f I may put this evident principle in other
words, that nothing is able to exist unless something else is able to
discover it. Yet even if discovered the poor candidate for existence
would be foiled, for it would turn out to be nothing but a
modification of the mind falsely said to discover it. Existence and
discovery are conceptions which the malicious criticism of knowledge
(which is the psychology of knowledge abused) pretends to have
discarded and outgrown altogether; the conception of immediacy has
taken their place. This malicious criticism of knowledge is based on
the silent assumption that knowledge is impossible. Whenever you
mention anything, it baffles you by talking instead about your idea of
what you mention; and if ever you describe the origin of anything it
substitutes, as a counter-theory, its theory of the origin of your
description. This, however, would not be a counter-theory at all if
the criticism of knowledge had not been corrupted into a negative
dogma, maintaining that ideas of things are the only things possible
and that therefore only ideas and not things can have an origin.
Nothing could better illustrate how deep this cognitive impotence has
got into people's bones than the manner in which, in the latest
schools of philosophy, it is being disavowed; for unblushing idealism
is distinctly out of fashion. M. Bergson tells us he has solved a
difficulty that seemed hopeless by avoiding a fallacy common to
idealism and realism. The difficulty was that if you started with
self-existent matter you could never arrive at mind, and if you
started with self-existent mind you could never arrive at matter. The
fallacy was that both schools innocently supposed there was an
existing world to discover, and each thought it possible that its view
should describe that world as it really was. What now is M. Bergson's
solution? That no articulated world, either material or psychical,
exists at all, but only a tendency or enduring effort to evolve images
of both sorts; or rather to evolve images which in their finer texture
and vibration are images of matter, but which grouped and
foreshortened in various ways are images of minds. The idea of nature
and the idea of consciousness are two apperceptions or syntheses of
the same stuff of experience. The two worlds thus become substantially
identical, continuous, and superposable; each can merge insensibly
into the other. "To perceive all the influences of all the points