Criticisms

From his first publications, Bergson's philosophy attracted strong criticism. Among those who explicitly criticized Bergson (either in published articles or letters) were Bertrand Russell, George Santayana, G. Peirce took strong exception to being aligned with Bergson. In response to a letter comparing his work with that of Bergson he wrote, "a man who seeks to further science can hardly commit a greater sin than to use the terms of his science without anxious care to use them with strict accuracy; it is not very gratifying to my feelings to be classed along with a Bergson who seems to be doing his prettiest to muddle all distinctions." Some critics have taken exception to the notion that Proust took anything of great significance from Bergson's philosophy. As one critic remarks: "As much as he was influenced by Bergson’s ideas, Proust appears to have found the diametrically opposed 'metaphysic'...equally attractive....[Proust’s] attempt, expressed in the delaying syntax of his long sentences, to immobilize and protract the instant by subdividing it infinitely, by spreading and, so to speak, spatializing it, bespeaks the mathematical, atomic, Eleatic materialism..., precisely that 'mechanical' materialism against which Bergson argued." Even William James's students resisted the assimilation of his work to that of Bergson's. As Jean Wahl described the "ultimate disagreement" between James and Bergson: "for James, the consideration of action is necessary for the definition of truth, according to Bergson, action...must be kept from our mind if we want to see the truth." Gide even went so far as to say that future historians will over-estimate Bergson's influence on art and philosophy just because he was the self-appointed spokesman for "the spirit of the age."

Bergson's "duration" is subjective. As early as the 1890s, Santayana attacked Bergson's view of the New and the indeterminate: "the possibility of a new and unaccountable fact appearing at any time," he writes, "does not practically affect the method of investigation;...the only thing given up is the hope that these hypotheses may ever be adequate to the reality and cover the process of nature without leaving a remainder. According to Santayana and Russell, Bergson projected false claims onto the aspirations of scientific method, which Bergson needed to make in order to justify his prior moral commitment to freedom. Russell takes particular exception to Bergson's understanding of number in chapter two of "Time and Free-will." According to Russell, Bergson uses an outmoded spatial metaphor ("extended images") to describe the nature of mathematics as well as logic in general. "Bergson only succeeds in making his theory of number possible by confusing a particular collection with the number of its terms, and this again with number in general," writes Russell