Note 394 — Chapter IX · PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON386

As an indication of what the acceptance of the dynamic instead of the static view of matter on the part of Bergson means, I cite the phrase (or the conception) on p. 82 of Matter and Memory, the effect that “matter is here as elsewhere the vehicle of an action,” or the even more emphatic declaration on p. 261 of Creative Evolution, “There are no things, there are only actions.” It is impossible, of course, that these mere extracts can convey to the mind of the casual reader the same significance that they obtain in their setting in the pages of Bergson, although it is surely almost a matter of common knowledge about his teaching, that one of the first things it does is to begin with the same activistic or “actionistic” view of nature and matter that seems to be the stock in trade of the physics of our time since the discoveries pertaining to radio-activity, etc. Being only a layman in such matters, I may be excused for quoting from a recent booklet (whose very presence in the series in which it appears is to people like myself a guarantee of its scientific reliability) in which I find this same activistic view of matter that I find in Bergson. “What are the processes by which the primary rock material is shifted? There is the wind that, etc. etc.... There are the streams and rivers that, etc.... There is the sea constantly wearing away, etc.... Then there are ‘subtle’ physical and ‘chemical’ forces. And the action of plants.... Hence by various mechanical, organic, and chemical processes the materials originally scattered through the rocks of the earth’s crust, and floating in the air or water, are collected into layers and form beds of sand, clay, limestone, salt, and the various mineral fuels, including peat and coal” (The Making of the Earth, by Professor Gregory, F.R.S., of Glasgow University: Williams and Norgate).

It is only right to state here, or to remind the reader in this matter of a “dynamic” view of matter, that Bergson not only dissipates matter into force or energy or activity (as do the physicists of to-day), but also actually credits the world of matter and life with a kind of consciousness (and why not be courageous about it?) in which what I have already called the “susceptibility of everything to everything else,” or the action of everything upon everything else, becomes credible and intelligible. “No doubt, also, the material universe itself, defined as the totality of images, is a kind of consciousness in which everything compensates and neutralises everything else, a consciousness of which all the potential parts, balancing each other by a reaction which is always equal to the action, reciprocally hinder each from standing out” (Matter and Memory, p. 313).