Bergson and Myst i c i sm Henri Bergson " Les Deux Sources de

la Morale et de la Religion." (Felix Mean. Paris. 30 fr.)

SOME years ago Bergson affirmed that " his philosophy led to the idea of a free and creative God." And more recently : " I have taught for years that the soul is able to dominate the body : I am going to furnish its experimental proof." By the creation of his last work Henri Bergson has doubly fulfilled his promise.

Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion is undoubtedly the most impressive apology of Christian mysticism ever published by a writer foreign to Christianity by his origins.

When, in 1889, Bergson's first book appeared, Western thought, despite a few timid protestations, such as William James' Pragmatism, was dominated by the narrowest materialist conceptions and by the most limited mechanism. It is difficult at this date to realize the veritable liberation which the ideas of Bergson brought with them, and the salutary reaction which followed, against the doctrines of Hume, James and Stuart Mill, of Auguste Comte and Taine, of Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley. It was really a new " method of thinking " that Bergson revealed with his " intuition of duration."

Taking up again his favourite theses, Bergson shows that morals comprehend two distinct parts. In the one, the first, " obligation represents the force which the elements of society exercise upon one another so as to maintain the form of the whole." In the second, " obligation is the force of an aspiration, or of an elan, or driving power, the same élan which has ended in the human race." The first ethic is comparatively easy to formulate, but not the second.

" Our intelligence, as also our language, have, in fact, to do with things ; they are less at ease when they have to represent transitions or progress." . .. " The ethics of the Gospels is essentially that of the open soul. It has been said -that it is on the brink of paradox. But the paradox vanishes, the contradiction disappears if the intention of those maxims is considered, which is to induce a state of mind." Compare the ethics of the Stoics with that of Christianity. " There were almost the same words but they found no echo because they were not said with the same accent." The Stoic, in other words, is only a philosopher. It is the mystic, the hero or the saint, not the philosopher, who carries men away.

To this opposition between static and dynamic thought one could profitably compare the admirable parallel between logical and mystical expression which Jacques Maritain has recently drawn out in a study on St. John of the Cross, where, trying to resolve the apparent discord between the Angelic Doctor and the poet of the Obscure Night, he proved that their divergences appertain less to the meaning than to the intonation, the accent. So can be explained the failure of all purely intellectualistic ethics, that is to say, of the philosophers of duty. A pure idea could only influence our will effectively if it could be alone.

That reason is the distinctive mark of man no one can deny, but it must still be explained how it makes itself obeyed. " It is that behind it there are men who have made humanity divine. It is they who draw us to an ideal society." Far from despising intelligence, Bergson wishes to establish a distinction between perfect, dynamic intelligence and the merely dialectic faculty, static and fixed on the plane of language in the system of Aristotelian concepts. To him the essential marks of the first are the "taste for action, the faculty of adapting and re-adapting oneself to circumstances, firmness wedded to suppleness, a practical discernment of possible and impossible, the spirit of simplicity which triumphs over

complications, in a word, a superior common sense." That

" intellectual robustness " is found, among • the mystics, " real, complete, acting," and particularly among the " great Christian mystics," founders of monasteries and creators of orders : " Saint Paul, Saint Teresa, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Francis, Joan of Are and so many others."

Not that one must ignore the gnostics of pagan antiquity.; but if a few—such as Plotinus, the inheritor of the oral tradition of Socrates—" dimly foresaw the promised land, it was not given them to tread its soil." Has even the

India of Yoghis known a mysticism as rich and as perfect as that of Christendom ? Bergson doubts it. If the Yoga was, " according to the times and the place, a popular form

of mystical contemplation," the chief preoccupation of the Hindoo is to evade life ; and Brahminism believes that one is delivered only by renunciation and absorption in the whole.

On the supra-intellectual plane where the mystics unfold themselves, " the soul by the calm exaltation of all its faculties sees largely, -and however weak she be, realizes

powerfully. But, before all things, she sees simply, and that simplicity which strikes one as much in word as in deed; guides her through the complications which she seems not even to perceive. An innate science, or rather an acquired innocence, suggests to her the most useful pro- cedure, the decisive act, the unanswerable word."

" In truth, for the great mystics it is a matter of radically transforming mankind by first giving the example. The aim would have been reached, only when there appeared a divine humanity." And if the great mystics are such, it is because they have chosen to be imitators of the inimitable

Christ. For, at the origins of all Christian mysticism, there is always Jesus Christ ; and " those who have gone so far as to deny the existence of Jesus cannot prevent the Sermon on the Mount from figuring in the Gospels with other divine words " ; they cannot deprive that message and testimony of an author.

Henri Bergson does not hesitate to see in Jesus the con- tinuator of the prophets of Israel, the steal, the Paraclete, the fulfilment of a millennium. And though one may hesitate in giving the name of mystics to the ancient Nabis, " if there were too little intimacy between Israel and his God, if Jah ve was still too severe a judge," it is nevertheless

true that it is from the Hebrew prophets that there came forth the mysticism which Bergson calls complete : that of

Christian. mystics. For although " other waves carried certain souls to a state of contemplation," it is to pure con- templation that they arrived, and in order to cross the interval an elan, a driving force, was required which alone those prophets, anhungered after justice, could give to the Christian Saints : " an acting mysticism capable of marching to the conquest of the world."

To-day, menaced by the economic and political uncer- tainties threatening its future, and by a mechanism which, far from freeing it, enslaves it, humanity ought to undertake

" to simplify its existence with the same frenzy which it spent complicating it." " Let a mystical genius arise and he will carry with him a humanity whose body has grown enormously, whose soul will be transfigured by him. He will want to make of it a new species, or rather deliver it from the necessity of being a species."

Thus Bergson proclaims that in order to redeem itself humanity has to work at delivering itself from the clutches of practical interests which are brought in the train of exterior and material life. Far from introducing into us a foreign element, r elan vital " restores to us the sense of a universal communion and an intimate joy," each of us belonging as much to society as to himself. Since mankind has " conceived, proved, and practised the love of each for all, pure and universal charity, it is because, to the pressure of closed societies and groups there has been opposed the edifying influence of heroes who have said or done that

which no one before them had expressed. What is simple to our understanding is not necessarily so to our will.

There where logic tells us that a certain way is the shortest, experience steps in and tells us that in that direction there is no path at all. The truth is that one has to pasi through heroism to arrive at love."

This work, one of the greatest and most wise among those conceived by philosophers, brings, perhaps, a message to the world which, if it were understood, might restore to us the meaning of the words of Jesus : " I have said it : you arc