CONTENTS
Creative evolution
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Author: Bergson Henri (1859-1941)
Year: 1907
Reason, reasoning on its own powers, will never succeed in extending them, though the extension would not appear at all unreasonable once it were accomplished. Thousands and thousands of variations on the theme of walking will never yield a rule for swimming... So you may speculate as intelligently as you will on the mechanism of intelligence; you will never, by this method, succeed in going beyond it. You may get something more complex, but not something higher, or even something different. You must take things by storm; you must thrust intelligence outside itself by an act of will... Thus, in renouncing the factitious unity which the understanding imposes on nature from the outside, we shall perhaps find its true, inward and living unity. For the effort we make to transcend the pure understanding introduces us into that more vast something out of which our understanding is cut, and from which it has detached itself.
Qu. White: The Age of Analysis
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