Note 424 — Chapter IX · PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON386

It is somewhat difficult, and it is not necessary for our purposes, to explain what might be meant by the “Idealism” of Bergson—at least in the sense of a cosmology, a theory of the “real.” It is claimed for him, and he claims for himself that he is in a sense both an “idealist” and a “realist,” believing at once (1) that matter is an “abstraction” (an unreality), and (2) that there is more in matter than the qualities revealed by our perceptions. [We must remember that he objects to the idea of qualities in things in the old static sense. “There are no things; there are only actions.”] What we might mean by his initial idealism is the following: “Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of images. And by ‘image’ we mean [Matter and Memory, the Introduction] a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing—an existence placed half-way between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation.’ This conception of matter is simply that of common sense.” ... “For common sense, then, the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is in itself pictorial, as we perceive it: image it is, but a self-existing image.” Now, this very idea of a “self-existing image” implies to me the whole idealism of philosophy, and Bergson is not free of it. And, of course, as we have surely seen, his “creative-evolution” philosophy is a stupendous piece of idealism, but an idealism moreover to which the science of the day is also inclining.