Note 387 — Chapter IX · PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON386

“Our intelligence, as it leaves the hands of nature, has for its chief object the unorganised solid” (Creative Evolution, p. 162); “of immobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea” (ibid. 164). “The aspect of life that is accessible to the intellect—as indeed to our senses, of which our intellect is the extension—is that which offers a hold to action” (ibid. 170). “We see that the intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigour, the stiffness, and the brutality of the instrument not designed for such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us much in this matter. When we think of the cardinal, urgent, and constant need we have to preserve our bodies and to raise our souls, of the special facilities given to each of us in this field to experiment continually on ourselves and on others, of the palpable injury by which the wrongness of a medical or a pedagogical practice is made manifest and punished at once, we are amazed at the stupidity and especially at the persistence of errors. We may easily find their origin in the natural obstinacy with which we treat the living like the lifeless, and think all reality, however fluid, under the form of the sharply-defined solid. We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. The intellect is characterised by a natural inability to comprehend life” (Creative Evolution, p. 174). (Italics mine.)