Henri Bergson, ‘On the pragmatism of William James. Truth and reality’, Ch VIII in The Creative Mind (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp.248-260 (written as the preface to William James’s work on Pragmatism, trans. by E. Le Brun (Paris: Flammarion, 1911)

VIII On The Pragmatism Of William James. Truth And Reality

To talk about pragmatism after William James might well seem superfluous. And indeed what is there for me to say about it that has not already been said, and much better, in the fascinating and delightful book for which we now have an excellent translation? I should in fact refrain from saying anything were it not that James’s thought is frequently impoverished and falsified by the way in which it is interpreted. There are many ideas in circulation which threaten to come between the reader and the book and to cast an artificial obscurity over a work which is clarity itself.

One would have a mistaken idea of James’s pragmatism if one did not begin by modifying the idea usually held of reality in general. We speak of the “world” or the “cosmos”; and these words, according to their origin, designate something simple or at least well composed. We say “universe” and the word makes us think of a possible unification of things. One can be a spiritualist, a materialist, a pantheist, just as one can be indifferent to philosophy and satisfied with common sense: the fact, remains that one always conceives of one or several simple principles by which the whole of material and moral things might be explained. [end p.248]

This is because our intelligence loves simplicity. It seeks to reduce effort, and insists that nature was arranged in such a way as to demand of us, in order to be thought, the least possible labor. It therefore provides itself with the exact minimum of elements and principles with which to recompose the indefinite series of objects and events.

But if instead of reconstructing things ideally for the greater satisfaction of our reason we confine ourselves purely and simply to what is given us by experience, we should think and express ourselves in quite another way. While our intelligence with its habits of economy imagines effects as strictly proportioned to their causes, nature, in its extravagance, puts into the cause much more than is required to produce the effect. While our motto is Exactly what is necessary, nature’s motto is More than is necessary,—too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything. Reality, as James sees it, is redundant and superabundant. Between this reality and the one constructed by the philosophers, I believe he would have established the same relation as between the life we live every day and the life which actors portray in the evening on the stage. On the stage, each actor says and does only what has to be said and done; the scenes are clear-cut; the play has a beginning, a middle and an end; and everything is worked out as economically as possible with a view to an ending which will be happy or tragic. But in life, a multitude of useless things are said, many superfluous gestures made, there are no sharply-drawn situations; nothing happens as simply or as completely or as nicely as we should like; the scenes overlap; things neither begin nor end; there is no per-[end p.249] fectly satisfying ending, nor absolutely decisive gesture, none of those telling words which give us pause: all the effects are spoiled. Such is human life. And such, no doubt, in James’s eyes, is reality in general.

To be sure, our experience is not incoherent. At the same time as it presents us with things and facts it shows us relationships between the things and connections between, the facts: these relations are as real, as directly observable, according to William James, as the things and facts themselves. But the relations are fluctuating and the things fluid. This is vastly different from that dry universe constructed by the philosophers with elements that are clear-cut and well-arranged, where each part is not only linked to another part, as experience shows us, but also, as our reason would have it, is co-ordinated to the whole.

The “pluralism” of William James means little else than this. Antiquity had imagined a world shut off, arrested, finite: it is a hypothesis which answers certain demands of our reason. The moderns think rather of an infinite: it is another hypothesis which satisfies other needs of our reason. From the point of view taken by James, which is that of pure experience or of “radical empiricism,” reality no longer appears as finite or as infinite, but simply as indefinite. It flows without our being able to say whether it is in a single direction, or even whether it is always and throughout the same river flowing.

Our reason is less satisfied. It feels less at ease in a world where it no longer finds, as in a mirror, its own image. And certainly the importance of human reason is diminished. But the importance of man himself—the [end p.250] whole of man, will and sensibility quite as much as intelligence—will thereby be immeasurably enhanced!

The universe our reason conceives is, in fact, a universe which extends infinitely beyond human experience, the characteristic of reason being to prolong the data of experience, to extend them by way of generalization, in order to make us conceive many more things than we shall ever perceive. In such a universe man is expected to do very little and to occupy very little space: what he gives to his intelligence he takes away from his will. Above all, having attributed to his thought the power of embracing everything, he is obliged to imagine all things in terms of thought; of his aspirations, his desires, his enthusiasms he cannot ask enlightenment in a world in which everything accessible to him has been first considered by him as translatable into pure ideas. His sensibility cannot enlighten his intelligence, for it is with his intelligence that he has made what light there is.

Most philosophies, therefore, restrict our experience on the side of feeling and will as at the same time they indefinitely prolong it on the side of thought. What James asks of us is not to add too much to experience through hypothetical considerations, and also not to mutilate it in its solid elements. We are absolutely sure only of what experience gives us; but we should accept experience wholly, and our feelings are a part of it by the same right as our perceptions, consequently, by the same right as “things.” In the eyes of William James, the whole man counts.

In fact, he counts for a great deal in a world which no longer overwhelms him with its immensity. Consider-[end p.251] able surprise has been expressed at the importance James attributes, in one of his books, (A Pluralistic Universe, 1909) to the curious theory of Fechner which makes of the Earth an independent being, endowed with a divine soul. He did so because he saw in it a convenient means of symbolizing—perhaps even of expressing—his own thought. The things and facts which make up our experience constitute for us a human world, (M. André Chaumeix pointed out resemblances between personality of James and that of Socrates) no doubt connected with others, but so far removed from them and so close to us that we must consider it, in practice, as sufficient for man and sufficient unto itself. We are an integral part of these things and these events,—we, that is to say, all that we are conscious of being, all that we experience. The powerful feelings which stir the soul at certain special moments are forces as real as those that interest the physicist; man does not create them any more than he creates heat or light. According to James, we bathe in an atmosphere traversed by great spiritual currents. If many of us resist, others allow themselves to be carried along. And there are certain souls which open wide to the beneficent breeze. Those are the mystical souls. We know with what sympathy James studied them. When his book Religious Experience appeared, many saw in it only a series of very vivid descriptions and very penetrating analyses,—a psychology, they said, of religious feeling. This was a complete misinterpretation of the author’s thought. The truth is that James leaned out upon the mystic soul as, on a spring day, we lean out to feel the caress of the breeze on our cheek, or as, at the sea-side, we watch the coming and going of sail-boats to know how the wind blows. Souls filled with religious enthusiasm are truly uplifted and carried away: why could they [end p.252] not enable us to experience directly, as in a scientific experiment, this uplifting and exalting force? That is undoubtedly the origin, the inspiring idea of the “pragmatism” of William James. For him those truths it is most important for us to know, are truths which have been felt and experienced before being thought. (M. Emile Boutroux re meaning of to experience: “which means, not coldly to observe a thing happening outside us, but to undergo, to feel within oneself, to live oneself this or that manner of being…”

It has at all times been said that there are truths which have to do with feeling as much as with reason; and that along with those truths we find already made there are also others we assist in the making, which depend in part on our will. But it must be said that in James this idea takes on a new strength and significance. Thanks to his particular conception of reality it blossoms into a general theory of truth.

What constitutes a true judgment? If an affirmation agrees with reality we say that it is true. But in what does this agreement consist? Our inclination is to see in it something like the resemblance of a portrait to the model: the true affirmation would be the one which would copy reality. Upon reflection, however, we shall see that it is only in rare and exceptional cases that this definition of the true finds its application. What is real is any determined fact taking place at any point in space and time, it is singular—it is changing. On the the contrary, most of our affirmations are general and imply a certain stability on the part of their object. Let us take a truth as close to experience as possible, for instance: “heat expands bodies.” Of what model is this truth a copy? It is possible, in a certain sense, to copy the expansion of a specific body at particular moments, by photographing it in its various stages. Even by metaphor I can still say that the affirmation, “that iron bar is ex-[end p.253] panding,” is the copy of what happens when I watch the expansion of the iron bar. But a truth which is applied to all bodies without concerning anyone in particular that I have seen, copies nothing, reproduces nothing. We insist however that it copy something and as far back as one can go philosophy has always sought to give us satisfaction on this point. For the ancient philosophers there was, above time and space, a world in which were located from all eternity all possible truths: the truth of human affirmations was measured by the degree of faithfulness with which they copied these eternal truths. Modern philosophers have brought truth from heaven down to earth; but they still see in it something which is pre-existent to our affirmations. According to them, truth is lodged in things and facts: our science seeks it in them, draws it from its hiding-place and exposes it to the light of day. An affirmation, such as “heat expands bodies,” would then be a law governing facts, which is enthroned if not above them, at least in their midst, a law veritably contained in our experience; all we should have to do would be to extract it therefrom. Even a philosophy like that of Kant, which insists that all scientific truth is relative to the human mind, considers true affirmations as given in advance in human experience: once that experience is organized by human thought in general, all the work of science consists, so to speak, in piercing the resisting envelope of the facts inside which the truth is lodged, like a nut in its shell.

This conception of truth is natural to our mind and natural also to philosophy, because it is natural to picture reality as a perfectly coherent and systematized whole sustained by a logical armature. This armature [end p.254] would be truth itself; all that our science does is to rediscover it. But experience pure and simple tells us nothing of the kind, and James confines himself to experience. Experience presents us a flow of phenomena: if a certain affirmation relating to one of them enables us to master those which follow or even simply to foresee them, we say of this affirmation that it is true. A proposition such as “heat expands bodies,” a proposition suggested by seeing a certain body expand, means that we foresee how other bodies will act when exposed to heat; it helps us to proceed from a past experience to new experiences; it is a clue conducting to what will happen, nothing more. Reality flows; we flow with it; and we call true any affirmation which, in guiding us through moving reality, gives us a grip upon it and places us under more favorable conditions for acting.

The difference between this conception of the truth and the traditional one is plain to see. We ordinarily define the true by its conformity to what already exists; James defines it by its relation to what does not yet exist. The true, according to William James, does not copy something which has been or which is: it announces what will be, or rather it prepares our action upon what is going to be. Philosophy has a natural tendency to have truth look backward: for James, it looks ahead.

More precisely, other doctrines make of truth something anterior to the clearly-determined act of the man who formulates it for the first time. He was the first to see it, we say, but it was waiting for him, just as America was waiting for Christopher Columbus. Something hid it from view and, so to speak, covered it up: he uncovered it.—Quite different is William James’s concep-[end p.255] tion. He does not deny that reality is independent, at least to a great extent, of what we say or think of it; but the truth, which can be attached only to what we affirm about reality, is, for him, created by our affirmation. We invent the truth to utilize reality, as we create mechanical devices to utilize the forces of nature. It seems to me one could sum up all that is essential in the pragmatic conception of truth in a formula such as this: while for other doctrines a new truth is a discovery, for pragmatism it is an invention. (Bergson notes that he is unsure if James used the word “invention”, but this helps us to understand Pragmatism.)

It does not follow, of course, that the truth is arbitrary. The value of a mechanical invention lies solely in its practical usefulness. In the same way an affirmation, because it is true, should increase our mastery over things. It is no less the creation of a certain individual mind, and it was no more pre-existent to the effort of that mind than the phonograph, for example, existed before Edison. No doubt the inventor of the phonograph had to study the properties of sound, which is a reality. But his invention was superadded to that reality as a thing absolutely new, which might never have been produced had he not existed. Thus a truth, if it is to endure, should have its roots in realities; but these realities are only the ground ill which that truth grows, and other flowers could just as well have grown there if the wind had brought other seeds.

Truth, according to pragmatism, has come little by little into being, thanks to the individual contributions of a great number of inventors. If these inventors had not existed, if there had been others in their place, we should have had an entirely different body of truths. Reality would evidently have remained what it is, or ap-[end p.256] proximately the same; but quite different would have been the paths we should have traced in reality, for our convenience in finding our way about in it. And this has to do not only with scientific truths. We cannot construct a sentence, we cannot even today pronounce a word, without accepting certain hypotheses which were created by our ancestors and which might have been very different from what they are. When I say: “My pencil has just fallen under the table,” I am certainly not enunciating a fact of experience, for what sight and touch show me is simply that my hand opened and let fall what it held: the baby tied in his high-chair, who sees his plaything fall, probably does not imagine that this object continues to exist; or rather he has not the clear idea of an “object,” that is to say, of something which subsists, invariable and independent, through the diversity and mobility of the appearances which pass before him. The first to venture to believe in this invariability and independence made a hypothesis: it is that hypothesis which we currently adopt every time we use a substantive, every time we speak. Our grammar would have been different, the articulations of our thought would have been other than what they are, had humanity in the course of its evolution preferred to adopt hypotheses of another kind.

The structure of our mind is therefore to a great extent our work, or at least the work of some of us. That, it seems to me, is the most important thesis of pragmatism, even though it has not been explicitly stated. It is in this way that pragmatism continues Kantianism. Kant had said that truth depends upon the general structure of the human mind. Pragmatism adds, or at least [end p.257] implies, that the structure of the human mind is the effect of the free initiative of a certain number of individual minds.

That, again, does not mean that truth depends upon each one of us: we might as well believe that each of us could invent the phonograph. But it does mean that of the various kinds of truth, the one which most nearly coincides with its object is not scientific truth, nor is it the truth of common sense, nor more generally truth of an intellectual order. Every truth is a path traced through reality: but among these paths there are some to which we could have given an entirely different turn if our attention had been orientated in a different direction or if we had aimed at another kind of utility; there are some, on the contrary, whose direction is marked out by reality itself: there are some, one might say, which correspond to currents of reality. Doubtless these also depend upon us to a certain extent, for we are free to go against the current or to follow it, and even if we follow it, we can variously divert it, being at the same time associated with and submitted to the force manifest within it. Nevertheless these currents are not created by us; they are part and parcel of reality. Pragmatism thus results in a reversal of the order in which we are accustomed to place the various kinds of truth. Apart from the truths which translate mere sensations, it is, according to pragmatism, the truths of feeling which would push their roots deepest into reality. If we agree to say that all truth is an invention, I believe we must, if we wish to remain faithful to the thought of William James, establish between the truths of feeling and the scientific truths the same kind of difference as there is, for exam-[end p.258] ple, between the sail-boat and the steamer: both are human inventions; but the first makes only slight use of artificial means,—it takes the direction of the wind and makes the natural force it utilizes perceptible to the eye; on the contrary, in the second the artificial mechanism holds the most important place; it covers the force it puts into play and assigns to it a direction which we ourselves have chosen.

The definition that James gives to truth therefore, is an integral part of his conception of reality. If reality is not that economic and systematic universe our logic likes to imagine, if it is not sustained by a framework of intellectuality, intellectual truth is a human invention whose effect is to utilize reality rather than to enable us to penetrate it. And if reality does not form a single whole, if it is multiple and mobile, made up of cross-currents, truth which arises from contact with one of these currents,—truth felt before being conceived,—is more capable of seizing and storing up reality than truth merely thought.

Therefore it is, in fact, with this theory of reality that a critique of pragmatism should first grapple. One may raise objections to it,—and I myself should make certain reservations concerning it: but no one will challenge its depth and originality. Neither will anyone, after having closely examined the conception of truth allied with it, fail to recognize its high moral value. People have said that the pragmatism of James was only a form of skepticism, that it towered truth, that it subordinated truth to material utility, that it advised against and discouraged disinterested scientific research. Such an interpretation will never enter the heads of those who [end p.259] read his work attentively. And it will greatly astonish those who have had the pleasure of knowing the man. No one loved truth with a more ardent love. No one sought it with greater passion. He was stirred by an immense unrest, arid went from science to science, from anatomy and physiology to psychology, from psychology to philosophy, tense over great problems, heedless of anything else, forgetful of himself. All his life he observed, experimented, meditated. And as if he had not done enough, he still dreamed, as he fell into his last slumber, of extraordinary experiments and superhuman efforts by which he could continue even beyond death to work with us for the greater good of science, and the greater glory of truth.

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