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Bergson in America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Thomas Quirk
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Extract

“O My Bergson, you are a magician,” wrote William James shortly after he had finished reading L'evolution Creatrice (1907), “and your book is a marvel.” He continued to praise the book in the letter, finding it a “pure classic in point of form,” its persistent “flavor of euphony” oddly reminding him of the “aftertaste” of Madame Bovary. If he was not in the “mood” to make any definite comment about the content of the book, James vaguely recognized certain coincident features between his “pragmatism” and what had already come to be called “Bergsonism”; and this shock of recognition was personally gratifying. (Indeed, in this respect, James was rather backward, for Bergson had read and been influenced by James' work long before the American had fully grasped the relevance of Bergson's thought to his own.) James felt they were “fighting the same fight” against what he called in the letter the great “beast,” “Intellectualism,” but which Bergson would have variously described as a pernicious Spencerian mechanism or the stubborn and habitual claims of a Platonic idealism. In any event, in James' mind, it was the much younger French philosopher who had delivered the “death wound,” and James was personally content to serve modestly “in the ranks” behind such an exquisite “commander.”

Type
General Essays
Information
Prospects , Volume 11 , October 1986 , pp. 453 - 490
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

NOTES

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56. Becker, Carl, “Some Aspects of the Influence of Social Problems and Ideas Upon the Study and Writing of History,” American Journal of Sociology, 18 (03 1913), p. 664CrossRefGoogle Scholar; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

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60. Cather, Willa, O Pioneers! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1941), p. 307.Google Scholar

61. Becker, Carl, “Juliette Fronet and Victor Hugo,” in Every Man His Own Historian, p. 257.Google Scholar

62. “Frederick Jackson Turner,” ibid., pp. 229–30; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

63. “Every Man His Own Historian,” p. 246.Google Scholar

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71. Reported in “The Threatened Collapse of the Bergson Boom in France,” Current Opinion, 05 1914, p. 371.Google Scholar

72. Quoted in “Bergson's Reception in America,” p. 226.Google Scholar

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