Quoted by T. Quick, 'Disciplining Physiological Psychology: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices, 1897-1922', Science in Context 30 (4), pp. 423-474.
Description:

'On the 26th of May 1911, the philosopher Henri Bergson gave a lecture to a packed hall at the University of Oxford.'

 

'

 At Oxford, Bergson was very specific regarding the significance of modern science for philosophy. Casting philosophical endeavour as a dialogue between the Western classical tradition and present-day investigation, he argued for a re-consideration of the former in relation to certain scientific disciplines rather than others:

Let us... study the ancients, become imbued with their spirit and try to do, as far as possible, what they themselves would be doing were they living among us. Endowed with our knowledge (I do not refer so much to our mathematics and physics, which would perhaps not radically alter their way of thinking, but especially our biology and psychology), they would arrive at very different results from those they obtained. (Bergson [1934] 1946, 153-154)

For the Bergson of 1911, the task of philosophy was to reclaim the spirit of classical European thought, and re-cast it in the light of the new sciences of psychology and biology.'