand during Bergson's years there. Gilbert Maire himself was a former student of Bergson at the Lycée Henry IV and later would become one of the founders of the Society of the Friends of Henri Bergson. 68. Gilbert Maire, "Crise pédagogique et anarchisme universitaire," Mercure de France 100 (1912):273. 69. Gilbert Maire, "Un Politicien en Sorbonne: M. Bouglé," Revue critique des idées et des livres 19 (1912): 162. 70. Maire, "Crise pédagogique . . . ," 289. 71. Maire, "Un Politicien en Sorbonne," 176. 72. Maire, "Crise pédagogique 278. 73. Agathon, L'Esprit, 2226. 74. Charles Péguy, "De la situation faite au parti intellectuel dans la monde moderne," Oeuvres en prose, 1104. 75. Pierre Leguay, La Sorbonne (Paris: B. Grasset, 1910), 93. 76. Agathon, L'Esprit 15357.

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77. Ibid., 95. The authors were referring to Bergson's applications to the Sorbonne submitted in 1894 and again in 1898. He was rejected both times. Years later, Daniel Halévy echoed this charge. He argued that Bergson was a philosopher of considerable stature and should have been installed at the Sorbonne. However, Halévy claimed, Bergson was not of the "party" and Lucien Herr and his friends decided to install their own militants instead. Daniel Halévy, Péguy et les Cahiers de la Quinzaine (Paris: B. Grasset, 1941), 16061. 78. Majorie Villiers, Charles Péguy: A Study in Integrity (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 268. See also Le Temps, 16 July, 1911, 1. The League was, however, not radical, since Charles Maurras and Edouard Drumont refused to join. 79. Le Temps 16 June, 1911, 1. 80. Le Temps 25 March, 1911, 1.

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81. One student who wrote to the Revue de la jeunesse complained of the aridity of university courses where the professor elaborates on various systems and important questions without ever occupying a position himself. The young student of today, he wrote, will, left to choose, become a Bergsonian. Revue de la jeunesse 10, no. 1 (1914): 50. 82. R. Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together, 84. 83. Ibid., 82. 84. Gabriel Marcel, in Thomas Hanna, The Bergsonian Heritage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 125. 85. Ibid. 86. Gilson, The Philosopher and Theology, 107. 87. R. Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together, 85. 88. Louis Couterat substituted for Bergson in 19051906 when he was preparing Creative Evolution for publication, and René Worms in 190910. 89. Isaac Benrubi, Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson (Neuchatel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1942), 1112. 90. Published originally as L'Evolution créatrice (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1907). Hereafter referred to as Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: The Modern Library, 1944). 91. Marcel Bataillon, in The Bergsonian Heritage 114. Alfred Binet, writing in 1901, said that Bergson already occupied an important place in the University and that "he exercises a very great influence upon the younger generation." Alfred Binet, "H. Bergson: note sur la conscience de l'effort intellectuel," Année psychologique 8 (1901): 471. 92. Halévy, Peguy, 47. 93. Wallace Fowlie, Ernest Psichari: A Study in Religious Conversion (Dublin: Richview Press, 1939), 3637. 94. Jérême and Jean Tharaud, Notre cher Péguy (Paris: Plon, 1926), 1: 26364. Josiah Royce, T.S. Eliot and Nikos Kazantsakis also attended Bergson's lectures. 95. "La farce de l'Université; La prise de berg-hopson," Fantasio 9 (1914): 48182. 96. T.E. Hulme, "Bax on Bergson," The New Age 9 (1911): 329. According to Elizabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre, the Countess Murat became the first of the society matrons to discover Bergson and to follow his course at the Collège de France. Her example was then imitated, and Bergson became à la mode. Elizabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre, Mémoires (Paris: B. Grasset, 1929), 2: 44. The same thing had happened to Charcot years before. His lectures were originally given to medical students but gradually his demonstrations of hypnosis took on the nature of "shows" which attracted to the Salpêtrière an audience of actors and actresses, journalists and writers, and ultimately, society women. E.J. Dingwall, Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), 1: 257. 97. La vie parisienne 50 (1912): 509. 98. Maire, Bergson, mon maître, 189. 99. Etienne Gilson, "The Glory of Bergson," Thought 22 (1947): 582. 100. Enid Starkie, in The Bergsonian Heritage, 92.

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101. Charles Rappoport, "The Intuitive Philosophy of M. Bergson," The New Review 2 (1914): 13839. 102. Ibid. 103. T.E. Hulme, "A Personal Impression of Bergson," in A.R. Jones, The Life and Opinions of Thomas Ernest Hulme (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 207. 104. Victor Delbos, "Matière et mémoire, essai sur la relation du corps à esprit, par Henri Bergson," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 5 (1897): 35354. 105. Frédéric Rauh, "Sur la position du problème du libre arbitre," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 12 (1904): 998.

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106. Paul-Louis Couchoud, ''La métaphysique nouvelle," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 10 (1902): 243. 107. Jones, The Life, 207. 108. Fowlie, Ernest Psichari, 38. 109. L'Opinion, 7 Feb., 1914, 184. 110. Henri Bergson, cited in Current Opinion 61 (1914): 371. Society women at Bergson's lectures were not the frivolous phenomenon they appear to be. It was true that Bergson was terribly à la mode and attracted his share of bored society matrons but all the evidence suggests that they remained until the war. Almost eight years! This would appear to be a bit more than a fad. One historian has suggested that the society element and the middle class generally "were prepared to turn their backs on their espousal of 'reason' and 'progress' because these might serve the interests of the classes whose rise they feared." Georges Dupeux, French Society, 17891970 (London: Methuen, 1976), 175. Judging from the testimony given before the Ribot Commission, it would appear that the middle class was gradually losing control of higher education. The University reformers consistently charged that higher education was only accessible to families of a certain rank. Most of the Chamber of Commerce and industrial representatives in 1899 favored the retention of classical over modern instruction in the curriculum, and they increasingly regarded the University with suspicion. "This fear of the educated," wrote Dupeux, "explains a change in the intellectual behaviour of the grande bourgeoisie. They welcomed the anti-positivist, and even anti-scientific reaction of the early years of the twentieth century." The Bergsonian "tendancy'' in pre-war France was then symptomatic of a new mental climate. 111. "La philosophic à la mode," La vie parisienne 52 (1914): 163. 112. Jones, The Life, 205. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid. 115. Thomas Hanna, The Bergsonian Heritage, 3. 116. Alfred Binet, "Une enquête sur l'évolution de l'enseignement de la philosophie," L'Année Psychologique 14 (1908): 152231. 117. Ibid., 153. 118. Ibid., 169. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid., 120. 121. Ibid., 170. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid., 169. 125. Ibid., 178.

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126. Ibid., 203. Marcel Bataillon has said that the students at the Lycée Louis le Grand had been "initiated" into Bergsonian philosophy by Bergsonian professors. The Bergsonian Heritage, 108. 127. Bulletin de la société française de philosophie, 1908 (November 28, 1907): 21. 128. Ibid., 128. 129. Léon Brunschvicg, L'Idéalisme contemporaine (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1905), 102. 130. Couchoud, "La metaphysique nouvelle," 243. 131. Rauh, "Sur la position," 9771006. 132. Fonsegrive, L'Evolution; André Lalande, "Philosophy in France, 1919," The Philosophical Review 29 (1920): 41336. 133. Bulletin de la société française de philosophie, May 2, 1901; May 23, 1901; May 29, 1902; July 2, 1908; and July 7, 1910.

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134. Brunschvicg, L'Idealisme contemporaine, 72. 135. Ibid., 10. 136. Ibid., 72. 137. Ibid., 45. René Le Senne has said that the "restlessness" produced by Bergson's intuitionism was very much resented by the University's philosophers. René Le Senne, "L'Influence de la philosophie bergsonienne en France," Revue de Paris 39, no. 2 (1932): 831. 138. Hanna, The Bergsonian Heritage, 15051. 139. André Lalande, "Philosophy in France, 1908," The Philosophical Review 17 (1909): 30030. 140. Letter of a student, Jacques Jary, to L'Action. Cited in Agathon, L'Esprit, 36566. 141. Mossé-Bastide, Bergson éducateur, 65. 142. Alfred Croiset, "Discours prononcé à l'ouverture des conference de la Faculté des Lettres de Paris," Revue internationale de l'enseignement 56 (1909): 39697. 143. Ibid. 144. Isaac Benrubi, Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson, 47. 145. "L'Instruction publique au Sénat, discours de M. Eugène Lintilhac," Revue internationale de l'enseignement 62 (1911): 332. 146. Ibid., 333. 147. Ibid. 148. Ibid. 149. Mercure de France 45 (1912): 385. 150. Le Temps, 16 June 1911, 1.

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Chapter VI The Catholic Revival By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the growth of the modern secular state appeared irresistible while the decline of the French Church seemed almost inevitable. The Republic, in the Catholic view, seemed to reject anything conceived culturally and religiously before the eighteenth century as irrelevant baggage to be discarded, while at the same time it advanced science as a means of solving all modern problems. Furthermore, persistent disputes between liberals and conservatives within the Church only served to further the demoralization of Catholics as did the anticlericalismso endemic in the Third Republicand the dechristianization of France in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair. Catholicism seemed to have lost its hold on many thinking men: Never had the yoke of matter seemed firmer or better established. Everyone who enjoyed any sort of reputation in art or science or literature was irreligious, and all the so-called great men of the end of the century were noted for their hostility to the Church. Renan was king. 1 Republican scientists and academics like Marcelin Berthelot, Renan and Durkheim were smug and a bit premature in their belief that religion was outmoded and that the future belonged to science. They felt that religion was a misguided superstition which impeded true intellectual progress while the fervour which often attended it was an aberration to be distrusted. "The universal triumph of science," Berthelot predicted, "will come to assure all men of the maximum possible happiness and morality."2 Yet even Renan and Taine expressed concern about the waning of religious faith; might it not weaken the nation further? Catholics came to see that after the debacle of 1871 what was needed was an authoritative ethic which only a religion could provide. The scientific method, while it could solve many of the material problems of the modern world, could neither provide the country with unity, nor with the basis for its moral reconstruction. This was what Brunetière meant when he charged science with being bankrupt. Science's promises, he

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asserted, remained largely unfulfilled; perfectly legitimate in its own domain, it was unable to supply men with a morality and a social discipline. 3 Conservative writers like Paul Bourget, Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras agreed that only Catholicism could fill this need and that therefore, a Catholic renaissance was indispensable.4 The revival of religious feelings among educated French Catholicsin large part a reaction against the bleak scientism and positivism of the 1880sbegan during the liberal pontificate of Leo XIII and expressed itself in several important ways. It was heralded, for example, by the founding of new Catholic periodicals: The Revue biblique (1892); Revue Thomiste (1893); La Revue de clergé français (1894); Revue d'histoire et de littérature religieuses (1896); La Quinzaine (1897); Demain (1905); Annales de philosophie chrétienne (1905) and the Revue pratique d'apologétique (1906), to mention only some of the more prominent journals that appeared between 1890 and 1907. These periodicals exemplified the regeneration of Catholic thought and the shift in interest from political matters stemming from the Ralliement to more intellectual and moral concerns. The revival was also manifest in literature beginning in the 1880s, in the Modernist controversy, which came to a head between 1903 and 1907, and in the neo-Thomist revival, which would gain its Vatican endorsement and articulate spokesmen in the same period. In all but the Catholic literary revival Bergson's ideas were significantly involved in the religious discussions throughout the years 1900 to 1914. This is borne out by the now familiar surveys which were made during the period. The pre-1914 generation of educated French Catholics was acutely conscious of its own changing views. The surveys of youthful attitudes made in this period indicated not only the desire of the authors to demonstrate the existence of a genuine religious revival in French life and letters and to tie it in with other conservative awakenings (namely, patriotism), but at the same time to vindicate those attitudes and aspirations. Indeed, most of the people who conducted these inquiries were direct participants in the revival itself. This was particularly true of the influential inquiry, Les jeunes gens d'aujourd'hui,5 conducted by Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde in 1912. These two authors were every bit as involved in the religious revival as the people they questioned. Like Agathon's, the other surveys were made by conservative, nationalistic, Catholic critics, all with a similar point to make. And that point could be made not by polling a cross-section of French youth but by carefully selecting a small group of young educated bourgeois. Massis and de Tarde admitted that they had no intention of drawing "the portrait of the average young man of 1912." This selective examination was also true of inquiries conducted by Emile Faguet and Amélie Gayraud. The results of these examinations, and of

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the survey conducted by Frédéric Charpin also suggested Bergson's impact upon young Frenchmen stirred by new religious awakenings. 6 Faguet concluded that Henri Bergson and Maurice Barrès were the dominant influences among writers who were patriotic and religious and who had rejected the ideas of Comte, Taine and Renan.7 Agathon added that the general tendencies were not only patriotic and religious but anti-mechanistic as well. In documenting the religious awakening among French youth in the state schools, Agathon made the point reiterated by most of the leading Catholics between 1907 and 1914 that Bergson's influence on Catholic youth was predominantly due to the negative side of his philosophy. His brilliant refutation of mechanistic philosophies had a strong appeal to people who were challenging the power and virtue of intelligence and appealing instead to "feeling" and to the "heart" or to the direct intuitive approaches to truth.8 For these people Bergsonian philosophy came as ''a vindication of spiritualism and free will, and indirectly a demonstration of a divine power."9 "It was Bergson," one student wrote to Agathon, "who opened up a new road which we followed in the wake of Le Roy, Blondel, and Father Laberthonnière. Our reason is thus able to grant to our emotions those religious effusions they need.''10 This renewal of Catholic faith among the student generation was the element of the revival which excited the pollsters the most. Surveys like Agathon's and the one conducted by the Revue de la jeunesse concluded that the lycée and the University youth had in significant numbers taken up Catholicism.11 According to Agathon, the Ecole Normale, which in 1905 numbered no more than three or four Catholics had forty in 1912, or close to one-third of the school. Moreover it was Bergson, Agathon suggested, who had played a major role in leading those students to the threshold of religious life.12 Even the conservative daily La Croix, which in so many ways was an enemy of Bergson and his ideas, had to grudgingly concede, in commenting on these surveys, that Bergson had helped "to purify the atmosphere." If intellectual youth were no longer anti-clerical and materialistic it was in large part because Bergson had "led young minds toward new and better horizons," although like Moses, who delivered the Jews from bondage and who could not enter the promised land, Bergson was "far from our frontiers."13 These surveys also helped to clarify the issues for those who hoped to be part of a new community of resurgent Catholics. Referring to Agathon, Raissa Maritain said: There were things in these conclusions that moved us. They showed us that we were no longer isolated or those strange animals to whose condition we had resigned ourselves; the way which we had followed five or six years earlier, finding no one at that time among our companions who understood us,

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was now being followed by many young people, disappointed in the same way as ourselves, animated by the same exigencies, ending up with exactly the same decision regarding religious faith. It seemed to us a naturalalthough unhoped forreaction of the spirit; and for the severe battles that were to come, as we know, we were happy to lose some of our peculiarity and to take our place among the humanity of our day. 14 The religious awakening began with a spate of religious conversions. Brunetière, Joseph Lotte, Jacques Rivière, Paul Claudel, Francis Jammes, Louis Bertrand, Ernest Psichari, Charles Péguy, and the Maritains all converted between 1890 and 1914, and did much to dispel the myth that men could not be both intelligent and Catholic at the same time. Many of these people acknowledged a spiritual debt to Bergson and all felt his impact at least indirectly for he not only helped shape the religious ferment but was himself a vital part of it. That this was so is indicated by Bergson's own spiritual progress. His religious development was very much like the converts he influenced. Like them Bergson was a man in religious transition, in flight from nineteenth-century mechanism and materialism, but one whose power of Christian conviction revealed itself more gradually than that of his contemporaries. To what extent Bergson considered himself a potential Christian is an important question in view of the fact that so many critics who were religiously oriented never ceased giving his ideas a spiritual meaning. In asserting his Jewishness, for example, Bergson never went beyond admitting a vague kind of religious solidarity with Jews everywhere. In a strictly religious sense, Judaism remained important for Bergson only insofar as it was a point of departure for what he thought was a higher religious ideal. This ideal was mystical Christianity, something Bergson felt was the continuation and fulfillment of the parent faith. In a conversation with the Dominican theologian, A.D. Sertillanges, Bergson maintained that Christ was "superhuman," having arisen in humanity "as an entirely new fact," although he added, "I believe this fact and the fact of Christianity had been made possible thanks to historical Palestinian antecedents."15 Bergson had approached Christianity through a study of the Christian mystics, especially St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. In a conversation with Jacques Chevalier, his disciple and former student, Bergson claimed that these mystics "revealed the meaning of the Gospel to me" and that Catholicism was "the living and dynamic religion par excellence."16 Since so much of Bergson's career seems to have represented an attempt to realize the Christian ideal, why then did he not adhere formally to Christianity? A passage from Bergson's will, dated February 8, 1937, explains his position clearly:

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My reflections have led me nearer and nearer to Catholicism, in which I find the absolute completion of Judaism. I would have become a convert if I had not seen in preparation for so many years this formidable wave of anti-Semitism which will soon overflow the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow will be the persecuted ones. But I hope that a Catholic priest will be willing, if the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris gives him the authorization, to come and say the prayers at my burial. If this authorization is not given, a rabbi should be asked, but without hiding from him, or from anyone, my moral adherence to Catholicism, as well as the desire, before stated, of having the prayers of a Catholic priest. 17 This might also explain why, despite his "moral adherence" to Catholicism and his advocacy of Jewish assimilation, he continued to maintain his Jewish identity long after his religion ceased to mean anything to him. In fact, one of his final acts was to refuse to accept special consideration from the Vichy government which offered to exempt him from the humiliating obligations that it imposed on all French Jews in 1941. Wishing to stand with his brethren in their most tragic hour Bergson resigned all his positions of honour including his chair at the Collage de France, and formally registered as a Jew. Young Catholics were therefore not mistaken about the sense of spirituality they received from both Bergson's work and from the man himself. Like the famous converts of the period, Bergson too was a religious pilgrim. If they had a spiritual odyssey to fulfill, so did Bergson. If they were exploring new intellectual and intuitive approaches to the question of God and soul, immortality and truth, so was Bergson. In a letter to a Jesuit critic Bergson outlined his intuitive road to faith: In my Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness I emphasized the existence of freedom; Matter and Memory demonstrated, I hope, the reality of the spirit; in my Creative Evolution, I presented creation as a fact. All of this should indicate the existence of a God freely responsible for creation and generator of both matter and life, through the evolution of the species and the constitution of human personalities.18 If Catholics came away from Bergson's work with nothing else, it was the feeling of "pure spirituality" and "joyous liberating relaxation."19 Paul Claudel, who found much to criticize in Bergson's work, nevertheless felt that "the iron age of scientific terror appeared over."20 Could one be more comfortably religious now that Bergson had rescued religion from the grasp of science? Bergson had done something more than

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merely "break the chains of French youth" as Péguy put it. He had also given Catholics the chance to demonstrate the validity of their faith. Bergson had said that "religion is a simple, unique element of life" which, he felt, would not disappear "since it is more feeling than thinking, and its object in part resides within itself as effect as much as cause." 21 More than any other person of his day Bergson had removed the chief scientific impediment to the pursuit of that "simple, unique element of life." And yet Bergson never isolated his spirituality but rather gave his theory of evolution a religious importance. It was this meaning which prompted one foreign observer to comment that in reading Bergson one could substitute in some passages the word "faith'' for philosophy and ''elohim" for élan vital.22 It was this combination of science and spirituality which offered young Catholics the chance to reconcile their loyalty to the Church with an acceptance of modern science. For every Catholic who refused to recognize the appeal of that combination and who refused to see Bergson as a pillar of the religious revival there were many others like Joseph Lotte, Ernest Psichari and Charles Péguy who did view him in this way. It was this recognition, for example, that was instrumental in the conversion of Joseph Lotte, a close friend of Péguy and the editor of the Bulletin des professeurs catholiques de l'Université: I owe Bergson a debt of gratitude, and I seize the opportunity offered me of paying it. I do not remember which Athenian in Plato's Symposium it is who declares that he has lived only since he has known Socrates. I should say as much for Bergson, had I not, since knowing him, become a Christian once more. It was the study of his philosophya study which I began as a most stubborn materialistthat opened out to me the path of liberty. Until 1902 my mind was fast bound by Taine and Renan. They were the Gods of my youth. The Introduction to Metaphysics . . . inspired me with an ardent desire to become acquainted with Bergsonism. I studied Matter and Memory; . . . little by little the world of the soul made itself known to me. The determinism of my former masters was at an end. The reign of Matter and of Science had concluded . . . The breath of God inspired the world . . . I shall never forget my rapturous emotion when, in the Spring of 1907, I read Creative Evolution. I felt the presence of God in every page. One needs to have lived for years without God to know the joy with which one finds Him once more. Bergson's books have led me to find Him again, and for that I shall be everlastingly grateful to them.23 One year later (in 1908), when Péguy announced his conversion, Lotte admitted that he had made the same commitment. "Reading Bergson," wrote a friend of

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Lotte, "exorcised the scientism in the spirit of Lotte; it broke the narrow limits, the rigid formulas of materialism. It was a liberation." Moreover Lotte's reaction to Bergson's work gives the impression that "in Bergsonism he found above all the intellectual freedom to become a Christian again; the rest held little importance for him." 24 Bergson's spiritual appeal had attracted Jacques Maritain, Henri Massis, and Ernest Psichari to his lectures as early as 1901. They became part of the conservative wing of the Catholic revival but in the early years of the decade they were souls "wandering in the desert of scientism." In his Friday afternoon lectures Bergson optimistically assured them that they could indeed discover final truths, that the reliance upon the intuitive powers of the individual would enable one not only to penetrate into reality but also to approach the Absolute itself. Psichari, like his colleagues of 1901 and after, had tried to flee from his rather secular intellectual heritage (he was a grandson of Renan). In the spartan existence of army life in Africa Psichari had regained the religious basis of his life.25 In Bergson's lectures he found a further liberation from a society grown morally stagnant, and he gained from Bergson's vitalism "the buoyancy with which to conquer the dangerous propensity that drove him away from life."26 While it might have been Maritain who led him back to the Church it was nevertheless Bergson who represented for Psichari, as he did for so many young Catholics of those years, an intellectual preparation for a subsequent conversion to Catholicism.27 Jacques Maritain, for whom Bergson played a similar role, acknowledged, even after he turned against him, that only Bergson's work possessed a "powerful spiritual intention . . . at the banquet of contemporary philosophy . . . he appears really as a man fasting among revellers in their cups."28 Bergson's was the voice of liberation for a generation driven by a torment and a restlessness which seemed beyond satisfaction, "a restlessness," wrote Georges Fonsegrive, the editor of the Catholic journal, La Quinzaine, "which sought a set position, aspired to find a dogma, a certainty, in order to know how to make use of their lives." That generation felt, said Fonsegrive, a "need of affirmation" and most Catholics at one time or another in that decade before the war thought they had found it in Henri Bergson.29 Raissa Maritain has written that Bergson created an enthusiasm and a ''joyous gratitude" lasting for years among Péguy, Claudel, Julien Green, the Abbé Bremond and Charles Du Bos.30 She could have gone on and mentioned virtually every Catholic intellectual of the day who had fled from the wasteland of nineteenth-century scientism and proceeded hopefully to the Collège de France. According to Jacques Maritain, the young Catholic exposed to Bergson for the first time ''will think he has awakened to thought; in reality, it is his imagination which will have awakened. And that is a great deal, for imagination is better than nothingness, and is so

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close a neighbor to intelligence that it might perhaps, on the rebound, manage to awaken this too." 31 Bergson's most loyal disciple was Charles Péguy. Péguy had been a Bergsonian devotee longer than any other writer caught up in the Catholic revival. He first discovered Bergson together with companions like Joseph Segond, Edouard Le Roy, Gaston Rageot, Maurice Pradines, André Chaumeix and Jérôme Tharaud while all were students at the Ecole Normale listening to Bergson lecture.32 Impressed by Bergson's books, Péguy was not disappointed at hearing the man lecture: In their presence, on their behalf, by means of analysis, he transformed the whole conception of reality, and exposed the weak spots in the highly prestigious dogmatics of rationalistic idealism and scientism . . . This marvelous teaching overwhelmed Péguy.33 Listening to the philosopher in silence, never contributing to discussions, Péguy was nevertheless permanently captivated by Bergson's thought. Daniel Halévy felt that Bergson was always a "good clue" to Péguy's thoughts and Félicien Challaye maintains that, "loyalty to Bergsonism was a constant in Péguy's mobile personality."34 To many of the people who knew Péguy best, like the Tharaud brothers, he "moved more easily in the world of the Bergsonian atmosphere. He thought naturally in terms of Bergson. He continually applied this philosophy to his daily reflections and later, when his mind turned completely to religious meditation, it was neither a St. Paul nor a St. Thomas that he used in his search for light on the mystery of freedom and grace, it was still to Bergson that he asked for clarity."35 After 1900, one biographer has indicated, in a period "which saw Péguy abandon old positions and attitudes and adopt new stances with the vigor and intolerance of the convert, Bergson alone remained the fixed star in his ideological firmament."36 Bergson always remained a somewhat distant master of Péguy offering advice but never really commiting himself to Péguy (nor anyone else). In 1910 when Péguy sought to get a written preface from Bergson for his Oeuvres Choisies, Bergson refused. The reasons for his refusal are rather vague. The only explanation offered by some of Péguy's biographers was that Bergson was afraid of compromising himself over the controversial Péguy.37 But Péguy forgave him for this, never hesitating to compromise himself for Bergson in 1914. After all, it was Bergson who had first freed Péguy from intellectual dogmatism. Before coming to the Ecole Normale he had been exposed to Hegelians and positivists at the Lycées Lakanac and Louis-le-Grand. Then he encountered Bergson and for Péguy, "philosophy began with Bergson."38 Like his Catholic

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colleagues whom he met at Bergson's lectures, Péguy had groped his way towards a set of spiritual values he could be at peace with, toward some sort of an ideal, transcending experience. For years Bergson had been lyricizing this very thing: that man bore within himself the means to transcend his own nature. Moreover, Bergson had tried to release his generation from the fetters of automatism by describing how the psychological mechanism of habit and ready-made ideas imprisoned the mind and inhibited the free act. For Péguy who sought and found a philosophy for his Catholicism in Bergsonian philosophy these ready-made inhibitions were the chief threat to spiritual life since they barred the path of faith into the consciousness of man. It was this "spiritual incrustation." brought on by a mind sealed by habit which prevented the soul from receiving grace. 39 This kind of dogmatism was precisely the reason for Péguy's impatience with the neo-Thomists, and in this context Péguy's exchanges with Jacques Maritain represent the period's Catholic controversy in microcosm. Maritain had insisted that Catholicism was very different from the divine feeling that one tried to seize in oneself, that the rights of intelligence must not be ignored and that Bergson was striking a blow at faith itself by doing so. Péguy's exasperated reply against what he felt was "spiritual encrustation" went to the heart of the issues dividing conservative and liberal Catholics and helps us to understand his passionate allegiance to Bergson:40 Leave me in peace with your St. Thomas . . . I would give the whole Summa for the Ave Maria and the Salve Regina . . . Your Thomism is an algebra where I find nothing for my soul. It is a dying thought, the hardening of the arteries, the sclerosis of Catholicism. Was it necessary to wait twelve centuries in order to have Catholic thought put in shape and solidly presented?41 In a criticism strongly related to the attack against the University, Péguy and many members of the younger generation struck out at a Thomism which seemed to be an arid, static, academic kind of Christianity. For Péguy the attack against Bergson represented a natural antagonism of the Roman bureaucracy against that thought and philosophy which he felt was so diametrically opposed to that bureaucratic mind which for Péguy was an example of mummification.42 This was what the Bergsonian revolution was all about, he felt. The resistance it met came from "our young pillars of apologetics, our catechising catechumens, our pale intellectuals of Catholic Sorbonnes" who hoped that Bergson would replace the "bloc" of the modern world so that he might be replaced by the Scholastic bloc.43 According to Péguy, to place Bergson on the Index, to remove his books and ideas from the sights and minds of seminarians and other

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inquisitive Catholics would not mean a triumph for St. Thomas but a reconquest by Spencer. When the Vatican placed Bergson's work on the Index in 1914, Péguy chose to stand up and denounce what he felt was a great injustice. Daniel Halévy wrote that Péguy was personally involved in the affair from every standpoint: His own activities were being observed from Rome and many ecclesiastics mistrusted him and were the more disturbed in that the younger clergy were beginning to read him. He had good reasons for thinking that his turn would come after M. Bergson's . . . He considered that it would be foolish as well as cowardly for him to stand by and let Bergson receive the blow without a word. 44 Péguy was outraged at the injustice being done to his master by an institution for whom Bergson had done so much. Ignoring warnings against compromising himself, Péguy seized the initiative and published Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne45 in April 1914, and followed that with his uncompleted Notre conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne. In his Note sur M. Bergson, Péguy recognized that Bergson was misunderstood not only by his enemies but also by his partisans. They all were wrong in thinking that Bergsonian philosophy attempted to displace the realms of reason, wisdom, logic and intelligence when, in fact, it called for an "internal revolution" which would "renovate them, excavate them and restore them."46 Unlike Cartesianism which had artificially tried to create order out of chaos, the Bergsonian revolution had denounced "universal intellectuals," a "universal sloth" consisting of service to ready-made ideas. Bergson had freed a metaphysics "sabotaged by the austerity of reason'' and had set in motion a new one. In his critique of Cartesianism, which was so often used against Bergson by his severest critics, Péguy lectured his contemporaries on the real meaning of the Bergsonian revolution. When he said that Bergsonian philosophy substituted for Cartesianism "the consideration of pure reality" and that it alone was living and dynamic and allowed for growth and development, he was using the language of mysticism so prevalent during the period. According to Péguy, the essential power of a mystical philosophy lay in the intuitive roads it opened to spirituality. If one looked for the usual philosophical substance in Bergson's work one missed the point since Bergson's ideas come to us more as an inspiring melody than as a set of instructive lyrics. "I really think," wrote Emmanuel Mounier, "that in this new philosophy, Péguy loved above all a message of youth and freedom, an atmosphere rather than a doctrine, the spring-like atmosphere which

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he already bore within himself." 47 This is what Mounier said was the "call of Bergson in all its sweetness"a call to look within for final truths, and a promise of deliverance to be found in submission to the power of the unknown. Rather than seeking a traditional, external Creator, the philosophy of intuition, according to William James, directed man's attention to "the indwelling divine." It was for this reason that Rémy de Gourmont felt that a non-scientific philosophy like Bergson's "spiral spirituality" could only reinforce Christianity: M. Bergson's spiral spirituality . . . achieves the same result. The metaphysical clouds it eloquently stirs dissolve in a religious rain, and this rain, as it dries, leaves a sort of manna upon which belief is fed. There are more priests than intelligent free-thinkers at M. Bergson's lectures. The manner of postulating free-will in a Catholic country like France takes on an apologetic value. The most illustrious of our metaphysicians must know very well what he is doing.48 Péguy was one of the first of the Bergsonians to sense the religious potential in Bergson's ideasthat the acquisition of final truths and the attainment of deliverance could be accomplished intuitively under Christian auspices: Péguy had quickly discerned in Bergson the last of the Jewish prophets, the eternal protestation of the eternal Jew against the hardness of the heart, against the collusion of the golden calf and the idols of the intelligence. And because this Jew was, like Bernard Lazare, completely penetrated with Christian tenderness, Péguy had predicted, twenty years before the work of Bergson itself acknowledged it, that one ought to read him in the most hidden way with the gold key of the Sermon on the Mount.49 Bergson's emphasis on spirituality was one of the most important elements in his impact upon French intellectuals and was inseparably bound up with his attack on mechanistic philosophy, and his substitution for it of a philosophy of mystical intuition. And it was here, through mystical intuition, that Bergson could make himself understood in both the occult and the Catholic worlds. After all, the occultist and the Catholic superficially had much in common. Both recognized the immortality of souls and both acknowledged (albeit in entirely different ways) the possibility of communication between incarnate and discarnate spirits. Furthermore, both rejected the gospel of materialism as inherently false and inadequate to human need. If there was a figure in Catholic theology through whom the highest spiritual faculties were developed and to whom the greatest veneration was given, it was the saint, a person in constant mystical communication with the unseen and one that the occultist could relate to. If occultist and Catholic were one on any single subject it was in the area of mystical

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theology. The mystic could have no quarrel with the Catholic view of the soul ascending through purgation, illumination, and eventual union with God, the Father. Bergson's influence on Péguy appears to have become a matter of some concern at the Vatican. Joseph Lotte told of a priest visiting him some time in 1914 on an official mission from Rome, and discussing Péguy's positions on a variety of religious and intellectual issues. It left Lotte with the distinct feeling that Péguy's situation with respect to the Church was a delicate one: "The time is coming when I will no longer be able to cover for him and when he will have to make a definite choice." 50 There is no doubt that Péguy had made his choice, especially when in his last meeting with Bergson in August 1914 he asked the philosopher to look after his children in the event of his death in the war. When Péguy was eventually killed in battle Bergson did in fact become the legal guardian of his children. If Bergson's influence had been restricted to the area of personal conversions, the Church might not have had any quarrel with him and would not have eventually indexed his books. As it happened, his influence was much broader than this, and for the Church which came to regard him as a dangerous influence on Catholics, his ideas intruded perilously into the liberal-conservative battles that Catholics waged before the war. Like the Crisis of the New Sorbonne, Catholic Modernism assumed dramatic proportions just as Bergson's popularity was increasing greatly. However, there was one essential difference. Whereas Bergson's ideas were used by conservatives in assaulting the establishment Sorbonne which regarded them as reactionaries, the same ideas articulated by liberal Catholics and modernists appeared as dangerous radicalism in the eyes of the establishment Church. What was reactionary in one case became radical in the other. In both cases, however, the timing of controversies was critical for understanding Bergson's impact on the pre-war milieu. In trying to make Catholicism more relevant to the twentieth century, Modernism based itself on a reconciliation and, to an extent, upon a trend of thought of which Bergson was perhaps one of the greatest exponents. In following the inspirations of the modern world the modernists tried to reconcile their devoted loyalty to the Church with their acceptance of modern scientific methods. They thought that they could achieve this new orientation by somehow synthesizing the mystical religious experience which went to the heart of faith with the scientific study of the Bible and early Church history. To achieve this reconciliation they adopted a theory of knowledge called, at various times, the

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Philosophy of Action, the New Apologetic, Moral Dogmatism and Immanentism. The most articulate spokesmen for Modernism were the so-called Philosophical Modernists, Maurice Blondel, Lucien Laberthonnière and Edouard Le Roy, who were concerned with the mysteries of the faith, and Alfred Loisy who interpreted scripture. There was no organized collaboration between these men but rather a shared belief that Thomism could not provide answers for the important philosophical problems raised in the contemporary world (particularly the challenge raised by anti-rational philosophies) and that a new apologetic was needed. This is what made Modernism into something like a cohesive school of thought and established its intellectual kinship with Bergson. In a now classic definition of the modernist philosophy generally, and Maurice Blondel's philosophy specifically, Alec Vidler had this to say: The philosophy of action is anti-intellectualist in the sense that it denies that ultimate truth can be reached simply through intellectual processes, dialectic, etc., and finally secured by such means in abstract formulas. The attainment of truth involves the activity of the whole of our beingwilling and feeling as well as knowing. The word 'action' is used to mean not one particular kind of activity, e.g., doing as opposed to thinking, but the whole of our life with all that is given in our experience, that is to say a reality that is always in movement, always incomplete, always becoming. Faith accordingly does not consist in accepting with our intellect dogmas which are revealed to us from entirely beyond our experience and, as it were, imposed upon us from outside. We approach and realize the supernatural from within. Our thinking, willing, feeling, when closely scrutinized, are found to demand an object beyond the natural, finite order. The method of immanence, as it was called, i.e., the analysis of our inmost life, is thus shown to lead to a doctrine of transcendence: it shows that the natural postulates the supernatural. Faith is not a final or static condition: it is an attitude or orientation of the whole personality. 51 Modernism, then, called for an individual approach to religion since it claimed that intuitively man could solve his problems from within. In itself this would have been sufficient to alarm an ecclesiastic authority which had already proclaimed that God could be recognized with certainty by reason but in conjunction with Loisy's scholarly efforts to challenge traditional assumptions about the Old and New Testaments the Church could not help but view the modernist movement as a dangerous heresy to be liquidated. The biblical question was, as one historian has put it, the "paradigm" for the whole

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controversy 52 since in applying the critical method to a study of the Bible Loisy sought to establish the proper relationship between religion and science. It was Loisy's work which helped spark the modernist movement and ultimately precipitated the modernist crisis. The modernists were aware of their kinship with Bergson. For example, Alfred Loisy, whose appointment to the Collège de France had received great support from Bergson, had acknowledged his intellectual affinities with the Bergsonian philosophy of intuition, and had greatly admired Creative Evolution for the effort that it was: a "forceful and beautiful" attempt to seize the vital movement of the universe without over-dogmatizing the argument.53 Loisy never really committed himself beyound this during the period before the war and it was only much later, during the 1930s when Bergson's last book appeared, that he tried to amplify some of its ideas with regard to the Bergsonian definitions of myth and ritual.54 Nevertheless, both men agreed that religion was more than a set of static ideas, that it was an intuition about life. Being primarily interested in Christian history and biblical exegesis Loisy did not feel the need to respond completely to Bergsonian philosophy. Still, he acknowledged affinities with the philosophy of intuition and was generous in recognizing the role Bergson had played in checking the pretensions of organized, established religion and in restoring to it the spirit and faith that lay at its heart.55 Tending in the same direction as much as forming a school, Maurice Blondel, Lucien Laberthonnière and Edouard Le Roy formed the philosophical branch of Modernism, supplying the nascent movement with its formative ideas and later with its challenges to traditional Catholic conceptions. Maurice Blondel sounded the keynote for the philosophy of action with his book, L'Action, in 1893. Arising out of the intellectual ferment of the 1880s and 1890s and trying to supply an alternative to the sceptical modern attitude toward revelation, L'Action appeared as an Augustinian alternative to the Thomistic tradition. Since L'Action was published four years after Bergson's Time and Free Will, Blondel had felt obliged to disclaim any influence that Bergson might have exerted on his own ideas. Referring to allusions to that influence made throughout the 1890s, Blondel said that it was only after 1893 that he had read a line of Bergson.56 Like many Catholics, Blondel was inspired and captivated by the negative side of Bergsonian philosophy. "He made me dream," Blondel wrote years later, "about the spring-like flowering of Ionian thought" and inspired "the sudden awakening of a vigorous unheaval from the weight of twenty-five centuries of

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science, a science whose sediments threatened the mind with aphixiation." 57 Even so, Blondel was always very careful to keep his own ideas at a safe distance from those of Bergson, and particularly from Bergson's disciples: "It has always seemed to me moreover, that a doctrine which would take or accept the name of 'New Philosophy' (this is not the case with Henri Bergson), would be, by that same pretension, judged and disqualified."58 Although Blondel expressed reservations about almost all of Bergson's work, there were perhaps more similarities between the philosophies of these two men than disparities. Both men, after all, became part of the current of late nineteenth century spiritualism when as students at the Ecole Normale they learned their philosophy from Léon Boutroux. Both of their philosophies were essentially dynamic, introducing a vital, energizing principle into the philosophical tradition. Blondel's L'Action was more overtly religious than Bergson's "intuition" and élan vital, probably reflecting the influence of Léon Ollé-Laprune, whose protegé Blondel had been at the Ecole Normale. Nevertheless, both philosophers insisted that mathematical science had nothing to do with reality, and carried to their generation "the more or less direct means of acceding to the mystery of revelation."59 In other words, both projected the same spirit of vitality and opposition to the dogmatic; both sought reality intrinsically in man; both put forward similar conceptions of the selfBergson calling it the superficial and profound self while Blondel explained it as the everyday will of senseexperience and the profound will, where the human spirit thrusts itself towards its supreme goal. That deeper will was the original creative force of the universe. And yet when Blondel was forced to think about Bergson at all he usually acknowledged a vague similarity between somewhat parallel tendencies but he did not really go beyond this. For example, in 1921 he said that Bergson's philosophy sought the evolution of life on the plane of duration. His own purpose was to seek "the conversion of the spirit, its transportation on the plane of eternity, its access to the transcendant order, its preparation for the supernatural, its cooperation in divine action."60 The religious difference between the two men was obvious to Blondel. The positive part of Bergson's philosophy was untenable, he said, since it was nothing more than a "futurism." He characterized his own philosophy as an "eternalism."61 In 1905, when the modernist crisis was coming to a head and when Le Roy published a serious of key articles strongly criticizing the position of dogma in the Church, Blondel felt compelled to respond indirectly in an article in one of the chief modernist journals, the Annales de philosophie Chrétienne. Blondel lashed out at the "point of departure" that these philosophers shared. Namely, that philosophy was only a conscious and reflective return to the data of intuition and in subscribing to the exclusive thesis that knowledge is only a view of the practical. This was too individualistic and too superficial for him.62 He

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continued to find Le Roy lacking in true Christian feeling, accusing him of an "ultra-Bergsonism" which "exalts itself by the ingenious attempt at its own suicide." 63 Blondel's ambivalence toward Bergson before 1914 may have stemmed from his own fear of Papal condemnation. Laberthonnière's work had already been placed on the Index. In 1906, Blondel had been warned to disassociate himself from Bergson's ideas and from those of his disciples since too many young Catholics were turning toward Bergson, and since the crisis might take a drastic turn.64 In 1907, the encyclical Pascendi was issued condemning Modernism, and alone among the chief modernists, Blondel's works escaped censure. One of the reasons his work probably evaded condemnation was its more or less consistent opposition to the Bergsonians, and especially to the "New Philosophy" of Edouard Le Roy. One modernist whose works did not escape the Index was Lucien Laberthonnière, an Oratorian and director of the Annales de philosophie Chrétienne. Like Blondel he asserted the pre-eminence of active faith over intellectual contemplation but was much more overt in his attempt to substitute a new apologetic (which he called moral dogmatism) for Thomism.65 Although much less conservative than Blondel, Laberthonnière was perhaps Bergson's severest critic among the modernists. Radical as he might have been there seemed to be no question of allaying his own position with a related and popular philosophy. This may have been true of the syndicalists but not of the modernists. In fact, Laberthonnière felt that in terms of position, method and point of view, his philosophy, as well as that of Blondel was rather "separated" from that of Bergson.66 Laberthonnière's chief criticism came over certain aspects of Bergsonian intuition and mobilism. Like Blondel, he was not as anti-intellectual as their contemporaries might have thought. The danger of an intuitive philosophy came, he felt, when we tried to live reality instead of thinking it, as Bergson would have us do. When we do so, he said, we run the risk of "dehumanizing ourselves" by returning to instinct. According to Laberthonnière it is by intelligence more than by intuition that we become conscious of ourselves. It is that consciousness of ourselves which truly constitutes our humanity.67 He was interpreting or perhaps misinterpreting Bergsonian intuition as being instinctual rather than as a living attitude and therefore the immersion in duration that Bergson called for was an illusion. Bergson was therefore giving, he felt, the impression of individuality when in fact he was destroying it.

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Laberthonnière felt that evolution could never explain very much. The thing to be explained after all was not how the human species evolved but how it appeared in the first place. Was its appearance due to necessity or to the intervention of a free will? Élan vital was an abstraction that promised much but explained little. It told us very little about ourselves or about the cosmos except that it was a bundle of tendencies that lacked a final direction to anyone of them. 68 Bergson's universe was devoid of unity or purpose, Laberthonnière concluded, and therefore contained no meaning. It was here that Laberthonnière placed his finger on one of the greatest weaknesses of Bergsonian philosophy in terms of religious faith: how can a mystical philosophy of becoming form the sound basis for a religious faith and give value to our lives? For Laberthonnière, the life of free beings opens on a perspective of eternity. Referring to a conversation he had with Bergson, he wrote that for Bergson there was no eternity. Becoming for Bergson was the absolute, ''and between that pure becoming, and pure duration and the eternity of the Greeks conceived as a dead fixity, there is for him hardly a mean."69 Bergson, he wrote, closed the door to spiritual immortality conceived as the flowering of life in eternity.70 Bergson seemed shocked when he told him that for the Christian evolution meant not change "from time to time, as the movement of a mobile on a horizontal line, but from time to eternity, as ascent from below on high in a vertical line."71 According to Laberthonnière, Bergson seemed very indecisive when confronted by these questions and took particular exception to his philosophy being characterized as a "dynamic pantheism."72 Laberthonnière had revealed the obvious flaw in Bergson's philosophy which was echoed by Catholics throughout the period, even by those who were otherwise enchanted by Bergson's message. Baron Friedrich von Hügel, the leading voice of Modernism in Germany, complimented Bergson on his "exquisite and most brilliant mind" but felt that the philosopher's aversion to any kind of finalism destroyed the promise of his work. What Bergson had done was stop halfway"he has removed the mechanical obstacles to liberty, but he has not discovered the spiritual conditions and requisites for the same liberty."73 Marcel Hébert voiced the same concerns. A Jesuit priest and director of the Ecole Fénélon in Paris, Hébert has been called "the first philosopher to appear within the phenomenon of Modernism."74 Hébert was an admirer of Bergson but was prevented from becoming a Bergsonian by the totally vague definition of God made in Creative Evolution. There was simply no rapport between the Creator in Creative Evolution and the Creator in the Judeo-Christian tradition because the absence of finality made them completely different. The lack of purposiveness in Bergsonian evolution simply stripped the cosmos of its spiritual character.75

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A trend of thought which could give rise to a hostile critic like Laberthonnière could also produce one of the chief Bergsonians in France, Edouard Le Roy, the man who succeeded Bergson at both the Collège de France and the French Academy. Always identified with the "New Philosophy" and the "New Positivism," which he more than anyone else helped formulate, and always associated with Bergson in the minds of their contemporaries, Le Roy sought the reconciliation of Bergson's philosophy with modernist faith. A professor of Mathematics at the Lycée Saint-Louis, Le Roy was not content with merely being translator of Bergsonian ideas. He was, after all, one of the leaders of the modernist-Christian learning, and it was inevitable that he should bring these ideas to bear upon the religious and intellectual controversies of the day. It was precisely here that his originality lay. As the most radical of the philosophical modernists, Le Roy carried Bergsonian philosophy forward to what the educational and religious establishments thought of as its logical extremes: a radical criticism of science and a rather heretical attack on religious dogma. For Le Roy the "New Philosophy" represented a direct reaction against, and a reform of, the old utilitarian positivism. The reform movement, which Bergson helped pioneer, consisted of freeing our intelligence from its utilitarian habits. Only by doing so, Le Roy said, only by renouncing the usual forms of analytic and synthetic thought could we, through a direct intuitional effort, achieve an immediate contact with reality. It was in the internal reform necessary to accomplish this that one could find the point of departure for a profound revolution in traditional ideas. 76 The interpretive similarities with Péguy are obvious but Le Roy carried the Bergsonian emphasis on the intuitional a bit further. He frankly stated that the "New Positivism" was an "anti-intellectualist philosophy, affirming the primacy of action and life" and that it represented ''a continuation of the great line of mystics."77 Traditional rationalism was something to be repudiated and with it much of the scientific method. After all, he wrote, the scientific method only applied to the world of practical action or inert matter. Always proceeding by symbolical representation and never having for its object the inner life of concrete reality, it deforms everything it touches. According to Le Roy science, under the influence of practical necessities, fabricates theories, laws, even scientific facts themselves, since its mission is to manufacture the truth which it seeks.78 Yet it misses the ultimate basis of everythingsoul, life and activity escape it. The appreciation of this is the ''New Philosophy."79 Le Roy had gone much further than Bergson in declaring science bankruptalthough he explicitly denied that this was his intention. Like Brunetière, Bergson had sought to give intelligence its due and to relegate science to its proper domain. Bergson understood that the scientific method and intelligence dealt with the categories of fixity, determination and exteriority. For Bergson this was not the deformation of anything but the understanding of

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common sense and spatial knowledge. Like Brunetière, he was misunderstood and labelled anti-intellectual. Technically he was not and yet one of his chief disciples, Edouard Le Roy, was indirectly acknowledging it. Bergson, furthermore, did nothing to repudiate these ideas. As a matter of fact, he expressed a great sympathy for Modernism generally and Le Roy specifically. 80 In one more sense the charge of anti-intellectualism was at least partially justified; if we accept Bergson at his word he was supra-intellectual rather than anti-intellectual. But if we realize, as most of his readers and critics did, that most of his career had been spent extolling the virtues and powers of intuition at the expense of intelligence and that his great message to his generation had been framed around the attack upon mechanism and scientism, we can see why his contemporaries failed to draw that thin line between the approaches of anti-mechanism and anti-intellectualism that Bergson did. Where did the first end? Bergson may have rested most of his case on the first, but was not the second implied? He may have begged his audience to give intelligence its due, but whenever he discussed it he always found reasons to limit its use. It was no wonder, then, that William James could credit Bergson with having slain "the beast intellectualism . . . absolutely dead."81 Like Péguy, Le Roy had interpreted Bergsonian philosophy in a very mystical way, and this too he carried much further than his master intended. Like Péguy, Le Roy realized that a mystical philosophy could render religious dogmas superfluous and provide the basis for a new religion that was free of them. Once one has accepted the "New Positivism" of the mind, he maintained, one is able to speak of the contigency of both scientific and dogmatically religious truths. This was yet another aspect of Le Roy's version of Bergsonism which made both their ideas suspect in the eyes of the Church. It also separated Le Roy from more conservative modernists who felt that a mystical philosophy could not provide the building blocks for a religion. The appearance of Le Roy's essay What Is A Dogma? in 1905 was described by a contemporary modernist as "a notable event in the history of the Liberal Catholic movement."82 Le Roy's motives were clear: "Every layman is called upon to fulfill the duty of apostleship. He alone can serve efficiently as the vehicle and intermediary of the Christian message to those who could not trust the priests."83 Le Roy sought to fulfill his "duty" by applying the Bergsonian distinction between the static and the dynamic to an explanation of the relationship of dogma with the modern mind. Le Roy maintained that dogmas have no real demonstrative validity. Ultimately they must make their appeal to mere authority which the modern mind rejects because it will not accept the imposition of such a truth from without. Truth, he wrote, is something developing in the mind, adapting itself to the needs

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of experience. 84 Truth for the modern mind is an intrinsic process, while dogma has an extrinsic value. "Men of today," he could then say, "are within their rights in not consenting to be held down to the point of view of the thirteenth century."85 The contemporary mind, according to Le Roy, rejected the idea of dogma as useless and unfruitful. But the gravest reproach that can be levelled against it is that it is unchangeable, remaining alien to that progress which is the very essence of truth. What he felt the modern mind was repelled by was the static, intellectualist concept of dogma which was so current in the orthodox apologetic. This intellectualist conception, he felt, was not a true Catholic conception.86 Le Roy took Bergson's ideas further in one more respect and recast his philosophy in more moral terms. Bergsonian evolution was not sufficiently teleological for Le Roy. He believed that cosmic becoming was oriented in a definite sense. "Universal reality is progress," he wrote, it is "belief and ascension toward the best and the greatest." Life for Le Roy was "ascent in a path of growing spiritualization." Adding a finalism to Creative Evolution, Le Roy claimed that life was an activity regulated by an end, an activity governed by a command emanating from a transcendent being.87 The one group that could never be permanently seduced by the Bergsonian magic was the conservative Catholics. Even those who, like Henri Massis, Ernest Psichari and Jacques Maritain, had followed Bergson as the "Apostle of new hopes" earlier in the decade abandoned him later and in many cases became Thomists when they discovered that the substance of Bergsonian philosophy was not as great as its promise. And it was the Thomists, in their struggle with the modernists, who alerted the Church to the dangers of Bergson and Bergsonism. Beginning in the late 1870s, Pope Leo XIII attempted to counter the influence of the Church's philosophical adversaries by proclaiming the value of Christian philosophy, and by urging Christian philosophers to draw upon the principles of the scholastic theologians. The Pope's original aim was to stimulate a new interest in the wisdom of St. Thomas and scholastic philosophy.88 Almost overnight new editions of, and commentaries on, the scholastics made their appearance. Scholars and theologians found additional outlets for their ideas in new Catholic periodicals and the Catholic Institute of Paris reformed its philosophy department by creating a special faculty devoted to the study of Thomistic philosophy. By 1907 the Thomistic revival was still an immature movement whose spokesmen, according to Etienne Gilson, were too certain about Thomistic philosophy and too inexperienced in philosophizing.89 Two developments

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helped bring the Thomist movement to maturity: the challenge of Modernism and its suppression by the Church in 1907, and the challenge posed by Bergsonian philosophy. During the period 19001914 Modernism and Bergsonism competed with the neo-Thomist movement for the intellectual sympathies of French Catholics. Modernism's challenge was met and dealt with in 1907. In condemning Modernism the Church had not merely moved to head off what it regarded as a heresy but at the same time it sought to further install Thomism as the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church by destroying its chief enemy. Where Leo XIII had been content to stimulate and encourage the growth of scholastic studies, Pius X after 1907 insisted that they form the basis of all sacred studies. The Thomists were now virtually alone within the Church in countering the influence of positivism and scientism. In the struggle to free metaphysics from the grasp of scientism, Bergson and the Thomists faced a common foe, and as long as they shared that experience Bergsonism's virtues were extolled and its role in liberating the spirit and restoring freedom, honoured. This was the case before 1907 when many in the religious revival were Bergsonian enthusiasts. Almost overnight, the appearance of Creative Evolution changed this, and Bergsonism came to be viewed as a competitor. Although the Thomists had accepted the critical conclusions made by Bergson against the mechanistic philosophies of the nineteenth century, after 1907 they began to question the very weapons Bergson used in his criticism. The Thomists no longer accepted the Bergsonian criticism of the intellect, or the philosophy of becoming. Years later Etienne Gilson lamented the Thomist's change in attitude when he wrote that Bergson's was a philosophy which was "obviously free from all links with religion and one which nevertheless was such that a Christian theology could use it to its own ends." 90 Christian theology, he said, found itself confronted by a "pagan philosophyall the more philosophy as it was pagan." Like Aristotle, Gilson said, Bergson needed his Aquinas: To judge him in the name of Christian philosophy was to impose on him duties that were not his; it was to exact from this philosophic intelligence, possibly the purest that the world had known since Plotinus, tasks that as a pagan he was not able to discharge.91 This was precisely where the Thomistic reaction to Bergson turnedover the question of Bergsonian philosophy's Christian value. The conviction arose in 1907 that there was an absolute doctrinal divergence between Bergson's philosophy and Thomism.

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Ironically, the confidence that the Thomists exhibited in turning against Bergson may be viewed as an indirect result of Bergson's impact on Christian philosophers. According to Gilson, Bergson enabled the Thomists "to preserve their religious faith without feeling ashamed of their philosophy. The presence of Bergson reassured us," and "thanks to him, metaphysics, once banned by Kant, was being reinstated in France." 92 The Thomists, however, were not interested in extracting the deeper truths of Bergsonian philosophy and Christianizing it but rather were interested in judging its weaknesses and criticizing its pretensions. The intellectual development of Thomists who felt compelled to come to terms with Bergsonian philosophy stretched from a youthful enthusiasm toward Bergson and his ideas before 1907 through a very critical and often hostile reaction to him after 1907 to finally, in some cases, a more understanding approach in later years. No one was more typical of this development or more important to the neo-Thomist movement than its chief representative of this century, Jacques Maritain. Prior to 1907 Maritain had been a student at the Sorbonne, where he was regarded as a disciple of Bergson and where, his wife has written, he "bore aloft through the classrooms the revolutionary torch of a passionate socialism and of the philosophy of intuition." On more than one occasion Maritain scandalized his more conservative colleagues by reading an "ultra-Bergsonian paper" in class. Yet it was not Maritain's ardor but his understanding of Bergsonian philosophy which prompted Bergson to tell Raissa Maritain that, of all his students, Jacques Maritain best understood and interpreted his thought.93 Like so many other young Frenchmen Maritain was captivated by Bergson's attack on mechanism and materialism. His reading of Matter and Memory almost made him a disciple but something prevented him from becoming a Bergsonian philosopher. Despite the appeal of Bergson's case against the mechanists and materialists, the rest of his philosophy made Maritain very uneasy. While he was in the process of converting to Catholicism (19061907), Maritain was bothered by what his wife called "cheap Bergsonism," something she classified as irresponsible and crude anti-intellectualism, and the "purposeless sentimentality disguised as intuition, which seemed to be spreading among young people and priests." This "childish passion to conform to the age," she said, was obscuring the real search for truth and this induced Maritain to regard the influence of the new philosophy as "a mortal danger for the intellect."94 Maritain resolved his doubts in his preface to the second edition of La philosophie bergsonienne, in 1913, a book which has since come to be viewed as

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one of the first important manifestations of the neo-Thomist movement. In this preface Maritain recalled his attempt at reconciling the Bergsonian critique of the concept and formulas of revealed dogma: "The choice had to be made, and obviously this choice could only be in favour of the infallible." 95 In the end the decision to turn away from his first master was prompted by his rediscovery of metaphysics through his reading of St. Thomas. Bergsonism was no longer compatible with his new interests. After 1908, Maritain became one of the most important critics of Bergsonian philosophy, and formed a vital part of what by 1912 became the mounting rationalistic counter-attack against the Bergsonian concepts of becoming and intuition, as well as Bergson's anti-intellectualism. Maritain began his attack against Bergson in two articles published in the Revue de philosophie in 1911, and the Revue thomiste in 1912.96 "It was singularly audacious," his wife has written, "to set the greatest philosopher of our times in opposition to himself. But were not the illustrious man and the bold youth before all else friends of truth? We found out that although Bergson was chagrined, he thus understood it."97 These two articles, together with the series of lectures he was invited to give at the Catholic Institute in 1913, made Maritain's reputation as the chief spokesman of neo-Thomism in France. These seven lectures entitled "The Philosophy of M. Bergson and Christian Philosophy"98 created something of a sensation when they were given, and for the first time Thomism reached a popular audience. The fact that it did was due in large part to its attack upon Bergsonism. Until 191213, the image Bergson projected to young Catholics was that of the uncompromising philosopher holding high the lamp of truth. Now Bergson was faced with a talented rival, a man who competed with him as a philosopher of the first rank. Bergson never for a moment lost his audience at the Collège de France. Nevertheless, young Catholic intellectuals like Henri Massis and Ernest Psichari, who were usually found in Bergson's classroom, were now attending Maritain's lectures at the Catholic Institute.99 Whereas Maritain's lectures and articles furnished the neo-Thomist movement with some of its basic texts, his attack against Bergsonism had been anticipated in a spate of articles which appeared in France in 1907 and 1908. In spare, outline form, these articles delineated the arguments that Maritain later covered more thoroughly in his own attack. Polemicizing against the excess of both scientism and Bergsonism, Maritain and his fellow Thomists advocated a doctrine of reason backed by faith. Their efforts aroused in the Catholic intellectual community a new interest in Thomism and scholastic philosophy.

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The Thomists distinguished between what Maritain called the "Bergsonism of Intention"the attack on the inanities of mechanismand the "Bergsonism of Fact," against which they concentrated their fire. The criticism of this side of Bergsonian philosophy fell into three major categories: Bergson's sacrifice of the intellect, his identification of reality with movement, and his conception of God. Apparently the Thomists waited until 1908 to make their refutations of Bergson's philosophy because only then did Creative Evolution present this philosophy in its completed form, yet it is difficult to ascertain why they waited so long to condemn an anti-intellectual philosophy. From the beginning the Thomists had placed their trust in reason. Quoting St. Thomas, Maritain said that "to err on the subject of the intellect . . . is the most unfortunate of all errors." 100 According to Maritain, if Bergsonian philosophy was mistaken about the intellect, "all the other errors we might blame it for will have their origin in that one."101 If one could successfully refute Bergson's criticism of the intellect which for the Thomists was the very edifice of Bergsonism, the whole philosophy would crumble. And yet until 1911 Thomists merely nibbled away at the essential problem confining their criticism, like one professor at the Catholic Institute of Paris, to the "insufficiency of the philosophies of intuition."102 Another critic, writing in the Revue Thomist, accused Bergson of a "radical vice" in completely reversing the traditional concept of knowledge. Bergson, he charged, arbitrarily transferred the role assigned by nature to the senses and to intelligence, to the will. "From there," he concluded, "comes everything bad."103 The distinguished Dominican theologian, Father Garrigou-Lagrange, went so far as to equate Bergson's negation of reason with the negation of that consciousness which would in turn reduce everything to the level of animal and vegetable life: ''Everything would return to biology.''104 Albert Farges, who with Garrigou-Lagrange was the only distinguished Thomist to criticize Bergson before Maritain did so, accused Bergson of causing an irreparable breach in the unity of the universe by setting up a rival to intelligence.105 Drawing upon his former intimacy with Bergson and his ideas Jacques Maritain seemed to understand not only what Bergson was saying but what might have prompted him to do so. He thus realized that what Bergson distrusted so much was not a faculty but a state of mind; not the intellect, but rather mechanically discursive reason. Bergson, Maritain said, had confused real intellect with a "disgraceful caricature," or "pseudo-intellect." Those who call this "science" give it a sham title to fool the ignorant. If what Bergson said about the intellect were true, "we should always have to tend toward mechanicism whenever we exerted our faculty of knowing in a natural way."106 Because Bergson

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neglected real intellect, "he deprived intellect of its own life and its essential activity, of its power to form ideas and of the intuitive light of first principles." 107 Bergsonian philosophy, Maritain maintained, was wrong in separating intuition from reason since true understanding followed from a synthesis of the two. For the Thomists, this was all-important. When Bergson tried to separate the two he stripped understanding of its intellectual character on one hand, and its "illuminating power" on the other.108 It is intelligence, Maritain said, that makes us men, and it is by intelligence that we possess the truth. In it "we defend both our very nature, our humanity, and our beatitude, the joy of the truth." Therefore, Maritain concluded, ''there is no conciliation possible betweeen Christian philosophy and any thought set up against the intellect."109 According to Maritain, Bergson compounded his error by making intuition surpass intelligence absolutely taking him even further away from the intellectual perception of the scholastics. Bergson's intuition is a lived identification of the mind and the thing, of object and subject. Therefore, Maritain says, if a philosopher wished to have the intuition of plant life or of matter he "would himself have to become materially vegetable or mineral."110 As a method of attaining knowledge, Maritain says, Bergsonian intuition must remain both imaginary and impossible to put into practise. Another element of Bergsonian philosophy that drew the fire of the Thomists was Bergson's identification of God and reality with movement. For them the universe was an ordered whole, and at the core of reality there was what Etienne Gilson calls, a "static energy." It is by virtue of this energy that a being exists. That energy is static, says Gilson, since "it is innocent of all becoming." God in Thomistic philosophy is the ultimate and pure act of being.111 The Thomists were thus alarmed that, as one put it, Bergson was "proposing nothing less than a change in the axis of human thought." Unless this philosophy of becoming was checked, one could expect the destruction of all knowledge, truth, certainty and reality.112 The Thomists were not overreacting when they claimed that Bergsonian becoming lacked a solid base. Bergsonian becoming, they thought, denied the very principles of identity and causality which furnished the Thomistic philosophy of being with its power.113 In this connection, Albert Farges accused the philosophy of becoming of vanity and lack of self-respect since it did not base itself upon the data of observation, but rather on the "clouds" of movement. If Bergson was right, Farges wrote, a new metaphysic had to be constructed on the ruins of the old.114

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Finally, what disturbed many Thomists was the place given to God in the philosophy of Bergsonthe lack of a clear doctrine of God as a distinct, absolute Creator. Maritain thought that any philosophy that tried to do without being was "logically incapable of establishing an absolute and total, real and essential distinction between God and things." If God had nothing of the already-made, as Bergson alleged, was He then, Maritain asked, in the making? "Was there nothing perfect in Him? Pure need instead of pure act?" 115 Another critic writing in the Revue de philosophie, suggested that Bergson's God had "the air of a poor devil, more deserving of pity than envy." What, after all, this critic asked, was God's history if we took Bergson seriously?: In the beginning He was an enormous sum of potentialities. Was he conscious of Himself? Was He not conscious? The author does not say; but I think that He was unconscious; for we are only conscious of the actual, and He only had potentialities in Him, or nearly so. It was "a poor God indeed, who was forced by an implacable and inexplicable fatality to wander eternally outside of Himself. Is this a God?"116 What the Thomists were saying as a school of philosophy was that by destroying intelligence, reason, and natural truths, Bergson was destroying the foundations of faith. This was why, Maritain concluded, in a dictum often repeated during the period by his colleagues, "a philosophy which blasphemes intelligence will never be Catholic." While Thomists continued to keep Bergsonism at arms length they never forgot the great debt they owed its author. This had been Maritain's attitude after he made his reputation in a great refutation of Bergsonian philosophy. He closed his lectures of 1913 by reminding his audience that in a difficult period Bergson alone victoriously attacked agnosticism and positivism which until then had reigned unchallenged: "In doing so, whatever he may have said of the intellect, he has served intelligence and truth. And many who had come out of the darkness of official atheism owe this to him and to the desire for truth that permeates and animates his teaching."117 In 1913, Maritain counseled moderation to those of his colleagues within the Church who saw the need to criticize Bergsonism in order to defend intellectual and metaphysical values. Maritain realized that "the greater the present vogue for Bergsonism is, the keener will be the reactionand the more unjust." The reaction against Bergson and Bergsonism had indeed become intense, and he probably had the Integralist attack in mind when he wrote those words.

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Thomist criticisms of Bergsonian philosophy may not have been personal or bitter, but they were certainly dramatic enough. They drew attention to its manifest potential as "a new metaphysic constructed on the ruins of the old," and warned that Bergson was "causing an irreparable breach in the unity of the universe," and that he was "proposing nothing less than a change in the axis of human thought." They were really alarmist cries for thoughtful Catholics to maintain vigilance against the looming tide of heresy. What the Thomist critique of Bergsonism did was to reinforce the Church's previous concerns over its potentially dangerous ideas and their supposedly insidious influence in France. Years before the Church placed Bergson's work on the Index it was concerned with his influence on Catholics, be they students, intellectuals or priests. We have seen the impact of that appeal on people who formed a vital part of the Catholic revival. As early as 1906 Maurice Blondel had been warned to disassociate himself from Bergson's ideas and from those of his disciples, and in the same period Raissa Maritain had complained about "cheap Bergsonism" spreading among young people and clergy. Conservative Catholics were quite clear about their fears of Bergsonism and Modernism, which were often regarded as synonymous, 118 and their rivalry for the allegiance of both priests and laymen. One priest writing in the conservative newspaper, L'Univers, claimed that this was the major reason for indexing Bergson's bookshis popularity among Catholics, especially those who read liberal Catholic journals.119 There was more here than concern over the odd priest discussing the religious implications of élan vital. Bergson's work had also penetrated the Catholic seminaries no less than the secular universities where it installed itself in what René Johannet calls "a Bergson snobism," threatening Thomism as the official Catholic philosophy.120 What ultimately sentenced Bergsonism in the eyes of the Church was its intellectual affinities with Modernism and its potential threat to the Church's basic philosophy. The Vatican believed that Modernism was a well-organized conspiracy dedicated to the subversion of the Catholic faith. When Rome issued the encyclical Pascendi Gregis in 1907 it dealt a mortal blow to Modernism, and eliminated what it felt was a great danger to formal religion. Pascendi and the decree which followed it, Lamentabili sane exitu, thoroughly condemned the modernist theses. In 1908 Alfred Loisy was excommunicated, modernist journals were forced to close, and the works of the leading modernists were placed on the Index. What then followed was, according to a recent historian of the subject, nothing less than an "anti-modernist witchhunt" which lasted until the 1920s.121 A purge followed Pascendi in which modernists and those presumed to be modernists were fired from administrative and teaching positions in seminaries and universities. Moreover, argus-eyed vigilance committees serving the

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bishop in each diocese were to see to it that anyone affiliated with a Catholic institution or publication who expressed a "different" view on such subjects as biblical exegesis or scholasticism was to be purged. These efforts to stamp out the modernist heresy reached a peak in 1910 when the Holy See, believing that Modernism still enjoyed a clandestine existence, imposed an anti-modernist oath on all priests having a pastoral charge or entering major orders. The oath speaks volumes about the religious climate of the day. Administered during a period of almost irrational hysteria, it ironically demanded that clergy accept the rational method of demonstrating the existence of God and the intellectual nature of religious belief. In the same year Bergson's ideas and books were prohibited from being taught in the Catholic seminaries. This came as something of a revelation to Marcel Proust. "I see that Pius X has forbidden the priests to attend his courses or to read his books," he wrote, "That's how I discovered that they do read them, and it pleased me because I was under the impression that they read only La Libre Parole (which is not, however, forbidden them by Pius X)." 122 One of the groups responsible for the anti-modernist campaign was a secret society within the Church itself called Sodalitium Pianum or the Society of St. Pius V. The Society originated in Rome in 1909 and lasted until 1921. Its leader was a Vatican official, Msgr. Umberto Benigni, who through a network of agents helped to fight and stamp out Modernism. The Integralists, as they came to be called, disseminated propaganda through the periodicals of allies, and denounced Church leaders, scholars, theologians, even Catholic politicians whose orthodoxy they suspected. They were able to operate secretly through their use of codes, pseudonyms and dedicated agents. Three of the most realiable Integralists in France were Bernard Gaudeau, editor of Foi Catholique, Msgr. Théodore Delmont, Professor of French Literature at the Catholic University of Lyon, and Jacques Rocafort.123 All were highly active in the integralist campaign against Modernism, and all of the them openly denounced Henri Bergson in the conservative Catholic press. These denunciations came through newspapers and periodicals such as La Croix, Foi Catholique, L'Univers, and Action Française where the Integralists had many allies and a large audience.124 To the Integralists who wanted to stamp out the last trace of Modernism in France, Bergsonism was a lingering incubus through which the modernist virus might be kept alive. It therefore had to be destroyed because it not only helped spawn Modernism but threatened to work its seductive magic permanently on French youth.125 The Integralists built their attack around the foreignness of Bergsonism. Bernard Gaudeau, for example, who gave two lectures on Bergsonism at the Catholic Institute in 1912, and who liked to refer to its author as the "Parisian Buddhist," insisted that Bergsonism was an essentially polluted and "Asiatic"

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philosophy. 126 By the same token Jacques Rocafort maintained that Maurras' reputation would prove more durable than Bergson's because Maurras' ideas were truly French, while Bergson's were quite foreign. In a line that could have been taken from Maurras himself, Rocafort accused Bergsonism of being completely alien: "this way of thinking with the heart is not French. We are an intellectual country, reasoning and reasonable and classical."127 To Abbé Delmont, Bergson was the "delicieux juif" of the Collège de France, a man who was "neither French, nor Christian."128 It seems reasonably certain that Pope Pius X did not know about the Society of St. Pius V, but his Secretary of State, Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, did. Merry del Val kept a discreet distance from the Integralists although he sympathized with their goals. On at least one occasion he openly intervened in the campaign against Bergson. Several days after the publication of Albert Farges' book, La philosophie de M. Bergson, the author received a letter from Merry del Val written in the name of the Pontiff: In response to the false theories of this new philosophy which hopes to shake great principles and the acquired truths of traditional philosophy, an authorized voice was heard unmasking and refuting these errors, in order to fight this poison of philosophical modernism, so much the more deadly and more dangerous because it is more disguised, more subtle and more seductive.129 One critic went so far as to say that Merry del Val's letter, since it was written in the name of the Pontiff, constituted an official condemnation of Bergson's ideas. Moreover, the letter clearly defined the religious debate; the issue came down to a struggle of "Thomism against Bergsonism."130 Despite the Integralist campaign of intimidation, Catholic critics of Bergson's work still followed the example of Jacques Maritain and struck a sensible balance between the "Bergsonism of Intent" and the "Bergsonism of Fact." Thomist critics could laud Bergson for the originality and powerful inspiration of his books, and for producing a metaphysic which was an "ingenious novel" while at the same time they could insist that Bergson's God was not a Christian God.131 Even the Indexing of Bergson's books in June 1914, in so many ways as Integralist triumph, did not change this. For example, to Abbé Georges Michelet, a Professor at the Catholic Institute of Toulouse, Bergsonism remained a "hymn to life" written by a man of great talent. This "new spiritualism'' was certainly inspirational but was basically incompatible with Catholicism.132 Another critic writing in the liberal Revue du clergé français agreed with the Integralist, Jacques Rocafort, that reason was ''l'avant foi" but urged his readers to remember that Bergson had been the great champion against determinism and

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materialism and had almost singlehandedly brought philosophy back into contact with reality and restored free will. 133 This was one of the major themes in the Catholic support of Bergson's candidacy for the French Academyhis responsibility in helping to create a Catholic renaissance in France. Among Catholics the reaction to Bergson did not occur in neat patterns. There were divisions among both the liberals and the conservatives. Catholics as far apart as Charles Péguy, Jacques Maritain and Edouard Le Roy in their own different ways understood the man and his work as well as and perhaps better than anyone else in pre-war France. They all got something from Bergson, be it yet another justification for religious faith, or a sustaining argument for an original bias, or just a persuasive cudgel against an alien ideology. All, in fact, took from Bergson what they wantedhis inspiration and with it at least a patina of his thoughtand refashioned it to meet their own personal needs. Bergsonism was never a school which set guidelines for its members but rather a tendency in pre-war France where men could call themselves Bergsonians and yet be their own masters.

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Footnotes 1. Paul Claudel, "My Conversion," Colosseum 2, no. 8 (1934): 261. 2. Marcelin Berthelot, "La science et la morale," Revue de Paris (1895): 469. 3. Ferdinand Brunetière, "Après une visite au Vatican," Revue des deux mondes 127 (1895), 97118. 4. K.W. Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 183. 5. Agathon, Les jeunes gens d'aujourd'hui (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1913). 6. Emile Faguet, "L'Enquête sur la jeunesse," Revue hebdomadaire (July 20, 1913): 289304; Amélie Gayraud, Les jeunes filles d'aujourd'hui (Paris: G. Oudin, 1914); Frédéric Charpin, "La question religieuse; Enquête internationale," Mercure de France 66 (1907): 57622; 67 (1907): 4071, 21849; 421452; 62556; 68 (1907): 3461. 7. Emile Faguet, "L'Enquête," 302. 8. Agathon, Les jeunes, 8384. 9. Ernest Dimnet, France Herself Again (New York: G.P. Putman's Sons, 1914), 249. 10. Agathon, Les jeunes, 158. 11. P. Mandonnet, "La crise rehgieuse chez les jeunes gens," Revue de la jeunesse 5 (190910): 2528, 7177, 10512. See also, "Les catholiques dans l'Université," Revue de la jeunesse 9 (191314): 16264, 33335, 49799, 61315. 12. Agathon, Les jeunes, 66 f. 13. A. Dossat, "Les jeunes catholiques et l'influence de Bergson," La Croix (June 13, 1913), 3. 14. Raissa Maritain, Adventures in Grace (New York: Longman's, Green, 1945), 147. 15. A.D. Sertillanges, Avec Henri Bergson (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 21. 16. Jacques Chevalier, "Comment Bergson a trouvé Dieu," Revue des deux mondes n.s. année 4, no. 20 (1951): 612. For further discussion of this subject see John M. Oesterreicher, "Henri Bergson and the Faith," Thought, 22, no. 87 (1947): 63578, and Henry Hogarth, ''Bergson's Spiritual Pilgrimage," Hibbert Journal 51, no. 200 (1952): 6366. 17. Jean Wahl, "Concerning Bergson's Relation to the Catholic Church," Review of Religion 9 (1944): 45. There is therefore some reason for believing that under ideal circumstances Bergson might have made a formal conversion to Catholicism. Rumours of such a conversion circulated in France in the years immediately following his death, fueled in part by his request for a priest and by Raissa Maritain's highly controversial claim that Bergson had been baptised. "Henri Bergson," Commonweal 32, no. 13 (1941): 31719. Nevertheless, Bergson's widow is quite explicit on this point; there was no baptism and there was no religious burial. 18. Letter to Père Joseph de Tonquédec, February 20, 1912, Études 130 (1912): 51415. 19. Charles Du Bos, Journal 19211923 (Paris: Coffêa, 1946), 60. 20. Letter of Paul Claudel to André Suarès, July 25, 1907, in André Suarès, André Suarès et Paul Claudel: Correspondence, 19041938 (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 106.

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21. Letter to Frédéric Charpin, "La question religieuse," 34. Bergson defined religion as "a defensive reaction of nature against the dissolvent power of intelligence." The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (New York: Henry Holt, 1935), 112. 22. E. Slosson, Major Prophets of Today (Boston: Little, Brown, 1914), 81. More than once during his career Bergson reaffirmed his ideas that élan vital was "an emanation of the divinity." A.D. Sertillanges, Avec Henri Bergson, 17. 23. Published originally in the Bulletin des professeurs catholiques de l'Université of February 20, 1912. Quoted in Jacques Chevalier, Henri Bergson (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 65. 24. Pierre Pacary, Un compagnon de Péguy, Joseph Lotte (Paris: Victor Le Coffre, 1916), 2526. 25. Ernest Psichari, Lettres du centurion (Paris: Canard, 1933).

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26. John White, "The Character Development of Ernest Psichari," Psychiatry 7 (1944): 418. 27. A. Goichon, Ernest Psichari; d'après des documents inedits (Paris: Editions de la Revue des jeunes, 1921), 67. 28. Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 71, 147. 29. Georges Fonsegrive, L'Évolution des idées dans la France contemporaine (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1917), 297. 30. Raissa Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together (New York: Longman's Green, 1942), 165. See also the very proBergsonian views of Albert Jounet, the Catholic poet and philosopher, and those of Abbé Paul Naudet in Gaston Picard and Gustave Tautain, "Enquête sur M. Henri Bergson et l'influence de sa pensée sur la sensibilité contemporaine," Grande revue 84 (1914): 115, 117. 31. Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy, 159. 32. Félicien Challaye, Péguy socialiste (Paris: Amoit-Dumont, 1954). 33. Daniel Halévy, Péguy et les Cahiers de la Quinzaine (Paris: B. Grasset, 1941), 47. 34. Challaye, Péguy socialisle, 274. 35. Jean and Jérôme Tharaud, Notre cher Péguy (Paris: Plon, 1926), 1: 26566. 36. Hans A. Schmitt, Charles Péguy. The Decline of an Idealist (Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 103. See also André Henry, Bergson Maître de Péguy (Paris: Éditions Elzévir, 1947). 37. Jean Delaporte, Connaissance de Péguy (Paris: Plon, 1944), 73. 38. Halévy, Péguy, 47. 39. Charles Péguy, Notre conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), 11819. 40. Jean and Jérôme Tharaud, Notre cher Péguy, 11819. 41. Ibid., 119. 42. Péguy, Notre conjointe, 227, 27783. 43. Ibid. 44. Halévy, Péguy, 347. 45. Charles Péguy, Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne (Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 1914). 46. Ibid., 18. 47. Cited in Yvonne Servais, Charles Péguy: The Pursuit of Salvation (Maryland: Newman Press, 1953), 210. 48. Mercure de France 88 (1910): 115. 49. Emmanuel Mounier, "Péguy, ou l'antimodernisme de la charité," in Pierre Péguy, Péguy et la vraie France (Montreal: Serge, 1944), 117. 50. Quoted in Jean and Jérôme Tharaud, Notre cher Péguy, 234.

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51. Alec Vidler, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church (London: Cambridge University Press, 1934), 18687. 52. John Ratté, Three Modernists (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967), 7. See also Michele Ranchetti, The Catholic Modernists: A Study of the Religious Reform Movement (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). 53. Alfred Loisy, Mémoires (Paris: Emile Nourry, 1931), 3: 367, 381. 54. Alfred Loisy, Y A-t-il deux sources de la religion et de la morale? (Paris: Emile Nourry, 1934). 55. Alfred Loisy, George Tyrrell et Henri Bremond (Paris: Emile Nourry, 1936), 19192. In 1908 he privately admitted to these affinities between his own thought and Bergson's. See Alec Vidler, A Variety of Catholic Modernists (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 93.

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56. Maurice Blondel, L'Intinéraire philosophique de Maurice Blondel (Paris: Editions Spes, 1928), 47. 57. Ibid., 4748. 58. Ibid., 47. 59. Adrien Dansette, Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine (Paris: Flammarion, 1948), 2: 480. 60. Maurice Blondel, Correspondence philosophique: Maurice Blondel et Lucien Laberthonnière (Paris: Editions du seuil, 1961), 219. 61. Blondel, L'Itinéraire philosophique, 5051. See also his letter to Abbé J. Wehrlé, written about 1908. Lettres philosophiques (Paris: Aubier, 1961), 292. 62. Maurice Blondel, "Le point de départ de la recherche philosophique," Annales de philosophie chrétienne 151 (1905), 337360. 63. Blondel, Correspondence philosophique, 19192. 64. Letter from Fernand Marret to Maurice Blondel, December 31, 1906, in Maurice Blondel et Auguste Valensin correspondence, 18991912 (Paris: Aubier, 1957), 246. 65. See Jean-Paul Gelinas, The Revival of Thomism Under Leo XIII and the New Philosophies (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1959). 66. Letter to Maurice Blondel, January 3, 1909, in Correspondence philosophique, 218. 67. Lucien Laberthonnière, Esquisse sur un philosophie personnaliste (Paris: Canet, 1942), 22532. 68. Ibid., 32122. 69. Letter to Maurice Blondel, January 3, 1909, in Correspondence philosophique, 21819. 70. Laberthonnière, Esquise, 195. 71. Blondel, Correspondence philosophique, 21819. 72. Ibid., 219. 73. Baron Friedrich Von Hügel, Eternal Life: Its Implications and Applications (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1912), 301. 74. New Catholic Encyclopedia, 11 (1967):975. 75. Marcel Hébert, "M. Bergson et son affirmation de l'existence de Dieu," Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 17 (1912): 61112. 76. Edouard Le Roy, The New Philosophy of Henri Bergson (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), 1020. 77. Edouard Le Roy, "Sur quelques objections adressées à la nouvelle philosophie," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 9 (1901): 295. 78. Edouard Le Roy, "Science et philosophie," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 7 (1899): 375425, 50362, 70831. 79. Edouard Le Roy, "Une positivisme nouveau," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 9 (1901): 13853.

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80. Benrubi, Souvenirs, 21. 81. Letter from William James to F.C.S. Schiller, June 13, 1907, in William James, The Letters of William James (Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 2: 290. 82. A.L. Lilley, Modernism, A Record and Review (New York: Scribner's, 1908). 149. 83. Edouard Le Roy, What Is A Dogma? (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1918), 20. 84. Ibid., 41. 85. Ibid., 26. 86. Ibid., 4243.

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87. See Eduard Le Roy, "Comment se pose le problème de Dieu," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 15 (1907): 497. Also The New Philosophy of Henri Bergson, 12224. Le Roy was not alone in trying to recast the "New Philosophy" in moral terms. Joseph Wilbois, one of his followers, also equated Bergsonian becoming with the moral act. See his Devoir et durée: Essai De morale social (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1912) and "Une nouvelle position au problème morale,'' Bulletin de la société française de philosophie 14 (1914): 7. 88. The encyclical Providentissimus Deus (1878) reaffirmed the complete inerrancy of the Bible. This was followed by Aeterni Patris in 1879, which emphasized the wisdom of St. Thomas. 89. Etienne Gilson, The Philosopher and Theology (New York: Random House, 1962), 152, 159. 90. Ibid., 112. 91. Ibid., 123. 92. Ibid., 134. 93. R. Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together, 95. 94. R. Maritain, Adventures in Grace, 204. 95. La philosophie bergsonienne, translated as Part I of Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 16. 96. "L'Evolutionism de M. Bergson," Revue de philosophie 19 (1911): 467540. Translated as Part I, section I, of Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism. "Les deux bergsonismes," Revue Thomiste 20 (1912): 43350. Translated as Part I, section II of same book. 97. R. Maritain, Adventures in Grace, 197. 98. Translated as Part I, section 2, of Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism. Maritain was not the only anti-Bergsonian to be invited to give guest lectures at the Institute; Canon Bernard Gaudeau, one of the principal Integralists in France, gave a series of lectures in 1912 called, "La philosophie de M. Bergson détruit la liberté." 99. Young Catholics like Massis, Psichari and Robert Valléry-Radot, rescued from scientism and positivism, could not go along with Bergsonism's criticisms of reason. Instead, they turned to Thomism, "the only admissible doctrine," wrote Massis, "capable of regenerating French Catholicism." Henri Massis, "M. Henri Bergson à l'Index," Revue de la jeunesse 10 (1914): 330. 100. Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, 114. 101. Ibid. 102. Clodius Piat, Insufficence des philosophies de l'intuition (Paris: Plonnourrit, 1908). 103. Thomas Pégues, "L'Evolution créatrice," Revue Thomiste 16 (1908): 158. 104. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, "Les sens commun, la philosophie de l'être," Revue Thomiste 16 (1908): 183. 105. Albert Farges, La philosophie de M. Bergson (Paris: Bayard, 1912), 401. After Maritain's book, this was the most widely discussed and influential Thomistic criticism of Bergsonism made during the period. 106. Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, 103.

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107. Ibid., 104. 108. Ibid., 106. 109. Ibid., 145. 110. Ibid., 155. See also Marcel Raymond, "La philosophie de l'intuition et la philosophie du concept," Études françiscaines 21 (1909): 66987, and Jules Grivet, "Henri Bergson: Esquisse philosophique," Études 124 (1910): 15384. 111. Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Thomism (New York: P.J. Kenedy, 1964), 68. 112. Thomas Pégues, "L'Evolution créatrice," 137. 113. Nicholas Balthasar, "Le problème de Dieu d'après la philosophie nouvelle," Revue néo-scholastique 15 (1908): 123.

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114. Farges, La philosophie de M. Bergson, 15657, 468. 115. Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, 19697. 116. H. Trouche, "L'Évolution créatrice," Revue de philosophie 13 (1908) 53132. 117. Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, 280. Maritain's view of the positive value of Bergsonian philosphy continued to evolve after 1914 and especially after the appearance of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. He considered Bergson's final book to be a landmark effort in ethics and he maintained that Catholics owed Bergson "a special debt of gratitude" for its writing. Bergson's moral philosophy, Maritain showed, leads us towards Christianity and its founder and away from Comte and the Religion of Humanity. In the process, Bergson does nothing less than rescue morality. Jacques Maritain, Moral Philosophy: An Historical and Critical Survey of the Great Systems (New York: Scribner's, 1964). 118. See for example Jacques Baylac, "La philosophie de M. Bergson," Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 11 (1909). More than just intellectual affinities linked Bergsonism with Modernism; on a personal level, many of Bergson's closest friends could be found among the modernistsEdouard Le Roy who eventually succeeded Bergson at the Collège de France, and Alfred Loisy, whose candidacy to the chair of the History of Religion at the Collège de France Bergson openly supported in 1908. 119. A. de la Valette-Monbrun, "Pourquoi Bergson a-t-il été mis à l'Index?" L'Univers (July 18, 1914), 1. 120. René Johannet, Vie et mort de Péguy (Paris: Flammarion, 1950), 388. 121. Rosemary Ruether, "Loisy: History and Commitment," Continuum 3 (1965): 152. 122. Letter to George de Lauris, 1910, in Mina Curtiss, Letters of Marcel Proust (New York: Random House, 1949), 197. 123. See Gerald J. O'Brien, "Anti-Modernism: The Integralist Campaign," Continuum 3 (1965): 187200. 124. René Remond, The Right Wing in France: From 1815 to de Gaulle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 251. See also N. Fontaine, Saint-Siège, 'Action française' et 'Catholiques integraux' (Paris: J. Gamber, 1928). 125. Jacques Rocafort, "La jeunesse d'aujourd'hui," L'Univers (February 15, 1913), 1. 126. Bernard Gaudeau, "Le déclin du bergsonisme," Foi Catholique (December 25, 1913), 48384. 127. Rocafort, "La jeunesse," 1. 128. Abbé Théodore Delmont, " Le philosophe à la mode," L'Univers (February 14, 1914), 1. 129. La Croix (Feburary 19, 1914), 1. All of the Integralists and most of the Thomists generally boosted the books of Jacques Maritain and Albert Farges and often used them in their campaigns against Bergsonism. 130. H. Bonifas, "Catholicisme et bergsonisme," Foi et vie 16 (1913): 65455. The Papal campaign against Bergsonism came to a head on June 8, 1914, when Bergson's major books were placed on the Index. This was followed by the Papal discourse to the faculty and students of the Collège Angélique on June 28, 1914, and the Motu propio of July 6, 1914. In both cases the Pope reinforced the need for studying St. Thomas in the seminaries. See L'Univers (July 18, 1914), 1. The Tharaud brothers interpreted the Indexing of Bergson's work in terms of the neo-Thomist movement. The Church felt, they wrote, that Bergson had had his hour of usefulness. He was now to be brushed aside so that his ideas could be replaced by those of St. Thomas. Notre cher Péguy, 3: 220.

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131. Charles Corbière, "Le Dieu de M. Bergson," Revue de théologie et des questions religieuses 19, no. 2 (1910): 18284. 132. Abbé Georges Michelet, "Chronique de philosophie," Revue pratique d'apologétique 18 (1914): 36991. See also Joseph de Tonquédec, "Bergsonisme et scholastique," La Revue critique 23 (1913): 65170 and Marie-Dominique Roland-Gosselin, "L'Intuition bergsonienne et l'intelligence," Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 7 (1913): 389411.

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133. J. Bricourt, "M. Bergson à l'Index," Revue du clergé français 20 (1914): 459. See also Léon Christiani, Le problème de dieu et le pragmatisme (Paris: Librarie Bloud, 1909), and Eugène Lenoble, "L'Évolution créatrice," Revue du clergé français 53 (1908): 180208. The Indexing of Bergson's work did not affect him. Years later he told A.D. Sertillanges that he realized that his books had an incomplete character and that in the Catholic view, their method might prove dangerous to believers. Avec Henri Bergson, 26.

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Chapter VII Rationalists, Anti-Rationalists and Academicians The reaction to Bergson on the eve of the First World War ran in two conflicting currents. Bergson was still the recipient of the febrile adulation of the self-styled Bergsonians but their panagyrics were now being met by the criticisms and polemics of those intellectuals who wished to counter Bergson's influence in France. One thing is certain about the reaction to Bergsonit did not, in any respect, lose its intensity until after August 1914. Politics may have commanded the attention of Frenchmen who speculated on the possibilities of war in that year but on the cultural level Bergson still attracted the intellectual passions and allegiances in 1914 that he attracted in 1907. As a popular lecturer Bergson still commanded the large overflowing crowds he had been drawing for so many years with their mixture of students, clerics, intellectuals and society ladies; the latter were more in evidence than they had ever been. In 1914 this development was caricatured by the irreverent journals of Paris. For example, one fashion critic suggested the designing of gowns for society ladies in which they might receive "the great metaphysician" if he were to accept their invitations to dinner. 1 Two other journals compared Bergson's lectures to the tango, the dance rage of 191314. Le sourire published an imaginary lecture on the tango by "the celebrated metaphysician of the Collège de France, M. Balgson" while L'Univers said that Bergsonism as a vogue was the equivalent of the society ladies' love of the tango.2 Le figaro lightly referred to these women as "young ladies trying to perfect their notion of self" but Parismidi lampooned them as people who were ''taking the cure" in philosophy as they did by the seashore.3 Commenting on the fact that Bergson's course was more crowded than ever, since the subtle analyst of the subconscious has become immortal," La vie

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parisienne published a fictional dialogue between "a lady of great name and meagre mind," and Bergson. The lady had hated all intellectual work until she became a rabid Bergsonian, and she came to thank Bergson for the new horizons that his course opened up for her: Ah, master, she said to him, if you only knew what you have made me think. And Bergson answered, excusing himself, Oh! pardon me, madame, pardon me! 4 Gabriel Hanotaux, writing in Le figaro, was much more sympathetic toward society's response to Bergson. He compared the "enjoyment" of Bergson to the enjoyment of "the ladies of the seventeenth century for the vortices of Descartes, or that of Mme. du Chatelet for the discoveries of Newton, or the friends of Mme. d'Epinay for the paradoxes of Rousseau." According to Hanotaux, Bergson's written and spoken language was supple and graceful, full of dazzling images and tremendously seductive. Although his ideas were never so abstruse that the public failed to understand him, Hanotaux wrote, this was not so important, since many great thinkers were, unlike Bergson, inaccessible to their contemporaries. What mattered in the creation of Bergson's following was that until Bergson, "modern thought was prostrated and ground down under the automatism of universal laws and their overwhelming determinism." With Bergson's philosophy the public was offered a ''hymn to life." Now, Hanotaux said, young people felt free to think even if it meant thinking against free though!5 But Bergson was more than just à la mode in the classrooms and salons of Paris. Between 1907 and 1914 he became the most widely discussed and published living philosopher in the world and the first in the twentieth century to become an international celebrity. In 1911, for example, he was invited to give a series of lectures in England and in the same year he emerged as the most popular figure at the philosophical congress held at Bologna; in 1913 he was invited to the United States to give a series of lectures at Columbia and Harvard universities; and finally, he crowned his success by receiving an appointment to the French Academy in 1914. The lecture tour in the United States in 1913, which was sponsored by Columbia University, certainly helped in furthering Bergson's reputation as an international figure. His earlier lecture tour in England6 had been followed with keen interest in the American press which on the whole was favourable to Bergson's ideas. Writing in New Outlook Theodore Roosevelt ranked Bergson along with Emile Boutroux and America's own William James as one of the great thinkers of his day.7 On the eve of Bergson's trip to the United States,

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Walter Lippmann, already one of the deans of American political journalism, saw in Bergson the most popular spokesman of modern times. Like Roosevelt, Lippmann was enthusiastic about the new ideas and hopes of a world "never so young as it is today, so impatient of old and crusty things." Bergson is to thought what Roosevelt is to action, a fresh wind blowing through the dogmatic materialism of the old world and exemplifying more than anyone else the spirit of the new century: No philosophy ever written is such a deadly enemy to the stand-pat intellect in all its forms. And if I were interested in keeping churches, constitutions, and customs fixed so that they would not change, I should regard Bergson as the most dangerous man in the world. The spread of his teaching will put all institutions and theories on the defensive. 8 Bergson arrived in the United States for a three-week tour on February 4, 1913. He lectured to capacity audiences, speaking in French for the general public and in English for the students. Bergson always impressed his English and American audiences with his command of their language. "Everyone was surprised by the choice of words," wrote one reporter, "a choice so accurate as to make one almost fancy that the philosopher might have thought out his philosophic ideas first in English."9 Nor did the switch to English limit Bergson's magnetic classroom presence. One member of the audience in comparing Bergson with Goethe and Carlyle, and the Americans Whitman and Emerson, claimed that he "possesses the same imaginative life, and begets in one a similar spiritual exaltation."10 The lectures were very popular and drew close to 5,000 listeners. One lecture that Bergson delivered in late February 1913 at the City College of New York drew no less than 2,000 students who greeted the visitor with three spirited examples of their "college yell." Never one to be nonplussed Bergson said he understood the greeting and thanked the students for the honour.11 It was these forms of popular and official recognition that provoked such an intensely hostile response from Bergson's critics. No longer was Bergsonism regarded as a vogue limited to an insignificant group of misguided intellectuals, student malcontents, and bored society ladies. Bergson now appeared to his contemporaries not just as the promoter of a new trend in philosophy but as the leader of a philosophical revolution. Paul Flat, the director of the Revue bleue, thought that Bergson had not merely done a thorough job of criticizing the old ways of discovering philosophical truth, but was convinced that he had discovered a new way to replace it.12 There was, therefore, a genuine concern on the part of many in France that Bergsonism was doing irreparable harm both to the rationalist philosophical tradition and to the pursuit of scientific truth. One young philosopher felt that the rationalists were disturbed because Bergson's

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Creative Evolution had represented "a declaration of war against the spirit that dominates contemporary science, and because in doing so, he had succeeded in creating a large following of believers." 13 To a great extent, Bergsonism condemned a large part of science as invalid. The rationalists were, therefore, not just made aware of Bergson himself, but of the whole movement of occult ideas that followed in his wake; the threatening wave of vitalism and mysticism, and the emphasis upon the irrational approach to what had formerly been intellectual problems. The rationalists felt the Bergsonism's threat more keenly than ever before because it embodied the spirit and longings of a new age, and because at the same time it was helping to shape that age. Even before Creative Evolution Henri Poincaré, who no less than Bergson contributed to the intuitive limitations of science, thought it necessary to strike out at the challenge posed by Bergson's anti-intellectual philosophy. Poincaré defended the rationalist tradition against the encroachments of the new philosophy in The Value of Science. He charged that in rejecting analysis and discourse an anti-intellectualistic philosophy "condemned itself to being intransmissible." At the very least it could only transmit its negations: "what wonder then that for an external observer it takes the shape of skepticism?" According to Poincaré, the weak point of Bergson's philosophy was that, if it tried to be true to itself, . . . its energy is spent in a negation and a cry of enthusiasm. Each author may repeat this negation and this cry, or may vary their forms, but without adding anything . . . And yet, would it not be more logical to remain silent? See, you have written long articles; for that, it was necessary to use words. And therein have you not been much more 'discursive' and consequently much farther from life and truth than the animal who surely lives without philosophy; would not this animal be the true philosopher?14 While Bergsonians like André Chaumeix, editor of the Revue des deux mondes, continued to exalt Bergson's work "as having as much importance as the Critique of Pure Reason,"15 a growing number of critics after 1907 expressed their alarm at the threat Bergsonism posed to the rational approach to intellectual problems. These critics very loosely belonged to the French literary and philosophical "establishment," which before 1914 was largely neo-classical and rationalist. Bergson's admirers, by contrast, were in some way critical of that intellectual establishment. The Rationalists took a very serious view of Bergson's appeal to society. They saw nothing amusing about the "Bergsonian vogue" or anything of lasting value in Bergsonian philosophy. What they saw was a philosophy that placed intuition over reason, something that was especially

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pleasing to a frivolous audience composed for the most part of what they thought were women who belonged to the idle and worldly upper class. What they saw was a public to whom study and intellectual effort were instinctively repugnant. Above all they deplored the mystical, neo-Romantic mood of the times that Bergson helped to create, and to which the public so enthusiastically responded. The influence of Bergson, Léon Blum thought, was not only creating a skepticism against rational knowledge by its attacks but in doing so was releasing what he called an "anarchical mysticism" that was leaving its stamp on the contemporary generation. It was an anarchical mysticism that "viewed all reality as the purely spontaneous evolution of forces, of which liberty was the unique reason for being." 16 Although attracted to the classics himself, Blum was not, however, judging the romanticism of his literary generation. All the great movements of modern literature, he claimed, were formed through the discovery of a "renascent religion," a response to, and a defense against the triumphant religion which preceded it. This religious feeling was what linked the Romantics of the 1820s with the literary generation of 1890 to 1913. And this was why Bergson's role was so importantto the writers of this generation Bergson opposed Taine the way Chateaubriand had opposed Voltaire.17 Blum's criticism of Bergson and the new literary generation was a scholarly one but it stood alone as a work of its kind from those people who were not themselves Bergsonians. Unlike Blum, the anti-Bergsonians who shared this point of view found Romanticism and Bergsonism despicable. Like the Danish critic, Georg Brandes, they wished aloud that both movements would go away: Is not the popularity of Bergson significant in that it shows that we are turning again to romanticismto the romantic spirit in both art and literature? . . . We have had enough of this romantic spirit. We don't want anymore.18 Critics of this kind were indeed alarmed at the romantic "expansion of consciousness" and the attack against neoclassical principles it represented. Even though many Bergsonians were themselves defenders of classical culture they were portrayed as romantic enemies of the Age of Reason. The novelist Paul Acker warned against the "anarchic consequences" of Bergsonian intuition and he cited the mystical Bergsonian writers like Albert Bazaillas and Alphonse Chide to support his case against what he called the intuitive "intellectual gymnastic exercise."19 In any discussion of those individuals who polemicized against Bergson after 1907 and who attacked the romantic anarchy of the era, Julien Benda must occupy the centre of the stage. He commands our attention for several reasons: his great reputation in French thought, initially won through his attack on

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Bergson; the fact that he so skillfully and thoroughly argued his case against Bergson and at the same time made a penetrating analysis of the milieu that produced him; and finally, because of the perseverance with which he pursued Bergson in his critical works through the next forty years, long after most other critics had fallen silent. Like Jacques Maritain, Julien Benda began his formal criticism of Bergson in 1911 when Bergson was at the peak of his popularity. His attitude at that point seemed hesitant, not unsympathetic towards Bergson, and only mildly hostile. He appreciated Bergson's attempts at reappraising traditional categories of thought but he was troubled by Bergson's bid to make metaphysics serve human needs, an attempt that could only reinforce the tendencies of salon society. 20 By 1912, however, Bergson became for Benda, as he had for Maritain, the opposite pole in his thinking and the chief intellectual stimulus, albeit a negative one, in his whole critical approach to modern culture. Benda's attack on Bergson now became so violent and personal, writes one of Benda's biographers, "that the critic became overnight almost as well known as the master himselffor the pages of Le Bergsonisme contain perhaps the boldest frontal assault delivered in our time against a dominant philosophical school."21 In complete contrast to Bergson, Benda's ideal intellectual was the man who pursued the contemplative life, observing problems rather than living them, and who discovered his emotions not in man and objects but in concepts. Benda felt that the highest achievement of the intellectual was science with its substitution of fixed entities for the constant change of the real world but a science which nevertheless knew its limitations. By 1912 this natural clash, which had been building for years as Benda's thinking matured, broke into the open with the publication of Le Bergsonisme.22 Benda's polemic against Bergson after 1912 was usually vicious, and always one-sided yet his work elicited no storm of protest from the Bergsonians or from Bergson himself. We know that privately Bergson was contemptuous of Benda's criticism but that he preferred to pass over it in silence.23 This aloofness in the face of a direct attack prompted Charles Péguy to say that, at bottom, Bergson was just a professor of philosophy who lacked the courage to speak out in his own defense because he was afraid of offending his enemies. And anyway, he told a friend, "the Bergson-Benda affair . . . is the old quarrel between the Alexandrian and Rabbinical Jews."24 This was an interesting insight in view of the fact that Benda himself was inclined to delineate the difference between Bergson and himself in this very light.

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He distinguished two types of Jews: the severe, moralistic Hebrews who still worshipped Jahveh and whose modern leader was Spinoza; and the sensation-loving Carthaginians, the worshippers of Balphégor whose modern leader was Bergson. 25 This distinction was an important theme in Benda's work. As one who had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the cause of Captain Dreyfus, he saw himself as a Jew who like his co-religionists was possessed of a unique mentality and personality. Isolated in an alien sea, the modern Jew for Benda was capable of detached, dispassionate, rational thinking. To be Jewish, he seems to say, is to think rationally hence the very serious distinction between Carthaginians and Hebrews he brings to bear upon Bergson's work and influence.26 Benda applied the concept of "Carthaginism" to two aspects of Bergson's philosophy which particularly irked him: Bergson's emphasis on time and becoming (durée), and intuition. He saw in the concept of duration the clearest sign of the decline of ancient philosophy, and of an attack upon the whole rational, contemplative life that he had come to idealize. Catering to the popular taste for a philosophy that occupies itself with Man, duration "embraces" man by projecting the profound self as the essence of the world. It flatters the belief that in the profound depths of our souls we can touch the living principle of the world. Duration, according to Benda, becomes the principle of the living world, and even more, a new religion of the unconscious.27 Benda also condemned as a gross fiction Bergson's exalting of intuition as the method of seizing the absolute. What Bergson calls intuition is really, "our self-awareness at its most common, most typical instant . . . it is nothing else than the act by which the mind has an idea."28 Benda accused Bergson of "the very darkest romanticism" in his investing the "commonest act on earth" with a mysterious uniqueness. For Benda, Bergson is no philosopher at all but a littérateur who advances no ideas but rather a new and romantic mysticism couched in (and this was a very strong charge of Benda) a "feminine" style. It is feminine because it glorifies life and exalts feeling over idea, the feminine over the virile, the musical over the plastic. On October 4, 1913, Bergson announced his candidacy for the French Academy. We may assume that Benda was writing his next attack at the same moment for it appeared soon after Bergson's election to the Academy in early 1914. The question that now concerned Bergson's critics was why, given the milieu, Bergsonism was so successful. Bergson, according to Benda, was dealing with a public he knew and understood perfectly. This "public" was comprised of the educated, rich bourgeoisie

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of the salons, those people who dictated the popular tastes of their society. Bergson realized that one of the most important attitudes of that public was its ''hatred" of science and discursive reason, and its persistent belief that "science owed them the absolute." 29 Bergson exploited this "exasperation" by "humiliating science and philosophy, and promising the public, the absolute." Bergson simply realized what the public wanted and gave it to them and it is here, said Benda, that we can find the secret of Bergson's success. Bergson appeared before the public like a "blond barbarian'' astride a "black horse," promising them the means to transcend the intellect and to discover the mysteries of the universe. Bergsonism, according to Benda, was an "intellectual Boulangism."30 The public scorn for science and intelligence is a theme of most of Benda's books. However, "the hatred of the intelligence is one of the essential characteristics of our moderns . . ." is a remark that any rationalist or classicist of the day could have made. By 1914, Benda had produced a complete attack upon Bergson and Bergsonism. In the next forty years he extended that attack, refined its edges, and incorporated that polemic into what became his total view of modern society and culture. In his modern classic, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, Bergson becomes both symptom and cause of everything that threatens to erode modern society. Behind his famous figure of the "clerc" who has "betrayed" Benda saw the allpervasive influence of Henri Bergson.31 Because his criticism of Bergsonism took the form of a diatribe, Benda sacrificed any real chance he may have had to gain a broad sympathetic appreciation for his views. Furthermore, in his attempt to brand Bergsonism as the chief evil of modern times, Benda was led to a serious misrepresentation of that philosophy, thereby calling into question the essential validity of his own criticism. For example, his accusation that Bergson had completely scorned the rational powers of man in favour of the non-rational, and that he completely exalted instinct over intelligence and emotion over reason, were distortions of Bergson's real positions. Nevertheless, Benda came closer than anyone else in the period to understanding Bergson's occult importance. What alarmed Benda and other rationalists of pre-war France about Bergsonism was the fact that it was providing its public with a new mystical faith free from acceptable dogmas, and thus threatened to carry all before it. Furthermore, Benda had a keen appreciation for the unique position of the professional philosopher in French society. Behind the feeling that philosophy owes the public "the reality of things" is the modern belief that philosophy can penetrate into the hidden recesses of the unknown. To the "mob," he says, "the philosopher is still first cousin of the alchemist."32

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While a storm of protest on Bergson's behalf was not forthcoming there were, nevertheless, several critical responses made to Benda's polemic which added to the whole Bergsonian controversy. Most of the critics who did reply to Benda's attack, like Gonzague Truc, reacted unfavourably. Truc dismissed Benda as a "scientist" who was trying to halt the return of the metaphysical spirit, and one who would not admit that in Bergson France finally had a man who had "said something new." 33 The labour historian, Edouard Dolléans, writing in the Nouvelle revue française, accused Benda of being a "ruthless pamphleteer" and of using "fabricated definitions" not against Bergson, but against a "straw puppet'' of his own creation.34 The bulk of opinion that dealt with Benda directly was hostile. Even an anti-Bergsonian like Jacques Maritain was repelled by the "bitter zeal and deliberate disparagement" of Benda's "intolerable'' attack.35 The only criticism against Benda that was polemic itself came from the "Bergsonian Left" of Georges Sorel and Edouard Berth. Sorel's criticism was hidden from contemporary view in a letter to Benedetto Croce in 1912, in which he referred to Benda's Le Bergsonisme as an unsuccessful, "very incompetent," and "pornographic fabrication," which might pass unnoticed "if only the Jewish Godfathers did not discuss it among themselves."36 Alone among the Bergsonians, Edouard Berth resorted to name-calling. In three pages of his Les méfaits de intellectuels he managed to call Benda a "metaphysical Jew" of the "perfumed, intellectual ghetto," a "sissy," a "cur," a "gutless monster," and finally, a "fakir lost in the contemplation of his intellectual navel."37 In other words, seven years after the publication of Creative Evolution the Bergsonian controversy was still very much alive and able to draw the polemical intensity it always had. This was in large part due to the impending elections in the French Academy. As one of the few surviving institutions of the Old Regime in France, the French Academy occupies a unique position in French life. Although originally founded to honour men of letters, the Academy early in its history included prominent men from the military, the Church, politics, and the scientific community. The roster of the Academy in the early Third Republic, therefore, reads like a roll-call of distinguished Frenchmen. The list ranges from literary figures like Anatole France, Pierre Loti and Paul Bourget to scientists like Marcellin Berthelot and Henri Poincaré and politicians like Raymond Poincaré and Alexandre Ribot. The Academy was also a rich and powerful institution. It received an annual grant from the government, owned a great deal of property

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and used its wealth to bestow literary and historical prizes on deserving authors. There can be no doubt that receiving such an award helped boost the sale of an author's work. But even greater than the competition for prizes were the campaigns for seats in the Academy. The prestige of an Academy seat was enormous in this period, and the elections to them were followed with keen interest by the general public. Regardless of how distinguished a candidate might be in his field, his election as one of the "forty immortals" could not but magnify an already glittering reputation. Three seats became vacant in the Academy by 1914; those of Henri Poincaré, Paul Thureau-Dangin and Emile Ollivier. Since the Academy never solicits new members the individual who is interested in securing a seat for himself must apply to the permanent secretary of the organization when a vacancy occurs, stating his qualifications in a letter. Once this is done the campaign for election may be said to have begun with the candidatures announced in the press and the relative merits of the respective candidates openly discussed in the press, the scholarly journals and in the salons. 38 Bergson and the poet, Charles de Pomairols, announced their candidatures for Emile Ollivier's seat on October 4, 1913. The election itself was slated to be held in February 1914, the first election in forty years in which the Academy was called upon to fill three vacancies at once.39 The prospect of Bergson becoming one of the forty "immortals" led to reexaminations of his work and reassessments of his role and influence in French culture. More than anything else the approaching election of 1914 brought the entire reaction to Bergson to a head. Among the people who were outraged by Bergson's candidacy were the leading writers of the Action Française, namely Charles Maurras, Léon Daudet and Pierre Lasserre. The attack they opened in 1913, which was designed to sway the Academy's vote, has never really been discussed, only alluded to in the literature. This is also true of the literature on Henri Bergson which has always skirted what for his biographers is a distasteful episode in the philosopher's career.40 And yet the election of 1914 was an important one because it illuminated the royalist movement and its chief spokesman at its most intense peak. At the same time it demonstrated the strength and integrity of the French Academy, a conservative institution which remained impervious to that movement's pressure. Finally it clearly indicated the tremendous popularity that Bergson enjoyed in 1914 and the directions that popularity took among the Action Française's own constituency. The Action Française did not discover Bergson in the election of 1914. It had been alerted to the Bergsonian "danger" for some time and had mounted an attack against him several years before. The first spokesman of the Action

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Française to attack Bergson was Pierre Lasserre, the literary critic of the movement's newspaper. As one of the betterknown representatives of neo-classical ideas in France, Lasserre shared with Maurras and Daudet a detestation of Henri Bergson. Although these men might have differed over what constituted classicism, they shared an identical hatred of what they took to be the nineteenth-century romantic ideal. Pierre Lasserre owed his anti-Bergsonism to the fact that Bergson was disliked by so many colleagues in the Action Française because of his Jewishness and because of his abhorrence for the theory of Inevitable Evolution. 41 In 1910 and 1911 he opened an attack on Bergson, both from the lecture hall of the Institute of the Action Française, and from the organization's newspaper. In that attack Lasserre called Bergson "barbarous," his work "the quintessence of animalism," and drew attention to Bergson's Jewishness.42 Lasserre lashed out at Bergson's psychology, the "neo-romantic rubbish which seduced the greatest number of people." People want to hear about the absolute originality of their internal life, he wrote, and they lend a charmed ear to the philosopher who tells them all about the ''modalities of their soul," and the formation of the "nuances of their feelings.'' Lasserre at the same time warned the Action Française's Catholic readers against confusing the mystical Bergsonian "softness" (flou) with genuine mystical Christian emotion.43 Bergson is furthermore a pantheist whose only novelty is in reversing the order of reason and the heart: "For him, that which thinks is inferior and that which does not is superior." In an interview with T.E. Hulme, Lasserre claimed that Bergsonism and the tactical use made of it constituted a clear, political danger by challenging the conservative interpretation of time-honoured and necessary institutions and traditions rooted in past history: They contest our assertion that there are such things as necessary laws governing societies, and more particularly that these laws can be discovered from past history. It is useless, they say, to search in the past for general truths which shall be applicable to the present . . . If we ask why, we are told that Bergson has now proved that Time is real, that every moment is a unique one, and parallelled by nothing in the past . . . If we point out that history does or does not show us any prosperous, strong, and conquering nation, which was at the same time a democracy, they retort, history would not be history if it were not change itself and perpetual novelty.44 In place of the Action Française's reason for arguing political beliefs, the Bergsonians used, he claimed (in the same interview), what they called "Life," a life that is always an incalculable creation. This was why Bergsonism was "the last disguise of romanticism."45

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Lasserre moderated his tone by 1913 although not his extreme skepticism regarding the value of Bergson's work. He was particularly bothered by Bergson's popularity, the product, he claimed, of an emotionally charged milieu ("Bergson is only a mist in the minds of those who are not drawn to clarity.") 46 There was in the earlier criticism the germ of the Action Française's later attack of 1913 and 1914: the hatred of the romantic ideal, an anti-semitism which was characteristic of the movement as a whole, and a subtle appeal to the movement's Catholic constituency. With Charles Maurras these ideas assumed an even greater importance. Charles Maurras commands our special attention because he enjoyed the largest political following of any figure on the French Right since the early nineteenth century and because in 1914 the only rival he had for the allegiance of French students was Henri Bergson himself. Maurras began raising general questions about Bergson and his ideas as early as February 15, 1913. The occasion for doing so was a youth survey which had recently appeared in L'Univers. Maurras, like many of the correspondents of the survey, felt compelled to speculate upon the future of Bergsonism. He professed a skepticism about the prolonged success of Bergsonism and for the first time raised a key question with respect to the philosopher's thought: was it or was it not French? For Maurras, who believed passionately in the revival of classicism (on his first trip to Greece he embraced and kissed the Acropolis), in politics, art and in religion, Bergsonian intuitionism did not represent real thought. As the integralist, Jacques Rocafort, put it "we are an intellectual country, reasoning and reasonable . . ." Bergson's way of thinking was simply not French.47 Maurras attacked again on April 10, 1913. Bergson had just returned from his highly successful trip to the United States and had been greeted warmly by René Doumic. Bergson was described by Doumic, the literary critic of Revue des deux mondes and the soon to be permanent secretary of the French Academy, as "one of the most vigorous masters of contemporary thought."48 This particularly irked Maurras since he knew that the Revue des deux mondes exerted a great deal of influence on Academy elections and that several of the most influential academicians, like Doumic, Francis Charmes and the Marquis de Ségur were associated with the journal. Taking exception to Doumic's use of the word "masters," Maurras drew the angry distinction between Bergson, the master of "Jewish France," and the masters of ''real" France, Leibnitz, Aquinas and Descartes.49 A few months later Maurras attacked the Academy itself. He objected to books by Jews being discussed by the Academy and he strongly protested against the Academy awarding prizes to what Maurras often called "métèques"resident aliens. These were examples, he declared, of "the

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inequality of the condition of the French people" compared to that of the métèques and the Jews. The struggle of the French people, he asserted, was "to recover the plentitude of their rights." 50 This was an important theme of Maurras' and one which he hammered at continually throughout his career: what, in fact, was truly French in contemporary culture and therefore of value, and what was foreign and alien and needed to be expunged. Since the 1890s when the movement was born the Action Française had combated "barbarian" influences in French literature and sought to restore the ancient classics to their place of honour. This was true of Lasserre's activity and even more so of Maurras. Throughout his life Maurras lashed out at the "feminine" in Romantic literature and in Socialism and spoke continually of the need for the intellect to dominate the emotions.51 These were constant themes in his attack on Bergson launched in 1913. Bergsonism, said Maurras, in language reminiscent of Benda, was a "feminine romanticism," a "metaphysics of instinct and Creative Evolution," a movement that was ''an irresolute, and undefined procreation," with "the stench of old clothes." The only new things about Bergson were the "fallacious and fleeting turns of his language'' which veiled both Bergson's art of going off on tangents and his "systematic denigration of the power of intelligence."52 The doctrine of the man whom Maurras alternately called the "Jewish rhetorician" and the "rhetorical Jew," sought to raise a cloud over the renaissance of French intelligence in literary criticism, in history, in politics, a cloud formed by a "political interest" that in the long run will destroy the credit of an important area of human knowledge, "The science of political morality." Therefore, Maurras said, in the name of truth one is justified in invoking the nation against Bergson.53 Maurras viewed Bergson as a threat to the older culture that had insulated society from cultural erosion. The ancient Greeks, he pointed out, had listened to the "rhetoricians and jugglers," the Bergsonians of their day, and had consequently gone under. Will Frenchmen, he asked, listen to the Bergsonians? The last great French philosopher, he wrote after Bergson's election to the Academy, was August Comte. The man whom the electors had chosen in 1914 was merely a "dressed-up professor" who boasted "some literary graces" but who also possessed a "rare philosophic poverty." The electors, because they were what Maurras called "sad substitutes for Schelling" forgot that Bergsonism was just so many "small Jewish roses that come to us from Germany and the Anglo-Saxon countries."54 Next to Charles Maurras the most popular leader of the Action Française was Léon Daudet. Son of the famous novelist Alphonse Daudet, Léon Daudet

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became the director of the movement's newspaper, a sounding-board from which he could almost daily attack Freemasons, Jews and Protestants, the so-called barbarian influences in French life. Originally designed to lure workingclass support ("you give us the King, and we'll give you the Jews"), Daudet's anti-Semitism became a leitmotif of the movement. In 1913 he launched an outraged attack on Lçon Bourgeois' candidacy to the French Academy. He announced to his readers that Lçon Bourgeois was the "chief Freemason" in France whose election must at all costs be stopped, and that the Academy had become the "depository of diseased politicians." 55 Daudet continued to attack in this vein until the election was held and his position vindicated by Bourgeois' defeat. Daudet saved most of his venom, however, for Bergson's candidacy. His offensive, conducted relentlessly throughout 1914, was directed at those things which made the affair such a typical Action Française campaign. Daudet was in the habit of explaining all unpopular political, economic and cultural developments in France in terms of the machinations of corrupt leaders and sinister racial conspiracies. As a tactic it also helped satisfy the need of the political movement to attract support and the need of a newspaper to boost circulation. Daudet's first tactic was to link Bergson with the Dreyfus Affair, the seminal event of the Action Française movement. "Bergson is a militant Jew," he wrote, "Dreyfusard from the first hour, and as dangerous as he is cunning." More than a consequence of the Dreyfus Affair, this election is an "ethnic revenge." "All of Israel,'' he warned, "has its eyes fixed on this election, considered by this enemy race of ours, as an important episode of the Franco-Jewish War.''56 The French, he charged, are being deliberately manipulated by "a cleverly hatched intrigue," which, "through the Jewish control of the press is exploiting the weakness of everyone's character, and provoking the absenteeism of certain academicians at the moment of the vote." And to what end? That most important event in the eyes of Israel: the entry of a Jew into the French Academy. "They seek a revenge," he explained, "avoiding any insistence on Bergson's Judaism, reserving that until after the victorious election." Once Bergson entered this Christian domain, Daudet warned, and the "ghetto of gold" requested it, Bergson would then proceed gently but firmly to declare that he votes for Joseph Reinach, "the racketeer of treason," and Henri Bernstein, "the deserter."57 Daudet and his colleagues always regarded the French Academy as an important part of the national patrimony, and they were always ready to make an issue of the Academy's bestowal of honours and appointments. At the same time they never missed an opportunity to attack those "racially unacceptable" in-

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tellectuals who were polluting the mainstream of French culture. In Henri Bergson they appeared to have a perfect object against which to rally outraged opinion. In turning to Bergsonian philosophy, Daudet merely echoed the more professional criticism of Lasserre and Maurras. The philosophy of intuition, Daudet charged, was a Jewish one, an "ideological sloth," a "philosophie à la mode," which replaced the Théâtre d'Amour as the tango had replaced the Matchiche. It was all a ''subtle poison," something like a "metaphysical opium." Being anti-intellectual, it was not really French. 58 Daudet's final attack was directed against the academicians themselves, especially those droitiers who had declared themselves at least sympathetic to Bergson's candidacy. He addressed himself to three "Academicians of the Right": Comte Othenin d'Haussonville, an historian, a constitutional monarchist and a liberal Catholic who entered the Academy in 1888; Marquis Pierre de Ségur, also an historian and a staff writer for the Revue des deux mondes who entered in 1907; and Denys Cochin, a liberal monarchist who represented a Paris district in the Chamber of Deputies and who entered in 1911.59 All three Academicians were monarchists who had been anti-revisionist during the Dreyfus Affair. Like a high percentage of their colleagues they were also Catholics who felt that the Republic's attack against the Congregations was aimed at the Catholic educational system and for whom Émile Combes was generally considered to be the Anti-Christ. All three had taken up the cause of Bergson. The Jews, Daudet alleged, have made dupes of what had been good droitiers by taking advantage of their "liberalism" and their broad-mindedness. But they have also deluded themselves. In rendering homage to talent, something which knows neither frontiers, race, nor religion, the academicians, according to Daudet, reason this way: The importance of the Jews in society or in the modern democracy . . . calls for their representation among us. It is important that they are not represented by a militant Jew, a deserter like Bernstein, or a champion of treason like Reinach. What could be more neutral than a Jewish ideologue? With Bergson we get a representative of Israel who lacks the most notorious disadvantages and who at the same time is the most showy representative of his people. Henceforth, we will be vaccinated against the others.60 Despite the appearance of attacking like a bloc through its newspaper, the Action Française movement was never really united over how best to react to Bergson's influence and popularity, and therefore to his election. It is a testament to Bergson's impact in France that he could produce a certain confusion of

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intellectual and political loyalties among some of the younger members of the right-wing movement. Henri Clouard and Gilbert Maire, both editors of the reactionary Revue critique des idées et des livres, 61 anxious to assert their independence within the Action Française movement, and attracted by the ideas of both Bergson and Maurras, tried to convince their colleagues that Henri Bergson really posed no problem for the Action Française. Clouard nevertheless appreciated why some members reacted favourably to Bergson's candidacy (like Gilbert Maire and Maurice Pujo) while others reacted hostilely. On one hand, he said, Bergsonism appeared to vindicate spiritual feelings while on the other hand it encouraged a certain depreciation of intelligence.62 To the younger intellectuals of the movement, like Clouard and Maire, or to Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, a synthesis of Bergsonian philosophy and Maurrasian politics should not have been impossible. In response to a questionnaire of 1914 Maire hopefully predicted that once Bergson's views on intellectualism were properly understood, Bergsonism would enjoy a great future "in its possible accord with the essential truths of Maurrasian doctrine."63 To Clouard and Maire, Maurras seemed a prisoner of his conservative Catholic readerspeople who were out of touch with the modern world and who could not possibly appreciate the new ideas of Henri Bergson. Maire also added that the hatred of the Maurrasians for Bergson's ideas followed from an almost irrational hatred of what they felt were things Jewish, and from a jealousy of their intellectual supremacy that excluded all rivals. Bergsonism, he wrote, "menaced their reign of pure intelligence."64 In this highly charged and intolerant atmosphere young intellectuals like Massis, de Tarde, Clouard and Maire felt impelled to choose between Bergson and Maurras. By 1914, Massis had repudiated Bergson while de Tarde had repudiated Maurras. In February 1914, as Bergson was being elected to the Academy, Clouard and Maire severed relations with the Action Française.65 Bergson was elected to the French Academy on February 12, 1914. With the election, Bergson received the highest honour which can fall to a Frenchman. The arch-conservative Academy had elected a philosopher who in so many ways seemed to typify the anti-rationalist and anti-establishment movement of 1900-1914. So often accused of rigidity and stagnation, the Academy elected Bergson, not late in life when all controversy had died down, but when it had reached a fever-pitch. In making their decision to elect Bergson the Academicians had to assess Bergson's contributions to his own field and to French culture, something very

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difficult to do in 1914 in view of the intense controversy Bergson provoked. The Academicians could not help being pulled between two extreme points of view. A good deal of the Right's attack against Bergson was directed at Catholic members of the Academy, at a time when a Vatican condemnation of Bergson's work appeared imminent. Georges Sorel has alleged that Maurice Barrès led the anti-Bergson campaign from within the Academy and that for this reason, more than any other, Bergson's election was a considerable event in 1914. What was noteworthy, he said, was the fact that the Academicians were not moved by "the fanatical hate of certain anti-Bergsonians." 66 This was due in large part to the fact that the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Amette, a target of Integralist attack and one of the most active enemies of the Action Française, helped neutralize much of the anti-Bergsonian campaign.67 Few Academicians have publicly gone on record to explain why they voted as they did. We do know, however, that the majority of elections had no political implications. Furthermore, most of the Catholics on the Academy were opposed to any violent action and were unwilling to join any anti-republican organization which advocated the overthrow of the government. This would have made them something less than receptive to the Action Française's strident campaign in 1913 and 1914 especially in view of the fact that Bergson was himself not a political figure despite the Action Française's attempt to portray him as one. Nevertheless, two of the Academicians, Paul Bourget and Jules Lemaître, were members of the Action Française and others like François Coppée and René Bazin were open sympathizers of the movement. Both Bourget and Lemaître joined the movement after they were elected to the Academy in the 1890s. Bourget provides a glimpse at the predicament of the Right-Wing, Catholic Academician of 1914. The great Catholic novelist claimed that while he knew Bergson was "not orthodox" (in an obvious reference to the Maurraisian polemic), at the same time he voted for Bergson because "he did more than all of us" in bringing about a spiritual renaissance. "In his own independent manner," he told a friend, "Bergson had done the Church a service which no one amongst ourselves was in a position to render."68 Bergson's positive importance in the final analysis was a religious one. On Feburary 12, 1914, Henri Bergson was elected to the French Academy, an ironic example of an anti-establishment figure invited to join a legitimate establishment body. The conflict over Bergsonism was reflected in the reactions to his election. On one hand, Bergsonism was seen by its friends as a liberating doctrine of freedom, as Romain Rolland called it; for them, Bergsonism's influence was not pernicious. On the contrary, Bergson was viewed as responding, consciously or otherwise, to the anxieties of the time, and conciliating the eternal

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conflicts of science and spirit. Most important of all, many intellectuals were in agreement on the central role that Bergson played in encouraging the hope and in removing the doubts of his contemporaries. "He gave notice to the heirs of positivism" wrote Ernest Seillière, "that metaphysical roads were never closed to the hardy flights of the human spirit." 69 On the other hand, to its rationalist enemies, it was an anarchic movement of dark intent and insidious influence. To Julien Benda the election of Bergson was an unmitigated disaster. To the Action Française, it was an ethnic revenge. What brought Benda and Maurras together, two otherwise diametrically opposed people, was an intellectual bias towards the great western rationalist tradition which in the milieu of pre-1914 France appeared to be threatened. It was thus in a climate of abuse and personal vilification that the reaction to Bergson came to a head. And in the midst of it, Bergson had become the latest of his country's immortals.

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Footnotes 1. Jacques D'Anton, "Lise à l'institute de beauté," La vie heureuse (March 20, 1914): 16. 2. Cited in Current Opinion 56 (1914): 371; Abbé Théodore Delmont, L'Univers (Feburary 14, 1914): 1. 3. "Nouvelles à la main," Le figaro, 8 Feb., 1914, 1; Carrière cited in L.A. Maugendre, La renaissance catholique au debut XXe siècle (Paris: Beauchesne, 1968), 2: 121. 4. "Le nouveau Caro," La vie parisienne 52 (1914): 145. 5. Gabriel Hanotaux, "Les philosophes et la mode," Le figaro, 27 Feb., 1914, 1. 6. In 1911 Bergson lectured at the universities of Leeds, Birmingham and Oxford. He returned to England in 1914 to give the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, and once again in 1920 to lecture at Oxford. 7. Theodore Roosevelt, "The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit," New Outlook 99 (1911): 81926. 8. Walter Lippman, "The Most Dangerous Man in the World," Everbody's Magazine 27, no. 1 (1912): 100101. Certainly, some of the churches were bothered by Bergson's visit; Catholic World, while conceding his success and influence, considered him, in anticipation of the indexing of his books a year later, an "unsafe teacher." "Bergson's Reception in America," Current Opinion 54 (1913): 226. So did spokesmen for the Episcopal Church of the United States. Speaking from the pulpit of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, one clergyman criticized Bergson for creating too much uncertainty for religious people without putting anything in its place. Bergson had added to, he said, not alleviated "our dread of impending change." "Bergson and Euken Under Fire,'' Ibid., 307. 9. "Henri Bergson," Outlook 103 (1913): 336. Bergson came by his bilingualism naturally. His mother, Katherine Lewison, was English. His mastery of English made him immensely helpful in the English translations of his works. 10. John Burroughs, "A Prophet of the Soul," Atlantic Monthly 113 (1913): 123. 11. "Professor Bergson at the City College," Outlook 103 (1913): 46768. He also produced, inadvertently, a minor controversy. Interviewed by reporters upon landing in New York, Bergson was asked for his views on women's suffrage: "I believe in women's suffrage, but France is not yet ready for it. I can only speak of France with authority. The women of France have too long been accustomed to considering men their political superiors. There must be a gradual change in thought before equal suffrage can be obtained. But I can see no reason why women should not ultimately have the ballot. They are good organizers, they are conscientious and they are economical. They would be truer, perhaps, to their political duties than are men. Of course there should be a return to the State for the privilege of the ballot, just as men in France must perform military service. That could be settled, by making it compulsory that women should care for the wounded in war." Applying Bergson's philosophy to the question of women's suffrage, one academic maintained that if Bergson's ideas were correct, the women's suffrage movement represented "an attempt to unravel the thread of evolution millions of years . . ." According to this critic, the male transmits the tendency to vary while the female transmits the tendency to be the same; the father transmits liberalism, and the mother conservatism. Thomas Beyer, "Creative Evolution and the Woman Question," Educational Review 47 (1914), 27. In reply, another critic insisted that Bergson was really saying that species evolved by throwing off the protective coverings and striking out in dangerous ways. "The way of the new woman,'' she wrote, "is full of danger, of risks, but it is the way of growth." Anne Burton Hamman, "Prof. Beyer and the Woman Question," Educational Review 47 (1914), 298. Another minor controversy arose at the end of Bergson's trip. It had been alleged in the Jewish community of New York, although by whom it is not clear, that Bergson had deliberately avoided meeting with his co-religionists and visiting their institutions, and that he had been a guest of Nicholas Murray Butler, the President of Columbia University, a man, one reporter said, who was suspected of "acute anti-Semitism." Questions about this were put to him on his last day in the United States. Bergson replied that his time was not his own, that he was really anxious to visit the Jewish institutions of New York, that he had accepted an invitation from the Judeans, although they had inexplicably met without him. Moreover, he dismissed the charge against Butler since anti-Semitism "would be unbecoming to a man of education and sense, as I have

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found him to be." S. Labarsky-Debalta, "Bergson As A Jew," The American Hebrew 92 (1913): 550. 12. In Gaston Picard and Gustave Tautain, "Enquête sur M. Henri Bergson et l'influence de sa pensée sur la sensibilité contemporaine," Grande revue 84 (1914): 112. 13. Lionel Dauriac, "Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de M. Henri Bergson," Année philosophique 22 (1911): 66. 14. Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science (New York: Science Press, 1907), 113. 15. André Chaumeix, "Les critiques du rationalisme à propos des idées de M. Bergson et de William James," Revue hebdomadaire (January 1, 1910), 25. 16. Léon Blum, " La prochain génération littéraire," Revue de Paris 1 (1913), 529. 17. Ibid., 53132. More than religious feeling and anti-rationalism linked the two periods; both generations reaffirmed the supernatural, deplored the preoccupation with material reality, and sponsored a cult of the ego. At the same time, men of both eras were led ultimately back to Catholicism. One can take the parallel even further. Just as the earlier Romantic revival had its complement in a seemingly unrelated Mesmerism movement, so did the later neo-Romantic movement of La belle époque have its scientific affiliate in Psychical research. At any rate, there was an attempt in both cases to rescue the unconscious from the eighteenth century. 18. "Georg Brandes: Big, strong, unamiable yet lovable," The New York Times (May 31, 1914), 1. See also the long criticism of René Berthelot, Un romantisme ulilitaire: étude sur le mouvement pragmatiste, Vol. II (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1913). 19. Paul Acker, in Picard and Tautain, "Enquête," 558. 20. Julien Benda, "Dialogue d'Eleuthère," Cahiers de la Quinzaine, Ser. 12, no. 9 (1911), 44. 21. Robert J. Niess, Julien Benda (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 98. 22. Julien Benda, Le Bergsonisme, ou une philosophie de la mobilité (Paris: Mercure de France, 1926), 78. Originally published in 1912. 23. I. Benrubi, Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson (Neuchatel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1942), 79. 24. Charles Péguy, "Lettres en entretiens," Cahiers de la Quinzaine, Ser. 18, no. 1 (1927): 154. These letters date from before 1914. 25. Julien Benda, Belphégor (Paris: Emile-Paul, 1947), 15758. Published originally in 1918. 26. See Niess, Julien Benda, 1819. 27. Julien Benda, Le Bergsonisme, 7190. 28. Ibid., 71. 29. Julien Benda, Sur le succés du bergsonisme (Paris: Mercure de France, 1914), 13536. 30. Ibid., 137. 31. Julien Benda, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959). Published originally in 1927 as La Trahison des clercs.

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32. Benda, Sur le succés du bergsonisme, 151. 33. Gonzague Truc, "M. Benda et le bergsonisme," Revue critique 24 (1914): 39. 34. Edouard Dolléans, "Une philosophie pathétique," Nouvelle revue française, 11 (1914): 885. 35. Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 280. See also Camille Vettard, "Le bergsonisme," Nouvelle revue française 8 (1912): 941; Edouard Le Roy, "A propos de l'intuition bergsonienne," Revue du mois 13 (1912): 73335; Jean Wahl, "Deux ouvrages récents sur la philosophie de M. Bergson," Revue du mois 14 (1912): 15380; Julien Benda, "Réponse aux defenseurs du bergsonisme,'' in Sur le succés du bergsonisme, 1132. 36. Letter of Georges Sorel to Benedetto Croce, 3 September 1912, in "Lettres de Georges Sorel à Benedetto Croce," La critica 26 (1928): 437. 37. Edouard Berth, Les méfaits des intellectuels (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1914), 38, 40, 41.

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38. The Salons exerted an important influence on the choice of Academicians, particularly the salons of Madame de Lloynes and Madame de Caillavet. Albert Thibaudet, Histoire de la littérature française de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Stock, 1936), 417. 39. At the same time Alfred Capus and Léon Bourgeois announced their candidatures for Henri Poincare's seat, and Pierre de la Gorce, Camille Jullian and Vicomte d'Avenel announced theirs for Thureau-Dangin's seat. The death of Jules Claretie in January 1914 added a fourth vacancy although his seat was not filled until 1918. 40. On the Action Française see especially Edward R. Tannenbaum, The Action Française (New York: Wiley, 1962), and Eugen Weber, Action Française (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1962). 41. W.M. Frohock, Pierre Lasserre: The Evolution of his Critical Doctrines (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1927), 32. 42. Pierre Lasserre, "La Philosophie de M. Bergson," Action Française (August 25, 1910), 3. 43. Action Française (August 23, 1910): 3. 44. T.E. Hulme, "Mr. Balfour, Bergson, and Politics," The New Age 10 (1911): 40. 45. Ibid. 46. Pierre Lasserre, "Une critique de Bergson," The New Age (June 29, 1912): 4. 47. Jacques Rocafort, "La Jeunesse d'aujourd'hui," L'Univers (February 15, 1913): 1. L'Univers was owned by the Action Française. Like Rocafort, Abbé Delmont insisted that Bergson was "neither French, nor Christian, nor frankly spiritualist," L'Univers (February 14, 1914): 1; and La libre parole, saddened by Bergson's election to the Academy, mourned the fact that "a foreign Jew occupies the place on the Academy reserved for a Frenchman." "Trois nouveaux académicians,'' La libre parole (Feburary 13, 1914): 1. See also Bernard Gaudeau, "Le declin du bergsonisme,'' Foi catholique (December 25, 1913): 48288. 48. Cited in Criton (pseudonym for Charles Maurras), Action Française (April 10, 1913): 3. 49. Ibid., 3. Attacks like this made Charles Péguy want to "grind" Maurras to dust, as he wrote to Bergson, and "stem the tide of the anti-Semites and fanatics." Letter of Charles Péguy to Henri Bergson, 2 March 1913, in Les études bergsoniennes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 8: 50. 50. Charles Maurras, "'Kiel et Tanger' à l'Academie française," Action Française (September 27, 1913): 1. Maurras and Bergson met briefly in 1938. Maurras was up for election to the Academy and, as was the custom, he was soliciting votes for the Academicians. Maurras had no qualms about asking Bergson for an interview. When Bergson asked him if his earlier attitude had changed, Maurras replied that it was Bergson's ideas and race that he found especially offensive, and not him, personally. Henri Massis, Maurras et notre temps (Paris: Plon, 1961), 36162. 51. See especialy his La Musique intérieure (Paris: Grasset, 1925), 13. 52. "A Propos de Bergson," Action Française (February 11, 1914): 1. 53. Ibid. 54. Criton, "Bergson," Action Française (February 14, 1914): 3. Georges de Celi, writing in Gazette de France, expressed disappointment that the Academy would now be penetrated by a "Judaic odor," and not the "Christian inspiration" of Charles de Pomairols (February 14, 1914): 1. 55. Léon Daudet, "L'Institut aux Politiciens," Action Française (December 3, 1913): 1.

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56. Léon Daudet, "Un Juif à l'Académie française, L'intrigue Bergson," Ibid. (January 27, 1914): 1. One Catholic critic went so far as to view Bergson as the willing tool of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. Francois Veuillot in La Croix (February 13, 1914): 2. 57. The playwright Henri Bernstein had deserted the army during his period of military service. 58. "Le juif Bergson à l'Académie," Action Française (January 30, 1914): 1. 59. d'Haussonville was particularly influential. See Henry Bordeaux, L'Académie française en 1914: Histoire d'une Candidature (Paris: Editions d'histoire et d'art, 1946), 5.

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60. Action Française (January 30, 1914): 1. 61. A journal owned and controlled by the Action Française. 62. Henri Clouard, in J. Muller and G. Picard, Les tendances présentes de la littèrature française (Paris: E. Basset, 1913), 118. 63. In Gaston Picard and Gustave Tautain, Enquête, 31819. 64. Gilbert Maire, Bergson, mon maître (Paris: B. Grasset, 1935), 214. Maurras' attack on Bergson was so vehement, wrote Maire, that it forced him to balance Maurrassism and Bergsonism. "Bergsonism," he concluded, "weighed more." (215). 65. Jacques Maritain overcame his somewhat fuzzy sympathies for the Action Française to eventually repudiate that movement, going so far as to defend the Vatican condemnation of Maurras' positions. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to disengage Massis from his stronger adherence to Maurras and the Action Française. In this case all he really won for his efforts was the enduring enmity of Massis. For a further discussion of their relationship see Bernard E. Doering, Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). 66. Georges Sorel, Letter of March 3, 1914, in "Lettres de Georges Sorel à Benedetto Croce," La critica 27 (1929): 49. Pomairols was a personal friend of Barrès and Barrès had just written a preface to Pomairol's Selected Poems in August 1913. 67. Gerald O'Brien, "Anti-Modernism: The Integralist Campaign," Continuum 3 (1965): 188. 68. H.A. Jules-Bois, "Bergson the Magician," Catholic World 52 (1941): 680. While it is true that few Academicians publicly explain their votes, some of them often privately state their personal preferences and those views eventually become common knowledge. The views of still others become reasonably clear either because of their previous statements for or against a candidate, or because of their intellectual and personal relationships with the candidates. Bergson received nineteen votes in the election of 1914, and Pomairols nine, with five Academicians absent and three failing to mark their ballots. If the anger of the Action Française indicates anything, it was common knowledge that good droitiers like Denys Cochin, Othenin d'Haussonville and the Marquis Pierre de Ségur "defected" and voted for Bergson, as did the politicians Alexandre Ribot and Raymond Poincaré, the President of the Republic. Action Française (January 27, 1914): 1; and La Croix (February 13, 1914): 1. As we have seen Paul Bourget, René Doumic and Gabriel Hanotaux expressed not a little sympathy for Bergson and Bergsonism; Maurice Donnay was a friend of Bergson and Emile Boutroux was his former mentor, in most of these cases it is not unreasonable to assume that they voted for Bergson. What links most of these men were their conservative views towards politics and religion. 69. Ernest Seillière, Mysticisme et domination (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1913), 208.

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EPILOGUE In an interview with Edmond Rostand on the eve of the Great War Bergson was asked what would happen when and if France faced its hour of crisis. In a response recalled in 1918 at his official reception to the French Academy, Bergson responded without hesitation, "France need not dread that hour; at the first call to arms, all phantoms will vanish, swept away by a great wave of patriotism." 1 Always optimistic about his country and its future, Bergson saw that war could be the basis for uniting even a highly divided people like the French. He could therefore predict the union sacrée of 1914 and, along with other members of the French intelligentsia, become an active participant in it. To Bergson war was one of the continuous mysteries of history since it persisted even as civilization progressed. Privately he had once confided to a friend that the two might, in fact, be inexorably linked. "I ask myself," he said, ''if war is not indispensable to the existence of a people."2 Bergson therefore joined a growing body of leading European intellectuals who tended to view war as a potentially redemptive force in European civilization. The vision of France redeemed was one of Bergson's most persistent themes during the Great War. Writing to Jacques Chevalier in 1915 Bergson expressed his understanding and dread that great sacrifices would have to be made in the war but the result, he confidentally predicted, will be "the rejuvenation and advancement of France, and the moral regeneration of Europe."3 Bergson drove the same point home in his lecture to Spanish students in Madrid in 1916. "Tomorrow,'' he said, "a great breath of spirituality will pass through the world," the surest sign of which is the heroic and uncomplaining sacrifices of the French people in the war.4 The French nation is being tested, he told an American and British audience of Red Cross workers in 1917; confronted with "the powers of evil evoked from below," the French recognized that their mission was indeed a "divine" one and it was this more than anything else which originally won the Battle of the Marne.5 Bergson carried a similar message to the United States in early 1917. In a rousing speech to the France-America Society, in which he defined the struggle as a "holy war," he explained the "miracle of the Marne" in spiritual terms, using almost the same language to do so as he had in Spain: "It was a kind of uplifting of the French soul by some spiritual breath" which produced the victory and "preserved from moral degradation the whole of the human race." This particular speech was delivered in New York City on March 12, 1917 at a banquet held in Bergson's honour. At the end of Bergson's speech Mr. George T. Wilson, the

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president of the France-America Society, called for "three great big, soul-stirring, heart-throbbing American cheers for our Guide, Philosopher and Friend from La Belle France, Professor Bergson." 6 This is not to say that Bergson shared in the great delusion of 1914that there would be one, quick, decisive victory. From his first war-time speech to the Acádemie des sciences morales et politiques on August 8, 1914, Bergson understood that the war would be a protracted conflict because of the powerful forces of science and technology arrayed, and because he understood the power of the modern state and its genius in manufacturing still more power. This is evident in virtually everything he said about Germany during the war. Like Marx and Engels he believed that Germany in the Franco-Prussian War succeeded in turning war into a European institution and that through their organization of the power of the state the Germans could turn power into an end in itself. This insight lay behind his constant warnings about German mechanism and barbarism and the threat that it posed to the civilized world. Once it became evident that the war could only be won by the effective mobilization of ideas no less than men and resources, the services of intellectuals like Bergson became indispensable. For Bergson the war was not just a unique opportunity to cast the issues of the struggle in terms of his own ideas, but a chance for the first time to take a public role in the service of his country. Initially Bergson's services were enlisted by the Committee for the Publication of Studies and Documents in 1914. Ernest Lavisse was the committee's president and Émile Durkheim its secretary. It also included Émile Boutroux, Gustave Lanson, Charles Seignobos and Charles Andler. The principle object of the committee was to depict Germany in very manichalan termsas the home of autocracy and militarism whose inherently aggressive nature made her the main architect of the Great War. As the most widely discussed and published living philosopher in the world of 1914, Bergson was uniquely equipped to become the committee's star and to transmit his views on the present danger and the meaning of the war to a very large and appreciative audience, both in France and to the world at large. He could do this in several ways: by beating his celebrated pen into a sword and writing war propaganda; by becoming what Jacques Chevalier called, "the apostle of the French ideal abroad," and lecturingoften charismaticallyto foreign audiences in neutral countries; and finally, and most importantly, becoming for a brief time in 1917 and again in 1918 an ambassadeur extraordinaire to the United States. The basic message that Bergson sought to convey in his speeches and writings during the war was that France was La grande nation, the greatest emissary of civilization and that it had enjoyed this role since the Middle Ages. Because France's cultural leadership was never tied to material force (unlike Germany) it was always capable of exerting a moral force in the family of nations. This

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message comes across very clearly in the polemical La philosophie française which he wrote for the San Francisco Exposition of 1915. 7 It was Bergson's purpose in this resumé of French philosophy to show how the main philosophical ideas and systems where man and the universe are analyzed and explained all came from France. For Bergson France's role in modern philosophy was clearit was the greatest "intellectual provider" of the world. Whether it was metaphysics or social philosophy, religious ideas or psychology, it was really the French who led the way. In Bergson's polemic the German mind was not a serious competitor; like the German state it represented, it was mechanical and artificial and its leading progenitors lacked the ability to make subtle and penetrating observations of the human soul. German philosophers like Kant and Hegel were overly concerned with systems and unfortunately wrote badly, dogmatically and even incoherently. Their importance, Bergson felt, was exaggerated. Whatever the Germans accomplished in philosophy and psychology paled beside the French achievement.8 In all of Bergson's war-time polemics he makes the point that on whatever level, whether it is the German mind or state, the enemy is mechanical and has "always evoked a vision of rudeness, of rigidity, of automatism." Bergson's critique of mechanism was a career-long theme he returned to almost obsessively. During the war when things were of necessity politically pointed he argued against mechanism with a polemical urgency. As I have said earlier,9 Bergson defined the war as an historical struggle between an artificially created and barbaric Germany revelling in its material force and inspired by the mechanical soul emanating from its Prussian core, and a spiritually dynamic, creative and spontaneous France. Casting the ideas of Creative Evolution into a theory of history Bergson maintained that Germany lacked the moral force to renew itself and therefore was doomed to lose the war while France, able to rejuvenate itself at every moment, represented the moral force that history dictated would redeem western civilization. Nevertheless, for all his stated confidence in the ultimate outcome of the war, Bergson was not idealistic enough to believe that history really bestowed victory automatically on one side. This was driven home to him in early 1917 when the war hung in the balance. The great battles of Verdun and the Somme were fought on the western front in 1916 and by the end of that year the war had cost the French over three million casualities. With the stalemate on all fronts so complete that neither side appeared able to force a decision in the field, the question of peace negotiations pressed to the fore. In December 1916 President Wilson sent notes to both sides asking them to state the terms that would satisfy them and their people that the war had been carried as far as it could be militarily. In January 1917 in an address before the U.S., Senate Wilson declared for a "peace without victory." Instead of making at least a gesture to keep the peace going the Germans on February 1, 1917 declared unrestricted submarine warfare. At this point Aristide Briand, Minister of Foreign Affairs,

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approached Bergson and suggested that he undertake a special mission to the United States for the French government. Bergson was to determine the reasons for Wilson's indecision in committing the U.S. to the war, and to speak to those issues with the hope of changing the President's mind. Briand felt that a man of Bergson's prestige who was known and admired in the U.S. could gain access to members of Wilson's entourage and exercise an influence over them. At first Bergson hesitated to undertake a mission of this sort since, according to Henri Bordeaux, he was uncomfortable in the non-academic world and since he felt it unrealistic to believe that a philosopher could do very much to alter the foreign policy of the United States. It was a visit to Denys Cochin which convinced him. Cochin, who was at that time a member of the Ministry as well as a fellow Academician, urged him to accept the mission but cautioned him about the perils of crossing an Atlantic ocean alive with German u-boats. "From that moment," Bergson recalled, "I no longer hesitated." 10 All that Bergson asked of Briand was a discreet silence on the mission since it was something other than an official visit, and since he did not wish to offend Jusserand, the French ambassador to the U.S. Bergson sailed for the U.S. in late January 1917 accompanied by René Viviani, the former premier of France and titular head of the mission, and General Joffre, the hero of the Battle of the Marne. Bergson remained in the U.S. from his arrival in February until his return to France in May, 1917. The choice of Henri Bergson as ambassadeur extraordinaire to the U.S. was a stroke of genius. Not only did he bring a dazzling reputation to a country which only four years before had welcomed him enthusiastically but he also brought to his mission a shrewd grasp of American politics and the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of Woodrow Wilson and his entourage. Bergson was kept busy in these four months shuttling between Washington, D.C. and New York City, delivering lectures, making speeches and most important of all, conferring with some of the most important men in American political life. Upon his arrival in Washington he quickly made contact with some of the people closest to President Wilson, and eventually with Wilson himself. He forged a close personal friendship with Franklin Lane, the Secretary of the Interior in the Wilson cabinet. Lane was a self-styled philosopher and something of a Bergsonian and Bergson used him to convey the French position on the war to the cabinet and the President.11 By far the most important friendship Bergson made during the war was with Colonel Edward M. House, Wilson's principle advisor and confidant. The two men met regularly during 1917 and 1918 and again at the Paris Peace

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Conference of 1919 and developed a warm personal relationship. Through House, Bergson was able to confirm his own views about Woodrow Wilson and gain first-hand knowledge about why the President hesitated to intervene militarily in the war. According to House, Wilson said that if he took the U.S. to war "God would demand an accounting for every soldier killed." In this case House took credit for changing Wilson's views by arguing that if Germany won the war in 1917 the U.S. would ultimately have to fight a much stronger Germany and then the sacrifice of American lives would be even greater. In the meetings with House in February and March 1917 the two men first discussed the possibilities of a League of Nations, although Bergson came away thinking that "making the world safe for democracy" was not only naive on Wilson's part but also betrayed an "incomplete knowledge" of Europe and its long history. 12 This is what worried Bergson the most: presidential decisions based on an ignorance of the historical factors that led to the war, and a misunderstanding of the relative strengths of the war's key belligerents. In February 1917 Bergson was granted a lengthy interview with President Wilson himself. This was an unusual honour since, as Bergson realized, Wilson was distrustful of and inaccessible to official personages in 1917. Wilson seems to have made an exception in the case of an intellectual emissary of the first rank. In this interview and in discussions with cabinet members Bergson tried to correct Wilson's impression that the "clash of national egoisms" caused the war and that therfore all the allied rhetoric about fighting for principles was just a bit fraudulent. In his meeting with Wilson he tried to change the president's thinking on these issues by appealing to his idealistic nature and to his faith in the "politics of righteousness" which Bergson to a certain extent shared. Bergson appreciated that Wilson was a leader who sought to carve for himself a secure place in the history of the twentieth century. Bergson was speaking Wilson's language and speaking it strongly when he urged him "to open a new era in the history of humanity."13 And until the U. S. was ready to create this new era of peace it was the role of democratic France to wage war on behalf of the civilized world against German autocracy. In dealing with Wilson directly Bergson discovered the third reason for his indecision. Wilson told Bergson that the Germans would soon ask for peace since "they have their bellies full." "I fought this opinion," wrote Bergson, "with all my powers and energy and an insistence to which the President did not seem to be accustomed."14 On April 2, 1917 President Wilson asked for a declaration of war against the Central Powers. To Bergson, who had played at least a small role in shaping the final decision, "France was saved. This was the greatest joy of my life."15 Confirmation of his role came from Franklin Lane just after Wilson's historic speech.

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Lane told Bergson, "you have been, far more than you think, in the President's decision." 16 Bergson thought this "probably exaggerated" although he admitted that if he had any influence on Wilson's ultimate decision it was mostly through the good offices of Colonel House. House, who did more than anyone to change Wilson's thinking about the war, acknowledged Bergson as "his confidant and his councilor in those unforgettable days."17 Bergson, understanding how the momentous decision was made, felt that a statue to House should be erected in France in honour of everything he had done for that country. In 1918 the Premier of France, Georges Clemenceau, asked Bergson to undertake yet another mission to the U.S. This mission was to be more formal than the first and this time Bergson was obliged to say that he represented the French government. Clemenceau dispatched this mission because in the allied view the war had reached another danger point. The peace treaty that was concluded between Russia and the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 marked the final collapse of the eastern front. In the same month the Germans launched their great spring offensive on the western front which reached its climax in May. At this juncture Bergson and General H.M. Berthelot were sent to Washington to help speed American forces to France before the tide turned in Germany's favour, and to persuade Wilson to militarily intervene in Russia in order to reconstitute the eastern front.18 Bergson's second mission to the U.S. lasted from June to September 1918. He saw Wilson at various times during that period and discussed the possibility of military intervention in Russia. At the same time he received at least partial support from Colonel House who favored a more limited policy of American economic intervention. At one point in 1918 House, who was in Massachusetts at the time, used Bergson even as Bergson had once used him too, to argue his position with the President.19 Wilson, of course, was seeing many people in 1918 about intervention and other issues, and it is almost impossible to say what role Bergson actually played in his decision. But in 1936 Bergson made the cryptic remark that Wilson had "evolved" towards his own view about intervention and he seemed to imply that his interviews with the President carried some extra weight.20 When the First World War ended, Bergson turned his talents and his prestige to the cause of peace.21 He had been attracted to the idea of world federation since the spring of 1916.22 But it was not a League of Nations on which he originally pinned his hopes for the future. He felt this to be too premature since it implied a family of nations which, given what Germany really was, simply did not exist. What we should rather be thinking about, he felt, was a "Federation of Allies" and not a Society of Nations.23

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Despite a somewhat sceptical attitude toward a Society of Nations, Bergson nevertheless accepted an appointment as the first president of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. The committee was the parent organization of UNESCO. It was created in January 1922 and Bergson was chosen by the membership to be its first president. Among other original members were Madame Curie, Albert Einstein and Gilbert Murray. 24 The committee was created to contribute to world peace by promoting international collaboration in education, science and culture. From the beginning it addressed itself to one of the war's tragic legaciesthe breakdown of world unity in cultural terms. The committee's archives during Bergson's term of office reflect his concern with this very problem. Under Bergson's leadership the committee sought to facilitate efforts of member states in the extension of free education, and to encourage the free exchange of ideas and knowledge among peoples and nations by sponsoring international conferences. Until his resignation due to ill health in 1925 Bergson spoke out on a variety of intellectual and cultural issues: he called for increased aid in the form of journals, books and research funds for Austria and Hungary; he fought for better copyright laws; he called for the preservation of archeological treasures; he raised the question of an international bibliographic index for the social sciences; and he worked for greater cultural exchange programmes between the world's universities.25 In those four years Bergson used his prestige to great advantage, conducted himself very diplomatically, and administered his post efficiently. He did all this, furthermore, in a period of declining health. Bergson suffered 'from rheumatoid arthritis and his failing health forced him to relinquish his League position in 1925. Thereafter he could only work sporadically since he was subject to great pain and headaches. Little was therefore heard from Bergson in the interwar years except when he received the Nobel Prize in 1928, and when he published his last book in 1932. Three years after his departure from the League of Nations Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He remains only one of four philosophers granted this highest of honours in the twentieth century. The prize was granted "in recognition of his rich and life-giving ideas and resplendent art with which they are presented."26 Bergsonian philosophy was, by and large, rather optimistic. Time and evolution for Bergson were things that not only grew and expanded but progressed, developed and improved. To this extent Bergson was a child of the nineteenth century. The Great War destroyed the climate within which that optimism had thrived. Writing under a physical disability fourteen years after the war, and in the middle of the Great Depression when the world teetered on the brink of international anarchy the tide of history seemed to be running against

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everything Bergson had ever stood for. Nevertheless, Bergson did not close himself off in the 1930s for the sake of some inner world, nor is it possible to think of Bergson saying, as Taine did in the 1880s, "My generation is finished. I am going away to hide in my hole in Savoy." In the early 1890s the more cautious Herbert Spencer had modified his earlier optimism about man's future. He no longer felt that the evolution of man on this planet would lead to "the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness." The conclusion he reached in the last decade of his life (before 1914), when he thought war a social anachronism, was that man was no longer capable of attaining perfectibility. For Bergson, who had lived through the greatest demonstration of mechanized slaughter in history, war was never far from his mind. Indeed, he believed it inexorably bound up with the industrial character of modern civilization. In his final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 27 he brooded over this tragic problem along with other problems of man and society. Unlike Spencer, however, he believed that there were social forces at work in history which were bound, ultimately, to bring man to perfection. There was nothing socially or biologically deterministic about this. Unless there is a thoroughgoing reform of man's present behaviour, Bergson warned, evolution will lead to a cul-desac. For Bergson this was the period of his "moral adherence to Catholicism," as he wrote in his will, and years in which he moved closer to the orthodox notion of God than he had in Creative Evolution. And what he was calling for in The Two Sources was the introduction of a more ascetic ideal which could be expressed within an evolutionary framework. He urged men to turn away from the "creature comforts, pleasures and luxuries" of a highly materialistic life, which cannot bring happiness, to a more simple and spiritual life. The moral reform required for this would allow man to leap any obstacle that nature sets up against our civilization. This was no collectivist call for man to submerge his interests to the common welfare. On the contrary, if man is to achieve a moral ricorso and evolution is to resume its progressive course, then it is up to extraordinary individuals, mystic heros and saints, to show the way. These "heros of moral life," as he calls them, will, by a combination of love and power and heroic example, steer us towards a new godlike direction. Just as Bergson's earlier pre-1914 work responded to a specific cultural malaisethe so-called mal du siècleso The Two Sources address itself to the moral and spiritual crisis that left its mark on the broken world of 19191939. Even though the pre-1914 soil to support a philosophy of optimism was no longer in existence, the bleak 1930s seemed to cry out for just such a message. In both periods Bergson was responding to the anxieties of the time. This accounts for the fact that The Two Sources ran through seventeen French editions

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in its first three years of publication. This obviously testifies to continued interest in what Bergson had to say and prompts us at this point to assess his popularity and the reasons for his importance. Certainly the enthusiasm for the man and his ideas changed considerably in the two periods in question. To a certain extent this was predictable. This was so because the many issues crucial to making Bergsonism so controversial were either resolved or simply collapsed by 1914. Catholic modernism as a vital religious alternative had been crushed between 1907 and 1914 and Thomism had triumphed in Catholic intellectual circles. By the same token, the Crisis of the New Sorbonne which did so much to draw Bergsonism before the public had spent itself in the same period. While this latter controversy re-emerged in the 1920s it did so in a very subdued way. Furthermore, the Great War helped to change the nature of intellectual debate in the inter-war period, where problems received a more political definition, and the survivors of the earlier cultural controversies now plunged into the political battles of the new era. There are other reasons for the shift in Bergson's popularity after the war. The battle for a seat on the French Academy had already been fought and won in 1914 and Bergson installed in it formally in 1918. At the same time his teaching career came to an end in 1914. He resigned from his chair at the Collège de France in 1921 and retired from active academic life. This removed him from the key popular stage of his career and from direct access to the French public. There is one final reason for what appears, on the surface at least, to be the transitory and to some even shallow nature of Bergsonism's popularity. There was, after all, never a Bergsonian movement between 1907 and 1914 in the sense that there was never an organized attempt to propagate his ideas on something like a mass level through organizational or journalistic outlets. Only in an indirect way did Bergson ever exercise any control over the controversy taking place all around him. Nor did he ever campaign to create a following. Unlike Emile Durkheim, whose Année sociologique served as the headquarters for his movement, Bergson never viewed himself as an authoritarian prophet of a philosophical revolution. He merely helped to keep his name alive and his ideas controversial by publishing his work, by continuing to lecture with his usual magnetic appeal at the Collège de France, and by maintaining contacts among France's intellectual community. Why, then, didn't the Bergsonians constitute themselves into an organized movement? The question is a legitimate one, and one answer to it is provided by Jacques Maritain in a penetrating, albeit biased, understanding of the nature of mystical philosophies like Bergson's: An anti-intellectualist philosophy cannot form disciples properly speaking, for a disciple is one whose intellect, set in action by a doctrine received, thinks it anew on its own

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account; ideas alone are communicated; impressions, sensations and intuitive sympathies can only be individual. Bergsonism can therefore have only propagators more or less faithful to the 'current of thought' of their master and who repeat more or less well the metaphors they have learned. 28 Much of what Maritain says is true (up to a point) but it ignores Bergson's role in the history of ideas. Bergson was a philosophic innovator whose work cut across the boundaries of science, psychology and philosophy and raised basic metaphysical questions on time and space, immortality and mind, and the psychic nature of reality. "No philosophic problem," wrote John Dewey in 1912, "will ever exhibit just the same face and aspect that it presented before Professor Bergson invited us to look at it in its connections with duration as a real and fundamental fact."29 In his attempt to provide a clear alternative to mechanistic determinism, Bergson responded to many of the perplexing questions of the time, and he succeeded in harmonizing the doubts and hopes of many of his contemporaries who were seeking answers to those very questions. Moreover, in showing us how to render unto science what is science's he succeeded every bit as much as anyone in the psychoanalytic movement in reorienting much of European thought in the direction of the mind itself. Like Sigmund Freud, Bergson taught his contemporaries to re-define man as an irrational and fallible creature, but one withand here he went beyond Freudclear spiritual needs and endowed with the ability to transcend himself. As a philosopher of mystical intuition Bergson had no peer, and as such, he succeeded in carving out an important place for himself in twentieth-century thought. He could do this because a mystical philosophy is by its very nature universalist in its scope and purpose, and in the hands ofnot a prophetbut a consummate artistic genius is able to provide the contemplative and the faithful with not merely a cognitive method, but with an infusion of spiritual inspiration. Bergson earned the gratitude of people not merely for delivering a mortal wound to French positivism but for spending his entire life brilliantly arguing for a more spiritualistic interpretation of the universe. The men who were closest to Bergson in his final years understand his work in this light and can best see the final direction of his work. Certainly men like Jacques Chevalier in former years, and Jean Guitton up to the present and all the people who went into creating Les Études bergsoniennes which has been appearing since the Bergson centennial in 1959, are indeed disciples, despite Maritain's protests to the contrary. They are so in the sense of being pupils of a revered teacher rather than followers who for years have managed to keep the torch lit on their master's behalf and who have, especially in Guitton's case, acted as custodians of Bergson's reputation.

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Jean Guitton, a prominent Academician like Bergson, has devoted much of his work in the last half-century to an appraisal of Bergson's career and a consideration of his ''vocation'' in the twentieth century. For Guitton, as for so many swept up in the Catholic revival of the early 1900s, Bergson was a great "spirituel," a seeker after spiritual truth whose religious personalism represents the conclusion of his philosophy. Bergson's philosophy was not merely an intellectual invention but a "revelation," a unique voyage owing little to predecessors and which seeks to lead us to a universal reconciliation. 30 In the final analysis, Bergson's importance is fundamentally religious. This is why, while Bergson lived long enough to witness the disappearance of the popular adulation surrounding his name and ideas, he left such an unforgettable impression upon his cultural milieu that Etienne Gilson felt justified in calling the first third of the twentieth century, "the age of Bergson." By the same token, because of what Guitton calls Bergson's mystical and religious "vocation," his ideas continue to flourish in a society shaken to its foundations by the dynamics of industrial and technological expansion. Because they do, they will be able to enrich modern thought for decades to come.

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Footnotes 1. René Doumic, Réponse de René Doumic (Paris: Perrin, 1918). 2. I. Benrubi, Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson (Neuchatel: Delachaux & Niesté, 1942), 71. 3. André Robinet, ed., Mélanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 1146. 4. Ibid., 12141215. 5. "Bergson Thanks America," New Republic 13 (1917): 208. 6. Robinet, Mélanges, 12471248. 7. "La philosophie française," in R.W. Mossé-Bastide, Écrits et Paroles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 2: 41336. 8. Ibid., 43436. 9. See Chapter IV, footnote 45. 10. Henri Bordeaux, L'Académie française en 1914; histoire d'une candidature (Paris: Editions d'histoire et d'art, 1946), 81. 11. Henri Bergson, "Mes Missions, (19171918)," in Mélanges, 1557. 12. Ibid., 15601561. 13. Ibid., 1559. 14. Ibid., 15591560. Bergson did not neglect Wilson's Republican opposition. He met separately with former President, Theodore Roosevelt, who railed against Wilson for two and a half hours straight, and with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who denounced Wilson in the most violent terms. 15. Ibid., 1564. 16. Ibid., 1557. 17. House sent Bergson a book in 1926 which included the following note: "To Henri Bergson, my guide, philosopher and friend, during some never-to-be forgotten days." Mélanges, 1556. 18. At one point in April, 1918, a mutual friend conveyed the following message from Bergson to President Wilson: "Tell the President that he is our Pope. Where we used to look to Rome for spiritual leading, now we look to Washington." When informed of this, tears came to Wilson's eyes. Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson; Life and Letters. March 1 November 11, 1918 (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939), 8:72. 19. See N. Gordon Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 90. 20. Robinet, Mélanges, 1568. 21. Bergson's linguistic talents were needed at the Paris Peace Conference where he was briefly used as an interpreter between Wilson and Aristide Briand. 22. Michel Corday, The Paris Front: An Unpublished Diary: 19141918 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1934), 158.

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23. Bergson seems to have envisioned a kind of post-1815 Holy Alliance which would be capable of taking creative political action, and at the same time, act as a check against any future eruption of German militarism. Be that as it may, he wanted to discourage public speculation about either a Federation or a League while the war was still on, lest the German government misrepresent the allies' intentions to their own people as just so much western imperialism aimed at the rest of the world. "Fragment of a letter to an unknown recipient," 16 August 1917, in Mélanges, 12711272. 24. See Charles Hodges, "The World Union of Intellectual Forces," Current History (June 1926): 41115. 25. Écrits et Paroles 3: 50419, 54059, 56265, 57982.

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26. Inscription on Bergson's award. See Annie Russell Marble, The Nobel Prize Winners in Literature, 19011931 (New York: Appleton Century, 1932), 313. The other philosophers who have won this award are Rudolph Euken (1908), Bertrand Russell (1950), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1964), who declined to accept his prize. 27. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Claudesley Brereton (New York: Henry Holt, 1935). 28. Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 27879. 29. John Dewey, "Preface," A Contribution to a Bibliography of Henry Bergson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912), xii. 30. Jean Guitton, La vocation de Bergson (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY All students of Henri Bergson owe a great debt to P.A.Y. Gunter. His mammoth Henri Bergson: A Bibliography (Bowling Green: Philosophy Documentation Centre, 1986, rev. 2nd. ed.) is the best effort of its kind. It includes a complete list of Bergson's publications helpfully arranged in chronological order. It cites between 6396 and 6662 separate and often annotated pieces written on Bergson and Bergsonian philosophy. It supersedes all other Bergson bibliographies (which are listed in the book), and corrects their errors in the process. It goes without saying, however, that no bibliography on such a vast subject can be complete. For additional literature on the Catholic revival, the Crisis of the New Sorbonne and the other controversies surrounding Bergson, I refer the reader to the footnotes in the text, and the selected bibliography that follows. Access to the published works of Bergson has been made easier by the appearance of André Robinet's collection, Mélanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972). It contains a complete collection of Bergson's articles, letters, book reviews, talks and interviews. It also contains the archival material in the Ecole Normale and the Collège de France pertaining to Bergsoncourse outlines, faculty appointments, personal communications, etc. This is an indispensable source in view of the fact that Bergson has left us no personal memoirs or collection of letters (in his will he ordered them burned) with which we might have gained additional insights into the man and his work. Much of the material in Mélanges can also be found in the three volumes of Henri Bergson: Écrits et Paroles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957). The bulletins of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques and the Société Française de Philosophie are also extremely helpful in following Bergson's discussion of important intellectual issues. More recent data that sheds light on various aspects of Bergson's career and work can be found in the multi-volumed Les Études bergsoniennes, published by Presses Universitaires de France, and which has been appearing irregularly since 1948.

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Works by Bergson Creative Evolution. New York: The Modern Library, 1944. Published originally as L'Evolution créatrice. Paris: F. Alcan, 1907. The Creative Mind. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946. Published originally as La Pensée et le mouvant. Paris: F. Alcan, 1934. Duration and Simultaneity. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Published originally as Durée el simultanéiti. Paris: F. Alcan, 1922. Écrits et paroles. 3 vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957. Extraits de Lucréce, avec cormmentaire et notes. Paris: Delagrave, 1884. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. London: MacMillan, 1911. Published originally as Le Rire. Paris: F. Alcan, 1900. Matter and Memory. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950. Published originally as Matière et mémoire. Paris: F. Alcan, 1896. The Meaning of The War. London: T.P. Unwin, 1915. Published originally as La Signification de la guerre. Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1915. Mind-Energy. New York: MacMillan, 1920. Published originally as L'Energie spirituelle. Paris: F. Alcan, 1919. Time and Free Will. New York: George Allen & Unwin, 1910. Published originally as Essai sur les données immediates de la conscience. Paris: F. Alcan, 1889. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. New York: Henry Holt, 1935. Published originally as Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion. Paris: F. Alcan, 1932.

Works About Henri Bergson Primary Sources Books Agathon. Les Jeunes gens d'aujourd'hui. Paris: Plonnourrit, 1919. . L'Esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne. Paris: Mercure de France, 1911. Alain. Histoires de mes pensées. Paris: Gallimard, 1936. Astruc, Gabriel. Le Pavillon des fantômes. Paris: F. Alcan, 1908. Bazaillas, Albert. Musique et inconscience Paris: F. Alcan, 1908.

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Benda, Julien. Belphégor. Paris: Emile-Paul Frères, 1947. . Le Bergsonisme: ou une philosophie de la mobilité. Paris: Mercure de France, 1912. . The Betrayal of the Intellectuals. Boston: Beacon Press, 1959. . La Crise du rationalisme. Paris: Les Editions du Club Maintenant, 1949. Benrubi, Isaak. Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson. Neuchatel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1942. Berth, Edouard. Les Méfaits des intellectuels. Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1914. Berthelot, Rene. Un Romantisme utilitaire. II Paris: F. Alcan, 1913. Billy, Andre. L'Epoque 1900. Paris: J. Tallendier, 1951. . L'Epoque contemporaine, 19051930. Paris: J. Tallendier, 1956. Blondel, Maurice. Correspondence philosophiques: Maurice Blondel and Lucien Laberthonnière. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961.

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. L'Itinéraire philosophique de Maurice Blondel. Paris: Editions Spes, 1928. . Lettres philosophiques. Paris: Aubier, 1961. Maurice Blondel et Auguste Valensin Correspondence (18991912). 2 vols. Paris: Aubier, 1957. Bois, Jules. Les petites religions de Paris. Paris: Flammarion, 1894. . Le satanisme et le magie. Paris: L Chailley, 1895. Bourdeau, J. Pragmatisme el modernisme. Paris: F. Alcan, 1909. Boutroux, Emile. Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1914. Brunschvicg, Léon. L'Idéalisme contemporain. Paris: F. Alcan, 1905. Chide, Alphonse. Le Mobilisme moderne. Paris: F. Alcan, 1908. Claudel, Paul. Correspondence: Jacques Rivière Paul Claudel, 19071914. Paris: Plon, 1926. Clermont-Tonnerre, Elizabeth de. Mémoires. 4 vols. Paris: B. Grasset, 1928-35. Delacroix, Henri. Études d'histoire et de psychologie du mysticisme. Paris: F. Alcan, 1908. Delbos, Victor. La Philosophie française. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1919. De Regnier, Henri. De mon temps. Paris: Mercure de France, 1933. Dimnet, Ernest. France Herself Again. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1914. Doumic, René Réponse de M. René Doumic: discours de reception de M. Henri Bergson. Paris: Perrin, 1918. DuBos, Charles. Extraits d'un journal. 190828. Paris: J. Scheffren, 1928. Farges, Albert. La Philosophie de M. Bergson. Paris: Boyard, 1912. Flammarion, Camille. The Unknown. New York: Harper, 1900. Fouillée, Alfred. L'Evolutionnisme des idées-forces. Paris: F. Alcan, 1890. . Le Mouvement idéaliste et la réaction contre la science positive. Paris: F. Alcan, 1896. . La Pensée, et les nouvelles écoles anti-intellectualistes. Paris: F. Alcan, 1911. Gaultier, Paul. La Pensée contemporaine. Paris: Hachette, 1911. Gayraud, Amelie. Les Jeunes filles d'aujourd'hui. Paris: G. Oudin, 1914. Gillouin, René. La Philosophie de Henri Bergson. Paris: B. Grasset, 1911. Guyau, Augustin. La Philosophie et la sociologie d'Alfred Fouillée. Paris: F. Alcan, 1913. Guy-Grand, Georges. La Philosophie Syndicaliste. Paris: B. Grasset, 1911.

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Halévy, Daniel. Péguy and Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine. New York: Longmans, Green, 1947. Henriot, Emile. A quoi rêvent les jeunes gens? Paris: Champion, 1913. Heuzé, Paul. Les morts vivent-ils? Enquête sur l'état présent des sciences psychiques. Paris: La renaissance du livre, 1921. Houtin, Albert. La Crise du clergé. Paris: E. Nourry, 1907. . Histoire du Modernisme Catholique. Paris: l'Auteur, 1913. Huysmans, J.K. A rebours. Paris: G. Charpentier, 1884. James, William. The Letters of William James. 2 vols. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920. . A Pluralistic Universe. New York: Longmans, Green, 1912. Jung, Carl. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. New York: Pantheon Books, 1953. III, VII. Laberthonnière, Lucien. L'Esquisse d'une philosophie personnaliste. Paris: Canet, 1942. . Oeuvres de Laberthonnière. Paris: Vrin, 1948. V, VI. Lasserre, Pierre. Les Chappelles littéraires. Paris: Gamier frères, 1920.

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. Le Romantisme français. Paris: Mercure de France, 1908. Le Dantec, Félix. Contre la métaphysique. Paris: F. Alcan, 1912. . Science et conscience. Paris: Flammarion, 1908. Leguay, Pierre. La Sorbonne. Paris: B. Grasset, 1910. LeRoy, Edouard. The New Philosophy of Henri Bergson. New York: Henry Holt, 1913. . What is Dogma? Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1918. Loisy, Alfred. George Tyrrell et Henri Bremond. Paris: Emile Nourry, 1936. . Mémoires: pour servir à l'histoire religieuse de notre temps. 3 vols. Paris: Emile Nourry, 1931. Maire, Gilbert. Bergson, mon maîtire. Paris: B. Grasset, 1935. Maritain, Jacques. Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism. New York: Philosophical Library, 1955. . Moral Philosophy; An Historical and Critical Survey of the Great Systems. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964. . Redeeming the Time. London: Centenary Press, 1946. Maritain, Raissa. Adventures in Grace. New York: Longmans, Green, 1945. . We Have Been Friends Together. New York: Longmans, Green, 1942. Massis, Henri. Barrès et nous. Paris: Plon, 1962. . Evocations, 19051911. Paris: Plon, 1931. . Jugements. Paris: Plon, 1924. . Maurras et notre temps. Paris: Plon, 1961. Maugendre, L.A. La Renaissance Catholique au début du XXe siècle. 2 vols. Paris: Beauchesne, 19631964. Meyer, Arthur. Ce que mes yeux ont vu. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1911. Meyerson, Emile. Identity and Reality. London: Allen & Unwin, 1938. Muller, Jean and Picard, Gaston. Les tendances présentes de la littérature française. Paris: E. Basset, 1913. Pacary, Pierre. Un Compagnon de Péguy: Joseph Lotte, 187511914. Paris: Victor Lecoffre, 1916. Paulain, Augustin. Des graces d'oraison. Paris: Beauchesne, 1901. Péguy, Charles. Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie Cartesienne. Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 1914. . Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne. Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 1914. . Oeuvres en prose, 18981908. Paris: Gallimard, 1959.

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. Oeuvres en prose, 19091914. Paris: Gallimard, 1961. Piat, Clodius. Insuffesance des philosophies de l'intuition. Paris: Plonnourit, 1908. Piobb, Pierre. L'Année occultiste et psychique. Paris: Henri Daragon, 1907. Poincaré, Henri. The Value of Science. New York: Dover Publications, 1958. Proust, Marcel. Correspondence generale de Marcel Proust. 6 vols. Paris: Plon, 1932. Psichari, Ernest. Lettres du centurion. Paris: Louis Canard, 1933. Psichari, Henriette. Ernest Psichari, mon frère. Paris: Plon, 1933. Ravaisson, Félix. Rapport sur la philosophie en France au XIXme siecle. Paris: 1885. Réclus, Maurice. Le Péguy que j'ai connu Paris: Hachette, 1951. Richet, Charles. Thirty Years of Psychical Research. New York: Macmillan, 1923. Rivière, Jacques. Correspondence: Jacques Rivière et Alain-Fournier. Paris: Gallimard, 1926.

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Rolland, Romain. Jean-Christophe. New York: Henry Holt, 1913. Sage, Michel. Le someil natural et l'hypnose. Paris: F. Alcan, 1904. Segond, Joseph. L'Intuition bergsonienne. Paris: F. Alcan, 1912. Sertillanges, A.D., Avec Henri Bergson. Paris: Gallimard, 1941. Siellière, Ernest. Mysticisme et domination. Paris: F. Alcan, 1913. Sorel, Georges. Lettres à Paul Delesalle. Paris: B. Grasset, 1947. . Reflections on Violence. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950. Tyrrell, George. George Tyrell's Letters. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1920. Articles Adès, Albert. "La Philosophie de Bergson dans la vie." Grande Revue 95 (1918): 64765; 96 (1918): 75-94, 27993. Aimel, Georges. "Individualisme et philosophie bergsonienne." Revue de philosophie 12 (1908): 582-93. Balthasar, Nicholas. "Le Problème de Dieu d'après la philosophic nouvelle." Revue néo-scolastique 14 (1907): 44989; 15 (1908): 90124. Batault, Georges. "La Philosophie de M. Bergson." Mercure de France 72 (1908): 193211. Baylac, Jacques. "La Philosophie de M. Bergson." Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique (October 1909): 32941. Belot, Gustave. "Un Nouveau spiritualisme." Revue philosoplique 44 (1897): 183-99. Benda, Julien. "Une méprise sur l'Intuition bergsonienne." Revue du mois 13 (1912): 57579. Berrod, P. "La Philosophie de l'intuition." Revue philosophique 74 (1912): 28389. Besse, Clement. "Lettre de France: Pour l'intellectualisme." Revue néo-scolastique 14 (1907): 281303. Binet, Alfred. "Une Enquête sur l'évolution de l'enseignement de la philosophie." Année psychologique 14 (1908): 152231. Blondel, Maurice. "Le Point de départ de la recherche philosophique." Annales de philosophie chrétienne 151 (1905): 33760. Blum, Jean. "La Philosophie de M. Bergson et la poésie syrnboliste." Mercure de France 63 (1906): 201207. Blum, Léon. "La Prochain génération littéraire." Revue de Paris 1 (1913): 51936. Bonifas, H. "Catholicisme et bergsonisme." Foi et vie 16 (1913): 65455. Borel, Emile. "L'Évolution de l'intelligence géometrique." Revue de métaphysique et de morale 15 (1907): 74754. Boucaud, Charles. "L'Histoire de droit et la philosophie de M. Bergson." Revue de philosophie 4 (1904): 299306. Bouglé, Céléstin. "Syndicalistes et bergsoniens." Revue du mois 7 (1909): 40316.

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Boutroux, Emile. "La Philosophie en France depuis 1867." Revue de métaphysique et de morale 16 (1908): 683716. Brunschvicg, Léon. "M. Henri Bergson." Revue de Paris 6 (1928): 67186. Cantecor, G. "La Philosophie nouveue et la vie de l'esprit." Revue philosophique 55 (1903): 25277. Charpin, Frédéric. "La Question religieuse; enquête internationale." Mercure de France 66 (1907): 577622; 67 (1907): 4071,21849,42152,62556; 68 (1907): 3461. Couchoud, Paul Louis. "La Métaphysique nouvelle Matière et mémoire de M. Bergson." Revue de métaphysique et de morale 10 (1902): 22543.

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Courtier, Jules. "Rapport sur les séances d'Eusapia Palladino à l'Institut général psychologique 19051908." Bulletin de l'Institut général psychologique 7 no. 56 (1908): 415546. Couterat, Louis. "Etudes sur l'espace et le temps de MM. Léchelas, Poincaré, Delboeuf, Bergson, L. Weber, et Evellin." Revue de métaphysique et de morale 4 (1896): 646669. Croiset, Alfred. "Discours prononcé à l'ouverture des conference de la Faculté des Lettres de Paris." Revue internationale de l'enseignement 56 (1909): 38697. D'Antan, Jacques. "Lise à l'institut de beauté." La Vie heureuse, 20 March 1914, 16. Daudet, Léon. "Un juif à l'Académie française, I'intrigue Bergson." Action Française, 27 January 1914, 1. Dauriac, Lionel. "Le Mouvement bergsonien." Revue philosophique 75 (1913): 400414. . Quelques reflexions sur la philsophie de M. Henri Bergson." Année philosophique 22 (1911): 5572. Delbos, Victor. "Matière et mémoire." Revue de métaphysique et de morale 5 (1897): 35398. Delmont, Abbé Théodore. "Le Philosophe à la mode." L'Univers 14 February 1914, 1. Desaymard, Joseph. "M. Bergson à Clermont-Ferrand." Bulletin historique et scientifique de l'-Auvergne series 2 (191011): 20416, 24367. Dossat, A. "Les jeunes catholiques et l'influence de Bergson." La Croix 13 June 1913, 3. Dwelshauvers, Georges. "M. Bergson et la methode intuitive." Revue du mois 4 (1907): 33650. Faguet, Emile. "L'Enquête sur la jeunesse." Revue Hebdomadaire, 20 July 1912, 289304. Farges, Albert. "L'Erreur foundamentale de la philosophie nouvelle." Revue thomiste 17 (1909): 18297, 299312. . "La Notion bergsonienne du temps." Revue néo-scolastique 19 (1912): 33778. Favre, G. "Souvenirs sur Péguy: 19031914." Europe 46 (1938): 14569, 31944, 475503. Garrigou-Lagrange, Reginald. "Le Sens commun la philosophie de l'être." Revue thomiste 16 (1908): 16486. Gaudeau, Bernard. "Le déclin du bergsonisme." Foi Catholique 25 December 1913, 483-84. Grivet, Jules. "Henri Bergson: Esquisse philosophique." Etudes 121 (1909): 3150, 45478; 124 (1910): 15384. Herr, Lucien. "H. Bergson: essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience." Revue critique 30 (1890): 51719. Hulme, T.E. "Mr. Balfour, Bergson, and Politics." The New Age 10 (1911): 3840, 4647. . "Bax on Bergson." The New Age 9 (1911): 32830. . "Bergsonism in Paris." The New Age 9 (1911): 18990. . "The New Philosophy." The New Age 5 (1909): 19899. . "Notes on Bergson I." The New Age 9 (1911): 58788.

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. "Notes on Bergson III." The New Age 10 (1911): 7982, 94. Jacob, B. "La Philosophie d'hier et celle d'aujourd'hui." Revue de métaphysique et de morale 6 (1898): 170201. Joussain, André. "L'Expansion du bergsonisme et la psychologie musicale." Revue bleue 50 (1912): 75863. Lalande, André. "Philosophy in France 1908." The Philosophical Review 17 (1909): 30030. Lasserre, Pierre. "La Doctrine officielle de l'Université." Mercure de France 76 (1908): 57789. . Une critique de Bergson." Action Française, 29 June 1912, 4. Léchalas, G. "L'Evolution créatrice." Revue des questions scientifiques 13 (1908): 30311. Le Dantec, Félix. "La Biologie de M. Bergson." Revue du mois 4 (1907): 23041.

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Wahl, Jean. "Concerning Bergson's Relations to the Catholic Church." Review of Religion 9 (1941): 4550. Journals Annales de philosophie chrétienne Annales des sciences psychiques Année biologique Annie psychologique Bulletin de l'Institut général psychologique Bulletin de littérature ecclesiastique Demain Echo du merveilleux Etudes franciscaines Foi catholique Grande Revue La critica Light Mercure de France Nouvelle revue française The Occult Review L'Opinion Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research Le Quinzaine Revue de clergé français Revue critique des idées et des livres Revue des deux mondes Revue générale des sciences Revue hebdomadaire Revue d'Histoire et de littérature religieuses

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Revue de la jeunesse Revue internationale de l'enseignement Revue de métaphysique et de morale Revue du mois Revue néo-scholastique Revue de Paris Revue de philosophie Revue philosophique Revue pratique d' apologétique Revue des questions scientifiques Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologie Revue Scientifique

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Revue Spirite Revue de théologie et des questions religieuses Revue thomiste Revue universelle Revue d' l'Université de Bruxelles Le Vie parisienne Newspapers Action Française Gazette de France La Croix La Libre Parole La Dépêche de Toulouse Le Figaro Les Nouvelles littéraires L'Echo de Paris L'Ere nouvelle Le Temps L'Univers

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