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Every reader of Bergson-and who to-day is not reading Bergson-is aware of a twofold strain in his doctrine. On the one hand, the defining traits of perception, of commonsense knowledge and science are explained on the ground of their intimate connection with action. On the other hand, the standing unresolved conflicts of philosophic systems, the chief fallacies that are found in them, and the failure to make definite progress in the solution of specific philosophic problems, are attributed to carrying over into metaphysics the results and methods of the knowledge that has been formed with the exigencies of action in view. Legitimate and necessary for useful action , they are mere prejudices as respects metaphysical knowledge. Prejudices, indeed, is too mild a name. Imported into philosophy; they are completely misleading; they distort hopelessly the reality they are supposed to know. Philosophy must, accordingly, turn its back, resolutely and finally, upon all methods and conceptions which are infected by implication in action in order to strike out upon a different path. It must have recourse to intuition which installs us within the very movement of reality itself, unrefracted by the considerations that adapt it to bodily needs, that is to useful action . As a result, Bergson has the unique distinction of being attacked as a pragmatist on one side, and as a mystic on the other. There are at least a few readers in sympathy with the first of these strains who find themselves perplexed by the second. They are perplexed, indeed, just in the degree in which the first strain has left them convinced. Surely, they say to themselves, if the irresolvable conflicts and the obscurities of philosophy have arisen because of failure to note the connection of every-day and of scientific knowledge with the purposes of action, public and private , the clarification ofphilosophic issues will arise by correcting this failure, that is to say, by the thorough development of the implications of the genuine import of knowledge. What an emancipation, they say to themselves, is to come to philosophy when it actively adopts this discovery and applies it to its own undertakings ! Perhaps it is because of unredeemed pragmatic prejudice that I find myself among those Perception and Organic Action (1912) (On Henri Bergson) 393 who have this feeling of a baffled expectation and a frustrate logic. Nevertheless, the feeling indicates a genuine intellectual possibility, a legitimate intellectual adventure. The hypothesis that the same discovery that has illuminated perception and science will also illuminate philosophic topics is an hypothesis which has not been logically excluded; it has not even been discussed. It may, then, be worth trying. Any notion that this road has been closed in advance arises from confusion in reasoning. It rests upon supposing that the unresolved antitheses of philosophic systems and the barriers that arrest its progress have been shown to be due to importing into philosophy , from common life and from science, methods and results that are relevant to action alone. If it had been shown that the evils of philosophy have resulted from knowingly carrying over into it considerations whose practical character had all along been knowingly acknowledged, then the conclusion would follow that philosophy must throw overboard these considerations, and find a radically different method of procedure. But this is a supposition contrary both to fact and to Bergson's premises. Why not, then, try the other hypothesis : that philosophic evils result from a survival in philosophy of an error which has now been detected in respect to every-day knowledge and science? Why not try avowedly and constructively to carry into philosophy itself the consequences of the recognition that the problems of perception and science are straightened out when looked at from the standpoint of action, while they remain obscure and obscuring when we regard them from the standpoint of a knowledge defined in antithesis to action? We are thus carried a step beyond the mere suggestion of a possibly valid adventure in philosophy. If a conception of the nature and office of knowledge that has been discarded for common sense and for science is retained in philosophy, we are forced into a dualism that involves serious consequences. Common-sense knowledge and science are set in invidious contrast not merely with philosophy -a contrast that they might easily endure more successfully than philosophy-but with "reality." As long as the notion survives that 394 true knowledge has nothing to do with action, being a purely theoretical vision of the...

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