The particular intellectualistic difficulty that had held my own thought so long in a vise was, as we have seen at such tedious length, the impossibility of understanding how ‘your’ experience and ‘mine,’ which ‘as such’ are defined as not conscious of each other, can nevertheless at the same time be members of a world-experience defined expressly as having all its parts co-conscious, or known together.  The definitions are contradictory, so the things defined can in no way be united.  You see how unintelligible intellectualism here seems to make the world of our most accomplished philosophers.  Neither as they use it nor as we use it does it do anything but make nature look irrational and seem impossible.

In my next lecture, using Bergson as my principal topic, I shall enter into more concrete details and try, by giving up intellectualism frankly, to make, if not the world, at least my own general thesis, less unintelligible.

LECTURE VI

BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF INTELLECTUALISM

I gave you a very stiff lecture last time, and I fear that this one can be little less so.  The best way of entering into it will be to begin immediately with Bergson’s philosophy, since I told you that that was what had led me personally to renounce the intellectualistic method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be.

Professor Henri Bergson is a young man, comparatively, as influential philosophers go, having been born at Paris in 1859.  His career has been the perfectly routine one of a successful french professor.  Entering the ecole normale superieure at the age of twenty-two, he spent the next seventeen years teaching at lycees, provincial or parisian, until his fortieth year, when he was made professor at the said ecole normale.  Since 1900 he has been professor at the College de France, and member of the Institute since 1900.  So far as the outward facts go, Bergson’s career has then been commonplace to the utmost.  Neither one of Taine’s famous principles of explanation of great men, the race, the environment, or the moment, no, nor all three together, will explain that peculiar way of looking at things that constitutes his mental individuality.  Originality in men dates from nothing previous, other things date from it, rather.  I have to confess that Bergson’s originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle me entirely.  I doubt whether any one understands him all over, so to speak; and I am sure that he would himself be the first to see that this must be, and to confess that things which he himself has not yet thought out clearly, had yet to be mentioned and have a tentative place assigned them in his philosophy.  Many of us are profusely original, in that no man can understand us—­violently peculiar ways of looking at things are no great rarity.  The rarity is when great peculiarity of vision is allied