Bergson and James

Given Bergson's repeatedly expressed denigration of Praxis, his association with seminal Pragmatist William James seems surprising. However, his Intuitive method is almost surely inspired by James' anteceding study of the 'stream-of consciousness', as James coins it, a method which, in turn, James, in his later period, begins to appreciate. Still, this latter appreciation is not a renunciation of James' long-time espousal of the value of Practical Reason, but a supplement to it, according to James, suggesting that he never repudiates the Pragmatist thesis that experience is the criterion of Truth, nor that he ceases being a "man of science", as Peirce puts it. So, any similarity between the two philosophies does not override the fact that James' demonstrates that Bergsonian Spiritualism is neither a necessary nor an exclusively valid interpretation of the meaning of the data of the stream of consciousness.