Idella J. Gallagher’s research while affiliated with University of Ottawa and other places

Bergson has described the closed society as static, circular, disciplined, caught up in automatism and organized for self-preservation. It represents a halt in the evolutionary process. The open society is dynamic, progressive, creative and characterized by freedom and universal charity. It represents a forward thrust. It is apparent that man has progressed beyond the state of the primitive closed society, and while he is still far from the ideal of the open society, morally he is advancing in that direction. How does this moral progress come about? Bergson answers the question in a remarkable analysis of the interacting relationship between the two moralities. The profound implications of his theory of knowledge are unfolded here, and perhaps nowhere else is the extraordinary originality and ingenuity of his moral doctrine, and the internal coherence of his whole philosophy, better revealed.

Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion is not a book to leave one indifferent. Those who are persuaded by its argument or inspired by its message are prone to manifest the same enthusiasm as Georges Cattaui who praised it as one of the greatest and wisest books conceived by philo­ sophers. Even those who take exception to the doctrine it expounds are impelled to acknowledge its significance. It was in his critique of Les Deux Sources that Jacques Maritain was moved to call the philosophy of Henri Bergson one of the most daring and profound of our time. When many years ago I opened Les Deux Sources for the first time, I turned out of curiosity to the last page and beheld these words, "l'univers ... est une machine it faire des dieux." Bergson was an evolutionist, but surely this was no ordinary evolutionist speaking, I thought. What must be the moral philosophy of a man who would write these words? When much later I undertook the present study, it was this same question which con­ cerned me.

Go to experience, gather the facts, and let your theorizing never go beyond the data. This was Bergson’s method. In Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory he had considered certain psychological data. Creative Evolution was an interpretation of biological data. What does experience tell us now about morality? It tells us that there are two distinct forces at work in the moral life of man: (I) a pressure or constraint exerted by society upon its members, and (2) an appeal or attraction exercised by certain privileged souls upon the rest of mankind. Reflection upon these facts reveals that there are two distinct and irreducible moralities, the closed and the open.

Bergson’s intuition of duration had convinced him that true reality is duration — movement, life, a continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty. His critique of science and its organ, the intellect, had revealed that science has never grasped real duration and is, owing to the nature of the intellect, radically incapable of doing so. Reviewing the various philosophical systems, he discovered further that they have approached reality with the same habits of intellect as science, and have, therefore, also missed duration. The intellect conceiving reality as so many separate, solid bodies, parcels it out in view of the demands of practical life, and does not concern itself with the inner structure of things. The philosophers have accepted this fragmentation and have attempted to construct reality from the pieces. If metaphysics is only a construction, however, then, since there are many ways of fitting the fragments together, many rival systems of philosophy will be erected and scepticism must result.1

Bergson’s account of moral obligation in terms of his doctrine of evolution was only the beginning of his treatment of morality. In tracing obligation back to society and beyond society to the life force itself, he was reducing it to a biological necessity, yet he was at the same time preparing the ground for the examination of a superior kind of morality and for a final explanation of all morality as originating in the ultimate creative principle of life and all its manifestations.

The rigorous employment of his empirical method led Bergson to the discovery that there are two distinct and irreducible moralities in the life of man — the closed or static, and the open or dynamic These two are not merely different aspects of a single morality since there is a difference of kind between them and not merely one of degree. Bergson traced each of the two moralities to a separate cause: the closed morality to social pressure, the open morality to aspiration. He found the first to be rooted in instinct and habit, and the second in the experience of moral heroes and mystics. Human beings behave as they do morally (I) because nature, acting through society, constrains them to do so, and (2) because certain heroic souls have had visions of a spiritual destiny for man and have inspired them with these visions. Social pressure and aspiration — these are the facts that must be taken into account in any inquiry into the nature and evolution of morality.

The full implications of Bergson’s intuition of duration are brought to light in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion which he presented to the public after forty years of philosophical reflection on reality sub specie durationis. Experience had revealed to him two distinct and irreducible moralities — the closed morality which he identified with nature, instinct, social cohesion — in a word, with biological necessity; and the open morality which he identified with the direct movement of the élan vital, intuition, creative emotion, and universal brotherhood. All the oppositions which had been set up in his earlier works are preserved here, for the closed morality is static, routine, conservative, while the open morality is dynamic, novel and progressive.

Bergson’s sharp distinction between intelligence and intuition had, he thought, saved metaphysics and the domain of the spirit from the attacks of Kant and of the scientific positivists. Can such a distinction be justified, however? Bergson believed that it could and that the evidence for it is to be found in the facts of human history, and particularly in the history of the evolution of life.

Bergson began his philosophical career as an enthusiastic follower of Herbert Spencer. He embraced the mechanistic theories prevailing at the time and dreamed of extending the mechanistic explanation to the whole universe.1 The vague generalities to be found in Spencer’s First Principles were due, he thought, to the author’s insufficient grasp of the latest ideas in mechanistics. He would correct the weaknesses of Spencer’s work, provide the precision it lacked, and establish it on a more solid foundation.