Note 412 — Chapter IX · PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON386

It is only with some degree of care and reservation that I wish to refer to any apparent confirmation of this idea by Bergson. And, as always, I object to the idea of any ultimate separation or “dualism” between faith and knowledge—faith being implied in all “knowledge.” There is no opposition in Bergson, or in the principles of his philosophy, between faith and knowledge; it is rather his idea that “the faculty of seeing should be made one with the act of willing” (Creative Evolution, 250; his italics), and that “philosophy” should “proceed, with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal reconstruction of all things, even of life” (C.E. xi.; italics mine). My reasons for finding in his writings a confirmation of the idea that it is indeed our rational and spiritual faith, rather than our demonstrable knowledge, that is to us the measure of truth and reality, are such considerations as the following (in addition to those of the clauses just quoted), his close association between the intellectual and the “volitional,” his general faith in “creative evolution,” in the idea that our “consciousness” means for us “new choices” and (real) “new possibilities,” his faith in the higher intuitions of the mind, in the spiritual nature of man, his belief that the building up of the true philosophy of the future will involve “the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting, and improving one another” (C.E. xiv.), etc. etc.