Indeed, Professor
Babbitt quotes him as saying in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton,
"mere sanity is the most Philistine and at the bottom most unessential
of a man's attributes."[15] In the same way Bergson, consistently
anti-Socratic and discrediting analytical intellect, insists that
whatever unity may be had must come through instinct, not analysis.
He refuses to recognize Plato's _One in the Many_, sees the whole
universe as "a perpetual gushing forth of novelties," a universal and
meaningless flux. Surrender to this eternal flux, he appears to say,
and then we shall gain reality. So he relies on impulse, instinct, his
_elan vital_, which means, I take it, on man's subrational emotions.
We call it Intuitionism, but such philosophy in plain and bitter
English is the intellectual defense and solemn glorification of
impulse. "Time," says Bergson, "is a continuous stream, a present that
endures."[16] Time apparently is all. "Life can have no purpose in the
human sense of the word."[17] Essentially, then, James, Bergson and
Croce appeal from intellect to feeling. They return to primitivism.
[Footnote 15: Letter to C.E. Norton, June 30, 1904.]
[Footnote 16: _Le Perception de Changement_, 30.]
[Footnote 17: _L'evolution creatrice_, 55.]
Here is a philosophy which obviously may be both as antihumanistic and
as irreligious as any which could well be conceived.
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