"
3. If this meaning of Life can be empirically determined more and more
exactly, and completely, a positive metaphysic is possible: that is to
say, a metaphysic which cannot be contested and which will admit of a
direct and indefinite progress; such a metaphysic would escape the
objections urged against a transcendental metaphysic, and would be
strictly scientific in form.
After having propounded these propositions, he defended them by
recalling much of the data considered in his work Matiere et Memoire
which he had published five years previously and which has been examined
in the previous chapter. The onus of proof lay, said Bergson, with the
upholders of parallelism. It is a purely metaphysical hypothesis
unwarrantable in his opinion as a dogma. He distinguishes between
correspondence--which he of course admits--and parallelism, to which he
is opposed. We never think without a certain substratum of cerebral
activity, but what the relation is precisely, between brain and
consciousness, is one for long and patient research: it cannot be
determined a priori and asserted dogmatically. Until such investigation
has been carried out, it behoves us to be undogmatic and not to allege
more than the facts absolutely warrant, that is to say, a relation of
correspondence. Parallelism is far too simple an explanation to be a
true one. Before the International Congress, Bergson launched another
attack on parallelism which caused quite a little sensation among those
present.
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