Bergson, "The possible and the real" (part 2)

The second part to an essay by this philosopher and man of letters.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

Great metaphysical problems are, in my estimation, as a rule badly described: they either tend to resolve themselves once their wording has been rectified, or reveal themselves to be problems formulated on the basis of an illusion, problems that disappear once we closely scrutinize the terms of this formulation.  In effect, they are born from what we shift or transpose in fabricating what we will call creation.  Reality is global and indivisible growth, gradual invention, and duration: as such, one might compare it to an elastic balloon that dilates little by little, suddenly assuming here and there unexpected shapes.  But our intelligence thinks of the origin and the evolution of all this as an arrangement and rearrangement of parts that would be doing nothing more than changing places.  Therefore it could, in theory, anticipate any state of arrangement and assembly; by starting with a definite number of stable elements, one is implicitly furnishing oneself in advance with all possible combinations. 

That is not all.  Reality, such as we perceive it directly, is of a fullness that never ceases to swell, one that knows no void or emptiness.  It has extension as it has duration; yet this concrete stretch is never infinite space and infinitely divisible so that intelligence exists as a terrain on which to build.  Concrete space has been extracted from things.  These things are not in it, it is concrete space that is in these things, and as soon as our thought process rationalizes reality, it makes space into a receptacle.  As it is accustomed to assembling parts in a relative void, it may think that reality encompasses who-knows-what kind of absolute void.  For if ignorance of radical novelty is at the origin of metaphysical problems poorly described, the habit of moving from void to fullness is the source of non-existent problems.  Besides, it is easy to see that the second error is already implicated in the first.  But I would first like to define the error more precisely.

I say that there are pseudo-problems, and that these are the most worrisome problems of metaphysics.  I will divide them in two categories: the first category has engendered theories of being; the second category theories of knowledge. 

The first category consists of asking oneself why there is being, why something or someone exists.  The nature of this is of little importance.  Regardless of whether it is matter, mind, or one and the other, or that both matter and mind are not enough, demonstrating a transcendent Cause, when one has considered existences and causes, and causes of these causes, one feels oneself drawn into a course of infinite length.  If one stops, it is simply to save oneself from the dizziness.  We may still say, or think we may still say, that the difficulty remains, that the problem remains and will never be resolved.  It will, in fact, never be resolved.  But it also never ought to be brought up. 

It is only brought up if we imagine a certain nothingness that would precede being.  One says to oneself: "there might be nothing there," and one may be surprised when, in fact, there is something there after all – or Someone.  But analyze this phrase once more: "there might be nothing there."  You will see that you are dealing with words, and not at all with ideas, and that "nothing" has no meaning here.  "Nothing" is a term of habitual language that can only make sense if we remain on the terrain, belonging to man, of action and fabrication.  "Nothing" means the absence of what we seek, of what we desire, of what we await.  Indeed, to suppose that experience could never present us with an absolute void means that it would be limited, that it would have contours, that it would be, after all, something.  But in reality there is no void.  We only perceive and, as it were, only conceive of fullness.  A thing only disappears when it has been replaced by something else.  Thus suppression also means substitution, only that we say "suppression" when we foresee the substitution of only one of two halves, or rather one of two faces – the face that interests us. 

We confirm in this way that we would like to direct our attention to the object that has left, and to turn our attention away from the object which has replaced it.  So we say that there is nothing more, understanding by that statement 'that which does not interest us,' and that we are interested in 'that which is no longer there' or 'that which could have been there.'  The idea of absence, or nothingness, or nothing, is thus inseparably linked to that of suppression, real or potential, and the idea of suppression is, in turn, nothing more than an aspect of the idea of substitution.  And it is here that we find methods of thinking which we employ in our daily lives.  It is of particular interest to our industry that our thinking knows how to linger upon reality and, when necessary, remain attached to what was and what could be, instead of being monopolized by what is.  But when we betake ourselves from the domain of fabrication to that of creation, when we wonder why there is being, why there is something or someone, why the world or God exists and why there is not nothing, when we wrestle with the most worrisome of metaphysical problems, we accept virtually an absurdity because all suppression is a substitution.  And if the idea of a suppression is nothing more than the truncated idea of a substitution, then talking at all about suppression is simply summoning a substitution, which would contradict itself if it were not one. 

For the whole idea of suppression has precisely enough existence as that of a round square – the existence of a sound, flatus vocis – or if it does in fact represent something, it translates a movement of the intelligence which goes from one object to another, preferring that which it has just left to that before which it finds itself, and, in so doing, designates the presence of the second by the 'absence of the first.'  We considered the whole matter then made it disappear piece by piece, one after the other, without consenting to see what replaced it.  It is therefore the totality of these presences, simply aligned in a new order, that one finds before one's eyes when one wishes to sum up the absences.  In other words, this pretended representation of an absolute void is, in reality, that of a universal fullness in a mind that leaps indefinitely from part to part, having resolved never to consider the void of its dissatisfaction rather than the fullness of things.  Which brings us back to saying that the idea of Nothing, when it is not just a simple word, implies as much matter as that of Everything, with, what is more, an operation of thought.

I would say the same for the idea of disorder.  Why is the universe ordered?  How does a rule impose itself upon the irregular, how does form impose itself upon matter?  How is it that our thinking finds itself among these things?  This problem, which has become for modern thinkers the problem of knowledge after having been, for ancient thinkers, the problem of being, is born from an illusion of the same kind.  It disappears once one considers that the idea of disorder has a definite sense in the domain of human industry or, as we say, in fabrication, but not in the domain of creation.  Disorder is simply the order we do not seek.  You cannot suppress one order, even by thought, without having another rise to the surface.  If there is no aim or willfulness, there is simply a mechanism; if the mechanism yields, it is to the benefit of willfulness, of capriciousness, of an aim.  But when you expect one of these two orders and you find the other, you say that there is disorder, formulating what is in terms of what could or should be, and objectifying your regret.  Thus all disorder is composed of two things: outside of us, an order; and within us, the representation of a different order which is the only one that interests us.  Suppression therefore again means substitution.  And the idea of the suppression of all orders, that is to say, the idea of absolute disorder, contains a true contradiction, because it involves assigning one face to an operation that, hypothetically, consists of two.  One may also say that the idea of absolute disorder only represents a combination of sounds, flatus vocis, or, if this idea responds to something, it translates a movement of the mind that leaps from mechanism to aim, from aim to mechanism, and which, to mark the spot where it is, prefers to indicate each time the place where it is not.  Thus, in wanting to suppress order, you provide yourself with two or more orders.  Which brings us back to saying that the conception of an order being added on to an "absence of order" implies an absurdity and thus the problem disappears.

The two illusions which I have just mentioned really compose only one.  They involve believing that there is less in the idea of a void than in the idea of fullness, less in the concept of disorder than in that of order.  In reality, there is more intellectual content in the ideas of disorder and nothing, when they represent something, than in the ideas of order and existence when they imply many orders, many existences and, moreover, a trick of the mind which juggles them unconsciously.       

And so, I find the same illusion in the case that concerns us.  At the heart of these doctrines that do not recognize the radical novelty of every moment of evolution there are misunderstandings, even errors.  But most of all there is the idea that the possible is less than the real, and that, for that reason, that the possibility of things precedes their existence.  They would thus be representable in advance; one could think of them before they were actually realized.  But it is the inverse that is the truth.  If we leave aside for the moment closed systems subject to purely mathematical laws, isolable because they are not gnawed upon by duration, if we consider the ensemble of concrete reality or very simply the world of life, and with even more reason the world of our consciousness, we find that there is more, and not less, in the possibility of each of these successive states than in their reality.  For the possible is merely the real with, in addition, an act of the mind which propels therefrom the image into the past the moment it is produced.  But this is what our intellectual habits prevent us from perceiving.                

Bergson, "The possible and the real" (part 1)

The first part to an essay by this philosopher and man of letters.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

I would like to return to a subject I mentioned before: the continual creation of unpredictable novelty that seems to keep happening in the universe.  For my part, I believe I feel it every second.  I am fond of imagining the details of what is going to occur; and how feeble, abstract and schematic is my imagination in comparison to the event actually produced!  This realization brings with it an unpredictable nothing that changes everything.  Say, for example, that I have to attend a meeting.  I know what people I'll find there, around what table and in what order they will be seated, and what problem they will discuss.  Yet they can arrive, sit down and begin to talk just as I have imagined, and say what I indeed thought they would, and still the constellation of this data gives me a unique and new impression, as if it were drawn as a single original trait by the hand of an artist.  Farewell, image I had fashioned for myself, simple juxtaposition that could be calculated in advance of things already known! 

Now I do not want this image to have the same artistic value as a painting by Rembrandt or Velasquez; nevertheless it is just as unexpected and, in this respect, just as original.  One might claim that I did not know the details of these circumstances, that I was ignorant of these persons, their gestures, and their attitudes, and that if the totality of this picture seems new to me, it is because there exists a surplus of elements.  And yet I possess the same impression of novelty with regard to my internal life.  I feel it more than ever with regard to acts of exclusively my own volition.  If I deliberate before I act, the moments of deliberation are summoned by my consciousness as successive sketches, each one of its own kind, which a painter might make of his painting; and the act itself, in taking place, will arise from what is desired and hence from what is foreseen, and yet has no less of an original form.  

Be that as it may, one may say; perhaps there is something original and unique in a state of the soul.  But the matter is repetition; and the outside word adheres to mathematical laws, superhuman intelligence that would know the position, the direction and the speed of all the atoms and electrons of the material universe at a given moment, and could calculate any future state of this universe as we calculate a solar or lunar eclipse.  Such a conclusion is possible if we are dealing with an inert world, and here the matter may become debatable, at least for elementary phenomena.  But this world is nothing more than an abstraction.  Concrete reality encompasses living, conscious beings encapsulated in inorganic matter.  I say living and conscious because I believe that whatever is living is conscious de jure; it becomes unconscious de facto when consciousness falls asleep.  But up to those areas in which consciousness gets drowsy, in the vegetable state, for example, there is regulated evolution, defined progress, ageing – in short, all the outward signs of duration which characterize consciousness. 

Why then would one speak of inert matter in which life and consciousness would be inserted as within a frame?  How can we even speak of an inert state to begin with?  The ancients imagined a Soul of the World which would assure the continuity of the existence of the material universe.  Stripping this concept of its mythical components, I would say that the inorganic world is a series of infinitely fast repetitions or quasi-repetitions which are summoned in visible and foreseeable changes.  I would compare them to the oscillations in the pendulum of a clock: some are attached to the continued relaxing of a spring that connects them to one another and from which they declaim progress; others pace life of conscious beings and measure their duration.  In this way, a living being lasts in essence: he lasts simply because he designs and plans unceasingly and because there can be no design or plan without research, and no research without groping about.  Time is this very hesitation, or it's nothing at all.  Suppress the conscious and the living (and you will only be able to do so by means of an artificial effort of abstraction since the material world may imply, once more, the necessary presence of consciousness and of life), and you obtain in effect a universe in which successive states are theoretically calculable in advance like images juxtaposed upon a film before the film itself rolls.  Why does reality unfurl?  How is it not unfurled?  What purpose does time serve (I speak here of real, concrete time, and not of abstract time which is merely the fourth dimension of space***)?  Such was once the starting point of my reflections.  About fifty years ago, I was strongly attached to the philosophy of Spencer.  One fine day I realized that time served no purpose and did nothing.  For something that does nothing is itself nothing.  Nevertheless, I said to myself, time is something.  Thus it does something, it acts.  What could it do, then?  Simple common sense replied: time is that which impedes everything from occurring all at once.  It delays, or, rather, it is delay.  It must be, therefore, development and planning.  Could it not then be the vehicle of creation and choice?  Doesn't the existence of time prove the indeterminacy of things?  Isn't time this very indeterminacy?

If such is not the opinion of most philosophers, it is because human intelligence is designed precisely so as to understand things from the opposite point of view.  I say intelligence; I do not say thought; I do not say mind.  Astride intelligence there is the effect of immediate perception, for each of us, of our own activity and the conditions in which it occurs.  Call it what you will: it is the feeling that we have to be creators of our intentions, our decisions, and our acts, and thereby of our habits, our character, and ourselves.  Artisans of our life – artists even, when we want to be – we work continuously, with the matter furnished by the past and present, by heredity and by circumstance, at molding a single, new, original figure, as unpredictable as the form the sculptor bestows upon the clay earth.  Doubtless, we are aware of this work and of what makes it unique while it is taking place; but the main thing is that we do it.  We do not need to deepen it, nor is it necessary that we be fully conscious of it.  No more, in any case, than the artist needs to analyze his own creative power; this concern he leaves to the philosopher and he contents himself with creating.  On the other hand, the sculptor does indeed need to know the techniques of his art and everything that he could possibly learn about them, and these techniques relate first and foremost to what his oeuvre has in common with other oeuvres.  These techniques are dictated by the demands of the matter upon which they operate and which impose themselves upon the artist as they do upon all artists: in short, they engage, in art, what is repetition or fabrication, and not creation itself.  Upon these techniques the artist concentrates what I would call his intellect.

By the same token, in the creation of our character we know very little about our own creative power.  To learn about it, we would have to return to ourselves, to philosophize, to climb back up the slope of nature, because nature has always wanted action and has hardly ever thought about speculation.  As soon as it is no longer a matter of simply feeling within ourselves a certain impetus and assuring ourselves that we may act, but of returning the thought upon itself so that we might seize this power and grab hold of this impetus, the difficulty becomes so great as to oblige us to invert consciousness's normal direction.  On the contrary, we have an enormous interest in familiarizing ourselves with the techniques of our actions, that is to say, to extract, from the conditions in which our actions occur, everything that could provide us with general recipes and rules on which our conduct would be based.  There would be no novelty in our acts apart from what repetition we would find in things.  Our normal faculty of knowing is thus in essence the power of extracting what stability and regularity there might be in the flow of the real. 

Is this a matter of perceiving?  Perception seizes upon on infinitely repeated shocks which are, for example, light or heat, and contracts them into relatively invariable sensations.  There are trillions of external oscillations which perception condenses for our eyes in the fraction of a second, the vision of a color.  Is this a matter of conceiving?  Forming a general idea means abstracting from diverse and changing things a common aspect that does not change or, at least, that offers an invariable hold for our action.  The constancy of our attitude, the identity of our potential or virtual reaction to the multiplicity and the variability of represented objects – here is what first marks and outlines the generality of an idea.  Finally, is this a matter of understanding?  This is simply a question of finding connections, establishing stable relationships between the facts that take place and revealing laws – an operation as perfect as the relationship is precise or the law mathematical.  All these functions are constitutive of intelligence.  And intelligence is in the right as long as it befriends and attaches itself to regularity and stability, to what is stable and regular in the real, to materiality.  Thus it touches one of the sides of the absolute, just as our consciousness touches another such side when it seizes within us a perpetual efflorescence of novelty or when, enlarging itself, it sympathizes with the indefinitely renovative effort of nature.  Error begins when intelligence attempts to think of one of these aspects as it thinks of another, and puts it to a use for which it was not made.            

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*** We were able to demonstrate in our Essay on the immediate data of consciousness, Paris, 1889, p. 82, that measurable Time could be considered to be "the fourth dimension of Space."  We were dealing there, of course, with pure Space, and not the amalgamation Space-Time of the theory of Relativity, which is something quite different.

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.