THE NATURE OF THE SOUL.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1307, 9 December 1911, Page 3

THE NATURE OF THE SOUL.

' PROFESSOR BERGSON'S LECTURES. On October 20 Professor Bergson, the distinguished French philosopher, gave, at' University College, Loudon, the first of four lectures on "The Nature of the Soul." lucre was a movement, he said, to-day in England and America and Franco to bring back philosophy to the stndv of those vital problems which interest evervone. In these lectures he should inquire into the essential characteristics of tho soul, and seek to determine how the action pf tho mind on things in general should bo represented. - There were two kinds of artificial difficulties surrounding' the question. Science, on tho one hand, regarded tho problem of tho soul as only a particular caso of the general problem of matter, since states of consciousness were united to certain modifications of brain matter. .Science had accepted this view because of iits convenience, but ho would try to show that it could not stand against criticism. Again, there was a difficulty .on tho side of philosophy. The source <f all knowledge was perception, but much in our perceptions, internal and external, was neglected in our coucepts, our mental classifications. The soul was not a thing, it was a movement, and classes, categories, concepts, must be put aside in order to arrive at its nature.' ' In his second lecture on October, 21, Professor Bergson urged again that for the knowledge of tho soul by tho soul wo must put aside concepts and classes and face the concrete reality. To apply this method to tho interior life was extremely difficult, because that life was -fluidity itself, perpetual change. All the philosophers, from tho tenth century 8.C., to Kant and Hoge!, never stopped 6aviug that everything changed, but they acted as if they believed at the bottom that things were immobilo and invariable. We thought wo recognised constantly succeeding "states" of the soul—now a pleasure, now a grief. It was certain that our inner life was a succession, but not a succession of the before and the after as wo ordinarily represented it. Ilowever paradoxical it might seem, ho believed the real succession did not involve separation between tho before and after. In a tune tho notes succeeded one another, but the notes wero not tho melody. What charmed the ear was what ono pcrcoived while it endured—not ono note and then another note—something indivisible. Our inner lifo was like a melody, indivisible. This indivisibility of the flux of the inner life, this cohesion of'the past with tho present in pure duration, was exactly what constituted the substantiality of the soul.