Bergson in America

Abstract

“O My Bergson, you are a magician,” wrote William James shortly after he had finished readingL'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” ofMadame 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.”