Nerval, "Adrienne"

A prose poem ("Adrienne") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

I regained my bed but could not find any rest.  Plunged in half-somnolence, I watched reels of my entire childhood cascade through my memory.  This state, in which the mind continues to resist odd combinations in dream, often allows one to see – if hurriedly in only a few minutes – the most striking paintings one may ever behold.

I imagined a castle in the times of Henri IV, its pointed roofs covered in slate and its reddish front with jagged corners of yellow stone; a large green clearing then appeared, framed in elm and lime trees whose foliage was pierced by the setting sun and its flaming strokes.  Young girls danced around the lawn singing old tunes inherited from their mothers, in a French so naturally pure it might have still existed in the old Valois country where for over a thousand years the heart of France had beaten.

In this circle I was the only lad.  Here I had brought a companion, still very young as well, Sylvia, a little girl from a neighboring hamlet, so alive and so fresh, with black eyes, a straight, neat profile and her skin lightly tanned!  I loved nothing but her, I could see nothing but her – until now!  I had just noticed in the circle in which we were dancing a blonde girl, tall and lovely, who was called Adrienne.  All of a sudden, in accordance with the rules of the dance, Adrienne found herself alone with me in the middle of the circle  Our heights were identical.  We were told to embrace, with the dance and choir now more vivacious than ever before.  In kissing her I could not help but squeeze her hand.  Her long flaxen curls caressed my cheeks.  From that moment on a hitherto unknown concern took hold of me.  My beauty had to sing to gain the right to rejoin the dance.  We sat around her and, just as quickly, in a voice both fresh and penetrating, almost lightly misted like the voices of girls from those hazy parts, she sang one of those old romances replete with love and melancholy.  It was a song typical of a princess incarcerated in a tower by her father who wished to punish her for having loved.  The melody stopped at each stanza for quavering trills that so enhance a young voice when, by modulated thrill, it imitates the trembling song of its foremothers.

As she sang darkness descended from the large trees, and the nascent moonlight retrieved her alone, isolating her from our tight little circle.  She fell silent, and no one dared interrupt her wordlessness.  The lawn was covered with weak condensed vapor which unraveled its white flakes upon the grass blades.  We thought that we were in paradise.  Finally I got up and ran along the castle's terrain where laurel trees were planted in great monochrome earthenware vases.  I brought back two branches which were then woven into a crown and bound with a ribbon.  Upon Adrienne's head then I placed this ornament whose lustrous leaves flashed on her blond hair in the pale streams of moonlight.  She resembled Dante's Beatrice who smiled at the poet straying along the outskirts of saintly abodes.   

Adrienne rose, drawing her svelte figure to its full height.  To us she bade a gracious farewell and ran back into the castle.  We were told that she was the granddaughter of one of the descendents of a family allied to the ancient kings of France; the blood of Valois coursed through her veins.  For this holiday she had been allowed to take part in our games; we would never see her again since she left the following day to a convent where she was a resident.

When I returned to Sylvia's side I noticed that she was crying.  The crown given by me to the beautiful singer had been the cause of her tears.  I offered to gather her another, but she protested that she was not keen on such a gift nor did she deserve it.  In vain I sought to defend myself, but she said not a word more to me as I took her back to her parents' house.

Returning to Paris to resume my studies, I bore this double image of tender friendship sadly broken and a vague and impossible love, a source of dolorous thoughts that university philosophy proved unable to assuage.   The figure of Adrienne remained only triumphant, the mirage of glory and beauty, softening or sharing the hours of grueling learning.  On vacation the following year I learned that this beauty hardly espied had just been consecrated by her family into the monastic life.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Whenever historically-minded scholars try to pinpoint the beginnings of the detective story, they often find themselves pondering the meaning of the terminology we apply like a cookie cutter to any tale that contains an initially unsolved crime.  To be sure, there are stories in which the only person who does not know what has occurred is the same poor soul entrusted with an official investigation; other narratives move from one mystery to one another so that, in the end, we are neither closer to solving these conundra nor quite certain what to make of the circumstances that have obtained.  An example of the former type is this well-known detective series; an example of the latter is an anagram for what has been termed the postmodern.

Now readers of these pages might have an inkling as to what I think of postmodern literature (never mind manifestations of its visual arts, which are best left unmentioned): with few exceptions of brilliant creativity such as this novel of genius, most attempts are laborious endeavors to mystify and obscure the truth behind a parade of parlor tricks that, upon close inspection, do not add up to much at all.  Their aim?  To point out the inherent contradictions in our system of values that lead them to assert, with no iota of conviction one way or another, that what we see and think and feel is not only relative, it also does not make any sense.  Since life doesn't make sense, and art is known in many circles to be nothing more than an imitation of life, it similarly has no such obligations to conform to logic.  Purveyors of such rot are easy to identify: they will tell a story that seems to contradict itself and when you ask for explanation, will inform you are too stupid to understand their charlatanism, I mean, their subtlety; they will waft around cocktail parties half-drunk and recount degrading stories of famous artists' lives, perhaps because their own lives, while degraded by no hope or imagination, are not nearly as interesting as those of the people they mock; and they will publish ironic and wholly nonsensical articles filled with neologisms and jargon that reference one another to make it seem as if there lurks a network of like-minded critics who collectively march towards truth, when their real destination is darkest oblivion.  What these second-raters do not understand is that true art does not destroy, it builds; it builds on the accomplishments of its forerunners and anticipates to a great extent its successors.  And all successors to the detective story owe something to this odd but rather amazing tale.

Our narrator – he remains unnamed throughout – tickles our fancy with an introduction both poorly organized and completely fascinating on the nature, as it were, of logic.  He begins this discourse with an observation about that supposedly most intellectual of childish pursuits, chess:

the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess.  In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play.  If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat.  The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers.

This setup suggests that the meaty portion of our narrative will provide evidence of such an approach – which, as it turns out, it does and does not – but what happens next is much more interesting for the history of letters because our narrator turns out to be our Boswell.  He quickly shifts into an introduction of a certain Auguste Dupin, a Frenchman of “an illustrious family,” who “had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir himself in the world, or to care for the retrieval of his fortunes.”  With a bit of shrewdness and understated austerity Dupin is able to maintain himself on his intellectual interests with “books as his sole luxuries.”  Starving intellectuals are unfortunately nothing new to either literature or life; but the acuity of Dupin’s reasoning is more than unusual and something akin to phenomenal.  To prove this claim our narrator then devotes another dozen paragraphs to Dupin’s amazing deduction that culminates in the observation, “he is a very little fellow, that's true, and would do better for the Theatre des Variétés,” a tactic that will remind the reader of this later work.  Yes, Holmes is a direct descendent of Dupin, and even goes so far as to criticize Dupin for precisely the trick of deductive reasoning (in the form of intrusive commentary at just the right time) that Holmes would make famous.  That does not stop Dupin, however, from making a name for himself.

The eponymous "murders" are some of the famous ever committed and involve an old woman and her daughter, a locked apartment on the fourth floor of a Paris building, a passel of witnesses who all claim to have heard a foreigner speaking "in a shrill voice" at the time of the murders, although they cannot agree at all on what language he spoke, and a sailor on a Maltese vessel.  One part of the solution, which is both ingenious and preposterous, would be copied in a Holmes story and, alas, the culprit can be easily ascertained through an image search of the title on the intergalactic weapon known as Google.  Nothing more should be said except one line from Dupin:

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of possibilities – that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration.

How strange, then, that this maxim, so well-kept and yet so very trivial, doesn't actually apply to the case in question.  Could we have detectives of integrity rather than opportunity?  Perhaps at the very beginning of it all.

La Double Vie de Véronique

Students of literature will readily admit that the theme of the double has been given, to put it mildly, its fair share of stage time.  I will spare you the dull modern interpretations of such a phenomenon because they invariably reflect their proponents' neuroses; what we can say is that the double has allowed writers to explore different realities for their characters without resorting to much-maligned 'dream' passages.  A more analytically productive approach, and one that covers more ground than merely the last century, is to consider the advantages and disadvantages of bilocation.  Being in two places at once may sound dandy to a child who wishes to play truant while simultaneously sitting at the back of a boring class, but with such a proposal comes dual responsibility (a topos taken to an extreme in this book reviewed earlier).  Another well-worn aphorism is that life offers us lucky souls a plethora of opportunities, the majority of which we must naturally forsake, otherwise we would not do anything at all.  The third possibility involves people who are and are not the same person – what we have called identical twins but which in the future could entail genetic replicas of the same being – often bestowed with the title "separated at birth."  Yes, the subject sounds quite hokey.  Nevertheless, there are moments in existence where we sense that our steps are not uniquely our own, where another path seems to parallel ours with fatidic residue.  A curious take on this sensation forms the core of this much-acclaimed film.

We begin in newly non-Communist Poland with Weronika (Irène Jacob), a young singer whose astral voice will haunt the whole film.  Her life is a plain but good one: choral practice, chats with her aunt, and in between, a blossoming love affair with a fellow called Antek.  Young, unkempt, and unremarkable apart from his motor scooter, Antek is only attractive to women of certain inexperience.  He looks at Weronika – a gifted and sensitive woman who is not hard on the eyes – like someone disappointed that she could have a life of her own.   Weronika is beautiful and has slept with him gladly, and those are the only two facts about her that matter.  Interspersed with vignettes showcasing her talent, Weronika is seen clutching her chest in agony and since she is only twenty-five or so, an explanation must be forthcoming.  We get it from her aunt: "Everyone in our family died while in good health; my mother, your mother.  It's about my will"; the subject, obviously one discussed regularly in their house, is taken no further.  Weronika makes a few mysterious comments about "feeling like [she's] not alone in the world," wins a singing competition in music-obsessed Poland despite her relatively modest credentials, and on the evening of her marquee performance, in front of hundreds and under the watchful eye of the old maestro who plucked her from among many other candidates, she starts to feel dizzy.  The solemnity that precedes her solo tells us that what we are hearing is the voice of an angel and also a prophecy.  Then something very strange happens: the other singer who had been passed over for Weronika looks to her left.  The look is voluptuous and evil and never explained.  Is she actually looking at Weronika, who is standing to her left but off-screen, or to someone else, to what lurks in the sinister shadows?  Soon thereafter Weronika collapses to the floor, and before she is pronounced dead we see the camera hover momentarily above the crowd.  It does not take much imagination to think that her spirit has left her body; where it goes, however, may or may not comprise the latter two-thirds of the film.

I have omitted one important detail: before her performance, Weronika wanders down to one of the prominent squares in this old city.  Here riot police abound against the protests of youth (the specter of Communism, as evidenced by the hauling away of a massive Lenin bust at the beginning of the film, has yet to be exorcised) and Weronika spots a tour bus of foreigners still inebriated by the fall of the Wall and eager to snap pictures of any type of manifestation of civil liberties.  Yet on that bus she sees something she cannot quite believe: a young woman who looks exactly like she does.  In many cultures the sight of your Doppelgänger means that death is near, and we are overcome with ill ease at what may take place.  That scene will resurface in part as the film draws to a close and the political undertone of such a juxtaposition is clear enough, but the artistic one is far superior.  What Weronika sees is an alternative to her own existence, and if the rest of the film drags a bit, it is in part because of the swiftness of its first third. The dynamic arrangement of Weronika's life, her seemingly unlimited potential, her unexpected demise, all this contrasts the slow labyrinth in which the girl she saw on the bus, a Frenchwoman called Véronique (also Jacob) finds herself.  

Véronique is Weronika's foil: while the latter is a virtuoso, the former teaches music to children.  She too feels that something is amiss in her life, and when Weronika dies, she mourns against her will and reason.  Her boyfriend is pretty and feminine, the exact opposite of Antek, but she will find someone else in one of the more unlikely nooks of contemporary existence: a puppet show.  In a wonderful scene destined ultimately for children, we see an armless hand move across a magic box.  This hand belongs to the puppeteer who will enthrall Véronique because he can make lifeless dolls move like human beings, dance just like ballerinas, and for a few brief moments we are manipulated by his movements into thinking that what we are watching is automotive.  At length an old woman puppet appears and Véronique notices, in the reflection of a mirror on the side of the stage, the ecstasy of the manipulator as if she had seen the face of God himself.  The puppet is shrouded in white and rises again from the earth to music that sounds eerily like the arias that Weronika had mastered, becomes a butterfly, spreads her wings and then the eyes of Véronique and the Creator (Philippe Volter) finally meet. 

The true motives of the Creator, who goes by Alexandre Fabbri, will not be revealed here, but you may be reminded of a similar structure to another Kieślowski film starring Jacob; Preisner's score will also sound very familiar to Kieślowski connoisseurs.  But a little old lady stopping to regather her bags who rebuffs Véronique's offer for help may be the finest touch of all.  Old people want to rekindle memories not be reminded of their frailness.  And Véronique's vision of the old woman puppet becoming a butterfly demonstrates her own mortality and the cycle of rebirth in which we think we feel that we have been – or still are – someone else.  In Greek, we recall, butterfly and soul are both psyche, so should we really be that surprised at this double existence or are they but two of many Véroniques hovering about?  We'll let our Creator and puppeteer answer that.

Bergson, "On the Pragmatism of William James" (part 2)

The conclusion to an essay by this French philosopher.  The original can be found in this collection.

What kind of judgment is then true?  We call true a statement that agrees with reality.  But of what does this agreement consist?   Here we would like to see something akin to the resemblance of a portrait and its model: a true statement would be one that copied reality.  Nevertheless, let us consider the question: we will see that only in rare and exceptional cases does this definition of the true become applicable.  What is real is this or that specific fact reaching such and such a point in place and time, that is the singular and changing thing.  On the contrary, most of our statements are general and imply a certain stability in their objects.  Let us take a reality as close as possible to experience, something such as "heat distends bodies."  Of what could this possibly be a copy? 

It is possible, in a certain sense, to copy the distension of a specific body in specific movements by photographing it in different phases.  Metaphorically I could even say that the statement "this iron bar is distended" is the copy of what occurs when I observe the distension of an iron bar.  But a truth that applies to all bodies without involving in particular any one of those I have seen copies and reproduces nothing.  We would like nonetheless to have it copy something and philosophy has always attempted to satisfy our desires in this regard.  For the philosophers of antiquity, there was beyond time and space a world where all possible truths had lain for eternity.  Human statements were for them all the more truthful because they faithfully copied eternal truths.  Modern thought has made truth tumble from the sky to the earth; yet even modern thinkers saw something there which antedated our statements.  Truth might lie in things and facts: science would go look for it, lure it out of its hiding place, and bring it all to light.  A statement such as "heat distends bodies" would then be a law which governed facts, which reigned, if not above them, then at least amongst them, a law truly contained in our experience in whose extraction we are limited.  Even a philosophy like Kant's that claims all scientific truth is relative to the human mind considers true statements as givens a priori in human experience.  Once this experience has been organized in general by human thought, the work of science would consist exclusively of piercing the tough carapace of facts whose truth is lodged within, like a nut in its shell.

This concept of truth is natural to our minds and natural as well to philosophy because it is natural to think of truth as a perfectly coherent and systematized whole within a framework of logic.  This framework would be truth itself; all science has to do is find it.  But pure and simple experience tells us nothing of the sort, and James sticks to experience.  Experience presents us with a flow of phenomena: if this or that statement related to one of these phenomena allows us to master those which come after or even simply to predict them, we say that this statement is true.  A proposition such as "heat distends bodies," a proposition suggested by viewing the distension of a specific body, acts in such a way that we can predict how other bodies may react in the presence of heat.  It helps us to move from an old experience to new ones; it is the conduit, nothing more.  Reality flows and we flow with it; and we call true any statement which, in directing us across moving reality, allows us to grasp hold of it and put ourselves in the best conditions to act.

We can see the difference between this idea and the traditional view of reality.  We normally define the true by the conformity that already exists; James defines it by a relationship that does not exist yet.  The true, according to James, does not copy something that has been or that is, it announces what will be; rather, it prepares our action towards what is going to be.  Philosophy has a natural tendency to want to examine truth retrospectively; James looks it prospectively.

To be more exact, other doctrines make truth into something antecedent to the very specific act of man who has formulated this truth for the first time.  He is the first person to see this truth, we may say, but it was waiting for him like America was waiting for Christopher Columbus.  Something hid it from everyone's purview and, so to speak, covered it; it was then he who discovered it.  But James's concept is completely different.  He does not deny that reality is independent, more or less, of what we may say or think of it.  Yet truth that can only attach itself to what we state or affirm of reality would appear to him to be created by our statements or affirmations.  We invent reality to make use of reality, just as we invent mechanical devices to make use of the forces of nature.  It seems to me that we could summarize the essential argument of pragmatism's concept of truth in such a formula: whereas for other doctrines a new truth is a discovery, for pragmatism it is an invention.

It does not follow, however, that truth is arbitrary.  A mechanical invention has no value apart from its practical utility.  In the same way, to be true a statement should increase our influence on things.   It is no less than the creation of a specific creative mind and it did not precede the effort of this mind any more than, for example, the phonograph preceded Edison.  Doubtless the inventor of the phonograph had to study the properties of sound, which comprises a reality.  Yet his invention is then added to this reality as an absolutely new thing which might never have been produced had he never existed.  Thus for a reality to be viable it must have its roots in realities; but these realities are nothing more than the terrain upon which this reality grows, and other flowers would also have grown there if the wind had scattered other grains. 

According to pragmatism, truth is made little by little thanks to individual contributions from a large number of inventors.  Had these inventors never existed, had there been others in their stead, we would have had an entirely different body of truths.  Reality has evidently remained what it is, or close to it; but there could have been other routes we might have taken for the convenience of our movements.  And here we are not only talking about scientific truths.  We cannot construct a sentence, we can no longer even utter a word these days without accepting certain hypotheses which were created by our ancestors and which could have been very different from what they are.  When I say "my pencil just fell under the table," I am certainly not promulgating a fact of experience since what sight and touch show me is simply that my hand is open and that it let go of what it was holding.  A baby strapped to his seat who sees fall the toy he is playing with probably does not conclude that this object continues to exist.  Rather, he does not possess the distinct idea of an "object," that is to say, of something that subsists, invariable and independent, through the diversity and mobility of appearances that take place.  The first person who decided to believe in this invariability and this independence made a hypothesis: it is this hypothesis that we currently adopt every time we use a noun, every time we speak.  Our grammar would have been different, the articulations of our thinking would have been different, if humanity in the course of its evolution had preferred to adopt hypotheses of a different kind.

The structure of our mind is therefore to a great extent our own doing, or at the very least the doing of some among us.  This is, in my opinion, the most important tenet of pragmatism even if it has not been explicitly released.  It is in this way that pragmatism continues from Kantianism.  Kant said that truth depended on the structure of the human mind.  Pragmatism adds, or at the very least implies, that the structure of the human mind is the effect of the free initiative of a specific number of individual minds.

This is again not to say, however, that truth depends on each of us; one might as well believe that each one of us invented the phonograph.  What it means is that, from the diverse types of truth, the one that is the closest to coinciding with its object is not scientific truth, nor the truth of common sense, nor, more generally, the truth of an intellectual order.  All truth is a route traced across reality; yet of all these routes, it is among those on which we could have attained a very different direction if our attention had been oriented in a different sense or if we had aimed at another type of utility.  On the contrary, it is of the sort whose direction is marked by reality itself.  It is of those which correspond, if one can put it thus, to the currents or flows of reality.  Doubtless these routes still depend on us to a certain extent since we are free to resist a current or to follow it.  And even if we follow it, we can inflect our movements in different directions, associated at the same time as we are subject to the force present therein.  It is no less true that these currents are not created by us: they form an integral part of reality.  Pragmatism borders, therefore, on inverting the order in which we are accustomed to placing the diverse types of truth.  Outside of truths that transmit brute sensation, it is the truths of feeling that would extend the deepest roots.  Should we be comfortable in saying that all truth is an invention, I think in order to remain faithful to the thinking of William James we would have to establish between the truths of feeling and scientific truths the same type of difference as, for example, between a sailboat and a steamboat.  They are both human inventions; yet the former has only a slight role in artifice; it assumes the wind's direction and makes visible to the eye the force employed.  In the latter, on the other hand, it is the artificial mechanism that takes up the most space.  It recovers the force that it puts to use and assigns it a direction that we have chosen ourselves.

Thus the definition that James bestows upon truth creates a body with its conception of reality.  Should reality not be this economic and systematic universe which our logic likes to imagine, should it not be sustained by a framework of intellectuality, truth of an intellectual order would then be a human invention which has the effect of utilizing reality rather than introducing us into it.  And if reality does not form a whole, if it is mobile and multiple, made of currents which cross, then the truth born from contact with one of these currents – truth sensed before being conceived – is more capable than truth conceived simply to seize and stockpile reality itself.

It is therefore this theory of reality that we must first attack in our criticism of pragmatism.  We can raise objections against it, and as far as it is concerned, we would make some qualifications.  Yet no one would contest its depth and originality.  Nor would anyone, having closely examined the conception of truth attached to pragmatism, mistake its moral elevation.  It has been said that James's pragmatism is nothing more than a form of skepticism that debases truth and subordinates it to material utility; that discourages and dissuades disinterested scientific research.  Such an interpretation would never occur to those who were to read the work attentively, and it would profoundly surprise those who had the good fortune of knowing the man himself.  No one loved truth with greater ardor; no one sought it with greater passion.  He was motivated by an immense concern, and from science to science, from anatomy and physiology to psychology, from psychology to philosophy, he moved bent over all the large problems, uncaring of the rest, oblivious of himself.  His whole life he observed, he experimented, he meditated.  And as if he had not done enough, he also dreamed, falling into his final sleep; he dreamed of extraordinary experiences and superhuman efforts by which he could continue, until death and beyond, to work with us for the greater good of science and the greater glory of truth.                 

Bergson, "On the Pragmatism of William James" (part 1)

The first part to an essay by this philosopher and man of letters which served as the introduction to the French translation of this book.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

How can one speak about pragmatism after William James?  And what would we be able to say that has not been already said, and said better, in that enthralling and charming book of which we have here such a faithful translation?  We would hesitate to speak at all if James's thoughts were not so often diminished, or altered, or distorted by the interpretations we impute to them.  Surely many ideas that circulate risk interference between the reader and the book, as well as the imposition of an artificial obscurity upon a work that is the epitome of clarity.

We would poorly understand James's pragmatism if we didn't begin by modifying the current notion that we have of reality in general.  We speak of the "world" or the "cosmos," and those words, according to their origin, indicate something simple, more or less well-structured.  We say "universe," and the word makes us think of the possible unification of things.  We could be spiritualists, materialists, pantheists just as easily as we could be indifferent to philosophy and satisfied in the common sense of the word: we always imagine many simple principles through which the set of material and moral things could be explained.

Our intelligence has become enamored with simplicity.  It economizes effort and wishes for nature to be arranged in such a way so as not to draw our attention; to be thought of should require the smallest possible amount of work.  It is present up until that point at which we need elements or principles to reconstruct its indefinite series of objects and events.      

But if, instead of ideally reconstructing things to give our reason supreme satisfaction we were to grasp these things purely and simply based on what experience permits, we would think and express ourselves in a wholly different manner.  Whereas our intelligence, with its habits of economy, imagines effects in strict proportion to their causes, prodigious nature places in the cause much more than required to produce its effect.  Whereas our motto is Only what we need, nature's motto is More than what is needed – too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything.  Reality, in James's view, is redundant and superabundant.  I think that the same relationship has been established between this reality and the reality reconstructed by philosophers as between the life we live every day and the life that actors portray every evening on the stage.  In the theater, every person does not say what he needs to say nor does what he needs to do; scenes have clear divisions – each play has a beginning, a middle and an end; and all of this is most parsimoniously distributed with a view to a dénouement that may be happy or tragic.  But, in life, we utter an endless array of useless things, we undertake an endless array of useless acts; there are rarely neat and streamlined situations.  Nothing really happens with such simplicity or as completely or beautifully as we might like.  Scenes encroach upon one another; things never begin or end; there is never an entirely satisfying dénouement or an absolutely decisive act.  All the concomitant effects are therefore ruined.  Such is human life.  And such is also what James undoubtedly thinks of reality in general. 

Certainly, our experience is not incoherent.  At the same time as it presents to us things and facts, it shows us the connections between things and the relationships between facts.  These relationships, according to James, are just as real and directly observable as the things and facts themselves.  But relationships fluctuate and things are fluid.  It is well beyond this dry universe in which philosophers compose well-divided and well-constructed elements, and where each part is no longer only connected to another part, as experience tries to suggest, but is coordinated with Everything – which is what is suggested by reason.

James's "pluralism" has no other meaning than this.  Antiquity was represented as a closed, halted, finite world, a hypothesis that corresponds to certain demands of our reason.  Modern people tend to think of the infinite, which is another hypothesis that satisfies other demands of our reason.  From the point of view that James assumes, which is of pure experience or "radical empiricism," reality no longer appears to be finite or infinite, but simply indefinite.  It flows without our being able to ascertain whether it flows in one direction, nor whether it is always the same river flowing past.

Our reason is less satisfied.  It feels less at ease in a world where it can no longer find, as in a mirror, its own image.  And, doubtless, the importance of human reason is diminished.  But to what degree will the importance of man himself – of man in his entirety, in his willfulness and sensibility as well as in his intelligence – then find itself increased!

The universe conceived by our reason is, as it were, a universe that infinitely surpasses human experience.  The peculiar thing about reason is that it prolongs the data of experience, extending them by means of generalization, with the aim of having us conceive of things far past what we will ever glimpse.  In such a universe man is supposed to do few things and occupy little space: what he attributes to his intelligence he will take from his will.  Most of all, having accorded his mind the power of encompassing everything, he is then obliged to imagine all things in terms of thought: of his aspirations, his desires, and his enthusiasm he can hardly ask for clarification in a world where everything is accessible to be considered by him in advance, as if translatable into pure ideas.  His sensibility would never know how to clarify his intelligence, whose enlightenment was his own doing.

Most philosophies, therefore, shrink our experience with regard to emotion and willpower while at the same time prolonging this experience indefinitely in terms of thought.  What James asks of us is not to add too much to experience from hypothetical views, nor to mutilate something that is already solid.  We are not at all sure about what experience offers us; but we have to accept experience integrally, and our feelings provide this experience to the same extent as our perceptions do, to the same extent, consequently, as "things" do.  In the eyes of William James, complete man counts for something.

He counts for even more in a world that does not squash him by its immensity.  We are surprised by the importance that James, in one of his books, attributes to Fechner's curious theory that states Earth is an independent being blessed with a divine soul.  It may be that he sees in this a convenient means to symbolize – perhaps even to express – his own thinking.  The things and facts that compose our experience constitute for us a human world, connected undoubtedly to others, but so distanced from them and so close to us that we have to consider it, in practice, both sufficient for man and self-sufficient.  With things and events we create a body – we meaning everything of which we are conscious of being, everything we experience.  The powerful feelings that stir our souls at certain, privileged moments are forces just as real as those which interest a physicist: man creates them no more than he creates heat or light.  According to James, we bathe in an atmosphere which cuts across large spiritual currents.  If many among us grow rigid, others allow themselves to be carried off.  And he is one of those souls who open themselves as widely as possible to these salubrious airs.  Such people are those with the souls of mystics.  We know how sympathetically James studied these people.  When his book The Varieties of Religious Experience appeared, many saw in it only a series of very vivid descriptions and penetrating analyses – psychology, they said, of religious feeling.  How wrong they were about the author's mentality!  The truth is that James studied the mystic soul in the same way that we study the weather on a fine spring day to feel the caress of the breeze, or how, on the seashore, we survey the comings and goings of ships and the filling of their sails so as to learn in which direction the wind is blowing.  Souls filled with religious enthusiasm are truly lifted and transported: how could they not make us extract from real life, as if it were a scientific experiment, that force that lifts and transports?  There we have, without a doubt, the origin; there lies the idea that inspired the "pragmatism" of William James.  In his opinion, the most important truths for us to know are the truths that have been felt or lived before having been thought.

All this time we have said that there are truths that result from feeling as much as from reason.  And all this time we have also said that apart from the ready truths we have found, there are other truths that we assist in making which depend in part on our willpower.  Yet it should be noted that, in James's work, this idea takes on new meaning and force.  It blooms thanks to the conception of reality which is peculiar to his philosophy in a general theory of truth.