Note 426 — Chapter IX · PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON386

Cf. “We have now enumerated a few of the essential features of human intelligence. But we have hitherto considered the individual in isolation, without taking account of social life. In reality man is a being who lives in society. If it be true [even] that the human intellect aims at fabrication, we must add that, for that as well as other purposes, it is associated with other intellects. Now it is difficult to imagine a society whose members do not communicate by signs,” etc. etc. (Creative Evolution, p. 166). Indeed all readers of Bergson know that he is constantly making use of the social factor and of “co-operation” by way of accounting for the general advance of mankind. It may be appropriate in this same connexion to cite the magnificent passage towards the close of Creative Evolution in which he rises to the very heights of the idea [Schopenhauer and Hartmann had it before him, and also before the socialists and the collectivists] of humanity’s being possibly able to surmount even the greatest of the obstacles that beset it in its onward path: “As the smallest grain of dust [Creative Evolution, pp. 285–6] is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself, so all organised beings, from the humblest to the highest, ... do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.”