Note 433 — Chapter IX · PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON386

As I have indicated in my Preface, I am certainly the last person in the world to affect to disparage the importance of the thin end of the wedge of Critical Idealism introduced into the English-speaking world by Green and the Cairds, and their first followers (like the writers in the old Seth-Haldane, Essays on Philosophical Criticism). Their theory of knowledge, or “epistemology,” was simply everything to the impoverished condition of our philosophy at the time, but, as Bergson points out, it still left many of us [the fault perhaps was our own, to some extent] in the position of “taking” the scientific reading of the world as so far true, and of thinking that we had done well in philosophy when we simply partly “transformed” it. The really important thing was to see with this epistemology that the scientific reading of the world is not in any sense initial “fact” for philosophy.