When our philosopher is a contemporary, the case is different in that then personal predilection and prejudice are without the regulation imposed by historical perspective; and injustice, even negative or privative, either to the living philosopher or to his living antagonists, has a certain human import of which the conditions are removed with mere temporal remoteness of the subject of study, when history has placed him in a setting which includes an “after” as well as a “before.”
Professor A. D. Lindsay has pointed out[152] that, in one important respect, Bergson’s genius is of the Kantian kind. It is capacity for such interpretation of old problems that they become veritably renewed. “It is a great and essential proof of cleverness or insight,” said Kant, “to know how to ask reasonable questions.” Now, comments Professor Lindsay (without suggesting any comparison in importance between Kant and Bergson), there is this resemblance between them, that much of the interest of Bergson’s work, as of Kant’s, consists in statement and exposition of antinomies in philosophy. Like Kant’s, Bergson’s philosophy is interesting because it is a new method, and, in the same sense as Kant’s, is a critical philosophy, for it consists in finding the main source of previous difficulties in uncriticized false assumptions.
Such criticism of the question (“interpretation of the problem” I called it above) is just the proper business of the philosopher. For, every question is also an unconditional assertion. Falseness in this implied assertion is a case of the fallacy of “many questions,” which, accordingly, may be regarded as the philosopher’s first concern.
Bergson is a philosopher preeminently in this sense. He is a philosopher also (in spite of the cavalier denial of Sir. E. Ray Lankester)[153] in that he is a man with an articulate conviction concerning the nature of being and of knowledge. In the aspersion of Bergson’s thought by the above writer and by Mr. Hugh S. R. Elliot,[154] there is a rancour which, in spite of much valid criticism in detail, produces an impression of ill-regulated prejudice.
This impression is no more than fairly counterbalanced by the contrary enthusiasm of such whole-souled votaries of Bergsonism as Edouard LeRoy, William James and H. Wildon Carr.