Bergson and James agree that empiricism has not been empirical enough.
While for James the solution is to chase out nominalism, beginning with mental atomism and fictionalism about relations, Bergson wants to refute the assumptions that draw empiricism and nominalism together.
He says the problem with empiricism is “not that it sets too high a value on experience, but that it substitutes for true experience... an experience which is disarticulated and therefore, most probably, disfigured,—at any rate arranged for the greater facility of action and language.” After more than a long page criticizing various empiricisms, Bergson finally says, “There is a last enterprise that might be undertaken. It would be to seek experience at its source, or rather above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience”1He is saying that a more consistent empiricism would catch experience before it is cut to the convenience of practical action and social forms. “We must appeal to experience—an experience purified, or, in other words, released, where necessary, from the molds that our intellect has formed in the degree and proportion of the progress of our action on things” A “true empiricism” would probe experience “by a kind of spiritual auscultation” Like an ancient medical empiricist, Bergson exhorts philosophers to turn away from schematic concepts and generalizations and sound out the individual.2