Excerpt from Logic of Bergson's Philosophy

Like a number of other philosophical writers M. Bergson presupposes a world in which there are objects of knowledge and knowledges of these objects, the latter being true in the measure of their resemblance to what they are knowledges of; but more elabo rately than any other philosopher, perhaps, he develops a consequence of this fundamental assumption, according to which a knowledge, to be absolutely true, must coincide with what it is knowledge of. He applies this supposition, along with its consequence, first to psychol ogy, then to physics and biology, and, finally, to natural science as a whole. In Time and free-will he tries to effect a reform of psychol ogy by making the mind it describes coincide with the Object Of psychological science, or immediate experience; in the sequel he repeats the attempt with regard to physics and biology. In other words, M. Bergson condemns whatever discrepancy he succeeds in discovering between science and concrete experience; he finds fault with science for being abstract and analytical, and his philosophy argues in favor of the validity of immediate intuition. It is not an unequivocal argument in favor of the doctrine of immediate intuition, however, for besides the difficulty of accounting for error in a doctrine that defines any Object presented in consciousness as the truth of itself, an attack on the truth of the natural sciences, to carry weight, requires the provision of a substitute science. But - since formula tions are abstract irremediably and experience concrete - in formu lating a substitute science M. Bergson transgresses the fundamental assumption Of his argument, which declares that as long as a discrep ancy exists between knowledge and the Object of knowledge, the latter must fall short of the absolute truth. Hence the most general characteristic of M. Bergson's logic: He discovers what he takes to be flaws of an epistemological order in natural science, and proposes a novel science in its place, in which the same flaws, or flaws of a similar sort, reappear.

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