The Story of Philosophy

CHAPTER TEN

Contemporary European Philosophers: Bergson, Croce and Bertrand Russell

I. Henri Bergson

1. THE REVOLT AGAINST MATERIALISM

The history of modern philosophy might be written in terms of the warfare of physics and psychology. Thought may begin with its object, and at last, in consistency, try to bring its own mystic reality within the circle of material phenomena and mechanical law; or it may begin with itself, and be driven, by the apparent necessities of logic, to conceive all things as forms and creatures of mind. The priority of mathematics and mechanics in the development of modern science, and the reciprocal stimulation of industry and physics under the common pressure of expanding needs, gave to speculation a materialistic impulsion; and the most successful of the sciences became the models of philosophy. Despite Descartes’ insistence that philosophy should begin with the self and travel outward, the industrialization of Western Europe drove thought away from thought and in the direction of material things.

Spencer’s system was the culminating expression of this mechanical point of view. Hailed though he was as “the philosopher of Darwinism,” he was more truly the reflex and exponent of industrialism; he endowed industry with glories and virtues which to our hind-sight seem ridiculous; and his outlook was rather that of a mechanician and an engineer absorbed in the motions of matter, than that of a biologist feeling the élan of life. The rapid obsolescence of his philosophy is due largely to the replacement of the physical by the biological stand-point in recent thought; by the growing disposition to see the essence and secret of the world in the movement of life rather than in the inertia of things. And indeed, matter itself has in our days almost taken on life: the study of electricity, magnetism, and the electron has given a vitalistic tinge to physics; so that instead of a reduction of psychology to physics—which was the more or less conscious ambition of English thought—we approach a vitalized physics and an almost spiritualized matter. It was Schopenhauer who first, in modern thought, emphasized the possibility of making the concept of life more fundamental and inclusive than that of force; it is Bergson who in our own generation has taken up this idea, and has almost converted a sceptical world to it by the force of his sincerity and his eloquence.

Bergson was born in Paris, in 1859, of French and Jewish parentage. He was an eager student, and seems to have taken every prize that turned up. He did homage to the traditions of modern science by specializing at first in mathematics and physics, but his faculty for analysis soon brought him face to face with the metaphysical problems that lurk behind every science; and he turned spontaneously to philosophy. In 1878 he entered the École Normale Supèrieure, and on graduating, was appointed to teach philosophy at the Lycée of Clermont-Ferrand. There, in 1888, he wrote his first major work—the Essai sur les données immèdiates de la conscience, translated as Time and Free-will. Eight quiet years intervened before the appearance of his next (and his most difficult) book—Matière et mémoire. In 1898 he became professor at the École Normale, and in 1900 at the Collège de France, where he remained until his death in 1941. In 1907 he won international fame with his masterpiece—L’Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution); he became almost overnight the most popular figure in the philosophic world; and all that was needed for his success was the placing of his books upon the Index Expurgatorius in 1914. In that same year he was elected to the French Academy.

It is a remarkable thing that Bergson, the David destined to stay the Goliath of materialism, was in youth a devotee of Spencer. But too much knowledge leads to scepticism; early devotees are the likeliest apostates, as early sinners are senile saints. The more he studied Spencer, the more keenly conscious Bergson became of the three rheumatic joints of the materialist mechanism: between matter and life, between body and mind, and between determinism and choice. The patience of Pasteur had discredited the belief in abiogenesis (the generation of life by non-living matter); and after a hundred years of theory, and a thousand vain experiments, the materialists were no nearer than before to solving the problem of the origin of life. Again, though thought and brain were obviously connected, the mode of connection was as far from obvious as it had ever been. If mind was matter, and every mental act a mechanical resultant of neutral states, of what use was consciousness? Why could not the material mechanism of the brain dispense with this “epiphenomenon,” as the honest and logical Huxley called it, this apparently useless flame thrown up by the heat of cerebral commotion? Finally, was determinism any more intelligible than free will? If the present moment contains no living and creative choice, and is totally and mechanically the product of the matter and motion of the moment before, then so was that moment the mechanical effect of the moment that preceded it, and that again of the one before . . . and so on, until we arrive at the primeval nebula as the total cause of every later event, of every line of Shakespeare’s plays, and every suffering of his soul; so that the sombre rhetoric of Hamlet and Othello, of Macbeth and Lear, in every clause and every phrase, was written far off there in the distant skies and the distant æons, by the structure and content of that legendary cloud. What a draft upon credulity! What an exercise of faith such a theory must demand in this unbelieving generation! What mystery or miracle, of Old Testament or New, could be half so incredible as this monstrous fatalistic myth, this nebula composing tragedies? There was matter enough for rebellion here; and if Bergson rose so rapidly to fame it was because he had the courage to doubt where all the doubters piously believed.

2. MIND AND BRAIN

We naturally incline to materialism, Bergson argues, because we tend to think in terms of space; we are geometricians all. But time is as fundamental as space; and it is time, no doubt, that holds the essence of life, and perhaps of all reality. What we have to understand is that time is an accumulation, a growth, a duration. “Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances”; it means that “the past in its entirety is prolonged into the present and abides there actual and acting.” Duration means that the past endures, that nothing of it is quite lost. “Doubtless we think with only a small part of our past; but it is with our entire past . . . that we desire, will, and act.” And since time is an accumulation, the future can never be the same as the past, for a new accumulation arises at every step. “Each moment is not only something new, but something unforeseeable; . . . change is far more radical than we suppose”; and that geometrical predictability of all things which is the goal of a mechanist science is only an intellectualist delusion. At least “for a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating one’s self endlessly.” What if this is true of all things? Perhaps all reality is time and duration, becoming and change?¹

In ourselves, memory is the vehicle of duration, the handmaiden of time; and through it so much of our past is actively retained that rich alternatives present themselves for every situation. As life grows richer in its scope, its heritage and its memories, the field of choice widens, and at last the variety of possible responses generates consciousness, which is the rehearsal of response. “Consciousness seems proportionate to the living being’s power of choice. It lights up the zone of potentialities that surrounds the act. It fills the interval between what is done and what might be done.” It is no useless appendage; it is a vivid theatre of imagination, where alternative responses are pictured and tested before the irrevocable choice. “In reality,” then, “a living being is a center of action; it represents a sum of contingency entering into the world; that is to say, a certain quantity of possible action.” Man is no passively adaptive machine; he is a focus of redirected force, a center of creative evolution.²

Free will is a corollary of consciousness; to say that we are free is merely to mean that we know what we are doing.

The primary function of memory is to evoke all those past perceptions which are analogous to the present perception, to recall to us what preceded and what followed them, and so to suggest to us that decision which is the most useful. But this is not all. By allowing us to grasp in a single intuition multiple moments of duration, it frees us from the movement of the flow of things, that is to say, from the rhythm of necessity. The more of these moments memory can contract into one, the firmer is the hold which it gives to us on matter; so that the memory of a living being appears indeed to measure, above all, its powers of action upon things.³

If determinists were right, and every act were the automatic and mechanical resultant of pre-existent forces, motive would flow into action with lubricated ease. But on the contrary, choice is burdensome and effortful, it requires resolution, a lifting up of the power of personality against the spiritual gravitation of impulse or habit or sloth. Choice is creation, and creation is labor. Hence the worried features of men; and their weary envy of the choiceless routine of animals, who “are so placid and self-contained.” But the Confucian peacefulness of your dog is no philosophic calm, no quiet surface of unfathomed depth; it is the certainty of instinct, the orderliness of an animal that need not, and cannot, choose. “In the animal, invention is never anything but a variation on the theme of routine. Shut up in the habits of the species, it succeeds, no doubt, in enlarging them by its individual initiative; but it escapes automatism only for an instant, for just the time to create a new automatism. The gates of its prison close as soon as they are opened; by pulling at its chain it succeeds only in stretching it. With man, consciousness breaks the chain. In man, and man alone, it sets itself free.”⁴

Mind, then, is not identical with brain. Consciousness depends upon the brain, and falls with it; but so does a coat fall with the nail on which it hangs,—which does not prove that the coat is an “epiphenomenon,” an ornamental ectoplasm of the nail. The brain is the system of images and reaction-patterns; consciousness is the recall of images and the choice of reactions. “The direction of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course. Consciousness is distinct from the organism which it animates, although it must undergo its vicissitudes.”⁵

It is sometimes said that in ourselves, consciousness is directly connected with a brain, and that we must therefore attribute consciousness to living beings which have a brain, and deny it to those which have none. But it is easy to see the fallacy of such an argument. It would be just as though we should say that because in ourselves digestion is directly connected with a stomach, therefore only living beings with a stomach can digest. We should be entirely wrong, for it is not necessary to have a stomach, nor even to have special organs, in order to digest. An amoeba digests, although it is an almost undifferentiated protoplasmic mass. What is true is that in proportion to the complexity and perfection of an organism, there is a division of labor; special organs are assigned special functions, and the faculty of digesting is localized in the stomach, or rather is a general digestive apparatus, which works better because confined to that one function alone. In like manner, consciousness in man is unquestionably connected with the brain; but it by no means follows that a brain is indispensable to consciousness. The lower we go in the animal series, the more nervous centers are simplified and separate from one another, and at last they disappear altogether, merged in the general mass of an organism with hardly any differentiation. If, then, at the top of the scale of living beings, consciousness is attached to very complicated nervous centers, must we not suppose that it accompanies the nervous system down its whole descent, and that when at last the nerve stuff is merged in the yet undifferentiated living matter, consciousness is still there, diffused, confused, but not reduced to nothing? Theoretically, then, everything living might be conscious. In principle, consciousness is coextensive with life.⁶

Why is it, nevertheless, that we seem to think of mind and thought in terms of matter and the brain? It is because that part of our minds which we call the “intellect” is a constitutional materialist; it was developed, in the process of evolution, to understand and deal with material, spatial objects; from this field it derives all its concepts and its “laws,” and its notion of a fatalistic and predictable regularity everywhere. “Our intellect, in the narrow sense of the word, is intended to secure the perfect fitting of our body to its environment, to represent the relations of external things among themselves,—in short, to think matter.”⁷ It is at home with solids, inert things; it sees all becoming as being,⁸ as a series of states; it misses the connective tissue of things, the flow of duration that constitutes their very life.

Look at the moving-picture; it seems to our tired eyes to be alive with motion and action; here, surely, science and mechanism have caught the continuity of life. On the contrary, it is just here that science and the intellect reveal their limitations. The moving picture does not move, is not a picture of motion; it is only a series of instantaneous photographs, “snap-shots,” taken in such rapid succession that when they are thrown in rapid succession upon the screen, the willing spectator enjoys the illusion of continuity, as he did in his boyhood with thumb-nail movies of his pugilistic heroes. But it is an illusion none the less; and the cinema film is obviously a series of pictures in which everything is as still as if eternally congealed.

And as the “motion”-picture camera divides into static poses the vivid current of reality, so the human intellect catches a series of states, but loses the continuity that weaves them into life. We see matter and we miss energy; we think that we know what matter is; but when at the heart of the atom we find energy, we are bewildered, and our categories melt away. “No doubt, for greater strictness, all considerations of motion may be eliminated from mathematical processes; but the introduction of motion into the genesis of figures is nevertheless the origin of modern mathematics”;⁹—nearly all the progress of mathematics in the nineteenth century was due to the use of the concepts of time and motion in addition to the traditional geometry of space. All through contemporary science, as one sees in Mach and Pearson and Henri Poincaré, there runs the uncomfortable suspicion that “exact” science is merely an approximation, which catches the inertia of reality better than its life.

But it is our own fault if, by insisting on the application of physical concepts in the field of thought, we end in the impasse of determinism, mechanism, and materialism. The merest moment of reflection might have shown how inappropriate the concepts of physics are in the world of mind: we think as readily of a mile as of half a mile, and one flash of thought can circumnavigate the globe; our ideas elude every effort to picture them as material particles moving in space, or as limited by space in their flight and operation. Life escapes these solid concepts; for life is a matter of time rather than of space, it is not position, it is change; it is not quantity so much as quality; it is not a mere redistribution of matter and motion, it is fluid and persistent creation.

A very small element of a curve is very near to being a straight line. And the smaller it is, the nearer. In the limit it may be termed a part of the straight line, as you please, for in each of its points a curve coincides with its tangent. So, likewise, “vitality” is tangent, at any and every point, to physical and chemical forces; but such points are, in fact, only views taken by a mind which imagines stops at various moments of the movement that generates the curve. In reality, life is no more made-up of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines.¹⁰

How then shall we catch the flow and essence of life if not by thinking and the intellect? But is the intellect all? Let us for a while stop thinking, and just gaze upon that inner reality—our selves—which is better known to us than all things else: what do we see? Mind, not matter; time, not space; action, not passivity; choice, not mechanism. We see life in its subtle and penetrating flow, not in its “states of mind,” not in its devitalized and separated parts, as when the zoologist examines a dead frog’s legs, or studies preparations under a microscope, and thinks that he is a biologist studying life! This direct perception, this simple and steady looking-upon (intueor) a thing, is intuition; not any mystic process, but the most direct examination possible to the human mind. Spinoza was right: reflective thought is not by any means the highest form of knowledge; it is better, no doubt, than hearsay; but how weak it is beside the direct perception of the thing itself! “A true empiricism is one that sets itself the task of getting as close as possible to the original, of sounding the depths of life, of feeling the pulse of its spirit by a sort of intellectual auscultation”;¹¹ we “listen in” on the current of life. By direct perception we feel the presence of mind; by intellectual circumlocution we arrive at the notion that thought is a dance of molecules in the brain. Is there any doubt that intuition here beholds more truly the heart of life?

This does not mean that thinking is a disease, as Rousseau held, or that the intellect is a treacherous thing which every decent citizen should forswear. The intellect retains its normal function of dealing with the material and spatial world, and with the material aspects or spatial expressions of life and mind; intuition is limited to the direct feeling of life and mind, not in their external embodiments but in their inner being. “I have never maintained that it was necessary ‘to put something different in the place of intellect,’ or to set instinct above it. I have simply tried to show that when we leave the domain 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 the same vital impulse as instinct—although instinct, properly so-called, is quite a different thing.” Nor do we try “to refute intellect by intellect”; we merely “adopt the language of the understanding, since only the understanding has a language”; we cannot help it if the very words that we use are psychological only by symbolism, and still reek with the material connotations forced upon them by their origin. Spirit means breath, and mind means a measure, and thinking points to a thing; nevertheless these are the crass media through which the soul must express itself. “It will be said that we do not transcend our intellect, for it is still with our intellect, and through our intellect, that we see the other forms of consciousness”; even introspection and intuition are materialist metaphors. And this would be a legitimate objection, “if there did not remain, around our conceptual and logical thought, a vague nebulosity, made of the very substance out of which has been formed the luminous nucleus that we call the intellect.” The new psychology is revealing in us a mental region incomparably wider than the intellect. “To explore the most sacred depths of the unconscious, to labor in the sub-soil of consciousness: that will be the principal task of psychology in the century which is opening. I do not doubt that wonderful discoveries await it there.”¹²

3. CREATIVE EVOLUTION

With this new orientation, evolution appears to us as something quite different from the blind and dreary mechanism of struggle and destruction which Darwin and Spencer described. We sense duration in evolution, the accumulation of vital powers, the inventiveness of life and mind, “the continual elaboration of the absolutely new.” We are prepared to understand why the most recent and expert investigators, like Jennings and Maupas, reject the mechanical theory of protozoan behavior, and why Professor E.B. Wilson, dean of contemporary cytologists, concludes his book on the cell with the statement that “the study of the cell has, on the whole, seemed to widen rather than to narrow the enormous gap that separates even the lowest forms of life from the inorganic world.” And everywhere, in the world of biology, one hears of the rebellion against Darwin.¹³

Darwinism means, presumably, the origin of new organs and functions, new organisms and species, by the natural selection of favorable variations. But this conception, hardly half a century old, is already worm-eaten with difficulties. How, on this theory, did the instincts originate? It would be convenient to conceive them as the inherited accumulation of acquired habits; but expert opinion closes that door in our faces,—though some day that door may be opened. If only congenital powers and qualities are transmissible, every instinct must have been, on its first appearance, as strong as it natively is now; it must have been born, so to speak, adult, in full panoply for action; else it could not have favored its possessor in the struggle for existence. If, on its first appearance, it was weak, it could have achieved survival value only through that acquired strength which (by current hypothesis) is not inherited. Every origin is here a miracle.

And, as with the first instincts, so with every variation: one wonders how the change could have offered, in its first form, a handle to selection. In the case of such complex organs as the eye, the difficulty is discouraging: either the eye appeared at once, full-formed and competent (which is as credible as Jonah’s introspection of the whale); or it began with a series of “fortuitous” variations which, by a still more fortuitous survival, produced the eye. At every step the theory of a mechanical production of complicated structures by a blind process of variation and selection presents us with fairy-tales that have all the incredibility of childhood’s lore, and little of its beauty.

The most decisive difficulty, however, is the appearance of similar effects, brought about by different means, in widely divergent lines of evolution. Take as example the invention of sex as a mode of reproduction, both in plants and in animals; here are lines of evolution as divergent as could be, and yet the same complex “accident” occurs in both. Or take the organs of sight in two very distinct phyla—the molluscs and the vertebrates; “how could the same small variations, incalculable in number, have ever occurred in the same order on two independent lines of evolution, if they were purely accidental?” More remarkable still,

nature arrives at identical results, in sometimes neighboring species, by entirely different embryogenic processes . . . . The retina of the vertebrate is produced by an expansion of the rudimentary brain of the embryo . . . . In the mollusc, on the contrary, the retina is derived from the ectoderm¹⁴ directly . . . . If the crystalline lens of a Triton be removed, it is regenerated by the iris. Now the original lens was built out of the ectoderm, while the iris is of mesodermal origin. What is more, in the Salamandra maculata, if the lens be removed and the iris left, the regeneration of the lens takes place at the upper part of the iris; but if this upper part of the iris itself be taken away, the regeneration takes place in the inner or retinal layer of the remaining region. Thus parts differently situated, differently constituted, meant normally for different functions, are capable of performing the same duties and even of manufacturing, when necessary, the same pieces of the machine.¹⁵

So, in amnesia and aphasia, “lost” memories and functions reappear in regenerated or substituted tissues.¹⁶ Surely we have here overwhelming evidence that there is something more in evolution than a helpless mechanism of material parts. Life is more than its machinery; it is a power than can grow, that can restore itself, than can mould to its own will some measure of environing circumstance. Not that there is any external design determining these marvels; that would be merely an inverted mechanism, a fatalism as destructive of human initiative and of creative evolution as the sombre surrender of Hindu thought to India’s heat. “We must get beyond both points of view—mechanism and finalism—as being, at bottom, only standpoints to which the human mind has been led by considering the work of men”: we thought at first that all things moved because of some quasi-human will using them as instruments in a cosmic game; and then we thought that the cosmos itself was a machine because we had been dominated, in character and philosophy, by our mechanical age. There is a design in things; but in them, not outside; an entelechy, an inward determination of all the parts by the function and purpose of the whole.¹⁷

Life is that which makes efforts, which pushes upwards and outwards and on; “always and always the procreant urge of the world.” It is the opposite of inertia, and the opposite of accident; there is a direction in the growth to which it is self-impelled. Against it is the undertow of matter, the lag and slack of things toward relaxation and rest and death; at every stage life has had to fight with the inertia of its vehicle; and if it conquers death through reproduction, it does so only by yielding every citadel in turn, and abandoning every individual body at last to inertia and decay. Even to stand is to defy matter and its “laws”: while to move about, to go forth and seek, and not, plant-like, to wait, is a victory purchased at every moment by effort and fatigue. And consciousness slips, as soon as it is permitted, into the restful automatism of instinct, habit, and sleep.

At the outset life is almost as inert as matter; it takes a stationary form, as if the vital impulse were too weak to risk the adventure of motion. And in one great avenue of development this motionless stability has been the goal of life: the bending lily and the majestic oak are altars to the god Security. But life was not content with this stay-at-home existence of the plant; always its advances have been away from security towards freedom; away from carapaces, scales and hides, and other burdensome protections, to the ease and perilous liberty of the bird. “So the heavy hoplite was supplanted by the legionary; the knight, clad in armor, had to give place to the light free-moving infantryman; and in a general way, in the evolution of life, just as in the evolution of human societies and of individual destinies, the greatest successes have been for those who accepted the heaviest risks.”¹⁸ So, too, man has ceased to evolve new organs on his body; he makes tools and weapons instead, and lays them aside when they are not needed, rather than carry all his armament at every step, like those gigantic fortresses, the mastodon and the megatherium, whose heavy security lost them the mastery of the globe. Life may be impeded, as well as aided, by its instruments.

It is with instincts as with organs; they are the tools of the mind; and like all organs that are attached and permanent, they become burdens when the environment that needed them has disappeared. Instinct comes ready-made, and gives decisive—and usually successful—responses to stereotyped and ancestral situations; but it does not adapt the organism to change, it does not enable man to meet flexibly the fluid complexities of modern life. It is the vehicle of security, while intellect is the organ of an adventurous liberty. It is life taking on the blind obedience of the machine.

How significant it is that we laugh, usually, when a living thing behaves like matter, like a mechanism; when the clown tumbles about aimlessly, and leans against pillars that are not there; or when our best beloved falls on an icy path, and we are tempted to laugh first and ask questions afterward. That geometrical life which Spinoza almost confused with deity is really a reason for humor and tears; it is ridiculous and shameful that their philosophy should describe them so.

Life has taken three lines in its evolution: in one it relapsed into the almost material torpor of plants, and found there, occasionally, a supine security, and the cowardly tenure of a thousand years; in another avenue its spirit and effort congealed into instinct as in the ants and bees; but in the vertebrates it took the dare of freedom, cast off its ready-made instincts and marched bravely into the endless risks of thought. Instinct still remains the profounder mode of visioning reality and catching the essence of the world; but intelligence grows ever stronger and bolder, and wider in its scope; it is at last in intelligence that life has placed its interests and its hopes.

This persistently creative life, of which every individual and every species is an experiment, is what we mean by God; God and Life are one. But this God is finite, not omnipotent,—limited by matter, and overcoming its inertia painfully, step by step; and not omniscient, but groping gradually towards knowledge and consciousness and “more light.” “God, thus defined, has nothing of the ready-made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely,” when we consciously choose our actions and plot our lives.¹⁹ Our struggles and our sufferings, our ambitions and our defeats, our yearnings to be better and stronger than we are, are the voice and current of the Élan Vital in us, that vital urge which makes us grow, and transforms this wandering planet into a theatre of unending creation.

And who knows but that at last life may win the greatest victory of all over its ancient enemy, matter, and learn even to elude mortality? Let us have an open mind, even to our hopes.²⁰ All things are possible to life if time is generous. Consider what life and mind have done in the mere moment of a millennium, with the forests of Europe and America; and then see how foolish it is to put up barriers to life’s achievements. “The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.”²¹

4. CRITICISM

“I believe,” says Bergson, “that the time given to refutation in philosophy is usually time lost. Of the many attacks directed by the many thinkers against each other, what now remains? Nothing, or assuredly very little. That which counts and endures is the modicum of positive truth which each contributes. The true statement is of itself able to displace the erroneous idea, and becomes, without our having taken the trouble of refuting anyone, the best of refutations.”²² This is the voice of Wisdom herself. When we “prove” or “disprove” a philosophy we are merely offering another one, which, like the first, is a fallible compound of experience and hope. As experience widens and hope changes, we find more “truth” in the “falsehoods” we denounced, and perhaps more falsehood in our youth’s eternal truths. When we are lifted up on the wings of rebellion we like determinism and mechanism, they are so cynical and devilish; but when death looms up suddenly at the foot of the hill we try to see beyond it into another hope. Philosophy is a function of age. Nevertheless . . .

What strikes one first in reading Bergson is the style: brilliant not with the paradox-fireworks of Nietzsche, but with a steady brightness, as of a man who is resolved to live up to the fine traditions of luminous French prose. It is harder to be wrong in French than in some other languages; for the French will not tolerate obscurity, and truth is clearer than fiction. If Bergson is occasionally obscure it is by the squandered wealth of his imagery, his analogies, and his illustrations; he has an almost Semitic passion for metaphor, and is apt at times to substitute ingenious simile for patient proof. We have to be on our guard against this image-maker, as one bewares of a jeweler, or a real-estate poet—while recognizing gratefully, in Creative Evolution, our century’s first philosophic masterpiece.²³

Perhaps Bergson would have been wiser to base his criticism of the intellect on the grounds of a broader intelligence, rather than on the ukases of intuition. Introspective intuition is as fallible as external sense; each must be tested and corrected by matter-of-fact experience; and each can be trusted only so far as its findings illumine and advance our action. Bergson presumes too much in supposing that the intellect catches only the states, and not the flux, of reality and life; thought is a stream of transitive ideas, as James had shown before Bergson wrote;²⁴ “ideas” are merely points that memory selects in the flow of thought; and the mental current adequately reflects the continuity of perception and the movement of life.

It was a wholesome thing that this eloquent challenge should check the excesses of intellectualism; but it was as unwise to offer intuition in the place of thought as it would be to correct the fancies of youth with the fairy-tales of childhood. Let us correct our errors forward, not backward. To say that the world suffers from too much intellect would require the courage of a madman. The romantic protest against thinking, from Rousseau and Chateaubriand to Bergson and Nietzsche and James, has done its work; we will agree to dethrone the Goddess of Reason if we are not asked to re-light the candles before the ikon of Intuition. Man exists by instinct, but he progresses by intelligence.

That which is best in Bergson is his attack upon materialist mechanism. Our pundits of the laboratory had become a little too confident of their categories, and thought to squeeze all the cosmos into a test-tube. Materialism is like a grammar that recognizes only nouns; but reality, like language, contains action as well as objects, verbs as well as substantives, life and motion as well as matter. One could understand, perhaps, a merely molecular memory, like the “fatigue” of overburdened steel; but molecular foresight, molecular planning, molecular idealism?—Had Bergson met these new dogmas with a cleansing scepticism he might have been a little less constructive, but he would have left himself less open to reply. His doubts melt away when his system begins to form; he never stops to ask what “matter” is; whether it may not be somewhat less inert than we have thought; whether it may be, not life’s enemy, but life’s willing menial if life but knew its mind. He thinks of the world and the spirit, of body and soul, of matter and life, as hostile to each other; but matter and body and the “world” are merely the materials that wait to be formed by intelligence and will. And who knows that these things too are not forms of life, and auguries of mind? Perhaps here too, as Heraclitus would say, there are gods.

Bergson’s critique of Darwinism issues naturally from his vitalism. He carries on the French tradition established by Lamarck, and sees impulse and desire as active forces in evolution; his spirited temper rejects the Spencerian conception of an evolution engineered entirely by the mechanical integration of matter and dissipation of motion; life is a positive power, an effort that builds its organs through the very persistence of its desires. We must admire the thoroughness of Bergson’s biological preparation, his familiarity with the literature, even with the periodicals in which current science hides itself for a decade of probation. He offers his erudition modestly, never with the elephantine dignity that weighs down the pages of Spencer. All in all, his criticism of Darwin has proved effective; the specifically Darwinian features of the evolution theory are now generally abandoned.²⁵

In many ways the relation of Bergson to the age of Darwin is a replica of Kant’s relation to Voltaire. Kant strove to repulse that great wave of secular, and partly atheistic, intellectualism which had begun with Bacon and Descartes, and had ended in the scepticism of Diderot and Hume; and his effort took the line of denying the finality of intellect in the field of transcendental problems. But Darwin unconsciously, and Spencer consciously, renewed the assaults which Voltaire, and his more-than-Voltairean followers, had leveled at the ancient faith; and mechanist materialism, which had given ground before Kant and Schopenhauer, had won all of its old power at the beginning of our century. Bergson attacked it, not with a Kantian critique of knowledge, nor with the idealist contention that matter is known only through mind; but by following the lead of Schopenhauer, and seeking, in the objective as well as in the subjective world, an energizing principle, an active entelechy, which might make more intelligible the miracles and subtleties of life. Never was vitalism so forcefully argued, or so attractively dressed.

Bergson soared to an early popularity because he had come to the defense of hopes which spring eternally in the human breast. When people found that they could believe in immortality and deity without losing the respect of philosophy, they were pleased and grateful; and Bergson’s lecture-room became the salon of splendid ladies happy to have their heart’s desires upheld with such learned eloquence. Strangely mingled with them were the ardent syndicalists who found in Bergson’s critique of intellectualism a justification of their gospel of “less thought and more action.” But this sudden popularity exacted its price; the contradictory nature of Bergson’s support disintegrated his following; and Bergson may share the fate of Spencer, who lived to be present at the burial of his own reputation.

Yet, of all contemporary contributions to philosophy, Bergson’s is the most precious. We needed his emphasis on the elusive contingency of things, and the remoulding activity of mind. We were near to thinking of the world as a finished and pre-determined show, in which our initiative was a self-delusion, and our efforts a devilish humor of the gods; after Bergson we come to see the world as the stage and the material of our own originative powers. Before him we were cogs and wheels in a vast and dead machine; now, if we wish it, we can help to write our own parts in the drama of creation.

II. Benedetto Croce

1. THE MAN

From Bergson to Croce is an impossible transition: there is hardly a parallel in all their lines. Bergson is a mystic who translates his visions into deceptive clarity; Croce is a sceptic with an almost German gift for obscurity. Bergson is religiously-minded, and yet talks like a thorough-going evolutionist; Croce is an anti-clerical who writes like an American Hegelian. Bergson is a French Jew who inherits the traditions of Spinoza and Lamarck; Croce is an Italian Catholic who has kept nothing of his religion except its scholasticism and its devotion to beauty.

Perhaps the comparative infertility of Italy in the philosophy of the last hundred years is due in some part to the retention of scholastic attitudes and methods even by thinkers who have abandoned the old theology. (More of it, doubtless, is due to the northward movement of industry and wealth.) Italy might be described as the land that had a Renaissance, but never a Reformation; it will destroy itself for beauty’s sake, but it is as sceptical as Pilate when it thinks of truth. Perhaps the Italians are wiser than the rest of us, and have found that truth is a mirage, while beauty—however subjective—is a possession and a reality. The artists of the Renaissance (excepting the sombre and almost Protestant Michelangelo, whose brush was the echo of Savonarola’s voice) never worried their heads about morals or theology; it was enough for them that the Church recognized their genius, and paid their bills. It became an unwritten law in Italy that men of culture would make no trouble for the Church. How could an Italian be unkind to a Church that had brought all the world to Canossa, and had levied imperial tribute on every land to make Italy the art-gallery of the world?

So Italy remained loyal to the old faith, and contented itself with the Summa of Aquinas for philosophy. Giambattista Vico came, and stirred the Italian mind again; but Vico went, and philosophy seemed to die with him. Rosmini thought for a time that he would rebel; but he yielded. Throughout Italy men became more and more irreligious, and more and more loyal to the Church.

Benedetto Croce is an exception. Born in 1866 in a small town in the province of Aquila, and the only son of a well-todo Catholic and conservative family, he was given so thorough a training in Catholic theology that at last, to restore the balance, he became an atheist. In countries that have had no Reformation there is no half-way house between orthodoxy and absolute unbelief. Benedetto was at first so pious that he insisted on studying every phase of religion, until at last he reached its philosophy and its anthropology; and insensibly his studies were substituted for his faith.

In 1883 life dealt him one of those ruthless blows which usually turn men’s minds back to belief. An earthquake overwhelmed the little town of Casamicciola where the Croces were staying; Benedetto lost both his parents, and his only sister; he himself remained buried for hours under the ruins, with many broken bones. It took him several years to recover his health; but his later life and work showed no breaking of his spirit. The quiet routine of convalescence gave him, or strengthened in him, the taste for scholarship; he used the modest fortune which the catastrophe left him to collect one of the finest libraries in Italy; he became a philosopher without paying the usual penalty of poverty or a professorship; he realized Ecclesiastes’ cautious counsel, that “wisdom is good with an inheritance.”

He has remained throughout his life a student, a lover of letters and of leisure. It was against his protests that he was drawn into politics and made minister of Public Education, perhaps to lend an air of philosophic dignity to a cabinet of politicians. He was chosen to the Italian senate; and as the rule in Italy is, once a senator always a senator (the office being for life). Croce provides the spectacle, not unusual in ancient Rome, but rather unique in our day, of a man who can be a senator and a philosopher at the same time. He would have interested Iago. But he does not take his politics too seriously; his time goes chiefly to the editing of his internationally famous periodical, La Critica, in which he and Giovanni Gentile dissect the world of thought and belles lettres.

When the war of 1914 came, Croce, angered at the thought that a mere matter of economic conflict should be permitted to interrupt the growth of the European mind, denounced the outbreak as suicidal mania; and even when Italy had, of necessity, thrown in her lot with the Allies, he remained aloof, and became as unpopular in Italy as Bertrand Russell in England or Romain Rolland in France. But Italy has forgiven him now; and all the youth of the land look up to him as their unbiased guide, philosopher, and friend; he has become for them an institution as important as the universities. It is nothing unusual now to hear judgments of him like Giuseppe Natoli’s: “The system of Benedetto Croce remains the highest conquest in contemporary thought.” Let us inquire into the secret of this influence.

2. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT

His first book, in its original form, was a leisurely series of articles (1895–1900) on Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx. He had been immensely stimulated by Antonio Labriola, his professor at the University of Rome; under his guidance Croce had plunged into the labyrinths of Marx’s Kapital. “This intercourse with the literature of Marxism, and the eagerness with which for some time I followed the socialistic press of Germany and Italy, stirred my whole being, and for the first time awakened in me a feeling of political enthusiasm, yielding a strange taste of newness to me; I was like a man who, having fallen in love for the first time when no longer young, should observe in himself the mysterious process of the new passion.”²⁶ But the wine of social reform did not quite go to his head; he soon reconciled himself to the political absurdities of mankind, and worshipped again at the altar of philosophy.

One result of this adventure was his elevation of the concept Utility to a parity with Goodness, Beauty and Truth. Not that he conceded to economic affairs the supreme importance given to them in the system of Marx and Engels. He praised these men for a theory which, however incomplete, had drawn attention to a world of data before underrated and almost ignored; but he rejected the absolutism of the economic interpretation of history, as an unbalanced surrender to the suggestions of an industrial environment. He refused to admit materialism as a philosophy for adults or even as a method for science; mind was to him the primary and ultimate reality. And when he came to write his system of thought he called it, almost pugnaciously, “The Philosophy of the Spirit.”

For Croce is an idealist, and recognizes no philosophy since Hegel’s. All reality is idea; we know nothing except in the form it takes in our sensations and our thoughts. Hence all philosophy is reducible to logic; and truth is a perfect relationship in our ideas. Perhaps Croce likes this conclusion a bit too well; he is nothing if not logical; even in his book on Esthetics he cannot resist the temptation to intrude a chapter on logic. It is true that he calls philosophy the study of the concrete universal, and science the study of the abstract universal; but it is the reader’s misfortune that Croce’s concrete universal is universally abstract. He is, after all, a product of the scholastic tradition; he delights in abstruse distinctions and classifications that exhaust both the subject and the reader; he slides easily into logical casuistry, and refutes more readily than he can conclude. He is a Germanized Italian, as Nietzsche is an Italianized German.

Nothing could be more German, or more Hegelian, than the title of the first of the trilogy that makes up the Filosofia dello Spirito—the Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept (1905). Croce wants every idea to be as pure as possible—which seems to mean as ideological as possible, as abstract and unpragmatic as possible; there is nothing here of that passion for clarity and practical content which made William James a beacon-light amid the mists of philosophy. Croce does not care to define an idea by reducing it to its practical consequences; he prefers to reduce practical affairs to ideas, relations, and categories. If all abstract or technical words were removed from his books they would not so suffer from obesity.

By a “pure concept” Croce means a universal concept, like quantity, quality, evolution, or any thought which may conceivably be applied to all reality. He proceeds to juggle these concepts as if the spirit of Hegel had found in him another avatar, and as if he were resolved to rival the reputation of the master for obscurity. By calling all this “logic,” Croce convinces himself that he scorns metaphysics, and that he has kept himself immaculate from it; metaphysics, he thinks, is an echo of theology, and the modern university professor of philosophy is just the latest form of the medieval theologian. He mixes his idealism with a certain hardness of attitude towards tender beliefs: he rejects religion; he believes in the freedom of the will, but not in the immortality of the soul; the worship of beauty and the life of culture are to him a substitute for religion. “Their religion was the whole intellectual patrimony of primitive peoples; our intellectual patrimony is our religion . . . . We do not know what use could be made of religion by those who wish to preserve it side by side with the theoretic activity of man, with his art, his criticism, and his philosophy . . . . Philosophy removes from religion all reason for existing . . . . As the science of the spirit, it looks upon religion as a phenomenon, a transitory historical fact, a physic condition that can be surpassed.”²⁷ One wonders if La Gioconda’s smile did not hover over the face of Rome when it read these words.

We have here the unusual occurrence of a philosophy that is at once naturalistic and spiritualistic, agnostic and indeterministic, practical and idealistic, economic and esthetic. It is true that Croce’s interest is caught more surely by the theoretical than by the pragmatic aspects of life; but the very subjects he has essayed bear witness to an honorable effort to overcome his scholastic inclinations. He has written an immense volume on The Philosophy of the Practical, which turns out to be in part another logic under another name, and in part a metaphysical discussion of the old problem of free will. And in a more modest tome On History he has achieved the fruitful conception of history as philosophy in motion, and of the historian as one who shows nature and man not in theory and abstraction but in the actual flow and operation of causes and events. Croce loves his Vico, and warmly seconds the earlier Italian’s plea that history should be written by philosophers. He believes that the fetish of a perfectly scientific history has led to a microscopic erudition in which the historian loses the truth because he knows too much. Just as Schliemann exhumed not only one Troy but seven after scientific historians had shown that there had been no Troy at all, so Croce thinks the hypercritical historian exaggerates our ignorance of the past.

I recollect the remark made to me when I was occupied with research work in my young days, by a friend of but slight literary knowledge, to whom I had lent a very critical, indeed hypercritical, history of ancient Rome. When he had finished reading it he returned the book to me, remarking that he had acquired the proud conviction of being “the most learned of philologists”: for the latter arrive at the conclusion that they know nothing, as the result of exhausting toil; while he knew nothing without any effort at all, simply as a generous gift of nature.²⁸

Croce recognizes the difficulty of finding out the actual past, and quotes Rousseau’s definition of history as “the art of choosing, from among many lies, that one which most resembles the truth.”²⁹ He has no sympathy with the theorist who, like Hegel, or Marx, or Buckle, distorts the past into a syllogism that will conclude with his prejudice. There is no foreordained plan in history; and the philosopher who writes history must devote himself not to the tracing of cosmic designs, but to the revelation of causes and consequences and correlations. And he will also remember that only that part of the past is of value which is contemporary in its significance and its illumination. History might at last be what Napoleon called it,—“the only true philosophy and the only true psychology”—if historians would write it as the apocalypse of nature and the mirror of man.

3. WHAT IS BEAUTY?

Croce came to philosophy from historical and literary studies; and it was natural that his philosophic interest should be deeply colored by the problems of criticism and esthetics. His greatest book is his Esthetic (1902). He prefers art to metaphysics and to science: the sciences give us utility but the arts give us beauty; the sciences take us away from the individual and the actual, into a world of increasingly mathematical abstractions, until (as in Einstein) they issue in momentous conclusions of no practical importance; but art takes us directly to the particular person and the unique fact, to the philosophical universal intuited in the form of the concrete individual. “Knowledge has two forms: it is either intuitive knowledge or logical knowledge; knowledge obtained through the imagination or knowledge obtained through the intellect; knowledge of the individual or knowledge of the universal; of individual things or of the relations between them; it is the production either of images or of concepts.”³⁰ The origin of art, therefore, lies in the power of forming images. “Art is ruled uniquely by the imagination. Images are its only wealth. It does not classify objects, it does not pronounce them real or imaginary, does not qualify them, does not define them; it feels and presents them—nothing more.”³¹ Because imagination precedes thought, and is necessary to it, the artistic, or image-forming, activity of the mind is prior to the logical, concept-forming, activity. Man is an artist as soon as he imagines, and long before he reasons.

The great artists understood the matter so. “One paints not with the hands but with the brain,” said Michelangelo; and Leonardo wrote: “The minds of men of lofty genius are most active in invention when they are doing the least external work.” Everybody knows the story told of da Vinci, that when he was painting the “Last Supper,” he sorely displeased the Abbot who had ordered the work, by sitting motionless for days before an untouched canvas; and revenged himself for the importunate Abbot’s persistent query—When would he begin to work?—by using the gentleman as an unconscious model for the figure of Judas.

The essence of the esthetic activity lies in this motionless effort of the artist to conceive the perfect image that shall express the subject he has in mind; it lies in a form of intuition that involves no mystic insight, but perfect sight, complete perception, and adequate imagination. The miracle of art lies not in the externalization but in the conception of the idea; externalization is a matter of mechanical technique and manual skill.

“When we have mastered the internal word, when we have vividly and clearly conceived a figure or a statue, when we have found a musical theme, expression is born and is complete, nothing more is needed. If, then, we open our mouth, and speak or sing, . . . what we do is to say aloud what we have already said within, to sing aloud what we have already sung within. If our hands strike the keyboard of the pianoforte, if we take up pencil or chisel, such actions are willed” (they belong to the practical, not to the esthetic, activity), “and what we are then doing is executing in great movements what we have already executed briefly and rapidly within.”³²

Does this help us to answer that baffling question, What is beauty? Here certainly there are as many opinions as there are heads; and every lover, in this matter, thinks himself an authority not to be gainsaid. Croce answers that beauty is the mental formation of an image (or a series of images) that catches the essence of the thing perceived. The beauty belongs, again, rather to the inward image than to the outward form in which it is embodied. We like to think that the difference between ourselves and Shakespeare is largely a difference in technique of external expression; that we have thoughts that lie too deep for words. But this is a fond illusion: the difference lies not in the power of externalizing the image but in the power of inwardly forming an image that expresses the object.

Even that esthetic sense which is contemplation rather than creation is also inward expression: the degree in which we understand or appreciate a work of art depends upon our ability to see by direct intuition the reality portrayed,—our power to form for ourselves an expressive image. “It is always our own intuition we express when we are enjoying a beautiful work of art . . . . It can only be my own intuition when, reading Shakespeare, I form the image of Hamlet or Othello.”³³ Both in the artist creating and in the spectator contemplating beauty, the esthetic secret is the expressive image. Beauty is adequate expression: and since there is no real expression if it be not adequate, we may answer very simply the ancient question, and say, Beauty is expression.³⁴

4. CRITICISM

All this is as clear as a starless night; and not wiser than it should be. The Philosophy of the Spirit lacks spirit, and discourages a sympathetic exposition. The Philosophy of the Practical is unpractical, and lacks the breath of living reference. The essay On History catches one leg of the truth, by proposing a union of history and philosophy; but it misses the other by failing to see that history can become philosophy only by being not analytic but synthetic; not shredded history (giving in separate books the separate story of the supposedly insulated activities of men—economic, political, scientific, philosophical, religious, literary, and artistic) but what one might call, not too seriously, wedded history,—history in which all the phases of human life in a given period—made as brief as individual frailty may require—shall be studied in their correlation, in their common response to similar conditions, and in their varied mutual influence. That would be the picture of an age, the image of the complexity of man; it would be such history as a philosopher would consent to write.

As to the Esthetic, let others judge. At least one student cannot understand it. Is man an artist as soon as he forms images? Does the essence of art lie only in the conception, and not in the externalization? Have we never had thoughts and feelings more beautiful than our speech? How do we know what the inward image was, in the artist’s mind, or whether the work that we admire realizes or misses his idea? How shall we call Rodin’s “Harlot” beautiful, except because it is the expressive embodiment of an adequate conception?—conception though it be of an ugly and distressing subject? Aristotle notes that it pleases us to see the faithful images of things that are repugnant to us in reality; why, except that we reverence the art that has so well embodied the idea?

It would be interesting, and no doubt disconcerting, to know what artists think of these philosophers who tell them what beauty is. The greatest living artist has abandoned the hope of answering the question. “I believe,” he writes, “that we shall never know exactly why a thing is beautiful.” But the same mellow wisdom offers us a lesson which we learn, usually, too late. “No one has ever been able to show me precisely the right way . . . . As for me, I follow my feeling for the beautiful. What man is certain of having found a better guide? . . . If I had to choose between beauty and truth, I should not hesitate; it is beauty I should keep . . . . There is nothing true in the world except beauty.”³⁵ Let us hope that we need not choose. Perhaps we shall some day be strong enough and clear enough in soul to see the shining beauty of even the darkest truth.

III. Bertrand Russell

1. THE LOGICIAN

We have kept for the last the youngest and the most virile of the European thinkers of our generation.

When Bertrand Russell spoke at Columbia University in 1914, he looked like his subject, which was epistemology—thin, pale, and moribund; one expected to see him die at every period. The Great War had just broken out, and this tenderminded, peace-loving philosopher had suffered from the shock of seeing the most civilized of continents disintegrate into barbarism. One imagined that he spoke of so remote a subject as “Our Knowledge of the External World” because he knew it was remote, and wished to be as far as possible from actualities that had become so grim. And then, seeing him again, ten years later, one was happy to find him, though fifty-two, hale and jolly, and buoyant with a still rebellious energy. This despite an intervening decade that had destroyed almost all his hopes, loosened all his friendships, and broken almost all the threads of his once sheltered and aristocratic life.

For he belongs to the Russells, one of the oldest and most famous families in England or the world, a family that has given statesmen to Britain for many generations. His grandfather, Lord John Russell, was a great Liberal Prime Minister who fought an unyielding battle for free-trade, for universal free education, for the emancipation of the Jews, for liberty in every field. His father, Viscount Amberley, was a free-thinker, who did not over-burden his son with the hereditary theology of the West. He is now heir presumptive to the second Earl Russell but he rejects the institution of inheritance, and proudly earns his own living. When Cambridge dismissed him for his pacifism he made the world his university, and became a traveling Sophist (in the original sense of that once noble word), whom the world supported gladly.

There have been two Bertrand Russells: one who died during the war; and another who rose out of that one’s shroud, an almost mystic communist born out of the ashes of a mathematical logician. Perhaps there was a tender mystic strain in him always; represented at first by a mountain of algebraic formulae; and then finding a distorted expression in a socialism that has the ear-marks rather of a religion than of a philosophy. The most characteristic title among his books is Mysticism and Logic: a merciless attack on the illogicality of mysticism, followed by such a glorification of scientific method as makes one think of the mysticism of logic. Russell inherits the English positivist tradition, and is resolved to be tough-minded, because he knows that he cannot.

Perhaps it was by an over-correction that he emphasized the virtues of logic, and made a divinity of mathematics. He impressed one, in 1914, as cold-blooded, as a temporarily animated abstraction, a formula with legs. He tells us that he never saw a motion-picture till he read Bergson’s cinematographic analogy for the intellect; then he reconciled himself to one performance, merely as a task in philosophy. Bergson’s vivid sense of time and motion, his feeling that all things were alive with a vital impetus, made no impression on Russell; it seemed to him a pretty poem and nothing more; for his part he would have no other god than mathematics. He had no liking for the classics; he argued vigorously, like another Spencer, for more science in education. The world’s woes, he felt, were largely due to mysticism, to culpable obscurity of thought; and the first law of morality should be, to think straight. “Better the world should perish than that I, or any other human being, should believe a lie; . . . that is the religion of thought, in whose scorching flames the dross of the world is being burnt away.”³⁶

His passion for clarity drove him inevitably to mathematics; he was almost thrilled at the calm precision of this aristocratic science. “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.”³⁷ He believes that the progress of mathematics was the finest feature of the nineteenth century; specifically, “the solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the mathematical infinite is probably the greatest achievement of which our age can boast.”³⁸ In one century the old geometry which had held the fortress of mathematics for two thousand years was almost entirely destroyed; and Euclid’s text, the oldest school-book in the world, was at last superseded. “It is nothing less than a scandal that he should still be taught to boys in England.”³⁹

Perhaps the source of most of the innovations in modern mathematics is the rejection of axioms; and Russell delights in men who challenge “self-evident truths” and insist upon the demonstration of the obvious. He was rejoiced to hear that parallel lines may somewhere meet, and that the whole may be no greater than one of its parts. He likes to startle the innocent reader with such puzzles as this: the even numbers are but half of all numbers, and yet there are just as many of them as there are numbers altogether,—since for every number there is its even double. Indeed, this is the whole point about that hitherto indefinable thing, the mathematical infinite: it is a whole containing parts that have as many terms or items as the whole.—The reader may follow this tangent if the spirit moves him.⁴⁰

What draws Russell to mathematics is, again, its rigid impersonality and objectivity: here, and here alone, is eternal truth, and absolute knowledge; these à priori theorems are the “Ideas” of Plato, the “eternal order” of Spinoza, the substance of the world. The aim of philosophy should be to equal the perfection of mathematics by confining itself to statements similarly exact, and similarly true before all experience. “Philosophical propositions . . . must be à priori,” says this strange positivist. Such propositions will refer not to things but to relations, and to universal relations. They will be independent of specific “facts” and events; if every particular in the world were changed, these proportions would still be true. E.g., “if all A’s are B’s, and X is A, then X is a B”: this is true whatever A may be; it reduces to a universal and à priori form the old syllogism about the mortality of Socrates; and it would be true if no Socrates, even if nobody at all, had ever existed. Plato and Spinoza were right: “the world of universals may also be described as the world of being. The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life.”⁴¹ To reduce all philosophy to such mathematical form, to take all specific content out of it, to compress it (voluminously) into mathematics—this was the ambition of this new Pythagoras.

“People have discovered how to make reasoning symbolic, as it is in algebra, so that deductions can be effected by mathematical rules . . . . Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the first proposition is really true, and not to mention what the anything is of which it is supposed to be true . . . . Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.”⁴²

And perhaps (if one may rudely interrupt exposition with opinion) this description does no great injustice to mathematical philosophy. It is a splendid game for those who like it; guaranteed to “kill time” as rapidly as chess; it is a new form of solitaire, and should be played as far as possible from the contaminating touch of things. It is remarkable that after writing several volumes of this learned moonshine, Bertrand Russell should suddenly come down upon the surface of this planet, and begin to reason very passionately about war, and government, and socialism, and revolution,—and never once make use of the impeccable formulae piled like Pelion upon Ossa in his Principia Mathematica. Nor has anyone else, observably, made use of them. To be useful, reasoning must be about things, and must keep in touch with them at every step. Abstractions have their use as summaries; but as implements of argument they require the running test and commentary of experience. We are in danger here of a scholasticism beside which the giant Summa’s of medieval philosophy would be models of pragmatic thought.

From such a starting point, Bertrand Russell was almost fated to pass into agnosticism. He found so much in Christianity that could not be phrased in mathematics, that he abandoned it all except its moral code. He speaks scornfully of a civilization that persecutes men who deny Christianity, and imprisons those who take it seriously.⁴³ He can find no God in such a contradictory world; rather, only a humorous Mephistopheles could have produced it, and in a mood of exceptional deviltry.⁴⁴ He follows Spencer in his vision of the end of the world, and rises to eloquence in describing the Stoic’s resignation to the ultimate defeat of every individual and every species. We talk of evolution and progress; but progress is an egotistical phrase and evolution is but one half of an unmoral cycle of events terminating in dissolution and death. “Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoan to the philosopher; and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately, it is the philosopher, not the protozoan, who gives us this assurance.”⁴⁵ The “free man” cannot comfort himself with childish hopes and anthropomorphic gods; he has to keep his courage up even though he knows that in the end he too must die, that all things must die. Nevertheless, he will not surrender; if he cannot win, he can at least enjoy the fight; and by the knowledge that foresees his own defeat he stands superior to the blind forces that will destroy him. His worship will go not to these brute powers without, that by their aimless persistence conquer him, and tear down every home and every civilization that he builds; but to those creative powers within him that struggle on in the face of failure, and raise for at least some centuries the frail beauty of carved and pictured things, and the majestic ruins of the Parthenon.

Such was the philosophy of Bertrand Russell—before the war.

2. THE REFORMER

And then the Great Madness came; and the Bertrand Russell who had lain so long buried and mute under the weight of logic and mathematics and epistemology, suddenly burst forth, like a liberated flame, and the world was shocked to find that this slim and anemic-looking professor was a man of infinite courage, and a passionate lover of humanity. Out of the recesses of his formulae the scholar stepped forth, and poured out upon the most exalted statesmen of his country a flood of polemic that did not stop even when they ousted him from his chair at the University, and isolated him, like another Galileo, in a narrow quarter of London. Men who doubted his wisdom admitted his sincerity; but they were so disconcerted by this amazing transformation that they slipped for a moment into a very un-British intolerance. Our embattled pacifist, despite his most respectable origins, was outlawed from society, and denounced as a traitor to the country which had nourished him, and whose very existence seemed to be threatened by the maelstrom of the war.

Back of this rebellion lay a simple horror of all bloody conflict. Bertrand Russell, who had tried to be a disembodied intellect, was really a system of feelings; and the interests of an empire seemed to him not worth the lives of the young men whom he saw so proudly marching forth to kill and die. He set to work to ferret out the causes of such a holocaust; and thought he found in socialism an economic and political analysis that at once revealed the sources of the disease and indicated its only cure. The cause was private property, and the cure was communism.

All property, he pointed out, in his genial way, had had its origin in violence and theft; in the Kimberley diamond mines and the Rand gold mines the transition of robbery into property was going on under the nose of the world. “No good to the community, of any sort or kind, results from the private ownership of land. If men were reasonable they would decree that it should cease tomorrow, with no compensation beyond a moderate life-income to the present holders.”⁴⁶

Since private property is protected by the state, and the robberies that make property are sanctioned by legislation and enforced by arms and war, the state is a great evil; and it would be well if most of its functions were taken over by cooperatives and producers’ syndicates. Personality and individuality are crushed into a rote conformity by our societies; only the greater safety and orderliness of modern life can reconcile us to the state.

Freedom is the supreme good; for without it personality is impossible. Life and knowledge are today so complex, that only by free discussion can we pick our way through errors and prejudices to that total perspective which is truth. Let men, let even teachers, differ and debate; out of such diverse opinions will come an intelligent relativity of belief which will not readily fly to arms; hatred and war come largely of fixed ideas or dogmatic faith. Freedom of thought and speech would go like a cleansing draught through the neuroses and superstitions of the “modern” mind.

For we are not so educated as we think; we are but beginning the great experiment of universal schooling; and it has not had time to affect profoundly our ways of thinking and our public life. We are building the equipment, but we are still primitive in methods and technique; we think of education as the transmission of a certain body of settled knowledge, when it should be rather the development of a scientific habit of mind. The distinctive feature of the unintelligent man is the hastiness and absoluteness of his opinions; the scientist is slow to believe, and never speaks without modification. The larger use of science, and of scientific method, in education would give to us a measure of that intellectual conscience which believes only up to the evidence in hand, and is always ready to concede that it may be wrong. With such methods, education may prove the great solvent of our ills; it may even make of our children’s children the new men and women who must come before the new society can appear. “The instinctive part of our character is very malleable. It may be changed by beliefs, by material circumstances, by social circumstances, and by institutions.” It is quite conceivable, for example, that education could mould opinion to admire art more than wealth, as in the days of the Renaissance, and could guide itself by the resolution “to promote all that is creative, and so to diminish the impulses and desires that center round possession.” This is the Principle of Growth, whose corollaries would be the two great commandments of a new and natural morality: first, the Principle of Reverence, that “the vitality of individuals and communities is to be promoted as far as possible”; and second, the Principle of Tolerance, that “the growth of one individual or one community is to be as little as possible at the expense of another.”⁴⁷

There is nothing that man might not do if our splendid organization of schools and universities were properly developed and properly manned, and directed intelligently to the reconstruction of human character. This, and not violent revolution, or paper legislation, is the way out of economic greed and international brutality. Man has come to control all other forms of life because he has taken more time in which to grow up; when he takes still more time, and spends that time more wisely, he may learn even to control and remake himself. Our schools are the open sesame to Utopia.

3. EPILOGUE

All this, of course, is rather optimistic,—though it is better to err on the side of hope than in favor of despair. Russell has poured into his social philosophy the mysticism and the sentiment which he had so resolutely repressed in his attitude towards metaphysics and religion. He has not applied to his economic and political theories the same rigid scrutiny of assumptions, the same scepticism of axioms, which gave him such satisfaction in mathematics and logic. His passion for the à priori, his love of “perfection more than life,” leads him here to splendid pictures that serve rather as poetic relief to the prose of the world than as practicable approaches to the problems of life. It is delightful, for example, to contemplate a society in which art shall be better respected than wealth; but so long as nations rise and fall, in the flux of natural group-selection, according to their economic rather than their artistic power, it is economic and not artistic power which, having the greater survival value, will win the greater plaudits and the large rewards. Art can only be the flower that grows out of wealth; it cannot be wealth’s substitute. The Medici came before Michelangelo.

But it is not necessary to pick more flaws in Russell’s brilliant vision; his own experience has been his severest critic. In Russia he found himself face to face with an effort to create a socialist society; and the difficulties encountered by the experiment almost destroyed Russell’s faith in his own gospel. He was disappointed to find that the Russian Government could not risk such a measure of democracy as had seemed to him the axiom of a liberal philosophy; and he was so angered by the suppression of free speech and free press, and by the resolute monopoly and systematic use of every avenue of propaganda, that he rejoiced in the illiteracy of the Russian people;—the ability to read being, in this age of subsidized newspapers, an impediment to the acquisition of truth. He was shocked to find that nationalization of the land had been forced (except on paper) to yield to private ownership; and it dawned upon him that men, as made today, will not properly till and husband their holdings unless they can rely on transmitting them, and the improvements which they put into them, to their children. “Russia seems on the way to becoming a greater France, a great nation of peasant proprietors. The old feudalism has disappeared.” He began to understand that this dramatic overturn, with all its sacrifices and all its heroism, was only Russia’s 1789.

Perhaps he was more at home when he went for a year to teach in China; there was less mechanism there, and a slower pace; one could sit down and reason, and life would stand still while one dissected it. In that vast sea of humanity new perspectives came to our philosopher; he realized that Europe is but the tentative pseudopodium of a greater continent and an older—and perhaps profounder—culture; all his theories and syllogisms melted into a modest relativity before this mastodon of the nations. One sees his system loosening as he writes:

I have come to realize that the white race isn’t as important as I used to think it was. If Europe and America kill themselves off in war it will not necessarily mean the destruction of the human species, nor even an end to civilization. There will still be a considerable number of Chinese left; and in many ways China is the greatest country I have ever seen. It is not only the greatest numerically and the greatest culturally, but it seems to me the greatest intellectually. I know of no other civilization where there is such open-mindedness, such realism, such a willingness to face the facts as they are, instead of trying to distort them into a particular pattern.⁴⁸

It is a little difficult to pass from England to America, and then to Russia, and then to India and China, and yet keep one’s social philosophy unchanged. The world has convinced Bertrand Russell that it is too big for his formulae, and perhaps too large and heavy to move very rapidly towards his heart’s desire. And there are so many hearts, and so many different desires! One finds him now “an older and a wiser man,” mellowed by time and a varied life; as wide awake as ever to all the ills that flesh is heir to and yet matured into the moderation that knows the difficulties of social change. All in all, a very lovable man: capable of the profoundest metaphysics and the subtlest mathematics, and yet speaking always simply, with the clarity which comes only to those who are sincere; a man addicted to fields of thought that usually dry up the springs of feeling, and yet warmed and illumined with pity, full of an almost mystic tenderness for mankind. Not a courtier, but surely a scholar and a gentleman, and a better Christian than some who mouth the word. Happily, he is still hearty and vigorous, the flame of life burns brightly in him yet; who knows but this next decade will see him grow out of disillusionment into wisdom, and write his name among the highest in “the serene brotherhood of philosophs”?