Stevenson’s metaphysics

This chapter considers some of the ways this particular commitment might speak to the philosophies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that adopted a dynamic view of reality, breaking with a mechanistic science and a static metaphysics. The genealogy back to Robert Louis Stevenson here is admittedly tenuous: Henri Bergson's philosophy was a key influence on Whitehead's metaphysical system, and both were strongly interested in the ideas of Stevenson's friend and admirer William James. Bergson does allude, briefly, to a passage on dreams by Stevenson in his own essay on that subject, but the chapter teases out some of the implications that the emphasis on movement has in Stevenson, by way of an exploration of some philosophical interest in the subject. Stevenson's sense of human reality as one of radical flux goes extraordinarily deep; and it issues, at least in this passage, in a sense of the mobility and relativity or perspectivalism of truth itself.