Note 392 — Chapter IX · PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON386

It is chiefly in Matter and Memory (in which, by the way, there are pages and pages of criticism of the rationalism of philosophy that are as valuable as anything we have in philosophy since the time of Descartes—Kant not excepted) that we are to look for the detailed philosophy of sensation and of perception, and the detailed philosophy of science upon which this protest of Bergson’s against the excesses of “conceptualism” rests. I indicate, too, at different places in this chapter some of the other special considerations upon which it rests. The gist of the whole is to be found, perhaps, in his contention that our science and our philosophy of the past centuries have both regarded “perception” as teaching us (somehow) what things are independently of their effect upon us, and of their place in the moving equilibrium of things—the truth being on the contrary (with Pragmatism and Humanism) that our knowledge has throughout a necessary relation to ourselves and to our place in the universe, and to our liberation from matter in the life of the spirit.