LECTURE XIX BERGSONIAN TIME AND A GROWING UNIVERSE TIME, then, seems one with the existence of the finite; and although the experience and the relations of time must be represented in the infinite Experience, this must be in a way which transcends our human perspective. So we might summarize the argument of the preceding lecture. It was a silent presupposition of the argument that time cannot be taken (in the current phrase) as ultimately real; that is to say, time, with all its implications of development and progress, is an aspect of facts within the universe,—an aspect of central significance, we have contended, but still an aspect within the whole-not, as it were, a containing element in which the Absolute or the All exists, and through which it advances, garnering new being and perfections as it proceeds. The idea of an absolute experience in which time is transcended is undoubtedly difficult, and the conception of a growing universe may seem, on a first statement, much easier; yet, as often as the conception has presented itself, we have set it aside as intrinsically incredible. A finite individual grows by appropriation from its environment-grows, in the last resort, by appropriation of the riches of the whole; but we feel that, while we may properly speak of such processes within the whole, it is not less than unmeaning to speak of the whole itself as such a process. Yet that is what is supposed to be involved in M. Bergson's theory of 'creative' evolution, and it is certainly the meaning of the unfinished universe' of William James and other Pluralists. The idea calls, therefore, for a more careful examination than we have hitherto given it. We have freely acknowledged the value of M. Bergson's XIX SPATIALIZED TIME 367 exposition of the true nature of durée réelle as the fundamental characteristic of conscious life, and as distinguished from the spatialized time of physical theory and of ordinary reflective thinking, dominated as that is by spatial images. We habitually figure the course of time to ourselves under the image of a line. But, as M. Bergson insists, there can be no greater contrast than that between the continuity or flowing of real time-the mutual interpenetration of its parts with the conservation of the past in the present-and the static image which we construct for ourselves of conceptual time, as consisting of separate and mutually exclusive moments arranged in an order of juxtaposition, like the parts of a line in space. Thinking of time thus, it is no wonder that we cannot see our way through the paradoxes of Zeno about the impossibility of movement; for we have conveyed into the fluent moments of time the same immobility and separateness which belongs to points of space, and so, as Zeno says, ' the flying arrow is always at rest'. In his first book, on Time and Free Will, M. Bergson has worked out impressively the influence of this spatialized idea of time in producing the peculiar illusion of determinism which represents us as the slaves of our own past, figured as a kind of external destiny. It is again the image of the line, giving an artificial permanence and externality to the circumstances or actions of the past. But the past has no operative reality save as fused in the agent's present, and we have no right to transport ourselves in imagination to some point in the past and treat our future course of action as preformed or predetermined there. As William James says, 'the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that such things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago'. But, if we banish the associations of 1 Principles of Psychology, vol. i, p. 453. the spatial image, we have in the self a development which is real at every point. The self is making itself continually by its own actions, and each of these actions is free in the ethical sense required. Hence, as M. Bergson says, the self 'lives and develops till the free action detaches itself from it like a fruit overripe'. There is no necessity here to revive the idea of the liberum arbitrium, nor does M. Bergson appear to do so. It is enough that every act of moral choice is, in its very idea, free, and is recognized by the agent as such to the end, however settled in certain courses of actions he may have become. The ethical point obscured by the false conception of time is simply, as Professor Bosanquet expresses it, ‘ that nothing past, nothing external, is operative in the agent's choice. It is all gathered up and made into the agent himself.' Hence, 'nothing but the agent determines the act, and there is no sense in applying to him any "must" or "cannot help it" except in the sense that everything is what it is '.1 We are subject to the same spatial illusion in thinking of the course of the world as a whole. We project the content of the universe into the past, and conceive all that follows, in James's phrase, as 'the dull rattling off of a chain forged innumerable ages ago '-a kind of destiny which the generations have to undergo, or a programme which they have to work out as passive instruments. If we embody this fixed fate in a mechanical system of material elements and forces, we have the common naturalistic creed; but it may also take a theological form, as in doctrines of divine predestination where the purpose of God' appears as a 'doom assigned'. There is also the idealistic form, in which the course of the world appears as the pre-determined evolution of a principle eternally perfect and complete. In all these cases, if the idea of complete determination is taken seriously, a paralysis tends to creep over the life of moral effort and practical 1 Individuality and Value, p. 355. XIX THE ILLUSION OF DETERMINISM 369 activity. And we may agree with Bergson that it is practically indifferent whether we adopt the naturalistic or the teleological alternative, that is to say, whether we regard the course of events as predetermined by the collocations of brute matter or by some divine Idea. Radical mechanism and radical finalism (so he calls the two theories) are in this respect at one, that in both, according to his favourite phrase, tout est donné, everything is given once for all. Finalism is, in this respect, only inverted mechanism; it substitutes the attraction of the future for the impulsion of the past. But succession remains none the less a mere appearance. 1 And here again, I think, we must agree with Bergson's analysis of the illusion, though we may not follow him in all the consequences which he draws from its rejection. If we transfer all real action to the past, action in the present becomes a hollow show. Our life in the present is no longer real; it comes to resemble a dance of marionettes or a procession of shadows. But it is the past which is the shadowa shadow cast by our human reflection; the present alone is real, in the sense we are considering, whether we take it, with Bergson, as the growing-point of an advancing reality or as the temporal appearance of a reality which is in itself complete and eternal. Action therefore is real here and now, whether it is man's action or God's; all the great issues are being really decided. It is wrong to place divine action in the past or in the future; but it is not, in the same way, wrong to place it in the present. The past and the future are essentially relative, and indeed negative, conceptions, the no-more and the not-yet; but the 'is' of the present, if we take it as we do in action and in all direct experience, is not infected by the same relativity, and hence there is in it something comparable to eternity. If we speak of the divine activity as an eternal act, that means for us, if we throw it, as we must, into terms of time, an act which is being 1 Creative Evolution, p. 42. accomplished now, and which we are helping to accomplish. And it is quite in accordance with this view that theologians find it necessary (as we saw in a previous lecture) to supplement the doctrine of a creation once for all, by saying that the continuance of the world in existence is equivalent to a continually repeated act of creation—a statement which completely transforms the original doctrine. The passage from the one statement to the other represents the effort of the mind to emancipate itself from the spatialized form of time. To place the creative act in the past is rightly felt to be making it a mere event in time; to treat it as the present act which sustains the universe is felt, with equal right, to lift it out of the temporal sequence and so to justify the predicate eternal. Every statement of religious truth must undergo the same transformation. Christ must die daily; the world is redeemed as well as created continually, and the whole life of God is poured into what we call our human' Now'. But the same spatial illusion, which he so successfully exposes in the case of the past, seems to beset M. Bergson himself when he comes to deal with the future. As is well known, the stress which he lays on the unpredictability, the unforeseeableness, of the future has led to his being regarded in many quarters as the apostle of pure contingency and irrationality. He develops his own account of ‘creative' evolution in contrast with the two rival theories of mechanism and finalism, punctuating his statement chiefly by reference to the ordinary teleological view. The essence of his theory seems included in the following statement: 'Reality appears as a ceaseless upspringing of something new. This is already the case with our inner life. For each of our acts we shall easily find antecedents of which it may in some sort be said to be the mechanical resultant. And it may equally well be said that each action is the realization of an intention. In this sense mechanism is everywhere, and finality everywhere, in the evolution of our conduct. But if |