THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

CHAPTER X
Contemporary European Philosophers:
Bergson,
Grace and Bertrand Russell
I. HENRI BERGSON
i. THE REVOLT AGAINST MATERIALISM
THE history of modern philosophy might be written in terms of the warfare
of physics and psychology. Thought may begin with its object, and
at last, in consistency, try to bring its own mystic reality within the circle
of material phenomena and mechanical law; or it may begin with itself >
and be driven, by the apparent necessities of logic, to conceive all things
as forms and creatures of mind. The priority of mathematics and mechanics
in the development of modern science, and the reciprocal stimu-
lation of industry and physics under the common pressure of expanding
needs, gave to speculation a materialistic impulsion; and the most successful
of the sciences became the models of philosophy. Despite Dascartcs*
insistence that philosophy should begin with the self and travel outward,
the industrialization of Western Europe drove thought away from thought
and in the direction of material things.
Spencer's system was the culminating expression of this mechanical
point of view. Hailed though he was as "the philosopher of Darwinism,**
he was more truly the reflex and exponent of industrialism; he endowed
industry with glories and virtues which to our hind-sight seem ridiculous;
and his outlook was rather that of a mechanician and an engineer ab*
sorbed in the motions of matter, than that of a biologist feeling the Man
of life. The rapid obsolescence of his philosophy is due largely to the* re-
placement of the physical by the biological stand-point in recent thought;
by the growing disposition to see the essence and secret of the world in
the movement of life rather than in the inertia of things. And indeed,
matter itself has in our days almost taken on life : the study of electricity,
magnetism, and the electron has given a vitalistic tinge to physics; so
that instead of a reduction of psychology to physics which was the more
or less conscious ambition of English thought we approach a vitalized
physics and an almost spiritualized matter. It was Schopenhauer who
first, in modern thought, emphasized the possibility of making the concept