Note 406 — Chapter IX · PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON386

Like his celebrated contemporary Eucken, and like many other thinkers of their time, Bergson is profoundly convinced of the one-sidedness of the so-called scientific culture of our day, and of the error of any and all conceptions of education and of social policy that are based upon it. Although I refer below to the limitations of his view that the intellect is adapted only to matter and to mechanical construction, I append the following quotation as symptomatic of his value as a spiritual teacher in our scientific age: “As regards human intelligence (Creative Evolution, pp. 145–6) it has not been sufficiently noted that mechanical invention has been from the first its essential feature, that even to-day our social life gravitates around the manufacture and use of artificial instruments.... This we hardly realise, because it takes longer to change ourselves than to change our tools.... In thousands of years, when seen from the distance, only the broad lines of our present age will be visible, our wars and our revolutions will count for little, even supposing they are remembered at all, but the steam-engine, and the procession of inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of prehistoric times; it will serve to define an age.”