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pUivEKsmoFjvuonj^ 1
Cz3
An Introduction to Metaphysics
By
It • • *
Henri Bergson
Member of the Institute and Professor of the College de
France
Translated by T. E. Hulme
Aothorized Edition, Revised by the Author, with
Additional Material
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London Zbc imfcfietbocftcr press
COPTRIGHT, 191a BY
O. P. Putnam's Sons
third Printing
Ube Itnldfterlwcftec fl)re00» Hew fiocft
Translator's Preface
THIS celebrated essay was first pub-
liahed in the Revue de Mctaphysique
et de Morale, in January, 1903. It ap-
peared then after Time and Free Will and
Matter and Memory and before Creative
Evolution; and while containing ideas set
forth in the first two of these works, it
announces some of those which were after-
wards developed in the last.
Though this book can in no sense be
regarded as an epitome of the others, it
yet forms the best introduction to them.
M. Edouard Le Roy in his lately published
book on M. Bergson's philosophy speaks of
" this marvelously suggestive study which
constitutes the best preface to the books
themselves."
It has, however, more importance than a
simple introduction would have, for in it
M. Bergson explains, at greater length and
vin greater detail than in the other boobs,
Preface
exactly what he means to convey by the
word intuition. The intuitive method ia
treated independently and not, as elsewhere
in his writings, incidentally, in its appli-
cations to particular problems. Por this
reason every writer who has attempted to
give a complete exposition of M. Bergson's
philosophy has been obliged to quote this
essay at length; and it is indispensable
therefore to the full understanding of its
author's position. Translations into Ger-
man, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Swedish,
and Russian have lately appeared, but the
Trench original is at present out of print.
This translation has had the great ad-
vantage of being revised in proof by the
author. I have to thank him for many
alternative renderings, and also for a few
slight alterations in the text, which he
thought would make his meaning clearer.
T. E. nULME. ,
St. John's College, Cambkidge.
An Introduction to Metaphysics
A COMPARISON of the definitions of
*^ metaphysics and the various concep-
tions of the absolute leads to the discovery
that philosophers, in spite of their apparent
divergencies, agree in distinguishing two
profoundly diflferent ways of knowing a
thing. The first implies that we move
round the object; the second that we enter
into it. The first depends on the point of
view at which we are placed and on the
symbols by which we express ourselves.
The second neither depends on a point of
view nor relies on any symbol. The first
kind of knowledge may be said to stop at
the relative; the second, in those cases
where it is possible, to attain the absolute.
An Introduction to
Consider, for example, the movement of
an object in space. My perception of the
motion will vary with the point of view,
moving or stationary, from which I observe
it. My expression of it will vary with the
systems of axes, or the points of reference,
to which I relate it; that is, with the sym-
bols by which I translate it. For this
donble reason I call such motion relative:
in the one case, as in the other, I am placed
outside the object itself. But when I speak
of an absolute movement, I am attributing
to the moving object an interior and, so to
speak, states of mind; I also imply that I
am in sympathy with those states, and that
I insert myself in them by an effort of
imagination. Then, according as the ob-
ject is moving or stationary, according as
it adopts one movement or another, what
I experience will vary. And what I ex-
perience will depend neither on the point
of view I may take up in regard to the
object, since I am inside the obj<
Bor on the aymbols by which I m
Metaphysics 3
late the motion, since I have rejected all
translations in order to possess the original.
In short, I shall no longer grasp the move-
ment from without, remaining where I am,
but from where it is, from within, as it is
in itself. I shall possess an absolute.
Consider, again, a character whose ad-
ventures are related to me in a novel. The
author may multiply the traits of his hero's
character*, may make him speak and act as
much as he pleases, but all this can never
be equivalent to the simple and indivisible
feeling which I should experience if I were
able for an instant to identify myself with
the person of the hero himself. Out of that
indivisible feeling, as from a spring, all the
words, gestures, and actions of the man
would appear to me to flow naturally.
They would no longer be accidents which,
added to the idea I had already formed of
the character, continually enriched that
idea, without ever completing it. The
character would be given to me all at once,
in its entirety, and the thousand incidents
An Introduction to
which manifest it, instead of adding them-
selves to the idea and so enriching it, would
Beein to me, on tlie contrary, to detach
themselves from it, without, however, ex-
hausting it or impoverishing its essence.
All the things I am told about the man
provide me with so many points of view
from which I can observe him. All the
traits which describe him. and which can
make him known to me only by so many
comparisons with persons or things I know
already, are siRns by which he is expressed
more or less symbolically. Symbols and
points of view, therefore, place me outside
him; they give me only what he has in
cominou with others, and not what belongs
to him and to him alone. But that which
is properly himself, that which constitutes
his essence, cannot 1k^ perceived from
without, being internal by definition, nor
t)e expressed by Myiubols, being incom-
mensurable with everything else. De-
scription, history, and analysis leave me
here in I he relative. Coincidence with
Metaphysics 5
the person himself would alone give me;' the absolute. !
It is in this sense, and in this sense only, \
that absolute is synonymous with perfec-r
tion. Were all the photographs of a town,
taken from all possible points of view, to
go on indefinitely completing one another,
they would never be equivalent to the solid
town in which we walk about. Were all
the translations of a poem into all possible
languages to add together their various
shades of meaning and, correcting each
other by a kind of mutual retouching, to
give a more and more faithful image of
the poem they translate, they would yet
never succeed in rendering the inner mean-
ing of the original. A representation taken \
from a certain point of view, a translation )
made with certain symbols, will always /
remain imperfect in comparison with the /
object of which a view has been taken, op/.
which the symbols seek to express. But the \
absolute, which is the object and not its
representation, the original and not its
6 An Introduction to
translation, is perfect, by being perfectly what it is.
/ It is doubtless for this reason that th6
jl absolute has often been identified with the
} infinite. Suppose that I wished to com-
municate to some one who did not know
Greek the extraordinarily simple impres-
sion that a passage in Homer makes upon
me; I should first give a translation of the
lines, I should then comment on my trans-
lation, and then develop the commentary;
in this way, by piling up explanation on
explanation, I might approach nearer and
nearer to what I wanted to express; but I
should never quite reach it. When you
raise your arm, you accomplish a movement
of which you have, from within, a simple
perception; but for me, watching it from
the outside, your arm passes through one
point, then through another, and between
these two there will be still other points;
so that, if I began to count, the operation
would go on for ever. Viewed from the
^ inside, then, an absolute is a simple thing;
Metaphysics 7
but looked at from the outside, that is tol
say, relatively to other things, it becomes, '
in relation to these signs which express it, j
the gold coin for which we never seem able ;
to finish giving small change. Now, that
which lends itself at the same time both
to an indivisible apprehension and to an
inexhaustible enumeration is, by the very ■
definition of the word, an infinite.
It follows from this that an absolute .
could only be given in an intmtion^ whilst i
everything else falls within the province of i
analysis. By intuition is meant the kind i
of intellectual sympathy by which one'^'
places oneself within an object in order to
coincide with what is unique in it and con-
sequently inexpressible. Analysis, on the
contrary, is the operation which reduces the
object to elements already known, that is,
to elements common both to it 'and other
objects. To analyze, therefore, is to ex-
press a thing as a function of something
other than itself. All analysis is thus a
translation, a development into symbols, a
An Introduction to
representation taken from auccesaive points
of view from which we not« as many re-
semblances &s possible between the new
object which we are studying and others
which we believe we know already. In its
eternally unsatisfied desire to embrace the
object around which it is compelled to
turn, analysis multiplies without end the
number of its points of view in order to
complete its always incomplete representa-
tion, and ceaselessly varies its symbols that
it may perfect the always imperfect trans-
lation. It goes on, therefore, to infinity.
But intuition, if intuition is possible, is a
simple act.
Now it is easy to see that the ordinary
function of positive science is analysis.
Positive science works, then, above all, with
symbols. Even the most concrete of the
natural sciences, those concerned with life,
confine themfielves to the visible form of
living beings, their organs and anatomical
elements. They make comparisons between
these forms, they i-educe the more complex