I must therefore, in order to make my own views more intelligible, give some preliminary account of the bergsonian philosophy.  But here, as in Fechner’s case, I must confine myself only to the features that are essential to the present purpose, and not entangle you in collateral details, however interesting otherwise.  For our present purpose, then, the essential contribution of Bergson to philosophy is his criticism of intellectualism.  In my opinion he has killed intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery.  I don’t see how it can ever revive again in its ancient platonizing role of claiming to be the most authentic, intimate, and exhaustive definer of the nature of reality.  Others, as Kant for example, have denied intellectualism’s pretensions to define reality an sich or in its absolute capacity; but Kant still leaves it laying down laws—­and laws from which there is no appeal—­to all our human experience; while what Bergson denies is that its methods give any adequate account of this human experience in its very finiteness.  Just how Bergson accomplishes all this I must try to tell in my imperfect way in the next lecture; but since I have already used the words ‘logic,’ ’logic of identity, intellectualistic logic,’ and ‘intellectualism’ so often, and sometimes used them as if they required no particular explanation, it will be wise at this point to say at greater length than heretofore in what sense I take these terms when I claim that Bergson has refuted their pretension to decide what reality can or cannot be.  Just what I mean by intellectualism is therefore what I shall try to give a fuller idea of during the remainder of this present hour.

In recent controversies some participants have shown resentment at being classed as intellectualists.  I mean to use the word disparagingly, but shall be sorry if it works offence.  Intellectualism has its source in the faculty which gives us our chief superiority to the brutes, our power, namely, of translating the crude flux of our merely feeling-experience into a conceptual order.  An immediate experience, as yet unnamed or classed, is a mere that that we undergo, a thing that asks, ‘What am I?’ When we name and class it, we say for the first time what it is, and all these whats are abstract names or concepts.  Each concept means a particular kind of thing, and as things seem once for all to have been created in kinds, a far more efficient handling of a given bit of experience begins as soon as we have classed the various parts of it.  Once classed, a thing can be treated by the law of its class, and the advantages are endless.  Both theoretically and practically this power of framing abstract concepts is one of the sublimest of our human prerogatives.  We come back into the concrete from our journey into these abstractions, with an increase both of vision and of power.  It is no wonder that earlier thinkers, forgetting that concepts are only man-made extracts from the temporal flux, should have ended by treating them as a superior type of being, bright, changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed in nature to the turbid, restless lower world.  The latter then appears as but their corruption and falsification.