An Introduction to Metaphysics by Henri Bergson

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

THIS CELEBRATED ESSAY was first published in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in January, 1903. It appeared, then, after Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory and before Creative Evolution; and while containing ideas set forth in the first two of these works, it announces some of those which were afterwards developed in the last.

Though this book can in no sense be regarded as an epitome of the others, it yet forms the best introduction to them. M. Edouard Le Roy in his lately published book on M. Bergson's philosophy speaks of "this marvelously suggestive study which constitutes the best preface to the books themselves."

It has, however, more importance than a simple introduction would have, for in it M. Bergson explains, at greater length and in greater detail than in the other books, exactly what he means to convey by the word intuition. The intuitive method is treated independently and not, as elsewhere in his writings, incidentally, in its applications to particular problems. For this reason every writer who has attempted to give a complete exposition of M. Bergson's philosophy has been obliged to quote this essay at length; and it is indispensable therefore to the full understanding of its author's position. Translations into German, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Swedish, and Russian have lately appeared, but the French original is at present out of print.

This translation has had the great advantage of being revised in proof by the author. I have to thank him for many alternative renderings, and also for a few slight alterations in the text, which he thought would make his meaning clearer.

T. E. HULME

ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

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A COMPARISON of the definitions of metaphysics and the various concepts of the absolute leads to the discovery that philosophers, in spite of their apparent divergencies, agree in distinguishing two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing. The first implies that we move round the object; the second, that we enter into it. The first depends on the point of view at which we are placed and on the symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither depends on a point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first kind of knowledge may be said to stop at the relative; the second, in those cases where it is possible, to attain the absolute.

Consider, for example, the movement of an object in space. My perception of the motion will vary with the point of view, moving or stationary, from which I observe it. My expression of it will vary with the systems of axes, or the points of reference, to which I relate it; that is, with the symbols by which I translate it. For this double reason I call such motion relative: in the one case, as in the other, I am placed outside the object itself. But when I speak of an absolute movement, I am attributing to the moving object an interior and, so to speak, states of mind; I also imply that I am in sympathy with those states, and that I insert myself in them by an effort of imagination. Then, according as the object is moving or stationary, according as it adopts one movement or another, what I experience will vary. And what I experience will depend neither on the point of view I may take up in regard to the object, since I am inside the object itself, nor on the symbols by which I may translate the motion, since I have rejected all translations in order to possess the original.

1912