Note 393 — Chapter IX · PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON386

He expresses this idea in the following way in the Introduction to Matter and Memory: “Psychology has for its object the study of the human mind for practical utility,” whereas in “metaphysics” we see “this same mind striving (the idea, as we say elsewhere, is not free from difficulty) to transcend the conditions of useful action and to come back to itself as to a pure creative energy.” Or in the following sentences from his Creative Evolution: “We must remember that philosophy, as we define it, has not yet become completely conscious of itself. Physics understands its role when it pushes matter into the direction of spatiality; but has metaphysics understood its role when it has simply trodden the steps of physics, in the chimerical hope of going farther in the same direction? Should not its own task be, on the contrary, to remount the incline that physics descends, to bring matters back to its origins, and to build up progressively a cosmology which would be, so to speak, a reversed psychology. All that which seems positive to the physicist and to the geometrician would become, from this new point of view, an interruption or inversion of the true positivity which would have to be defined in psychological terms” (pp. 219–20, italics mine).