CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GIFT OF Bepartment of Philosophy .^.-sS*" ^^Wmiiiiniininifflffi^f? ^ summary of his olin 3 1924 029 121 775 DATE DUE 'Jimsu^ ' mi F M& l\w^ PKtNTCO IN U.S./ Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029121775 BERGSON FOR BEGINNERS A Summary of his Philosophy WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY DARCY B. KITCHIN, M.A. NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1913 Printed by Ballantvne, Hanson &' Co. At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh PREFACE The aim of this book is to give the reader a general sketch of the philosophy of Professor Henri Bergson, in the order of its development and in the simplest manner that is consistent with accuracy, and so to introduce him to the original works and more especially to the excellent English translations. The summary or synopsis of Time and Free Will is on a scale sufficient to show the nature of the argument ; it has been made fuller than that of the later books in view of the obvious importance of the Fssai for the student, since it gives an exposition of the ideas which underlie the whole of Bergson's philosophy. My summary was made from the French, but I have compared it with the English translation in order to avoid any confusion in technical terms. That I should have ventured to condense so eloquent and (if I may add a per- sonal opinion) so generally cogent an argument must find its apology and vindication in a desire ', to lead others to his writings. Those who meet with obscurities or suspect misconceptions have thus an easy remedy. The Introduction is intended to indicate in a popular way the problems with which Bergson deals, and the Notes give an opportunity of discussing in vi THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON greater detail some of the main features of the philosophy and of hinting at certain criticisms with which it has met. Professor Bergson must be held responsible for nothing in this book which is not directly marked as a quotation. D. B. K. Scarborough, September 1913. CONTENTS Introduction : The Coming of Bergson Time and Free Will Chapter I Chapter II . Chapter III Notes to Time and Free Will 1. Time and Space . 2. Zeno and Motion . 3. Duration and the Self Matter and Memory Parallelism .... An Introduction to Metaphysics Creative Evolution Conclusion : A Backward Glance PAGE I 26 30 SI 70 95 95 III 119 138 169 188 196 228 The Works of Bergson . Some Books about Bergson 253 255 BERGSON FOR BEGINNERS INTRODUCTION Ever since man began to reflect he has been con- fronted by no more interesting and no more obsti- nate problem than that of his own free will. In those happy early days when scientific inductions were unknown Nature was regarded as essentially capricious ; she worked through living agencies ; every fountain had (or was) its nymph, every tree its hamadryad ; you had but to spell a natural object with a capital letter to make it function of itself. The ancient hylozoism remained, to some extent, mythological in character and, as Kant said, made science impossible.^ The mechanism of the universe, with the resulting problem of freedom, has occupied the attention of philosophers from the time of Plato, and it was not long before it became a question of interest for theology. With St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas arose the Chris- tian doctrine of predestination, a doctrine carried to its extreme limits by Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, the latter showing with pitiless logic that divine prescience and human freedom were incom- ' See below, p. 92. A 2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON patible. Huxley once instanced these theologians to repel the suggestion that morality might suffer from a belief in physical determinism, but it is questionable if such a refutation is complete, since many have doubted whether predestination, held as a really living belief, was not itself harmful to morals. However that may be, the doctrine was repugnant to the masses, who continued to believe in God's foreknowledge and man's free will, regard- less of the logical contradiction and content to consider it a mystery which might admit of a solu- tion, even though we ourselves were powerless to resolve it. For the philosopher there is no such easy passage from logic to faith. He, more than any man, is bound to square his belief with his reason, and it is therefore not surprising to find a tendency to deter- minism in Descartes, who is generally regarded as the founder of modern philosophy. It is true that he restricted mechanism to nature and automatism to animals, while he allowed to man a soul and free will. Man was a " conscious " automaton, although the expression is not used in the sense which Huxley afterwards gave to It. Nature was wholly determined, but man could exercise his freedom. Bergsoni points out that Descartes left open a choice of metaphysical methods. There is a vacilla- tion or indecision in his doctrine, for he follows neither the road of determinism nor that of free will to its logical conclusion. The second might have ' See also Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, i. 292. INTRODUCTION 3 led him to a real duration, a continuous creation, a true evolution, to a science rightly mechanistic in its method though limited in its operations to systems which it had artificially isolated from a continuous whole. If philosophy chose the less excellent way, it was largely because it was constrained by the natural tendency of our intellect and was, further, hypnotised by the influence of the Greeks, "artists for ever admirable." Descartes described man as a " confused mixture " of mind and body ; the Carte- sians attributed the correspondence between the two to the unceasing interference of God, a doctrine known as occasionalism and still widely held. Leibniz was revolted by this perpetual miracle, and explained the connection as a pre-established harmony, evidently under the impression that a single act of God was more in accordance with reason than a series of actions perpetually renewed, though why he should have thought so is not very clear, for to God the one must be as simple as the other. Spinoza led one form of the Cartesian doctrine to its logical conclusion, and pictured man and the universe as a vast mechanism, in which mind and matter were two, entirely disparate, attributes of one and the same substance, God. For him this mechanism was an aspect which reality takes for itself; for Leibniz, it was an aspect which reality takes for us : although, since all our knowledge is and must be human knowledge, the two aspects, so far as we are concerned, amount to the same thing. The two had this in common, that they 4 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON found it difficult to pass from God to things, from eternity to time — a difficulty also found in all absolutist theories. Spinoza has been called an atheist, but for him God was everything, nature nothing, and his pan- theism, which Hegel i more rightly called acosmism, differs from the pantheism which identifies God and nature — the latter being, in Schopenhauer's phrase, a polite atheism, although his dictum is not neces- sarily final. A modern example is found in Haeckel, who had the temerity to describe his own system as the purest monotheism, for he, like Spinoza, — although the resemblance is only superficial — de- fines the universe as consisting of matter and force (spirit), two attributes of substance or God. But the important point for us to notice is that, whether we accept the God of Spinoza, or the Absolute of Hegel, or the pantheism of Haeckel, there is in no case any room for human freedom. If we believe in an absolute God, we can see in evolution nothing more than the unrolling in time of a plan previously conceived and once for all determined. Things are what they are and the consequences of them will be what they will be, and any action of ours can in no way affect them. If we approach the question from the scientific side the result is the same ; nor is it surprising that it should be so, for as science has put determinism into its premises, so determinism will naturally come out in its conclusions. We have only to assume that scientific generalisations ^ Hegel's view of Spinozism is not accepted by all writers. INTRODUCTION 5 are universal laws, that the principle of the con- servation of energy applies to the totality of things, and there is little room for freedom. The assumption is generally made by scientific philoso- phers, but it is a large assumption, certainly not a logical one, for it involves the fallacy of com- position. But what of Kant ? the reader may ask. Did he not profess to destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith ? Did he not show that God, immortality and freedom could be lived, even if they could not be known .'' Put into the simplest, and therefore possibly insufficient terms, Kant held that freedom could not be proved to exist or even to be possible, but that we cannot get over our own feeling of freedom ; and he solves the antinomy, or contradiction, between the demands of pure science and pure ethics as he conceived them by saying (in Dr. James Ward's words ^) that " the self is here noumenal and its freedom transcendental, but its active manifestations are phenomenal and necessarily determined." Very few have been able to accept Kant's solution completely, and Dr. Ward goes on to call it a " splendid failure " though possibly con- taining a great underlying truth. With this truth we are not at present concerned, but may content ourselves with noting Kant's failure to show how a transcendental free-will could interact with a pheno- menal world of cast-iron necessity. A faith divorced from knowledge could satisfy nobody. Kant was • TAe Realm of Ends, p. 292. 6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON not far from a solution, but was prevented from reaching it by his doctrine of time and space. Ordinary folk have always been remarkably tena- cious of the belief in their own free will. They agree with Dr. Johnson that all argument is against it, all experience in its favour. It was not for them to attempt to unravel a mystery which du Bois- Reymond placed among those seven enigmas of which we know nothing, and shall never know any- thing — ignoramus atque ignorahimus . Their instinct led them, while accepting free will, to regard the arguments of the libertarians as so much special pleading, an attempt to demonstrate an indemon- strable fact ; at the same time there was an uneasy feeling that science was gradually tightening its grip and widening its scope, and that a day might come when the belief in freedom could no longer reasonably be held. It was not enough to know that science had not yet proved determinism. Could we confidently assert that, however far scientific knowledge might be extended, freedom could never be disproved ? Bergson shows us that common sense was right in its instinctive clinging to free will, right in its distrust of libertarian arguments, wrong in its fear of what the extension of scientific know- ledge might import. If we start from an Absolute who has fore- ordained all that will be until the end of time we can, as we have said, find no room for freedom ; if we assert that the whole of reality is contained in the equations of the scientist, our search will be INTRODUCTION 7 equally futile. But in either case we should be starting with a conception which is in some sort artificial. Men lived and acted long before philo- sophers and theologians evolved their idea of the absolute; reality existed long before science began to frame its description of such parts as it was able to isolate from, and dissect out of, the whole. If we take a more natural and immediate view of the world, what do we see ? — a mass of human beings, conative and cognitive agents, as psychologists call them, constantly acting and interacting, striving with one another, striving with and at times triumphing over nature. What would strike us particularly would be something new ever emerging from the old ; a number of free beings perpetually moulding nature to their wills ; nature inert and subject to "laws," men free and active agents turning these laws to their own advantage, not overcoming nature altogether, nor yet by it entirely overcome. We should see an evolution or progress in things, and this evolution becoming vastly more rapid after man began to take a hand in it. We should, in a word, see everywhere prima facie evidence of our own free activity. If we were told that we were merely carrying out the foreordained decrees of the Almighty, we should rightly ask why God had given us an illusive sense of freedom ; we should argue that if we, as we seem to be, are free, God must in creating us have limited himself; that he must be, as J. S. Mill rather unhappily phrased it, a finite God : we might hold that God in fraction- 8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON ating himself into his creatures had disappeared, as it were, in his own creation ; that he was immanent in Nature and one with it ; or we might consider that our finite wills pointed to an infinite Will, and that God, though self-limited and immanent in Nature, yet transcended it. A system of pluralism, as it is called, is consistent with theism, though all pluraiists are not necessarily theists. And the essential difference between pantheism and theism is that the former regards God as one with the universe, while the latter considers him as both immanent and transcendent. Of how God limited himself and created us we can form no proper idea ; the question is beyond our powers.^ If on the other hand we were told by the scien- tific philosophers 2 that our hopes and fears, our desires and aflfections were all contained, as Huxley said, in the primitive nebulosity of the universe, we might well ask how that could be. Huxley would reply that we do not know, and yet are ' For a discussion of pluralism see Dr. Ward's The Realm of Ends, and the works of W. James and Dr. F. C. S. Schiller. Pluralism has difficulties of its own, which Bergson recognises, and endeavours to escape by his theory of the vital impetus. He cannot be described as a pluralist, although he has striking affinities with both Dr. Ward and the late William James. This is illustrated by the eagerness with which the latter welcomed the French philosopher, an eagerness stimulated, no doubt, by a desire to cover up the ragged ends of his own teaching. Nor can Bergson be called a pragmatist, although his point of view has much in common with that of pragmatism. ^ For a criticism of scientific philosophy see James Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism, and compare F. H. Bradley's pungent characterisation in Appearance and Reality. INTRODUCTION 9 compelled to assume it from what science teaches us of the laws or sequences observed in phenomena. He would tell us that everything that happens in the world was implicitly there from the beginning ; that, in fact, anyone with a complete knowledge of scientific laws and possessed of perfect mathema- tical powers could predict from the year i anything and everything that would occur in the year 2000 ; that there was no such thing as free will or spon- taneity, these being fond illusions of man's imagin- ing. He would not deny the fact of consciousness, but would explain it as a phosphorescence, an epiphenomenon, a mere by-product of molecular movements in the brain, as ineffective as the shadow cast by the smoke from a passing train. We were, he would say, conscious of what went on but could effect nothing ourselves, — conscious automata, with as little spontaneity as the flakes in a snowstorm or the pebbles on a beach. He would proceed to describe the relation between our states of conscious- ness and brain movements as a parallelism, always constant and exact. If asked how such a parallelism could be constant unless one caused the other, he would admit the difficulty, again plead ignorance, refuse to allow that the psychical could cause the physical, and probably, if pressed, be driven to the assertion that the physical caused the psychical, thus destroying the parallelism and substituting for it a materialistic hypothesis of cause and effect. But if we persisted in our inquiry as to how the primitive meteoric dust or nebula could contain lo THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON consciousness, we should obtain no more satisfactory reply than that " our one certainty is the existence of the mental world, and that the existence of Kraft and Staff falls into the rank of a highly probable hypothesis." Or again "If I were to choose between absolute materialism and absolute idealism I should feel compelled to accept the latter alternative." Huxley, indeed, is not very consistent. Herbert Spencer, similarly interrogated, would prove a more amenable witness. He would allow that consciousness must have been present in some form in the primitive nebula ; that, if the world had to be interpreted in terms of mind or of matter, the former would be the only possible alternative, though he would maintain that in either case it was a mere unfruitful quarrel about symbols ; he would acknowledge that his philosophy did not go back to the beginning of things nor reach to the end ; that it was, properly speaking, not philosophy at all, and yet the only possible philosophy, a re- statement in more exact terms of the conclusions given to it by the sciences. He would tell us that a first cause is a necessary datum of consciousness, but that it cannot in any manner or degree be known in the strict sense of knowing. In the Principles of Sociology he added that the power mani- fested throughout the universe, distinguished as material, is the same Power which in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness ; and that the conception to which we must tend is much less INTRODUCTION ii that of a universe of dead matter than that of a universe everywhere alive. The last sentence has a curiously Bergsonian ring. From these and similar admissions, from the extremely suggestive changes which Spencer intro- duced into First Principles at the close of his life, from the fact that he felt constrained to modify his formula of evolution, a formula untouched for thirty years or more, even after the final edition of the book had been stereotyped, we may conclude that he, like Huxley, was not altogether happy in the philosophical position which he had taken up. Both affirmed determinism because they could find no place for freedom in the equations of science, and both, like Kant, limited knowledge to scientific know- ledge, although Spencer's phrase " in the strict sense of knowing " suggests that there may be a method of knowing less rigorous than that of the exact sciences and not verifiable in the same way, which might nevertheless give us knowledge. Huxley, with all his honesty and brilliance of intellect, was essentially a scientist, and his incursions into philo- sophy were rather in the nature of a relaxation ; and it is therefore, perhaps, not surprising that he should have arbitrarily divided up reality into two halves and should have looked exclusively to the mechanical half for an explanation of the whole. Even determinists speak and act as though they were free, although they feel themselves compelled to deny their freedom in deference to the fancied demands of a cast-iron system of cause and effect, 12 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON overlooking the fact that freedom, like motion, life, evolution, and every other progress, may, and indeed must, in its essence lie beyond the purview of a science vsrhich is strictly mathematical and exact in its method. The only way to disprove freedom is to prove the absolute universality of the principle of mechanism, and this, it is needless to say, is far from being done. Spencer himself only just missed the turning which might have led him to give us a real philosophy of change or evolution. " But he had no sooner started to follow the path than he turned off short. He had promised to retrace a genesis, and, lo ! he was doing something entirely different. His doctrine bore indeed the name of evolutionism ; it claimed to remount and redescend the course of the universal becoming ; but, in fact, it dealt neither with becoming nor with evolution." ^ Huxley, Spencer, and Haeckel are alike in this, that they repudiate philosophical materialism. Materialism nowadays finds few defenders, and we are no longer told, as we were in the time of Biichner and Moleschott, that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. There is much in a name, and it is probable that materialism has declined in favour from the vulgar connotation with which it has come to be associated. Cicero tells us that Sardanapalus ordered his tomb to be inscribed with the words " What I have eaten and drunk is mine ; all else is lost ; " and the Roman adds that such an epitaph is more fitting for an ox than for a man. ' Creative Evolution, p. 384. INTRODUCTION 13 The philosophical position of Sardanapalus would be popularly regarded as materialistic, and we can- not wonder if serious writers decline to be associated with it. Realism and dualism have suffered a similar degradation, though to a less degree, from their constant connection with the adjectives naive, popular and obvious. And yet we have, after all, as Kant says, only a choice of three possibilities — though Bergson has discovered a fourth ; either the mind is determined by things (materialism), or things are determined by the mind (idealism), or between mind and things we must suppose a mysterious agreement (dualism ; psycho-physical paralleHsm). Science, when it begins to philosophise, usually adopts paral- lelism, although the agreement is as much a mystery to it as it is to religion. Hence the position is an unstable one, and we find parallelism continually edging away in one of the two directions, materialism and idealism. The question as to which of these two is right is purely a question as to which fits in the better with all the facts.^ ' Hence any suggestion that materialism is morally inferior is to be deprecated. Prof. Rudolf Eucken in his Nobel lecture Naturalism or Idealism f goes so far as to say that " to subordinate all human striving under the aim of utility seems to Idealism to be an intolerable degradation, a complete surrender of all that constitutes the greatness and dignity of man." However, no con- nection between a particular philosophy and morahty has ever been satisfactorily established. Science has its martyrs as glorious, if not as numerous, as those of religion. We may rejoice in our Euckens, our Bradleys, our James Wards and our Martineaus, even while we sadly reflect that not so very long ago religious fanaticism would have burned them at the same stake as our Mills, our Huxleys, our Spencers, and our Leslie Stephens. 14 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON Common sense sees the sun rising and setting and finds this mode of expression convenient and indeed sufficient for everyday affairs. Science looks at the phenomena more closely and discovers that they are due to the rotation of the earth. As they are re- peated, it is able to predict their repetition in the future. So there grows up the immensely useful science of nautical astronomy, among others, but the methods which science uses, though more exact, do not differ essentially from those of common sense. Both common sense and science are primarily concerned with our possible action on things. If we ask what motion is, or life, or evolution, science will tell us that it does not know and in all pro- bability will never know. It can calculate relative motions, but motion itself it is compelled to repre- sent as a series of immobilities. Now it cannot be the business of philosophy to do the work of science over again, nor merely to extend its working to new fields and new conclusions, for science can do this work itself and do it very well. If it is to have any roison d^itre, philosophy must proceed by a new method. It must take warning from the rather O pathetic spectacle of Herbert Spencer trying to build up a living growth like evolution out of such dead abstractions as scientific generalisations. The result in Spencer's case was, as Dr. Ward said, a stupendous house of cards. Spencer's work may have been like that of a child piecing together the disjecta membra of a jig-saw puzzle, but it was none the less good work, well worth doing, if only that its insufficiency INTRODUCTION 15 might be conclusively demonstrated. Except for Spencer we might have no Bergson. We might not otherwise have recognised the limitations of science and the fact that science cannot usefully attempt to transcend those limits, for they are limits natural to what Bergson calls our intelligence. In his illumin- ating figure, the mechanism of our ordinary know- ledge is of a cinematographical kind, and this method is, for science, the only practical method, and so long as we are dealing with inert matter our conclusions will hold good, for in its case we can afford to neglect the flow of real duration without committing a serious error. If the plight of the scientific philosopher is desperate, the rational philosopher is hardly in better case. The Platonic ideas are shades of shadows, intellectual refinements of realities dimly apprehended ; and yet not realities at all, but mere views or moments artificially cut out of reality, stable things taken from an unstable flux. " To reduce things to Ideas is therefore to resolve becom- ing into its principal moments, each of these being, moreover, by the hypothesis, screened from the laws of time and, as it were, plucked out of eternity." ^ When we analyse the real, when we place immutable Ideas at the base of the moving reality, we are doing what Spencer did, though in a different fashion ; we are again applying the cinematographical mechanism of our intellect, and the consequences are far-reach- ing. Modern philosophers are always re-discovering ' Creative Evolution, p. 332. i6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON the conclusions of the Greeks ; they cannot help doing so, as long as they, like them, are content to take snapshots, at intervals, of motion, growth, change, life, evolution, in a word, of universal be- coming. You may take as many positions of a moving body as you like, but you will never there- from constitute motion ; motion is not made up of immobilities. Neither can becoming be constituted out of immutabilities. Philosophy ought to begin with the motion ; it has begun, both in ancient and modern days, with the immobilities ; and in so doing it has merely followed the natural bent of the intellect. Bergson says that the whole philo- sophy of Ideas can be summarised in the proposition that physics is but logic spoiled ; the physical is a degeneration of the logical, it is the logical fallen into time and space. Science, understood as the system of concepts, thus becomes more real than reality, and is held to be prior to human knowledge, which can only discover it by degrees ; " prior also to things, which awkwardly try to imitate it." If science is wrong, and philosophy, both ancient and modern, is also wrong, it is likely that their error springs from the same source. It is Bergson's object to track out this error, and to show us not only where they err, but why they err and why they cannot help erring — unless they adopt a new method. Bergson indicates this method and shows us how to apply it. He does not pretend to give us that ordered body of knowledge, totus^ teres atque rotundus, which the word philosophy is usually taken INTRODUCTION 17 to imply ; hence there is a certain lack of proportion in his treatment which has led to some misunder- standing, for he often leaves us to dwell for our- selves on features which are already sufficiently recognised in order to emphasise those which are novel or comparatively neglected. His thought, too, has been in some degree progressive— another stumbling-block for his readers; and his fondness for sharp contrasts, eiFective and legitimate though they are, may sometimes be misleading unless the student is able to bring the picture into focus for himself. For Bergson's literary style no praise could be too high. It is at once picturesque and precise, stimu- lating the imagination and yet rarely leaving the mind in doubt as to the meaning he wishes to convey. He is a true poet-philosopher, not in the ironical and half-contemptuous sense in which Dr. Ward applied the term to Spencer, but as uniting the creative genius of the artist with the power of nice analysis of the psychological and metaphysical expert. To compare him with Plato savours of exaggeration, but it may perhaps be said that of no other philosophical writer could such a com- parison more properly be made. His magnificent use of metaphor and illustration, the distinction and clarity of his style, the logical precision with which he develops his argument, combine to form an unrivalled vehicle for the impression of new truths upon reluctant ears. They have even caused a not unnatural feeling of opposition. Dr. Schiller humorously says of William James that his Prag- i8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON matism was " so lacking in the familiar philosophic catchwords that it may be doubted whether any professor has quite understood it." ^ So Bergson has suffered from the excess of his qualities. He has been accused of hypnotising us by fine language, of using metaphor where we look for facts, and of illustrating where he ought to prove. No doubt, even the best-intentioned writer may at times be run away with by an analogy. Bergson, however, employs illustration in the legitimate way of giving relief from continuous abstract argument. If we examine his well-known comparison of the life-force to a stream, we find that he does not suggest that, because the stream does so-and-so, the life-force therefore does the same. He uses the figure in order to assist us to grasp his meaning. Metaphor is unavoidable in certain connexions, and to ask that philosophy should prove itself by facts is to assume that it is verifiable in the same way as science and to imply a priori that it has no right to a separate existence. If Kant had given us more illustration, we should be grateful ; if Comte had been less wordy, we should read him, perhaps, with more patience. And yet no philosophical writer gives more attention to facts than Bergson does. It is the very essence of his indictment of intellectualism, whether philosophical or scientific, that it fails to explain more than a part of the facts. He begins, like Kant, with a criticism of existing theories, with ' In his preface to Pragfnaiis?n, by D. L. Murray. INTRODUCTION 19 a discussion of those antinomies, or contradictions, which hover like ghosts above these theories and refuse to be laid. He offers a solution of the difficulties, and his solution is entitled to hold the field until new difficulties arise or a better solution can be found. For he maintains that the task of philosophy is never done ; it must march forward hand in hand with science, incomplete but always progressing, ready to adapt itself to the new that is ever being born, breaking up its intuitions into con- cepts which any man may test by dialectic, handing on the torch of truth so that future generations may trim it to their needs. The philosophy he contem- plates is not so much an opposition to science as an extension of science. Bergson's beauty of style and the comparative absence of technicality in his writing may have won him many readers, but it cannot be doubted that his powerful appeal to the general public, almost without parallel in matters of so high dispute, has lain in the promise he gives of freeing them from the age-long controversies which make the thinking man despair of ever finding truth. When we see a learned Oxford professor listening with politely lifted eyebrows to the refutation of mechanism given by an equally learned Cambridge professor, we may well feel that, except for the pleasure of the battle and the mental activity it entails, the strife of twenty-five centuries of philosophy has been waged in vain. Bergson appears, like a deus ex machina in a Greek play, to compose the strife. 2o;the philosophy of bergson and to tell them that the quarrel of idealism and realism, as to whether presentations are in the mind or out of it, is a mere logomachy, since the problem should have been stated in terms of time rather than in terms of space. On the main question, the equally long dispute between teleology and mechan- ism, as to whether evolution is the unfolding of a plan or a mechanical rearrangement according to the fixed laws of science, he explains that tele- ology is merely inverted mechanism, or mechanism looked at from the other end, and that both are equally, or nearly equally, false. For it is true that Bergson has a teleology of his own, although it is not the radical finalism usually indicated by the word. We are conscious of our own free will and yet cannot reconcile it with the scientific doctrine of causation or the principle of the con- servation of energy. Bergson shows that any re- conciliation is impossible on the lines usually followed by both the supporters and the opponents of free will ; that, when libertarians attempt to state the problem in conceptual terms, they at once hand themselves over to the enemy ; that both sides start with assumptions which are not justifiable ; but that the problem itself fades away as soon as it is properly envisaged. So, too, with the relation be- tween mind and body. If there is anything of which we are certain it is our own personality and individuality ; yet science can point to an undoubted correspondence between our psychical life and the movements of the brain ; further, it INTRODUCTION 21 is certain that these molecular movements are only part and parcel of the general movement of the matter of the universe. Bergson reads the riddle for us ; he acknowledges the correspondence, shows how far it extends and explains how and why our psychical life goes beyond molecular movements. Again, we feel that we occupy a privileged place in nature, that we are, as men, the crown and roof of things ; but biological evolution traces our de- scent from the animal, shows that we are one with the ape, not essentially different from the sponge. Bergson resolves the enigma ; he discusses evolution in the light of his own philosophy and makes clear in what true evolutionism consists. We, or many of us, have a strong feeling of the possibility of a survival after death ; but whence come these " souls " which are supposed to exist, and to repre- sent us, after the dissolution of the body? We know that the body arises, quite naturally, from the union of two cells derived from the bodies of its parents ; when, how, and why does the soul enter into it ? Bergson has not, as yet, considered the question of immortality, nor has he formulated in any strict manner his conception of God. A consideration of the main principles of his philosophy would seem to lead to an idea of God as a focus imaginarius of life and spirit, if it is permissible to use the Kantian expression in a new connexion. God with Bergson, we feel, can hardly be other than a hypostatisation, a making real or substantial, of his leading thought. 22 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON duration.i Spirit, we think, can never die and therefore must, in a manner, survive its dissociation from matter, but it is difficult to see how on Berg- sonian principles it could retain its personality and individuality. However, the indications he gives us are vague and general, and the above opinions must be taken with reserve. We may well be content to let him develop his philosophy in this direction when, and if, he is willing to do so. ' " Some have wanted to see in it a kind of atheist monism. Mr. Bergson has answered this point himself. What he rejects, and what he is right in rejecting, are the doctrines which confine themselves to personifying the unity of nature or the unity of knowledge in God as motionless first cause. God would really be nothing, since he would do nothing. But he adds : ' The considerations put forward in my Essay on the Immediate Data result in an illustration of the fact of hberty ; those of Matter and Memory lead us, I hope, to put our finger on mental reality ; those of Creative Evolution present creation as a fact : from all this we derive a clear idea of a free and creating, God, pro- ducing matter and life at once, whose creative effort is continued, in a vital direction, by the evolution of species and the construction of human personalities.' How can we help finding in these words, according to the actual expression of the author, the most cate- gorical refutation 'of monism and pantheism in general'?" E. Le Roy, A New Philosophy, p. 224. M. Le Roy is quoting from a letter written by Bergson to P. de Tonquddec. Many critics, it must be confessed, have failed to find in Bergson's writings the categorical refutation of pantheism referred to above. Free will, the existence of spirit, and a continuous creation of new forms are consistent both with pluralism and with theism, but there is no reason why we should tie Bergson down to his definition of God as " a continuity of shooting out." {Creative Evolution, p. 262). He has always shown a desire to simplify the problem with which he is dealing by refusing to anticipate a discussion of questions with which he was not immediately concerned ; and it may be that his treatment of theism, when made, will prove to be as distinct an advance upon the doctrine of Creative Evolu- tion as that was upon the Cartesian dualism of Time and Free INTRODUCTION 23 But apart from these ultimate questions, Bergson has given us, as we have seen, much food for thought in the solutions he offers of the classic puzzles of life and mind ; a veritable feast of thought, indeed, which may well cause an indiges- tion unless we can bring to it the concentration of mind necessary for its proper assimilation. He vindicates science, rescuing it, in part, from the relativity alleged by agnosticism, while he limits the sphere within which it can be said, with any sort of truth, to be in touch with reality. The difficulties of idealism, realism, dualism, materialism, nominal- ism and conceptualism, and of a host of others, seem to vanish at the magic of his touch. Perhaps the most striking result of Bergson's philosophy is that these oppositions need not arise at all. The dilemmas themselves are seen to be artificialities of our own contriving. As a summary of Time and Free Will forms a main feature of this book, it need not detain us here. Bergson tells us in his preface that the first two chapters are intended to lead up to the third. The problem of freedom may have been his chief ' objective at the time, but his doctrine of duration is undoubtedly to be regarded, in the light of sub- i sequent events, as the main result of the Essai, for it contains the germ of all his future thought, and Will. An examination of theism would be of little value, unless it were preceded by a refutation of mechanism. Bergson has been labouring at the roots of the tree of which the theist enjoys the flowers and the fruit. 24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON Time and Free Will is therefore in many respects the most important and original work he has given us. The reader should obtain as clear as possible a view of what Bergson means by duration, and of the capital distinction which he draws between real time, time lived, concrete time, on the one hand, and, on the other, scientific time, time measured, abstract time, for without a proper appreciation of this, the central point and foundation of his main writings, he cannot hope to understand Bergson.^ An interesting coincidence may be pointed out, recalling in a manner the famous parallel instance where Cambridge and Paris were engaged on the same problem, an engagement which resulted in the simultaneous calculation of the existence and position of the planet Neptune by the astronomers Adams and Leverrier. For Dr. James Ward, one of our most distinguished thinkers, had already in his article on Psychology in the Encyclopcsdia Britannica, ^ Mr. H. S. R. Elliot's onslaught on Bergson fails, because, as may be seen from p. 69 of his Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson, he has completely misapprehended Bergson's position. Sir Ray Lankester, the eminent scientist, contributes a preface in which he tells us that Bergson is neither great, nor French, nor a philosopher, and he repeats the humorous com- parison of a metaphysician to " a blind man in a dark room hunting for a black cat which — is not there." That Sir Ray should write such a preface is, indeed, not a little remarkable, but he is so clearly philosophising "from an easy chair" that serious criticism would be out of place. He questions Bergson's science, but seems to speak from hearsay and gives no instances. Bergson does not claim to be a biological expert, and he therefore goes for his facts to the best available authorities. If the facts are wrong and can be shown to be essential to his conclusions, he would be compelled to restate them, but the two suppositions must be first established. INTRODUCTION 25 nth ed., anticipated Bergson's theory of duration or real time. Dr. Ward says ^ that "in 1886, three years before the publication of Prof. Bergson's Donnees, I had written a long paragraph on this topic, containing inter alia the following : — ' Thus . . . there is an element in our concrete time-per- ception which has no place in our abstract conception of time. In time, conceived as physical, there is no trace of intensity ; in time, as psychically experienced, duration is primarily an intensive magnitude.' " There is, of course, no question as to Bergson's originality and independence, and to him will always belong the credit of fully working out a conception which bids fair to revolutionise our philosophical thinking. ' Tke Realm of Ends, p. 306, note. TIME AND FREE WILL Bergson tells us in his preface that the difficulties of the problem of free will are due to a previous confusion of duration with extensity, of succession with simultaneity, of quality with quantity, a con- fusion, in other words, of time and consciousness with space and matter ; the unextended has been illegitimately translated into the extended, and quality into quantity. Towards the end of the book he explains the method he has adopted in order to get rid of these difficulties. As science for the convenience of study separates physical pheno- mena from consciousness, from our way of perceiv- ing or thinking about them, so Bergson proposes to effect a similar separation from the other side and to consider intensity, duration and voluntary determina- tion apart from all that they owe to the intrusion of the sensible world. Intensity in consciousness is a sign or symbol of quantity in space. It arises, Bergson says, from a compromise between pure quality and pure quantity, and he asks why psycho- logy should retain this bastard conception when physics, in order to predict phenomena, has decided to treat as negligible the impressions they make on consciousness. But here an objection presents itself. We shall 16 TIME AND FREE WILL 27 see later the effect of this separation on physical science ; how, for instance, it is compelled to regard motion as a series of motionless states ; how, by eliminating time, it becomes abstract and unreal. No doubt the progress of science has splendidly justified the position which it takes up, but it is one of Bergson's main contentions that science for that very reason can give us only a partial and incomplete view of reality. For its own convenience it has cut up reality into artificial pieces. Will not the same result occur — a partial and therefore a false view — if the separation is made from the psychological side ? I am conscious of the scent of a rose, or I am think- ing of a rose smelt in the past or of roses heard of or written about, but in no case can I separate my consciousness from external things. Consciousness always is of external things. However, for his immediate purpose Bergson's separation is legiti- mate enough. It is necessary to remember the limited nature of the present inquiry, and not to draw hasty conclusions from a contrast made for a special purpose and not intended to be definitive. For it will be noted that he does not deny that we are as a matter of fact conscious of a greater or less intensity, but that he seeks to explain how this consciousness arises. Much of the confusion comes from philosophers following Kant in distinguishing between two kinds of quantity, extensive and intensive, size and degree. As size or magnitude in the external world is never intensive, so intensity in consciousness is never 28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON magnitude; no one has ever explained what they have in common. Psychophysicists naturally take up the admission of philosophers that a sensation can increase, and ask by how much it increases, and proceed to invent means to measure the increase. Bergson maintains in this chapter that psychophysics has no proper foundation ; that the intensity of a psychical state is pure quality ; and that when we attempt to measure it we are, for the most part, measuring its external cause or occasion. If it could be shown that so much consciousness corresponds to so much external stimulus there would be a quantitative relation between the two, and a presumption that psychical states were deter- mined. The object of the present psychological inquiry is to refute this presumption and so to clear the way for Bergson's vindication of freedom. He is not here concerned with the other very difficult questions connected with sensation. In Matter and Memory Bergson holds that the difference between quality or sensation and pure quantity is irreducible, which is indeed the conten- tion of the present chapter, but he goes on to show that our sensations are always more or less exten- sive,i and that the opposition assumed by dualism between quality and quantity is not radical. In Time and Free Will he is frankly dualistic, though the separation is made for the purpose of investiga- tion ; in Matter and Memory he is also dualistic but ^ Cf. James Ward, " Psychology," in Encyclopedia Brttannica, and W. James, The Principles of Psychology. TIME AND FREE WILL 29 explains how the main difficulty of dualism, the interaction of mind and body, may be overcome. In Creative Evolution he appears to advance to ideal- istic (or spiritualistic) monism ; as, for instance, when he says : " We are not the vital current itself; we are this current already loaded with matter, that is, with congealed parts of its own substance which it carries along its course" (p. 252). The language is metaphorical, but in the realm of real being metaphor alone has any meaning. SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER I The Intensity of Conscious States If common sense ^ were asked whether there are differences of quantity between purely internal states, it would unhesitatingly answer Yes. But the ques- tion is less simple and more important than is usually supposed. A larger body occupies more space than a smaller body and a greater space con- tains a smaller space, but can we say that a more intense sensation contains a less intense sensation .? Do we pass through the less intense before feeling the more intense ? A number in a series contains a preceding number and is therefore said to be greater. Can we form a series of this kind with intensities .? It is usually said that there are two kinds of quantity (i) measurable and extensive, (2) intensive but not measurable, although one intensity may be said to be greater or less than another intensity. But what can there be in common between the ex- tended and the unextended ? Intensive magnitude seems to be a contradiction in terms, since magni- ^ Common sense is used in philosophy to denote the opinion of ordinary folk who take the obvious view of things and are not trained to make nice distinctions. Bergson — like the scholastics before him— has, in general, a high opinion of common sense, for it may sometimes instinctively grasp a truth which the more laboured analysis of the intellect tends to obscure. TIME AND FREE WILL 31 tude implies something extended, i.e. divisible. We are apparently led in some way to translate the intensive into the extensive and to compare two intensities by the confused intuition of a relation between two extensities. But the nature of this operation is not so easily determined. The most obvious solution is to define the inten- sity of a state of consciousness by the number and size of the objective, and therefore measurable, causes which have given rise to it. There is, for instance, a relation between sensation of light and candle-power ; but more commonly it is the inten- sity of the effect which leads us to form a hypothesis as to the number and nature of the causes. Our most confident judgments are often made when the subjective aspect of the phenomenon alone strikes us. We may compare two intensities without the least appreciation of their causes. A similar but more subtle hypothesis is that, e.g. a louder sound is referred to a greater vibration, or that every state of consciousness corresponds to a certain disturbance of the molecules of the brain. The last hypothesis fails because we are conscious of the sensation and not of the molecular move- ment. The question remains — Why do we associate intensity with quantity or size .? The problem is complicated by the fact that the same name is applied to intensities of very different kinds. Effort and sensation suggest muscular or physical condi- tions, but no extensive element seems to be involved in profound joy or sorrow. In the latter case inten- 32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON sity is reducible to a quality affecting a greater or less mass of psychic states. As an obscure desire develops into a deep emotion, it gradually permeates a greater number of psychical elements. What was before important to us is now regarded with indiffer- ence. Something similar happens in dreams where quite ordinary doings become tinged with romance. When an object dominates us, its image has affected a thousand feelings or memories. Our intellect, however, dislikes this mode of expression and pre- fers clear-cut distinctions such as we find in space. Hence we say that the emotion has grown larger, although it has no space-filling magnitude. The change is really a change of quality. The idea of the future, pregnant with infinite possibilities, is more to us than the future itself, when all but the most desired have been necessarily given up. Thus hope has more charm than posses- sion, expectation than realisation. Joy at its lowest level seems to be an orientation of our states of consciousness towards the future. In the next place, our ideas and sensations follow more rapidly ; our movements require less effort. Finally, extreme joy becomes a sort of ecstasy. As the form of the emotion changes it involves a greater or less number of our psychic states. Thus we can tell whether our joy colours the whole of our impressions during the day, or whether some escape it, and we are led to think that the successive joys are one and the same sentiment increasing in magnitude. The aesthetic sentiments offer more striking TIME AND FREE WILL 33 examples of this progressive intervention of new elements, which really only modify the nature of the emotion, although they appear to increase its magnitude. Spencer wrongly reduces grace to economy of effort, for that in itself is insufficient to explain its irresistible attractiveness. What we essentially find in anything we call very graceful is, besides ease and lightness, a sympathetic bond between it and ourselves. There is a qualitative progress which we interpret as a change in magni- tude owing to the difficulty of expressing the subtleties of psychological analysis in language. In studying the beautiful it is better to begin with examples produced by conscious effort, passing by insensible gradations from art to nature. We then find that the object of art is to put to sleep the active or rather resistant forces of our nature until we realise the idea suggested and sympathise with the feeling expressed. The procedure is a form of hypnotism, refined and in a sense spiritu- alised. So music may suspend our normal activities and by its own suggestion fill us with extreme emotion. The rhythm of poetry lulls our minds and compels us, as in a dream, to think and see with the poet. The pale immobility of the marble controls us by the eternity we see in the feelings it expresses. Architecture, too, has this immobility and a rhythm of its own. Its symmetry and repe- tition make us, as we say, forget ourselves, and an idea even lightly indicated may then suffice to fill our minds. Art aims not so much at expressing c 34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON feelings as at impressing them on us. Nature, like art, proceeds by suggestion but lacks rhythm, and uses in place of it the sympathy which exists between us and itself. — Thus all our feelings have aesthetic character, provided that they are suggested and not caused. Esthetic emotion appears to us to have degrees of intensity and elevation, but it really pro- gresses by distinct phases, like a state of hypnosis, the phases corresponding less to variations of degree than to differences of state or nature. Besides degrees of intensity, we distinguish degrees of depth or elevation. Inferior art may give only sensations, but most emotions are instinct with innumerable sensations, feelings or ideas, and each is thus a state unique and indefinable and only to be embraced in its totality by reliving the life of the experient. It is the artist's task to remove the barriers which time and space interpose between his consciousness and ours. Hence the successive intensities of aesthetic feeling correspond to changes of state in our- selves. Pity consists at first in putting ourselves mentally in the place of others, but if it were nothing more it would but rouse repugnance. A new element is soon added, the need of aiding and relieving. A certain self-interest may enter into the lower forms of compassion, but true pity desires to share suffer- ing, to avoid the appearance of being an accomplice in the injustice of nature. This need for self- humiliation is not without a charm of its own, for it flatters our self-esteem. Thus pity shows a TIME AND FREE WILL 35 qualitative progress from repugnance to fear, from fear to sympathy, and from sympathy to humility. Such psychic states are rarely unaccompanied by physical symptoms, which probably count for some- thing in our estimate of intensities. A sensation properly so-called is undoubtedly related to an ex- ternal cause, although its intensity cannot be defined by the magnitude of the cause. Muscular effort more than any other phenomenon seems to suggest quantity or at least magnitude, and the illusion of common sense in this regard is supported by some scientific writers, such as Bain and Wundt. The latter says that a paralytic has a very clear sensation of the force which he uses in the effort to raise his leg, although it remains inert. This view has been well criticised by William James. When a paralytic strives to raise a useless limb, he cannot execute that movement ; but, whether he wills it or not, he executes another. If there is no move- ment at all, there is no sensation of effort. James goes on to say that the feeling of effort is centri- petal and not centrifugal. Our concern is rather to discover in what exactly our perception of its intensity consists, and we maintain that the more a given effort seems to increase, the greater is the number of muscles which contract in sympathy with it, and that the apparent consciousness of a greater intensity of effort at a given point is really the perception of a larger surface of the body becoming involved in the operation. If you try to clench your fist more and more, you will probably localise 36 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON the sensation of effort entirely in the hand and fail to notice all the other muscles which in turn come into play. Hence you are led to assign a magnitude to the psychical force although it has no extensity. This and many similar instances bring us to the conclusion that "our consciousness of an increase of muscular effort is reducible to the twofold per- ception of a greater number of peripheral sensations, and of a qualitative change occurring in some of them" (p. 26). In both superficial efforts and profound emotions there are qualitative progress and increasing com- plexity, confusedly apprehended. But consciousness, used to thinking in terms of space, gives the feeling a single name and localises the effort at a particular point ; it then recognises a local effort unchanging in character but increasing in intensity, and a feeling which grows without changing its nature. Bergson now goes on to show that the same definition applies to states intermediate between the two. Intellectual effort or attention is not purely physi- ological. The movements which accompany it are not the cause or the result of the phenomenon, but form part of it, as Ribot has shown. There always enters into voluntary attention a purely psychical factor, if it be only the exclusion by the will of all ideas but the main one. But, after making this exclusion, we think we are still con- scious of a growing mental tension, an increasing immaterial effort. This impression is found on analysis to be the feeling of a muscular contrac- TIME AND FREE WILL 37 tion spreading over a wider surface or changing in nature. The effort of emotional tension does not differ essentially from that of attention. Keen desire, unrestrained anger, passionate love, violent hate may each be reduced to a system of muscular con- tractions co-ordinated by an idea. The intensity of violent emotions may then be simply the mus- cular tension which accompanies them. Darwin has given a remarkable description of the physiological symptoms of rage, but Bergson does not go so far as to say, with William James, that this emotion is reducible to the sum of the organic sensations. There will be always present a psychical element which gives the movements their common direction, but the increasing intensity of the state itself is, he maintains, nothing but the more and more pro- found engagement of the organism. It is true that in restrained anger consciousness seeks to hide the organic disturbance, but if this is altogether eliminated anger becomes a mere idea, or, if you prefer to call it so, an emotion without any intensity. Herbert Spencer says that intense fear expresses itself in cries, struggling, palpitations, &c. Bergson goes further and maintains that these movements form part of the fright itself; it is by means of them that fright becomes an emotion capable of passing through different degrees of intensity. Suppress them altogether and fright is merely the intellectual representation of a danger to be avoided. There is, then, no essential difference as regards 38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON intensity between the deep feelings already dis- cussed and the violent emotions. When we say that they gain in violence we mean that peripheral sensations take the place of internal states. The intensity always consists in the multiplicity of simple states which consciousness dimly discerns in them. Passing to sensations properly so called, Bergson notes that the intensity of these apparently simple states varies with the external cause of which they are said to be the conscious equivalent. How can we explain the intrusion of quantity into an effect which has no extensity and is moreover indivisible .'' Sensations are classed as affective or representative, although the division is no hard and fast one. There is nothing in common, he repeats, between superposable magnitudes like numbers of vibrations and sensations which do not occupy space. If a more intense sensation appears to contain a less intense, if, like the organic disturbance itself, it suggests magnitude, it probably does so because it preserves something of the physical disturbance to which it corresponds. It can preserve nothing of this if it is merely the translation in consciousness of a movement of molecules, for we have no con- sciousness of the molecular movement. It may be that pleasure and pain, instead of expressing only what is going on in the organism, as is ordinarily supposed, indicate also what is about to take place there. Why should nature, so pro- foundly utilitarian, confine her intimations to the past or present, which no longer depend on us.? TIME AND FREE WILL 39 We pass by insensible degrees from automatic to free movements, the latter having this peculiarity that they intercalate an affective sensation between the external action and the reaction willed. In many organised beings an external stimulus is followed by the appropriate reaction without con- sciousness being concerned at all. But when con- sciousness is concerned, it seems probable that pleasure and pain are produced in order to authorise resistance to the motor reaction which would other- wise follow ; either the sensation has no raison d'etre or it is a beginning of freedom. If we are to resist, nature must give us some sign of the reaction which is to follow ; and what sign could she give except a sketching out {esquisse) and, as it were, prefiguring of the coming automatic movements in the very midst (i««) of the sensation which is being felt ? ^ Of the molecular disturbance nothing remains in consciousness except the sensation into which it has been translated, but the automatic movements which tend to follow a certain stimulus are likely to be present in consciousness as movements ; otherwise the sensation has no raison d'etre. The intensity of pleasure and pain, then, may be the consciousness of involuntary movements about to take place, which ^ Hagen (quoted by Kirchner) designates pain as the defence of nature against a superior hostile element and therelore as a salutary arrangement for making the soul attentive to the dangers threatening it. Pain is called by Burdach " the warder of hfe." This view combines the physiological and teleological explanations of pain and is not unlike Bergson's. The latter develops in Matter and Memory the theory given in this chapter. 40 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON would, in fact, take place if we were automata and if consciousness did not intervene to prevent them. If this theory is sound, we should estimate the intensity of a pain by the larger or smaller extent of the organism affected, by the number and extent of the parts of the body which our consciousness regards as being involved. Richet gives a remark- able description of disgust, which leads to the same conclusion. Compare also Darwin's picture of pain increasing gradually in severity. An analysis of the idea of extreme pain shows that it is insupportable, i.e. that it urges the organism to try to escape it in a number of different ways. A nerve may transmit a pain which is independent of all automatic reaction ; a greater or less stimulus may affect this nerve accordingly ; but consciousness would not interpret these differences of sensation as differences of quan- tity unless they were attended by the more or less extensive reactions which usually accompany them. Without these subsequent reactions, the intensity of the pain would be a quality and not a magnitude. We have hardly any other means of comparing several pleasures. What is a greater pleasure if it is not the pleasure we choose ? In the presence of two pleasures, the body inclines towards one of them. This inclination consists in a number of sligiit movements in the organs interested and even in the rest of the body. The action would be spontaneous if we did not arrest it.-^ " It rests ^ The greater pleasure. is the pleasure finally chosen. Our choice or preference is a certain disposition of our organs which TIME AND FREE WILL 41 with us to check it, but the attraction of the pleasure is nothing but this movement that is begun, and the very keenness of the pleasure, while we enjoy it, is merely the inertia of the organism, which is immersed in it and rejects every other sensation. Without this vis inertia of which we be- come conscious by the very resistance which we offer to anything that might distract us, pleasure would be a state, but no longer a magnitude. In the moral as in the physical world, attraction serves to define movement rather than to produce it" (p. 38). Many representative sensations have an affective character and so provoke a reaction in us which we take into account in estimating their intensity. A great increase of light or a loud noise comes to us as a shock. Among flavours more or less bitter it is difficult to distinguish differences other than those of quality ; they are like shades of the same colour. We interpret them as differences in quantity on account of the pleasure or disgust with which they affect us. Further, the external cause of even a purely representative sensation may cause move- ments in us by which we measure it. To hear a makes our " body '' incline towards one of two pleasures presented to our mind. The action would be automatic if " we " did not check it. The argument seems to imply that the body, if left to itself, might prefer less pleasure to more pleasure. A pine-apple may set our mouth watering, but, mindful of a former indigestion, we elect for the greater pleasure of abstinence. But there is a large class of pleasures in which our organs or body are not in- terested and where there would be no literal inclination towards one of them. In what would our choice or preference consist in those cases ? 42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON distant sound, or to distinguish a feeble light, we have to strain our senses. The light appears to be feeble just because it has to be reinforced by our own efforts. When a gun is fired close at hand, we recognise the intensity of the sensation by the irresistible reflex movements provoked in us. Ch. Fere has shown that every sensation is accompanied by an increase in muscular force measurable by the dynamometer. We are, however, barely conscious of the increase, and when we consider the precision with which we distinguish sounds, colours, &c., we see that a new and easily definable element must come into play. An external cause of a sensation is extensive and therefore measurable. Our whole experience shows us a certain shade of sensation answering to a certain amount of stimulus ; we associate the idea of a definite quantity in the cause with a definite quality in the effect, and finally we put the quantity of the cause into the quality of the effect. Thus the intensity of the sensation becomes a magnitude. Apart from the shock or vibration it may cause to the organism, a sound is pure quality, though we are led by our experience to interpret this quality in terms of quantity. When we speak of the in- tensity of a sound of medium force as a magnitude, we are thinking of the effort we should ourselves have to make to produce the same effect on our ears. Even differences in pitch are not quantitative, although we are led to think them so from what we know of the vibrations to which they correspond. TIME AND FREE WILL 43 from their position in musical notation, and from the bodily effort required to produce them. Recent experiments go to prove that in sensations of heat and cold there is a distinction of nature rather than of degree. A more intense heat is really a different heat. Anyone can experiment for himself, provided that he clears his mind of any knowledge of causes and gives his whole attention to the sensation. When the psychophysicist raises a heavier weight, he tells us that he feels an increase of sensation. Consider whether this should not rather be called a sensation of increase. There lies the whole point at issue, for in the first case the sensation, like its external cause, would be a quantity, and in the second a quality representative of the magnitude of its cause. If you lift what appears to be a very heavy weight but is really quite a light one, you expect to bring into play a number of muscles which are not in fact required, and the effect is almost ludicrous. It is by the number and nature of these sympathetic efforts that we measure the sensation of weight ; the sensation would be pure quality if we did not ourselves introduce the idea of magnitude. We are similarly led by our previous knowledge of the cause of the sensation to attribute quantity to the intensity of light. Physi- cists are aware that colours change as they receive more or less light, but ordinary folk hardly notice the fact, unless forewarned. They are convinced that each object has its own particular colour, and, instead of saying that they see the colour changing. 44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON assert that their own sensation of luminous intensity varies. Consciousness receives a qualitative im- pression to which our understanding once again gives a quantitative interpretation. Physics speaks of degrees of luminous intensity as real quantities ; psychophysics goes further, and maintains that the eye itself measures intensities of light. Interesting experiments have been made in this direction by Delboeuf and others. Bergson does not contest the results, but says that everything depends on their interpretation. A candle placed at a certain distance from a sheet of paper lights it in a certain way ; if the distance is doubled, four candles are required to give the same sensation. You conclude that if you had doubled the distance with- out increasing the number of candles, the illumina- tion would have been one-fourth as . bright. This is the physical, not the psychological, effect ; you have not compared two sensations but have used one sensation to compare different lights at different distances. The physicist uses the sensation as an algebraical symbol, which aids the solution but dis- appears from the result. ^ But with the psychophysicist it is quite otherwise ; he studies the sensation itself and claims to measure it. Delboeuf, for instance, exhibits two shades of a colour (which we will call A and B) and by an ingenious apparatus varies a third shade C until ' One candle at one foot=j/y four candles at two feet=j/y there fore one at one foot = four at two feet; and the physicist can afford to neglect y altogether. TIME AND FREE WILL 45 an observer can tell him that the shade B lies equally distant between A and C ; or in other words that the contrast AB = the contrast EC; and he main- tains that from similar experiments a scale can be constructed by which we might pass from each sensation to the next by equal sensible contrasts ; in this way our sensations would measure one another. If, Bergson says, the contrast AB is really equal to the contrast BC, formed of different ele- ments ; if two sensations can be equal without being identical, then psychophysics is on a sure founda- tion. But this equality is the point he questions. Is it more than metaphorical ? When we say that one grey tint is equidistant between two other grey tints, we are affirming some- thing which we might equally well affirm of colours, as, for instance, that orange is at an equal distance between green and red. But we know from ex- perience that differences in grey tints correspond to differences in amount of light, and we proceed to erect changes in quality into variations in magni- tude — a thing we should not dream of doing with orange, green, and red. In the counting of inter- mediate shades between two given shades of grey our imagination is aided by our memory. The estimate is always rough and varies with individuals. When the shades differ considerably the difficulty is much greater, and Delbceuf obtained very different results from different observers and, indeed, from a series of observations by the same observer. But quite apart from this, in order to establish the 46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON equality of the contrasts, it would be necessary to prove that two successive contrasts are equal quan- tities, and we only know that they are successive. In fact Delboeuf's contention assumes a very important postulate — that the differences between the shades successively obtained, each of which represents the smallest perceptible increase of physical stimulation, are equal quantities ; and further, that a particular sensation is equal to the sum of the differences which separate the previous sensations, starting from no sensation at all.^ This is precisely the postulate of Fechner, who followed Weber's law that, given a certain stimulus causing a certain sensation, " the amount by which the stimulus must be increased for consciousness to become aware of any change bears a fixed relation to the original stimulus" (p. 60). The law has been much modified by Fechner's disciples, but Bergson makes no difficulty in admitting that some such relation exists, while denying that we can there- fore proceed to equate "quantity of sensation " with the corresponding stimulus. Two different sensa- tions cannot be called equal, unless some identity remains after their qualitative difference has been eliminated ; but what could then be left, since this qualitative difference is all that we perceive ? Fechner tries to get over the difficulty. Sensation admittedly changes in jumps {par sauts brusques) while the increase in the stimulus is continuous, ' Or, in other words, that a sensation is an aggregate of smallest perceptible differences. TIME AND FREE WILL 47 and he calls these jumps minima because each corre- sponds to the smallest perceptible increase in the stimulus. Eliminate the specific quality of the differences, and a common property remains, namely that they are minima. Being minima, they are all equal and can be added together. So, treating the difference between two sensations as a quantity, he regards a particular sensation as an aggregate made up of minima. But this reasoning is based on the postulate already mentioned. Bergson contests the postulate. I feel a sensa- tion S and, as the stimulus continuously increases, I feel after a time the sensation S'. One sensation has taken the place of another, but if the passage had been comparable to an arithmetical difference, I should have been conscious of an interval between the two states and of reaching S' by adding some- thing to S. By giving the transition a name, you make it first a reality and then a quantity. Now the only realities are S and S'. If they were num- bers, their difference would be a reality ; but if they are simple psychic states, what is the interval which separates them ^ And what is the transition from the first to the second but an act of thought, "which, arbitrarily and for the sake of the argu- ment, assimilates a succession of two states to a differentiation of two magnitudes .-' " It is the reduction of psychic states to symbols which introduces the idea of an arithmetical difference.^ 1 Mr. A. D. Lindsay writes, ''As Kant says, the apprehension of the sensation is immediate, and . . . its degree is not arrived at 48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON " All psychophysics is condemned by its origin to revolve in a vicious circle, for the theoretical postu- late on which it rests condemns it to experimental verification, and it cannot be experimentally verified unless its postulate is first granted. The fact is that there is no point of contact between the unextended and the extended, between quality and quantity. We can interpret the one by the other, set up the one as the equivalent of the other ; but sooner or later, at the beginning or at the end, we shall have to recognise the conventional character of this assimilation " (p. 70). Psychophysics is after all only a development of a conception familiar to common sense. It is our inveterate habit to interpret subjective states by their external causes. Physics is not concerned with subjective states and yet continually confuses the two, and so adds to the illusion of common sense. Psychophysics then attempts to measure both, and is encouraged by those philosophers who talk of intensive magnitudes while denying that psychic- states can be measured. If it is once admitted that by counting the intermediate stages. This is the important point. . . . There are no parts, there are only the several sensations perceived to be different. The difference can only be known when the sensations have been experienced and placed in a certain series, and neither the series nor any one of the sensations can be regarded as constituted by the differences. The perception of qualitative difference is ultimate. Any facts about the continuous change of the stimuli necessary to produce such different sensa- tions have nothing whatever to do with the question " ( The Philo- sophy of Bergson, p. 69). TIME AND FREE WILL 49 a thing has size, that it can grow or diminish, it is natural to ask by how much it grows or diminishes ; and, even if direct measurement is impossible, it by no means follows that science might not discover a suitable method. Either, then, sensation is pure quality, or, if a magnitude, measurable. We conclude that the notion of intensity is (i) in representative states of consciousness an acquired perception of extensive magnitude introduced from the outside, and (2) in affective states a confused perception of the larger or smaller number of simple psychical phenomena involved in the fundamental state ; although no sharp division of the two is possible. " The idea of intensity is thus situated at the junction of two streams, one of which brings us the idea of extensive magnitude from without, while the other brings us from within, in fact from the very depths of consciousness, the image of an inner multiplicity. Now, the point is to determine in what the latter image consists, whether it is the same as that of number, or whether it is quite different from it. In the following chapter we shall no longer consider states of consciousness in isolation from one another, but in their concrete multiplicity, in so far as they unfold themselves in pure duration. And, in the same way as we have asked what would be the intensity of a representa- tive sensation if we did not introduce into it the idea of its cause, we shall now have to inquire D 50 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON what the multiplicity of our inner states becomes, what form duration assumes, when the space in which it unfolds is eliminated. This second question is even more important than the first " (P- 73)- CHAPTER II In the preceding chapter Bergson has concluded that conscious states were in themselves -pure quality; in the present one he inquires into these states as they combine or coalesce to form our conscious life. They then appear to form a multiplicity, although we cannot really say of our conscious life whether at a particular moment it is one or many. Multi- plicity implies number which implies a homogeneous medium, space, in which numbers can be set side by side and added together. All counting involves time, but the counting which culminates in a sum involves space. Our conscious states are clearly not in space, and there must therefore be two kinds of multiplicity (i) the discrete or numerical multi- plicity of things in space (2) the qualitative multi- plicity of conscious states which we can count only by means of a symbolical representation in space. Bergson is thus led to a discussion of homogeneous time and space, resulting in the conclusion that time as a homogeneous medium is reducible to space, and that time as pure duration is wholly qualitative and can be measured only by a symbolical representation in space. A discussion of motion and velocity leads to a similar conclusion. Just as there are two forms of multiplicity, so there are two forms of duration 52 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON and of conscious life. The errors of associationism come from the failure to recognise this. We are thus brought to consider the idea of duration, which is the central point of this book and indeed of Bergson's whole philosophy. As the very im- portant questions raised in this chapter are dis- cussed separately, it is not necessary to dwell upon them here.^ ' See below, pp. 95-136. SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER II The Multiplicity of Conscious States The Idea of Duration If the confusion of quality with quantity were limited to isolated facts of consciousness, it would create obscurities, as we have seen, rather than prob- lems ; but when it invades the series of our psychic states and introduces space into our conception of duration, it corrupts at their very source our ideas of external and internal change, of motion and freedom. Hence the sophisms of the Eleatic school ; hence the problem of free will. The idea of number implies a simple intuition of a multiplicity of absolutely similar parts or units. In counting fifty sheep we neglect their individual differences and distinguish them by the position they occupy in space. Let us suppose that the sheep are not there and that the counting is purely mental. We must then either imagine the sheep side by side in an ideal space, or call up the image of a single sheep fifty times. In the latter case the series might be supposed to lie in duration rather than in space ; but this is not so. I have to retain the successive images and to place them alongside each new unit as I form it in my mind. 54 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON and this juxtaposition can take place only in space. All counting of material objects implies a simul- taneous representation which implies space. But does the same intuition of space accompany the idea of abstract number ? When we count up to 50, what we have counted are moments of time rather than points in space, but that is not the whole of the matter. We can apprehend in time a succession of numbers but not an addition, i.e. a succession which culminates in a sum. A sum implies that each term of the series remains as we pass to the next, and waits, so to speak, until we add it to the others. This waiting we localise in space. A clear idea of number in- volves a visual image in space, though we may not always consciously picture it. Every number is a collection of units and also itself a unit, a synthesis of units. The unit, which is a synthesis of units, is a multiplicity simultane- ously apprehended, but the units of which it is composed appear at first sight to be units pure and simple, irreducible and indivisible. It is true that each of these units regarded alone may be considered indivisible, since I am assumed to be thinking of nothing else ; but as soon as I leave it to pass to the next, I make it objective, a thing, and therefore a multipHcity. Arithmetical units are provisional units capable of indefinite division, and made up of as many parts as we care to imagine. This divisi- bility implies that the unit is an extended object, one in intuition but multiple in space. TIME AND FREE WILL 55 The number 3 may be made up of three units of one, or of six units of a half, or of twelve units of a quarter. Each of these elements is provision- ally indivisible and discontinuous and we jump from one to the other, for it is necessary, in order to obtain a number, to fix our attention in turn upon each of the units of which it is compounded. The unit is irreducible while we are thinking it and number is discontinuous while we are forming it ; once formed it becomes objective and therefore infinitely divisible. Objectivity is the actual and not merely the virtual perception of subdivisions in the undivided. The subjective element in the idea of number is the indivisible process by which the mind concentrates attention in turn on the different parts of a given space ; these isolated parts remain to be added to others, and when the addition has been made, they are divisible in any way and are therefore parts of space. Space is the material with which the mind constructs number, the place where the mind puts it. This is the conclusion already reached when we found that all addition implies a multiplicity of parts simultaneously appre- hended. There is in both cases juxtaposition in space. There are, then, two very different kinds of multiplicity ; that of material objects such as we can see or touch, which we can count immediately within the very medium in which they come under our observation ; and the multiplicity of states of consciousness which cannot be separated or counted 56 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON without the help of some symbolical representation, in which a necessary element is space. Will not this symbolical representation affect to some extent our normal perception ? Let us recall what we have already said about the intensity of certain psychic states. Representative sensation is in itself pure quality ; but, seen through the medium of extensity, this quality becomes in a certain sense quantity, and is called intensity. So the projection of our psychic states into space in order to form a discrete multiplicity gives them a new form. We usually think of time as a homogeneous medium in which our conscious states are ranged and placed together as in space, but such time is only a sign or symbol, absolutely distinct from real duration. The time we use for distinguishing and counting is nothing but space. Duration must be something different. To elucidate this, we must consider the ideas of space and time in their mutual relations. We need not labour the question of the absolute reality of space. What is certain is that our senses perceive the qualities of bodies and space along with them, and we have to decide whether (i) space, or extensity, is an aspect or quality of these physical qualities, or whether (2) these qualities are essenti- ally unextended, space coming in as a later addition but being self-sufficient and existing without them. The first hypothesis reduces space to an abstraction, or rather an extract, the element belonging to certain sensations in common. In the second case, space would be a reality as solid as the sensations them- TIME AND FREE WILL 57 selves, although of a different order. Thus for Kant extensity is not an abstraction ; he gives space an existence apart from its content, and his concep- tion not only bears some resemblance to that of common sense but has forced itself, sometimes with- out their knowledge, on philosophers of all schools. Some empiricists regard space as resulting from the co-existence or synthesis of certain sensations which are themselves unextended and qualitative. But inextensive sensations will remain inextensive sensa- tions, if nothing be added to them. For their co-existence to give rise to space, there must be an act of the mind which takes them in all at the same time and sets them in juxtaposition : this unique act is very like what Kant calls an a priori form of the sensibility. This act consists essentially in the conception of an empty homogeneous medium. " For it is scarcely possible to give any other definition of space : space is what enables us to distinguish a number of identical and simultaneous sensations from one another ; it is thus a principle of differen- tiation other than that of qualitative differentiation, and consequently it is a reality with no quality " (p. 95). If it is urged that simultaneous sensations are never identical, we agree ; for if two points in a homogeneous surface produced the same impression, there would be no reason for our putting one to the right rather than to the left. Since we afterwards interpret this difference of quality as a difference of situation, it follows that we must have a clear idea 58 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON of a homogeneous medium, i.e. of a simultaneity of terms which, although identical in quality, are yet distinct from one another. What is given as qualitative heterogeneity is perceived by the activity of the mind as extensive homogeneity, but there must, no doubt, be within the qualities themselves some reason why each occupies a definite position in space. Bergson proceeds to draw a distinction between per- ception of extensity and conception of space ; each is implied in the other, but the latter becomes clearer as intelligence increases. He illustrates this by the remarkable sense of direction in animals, which sug- gests that for them space is not so homogeneous as for us. There is no reason why two concrete directions should not be as immediately perceived as two colours, "but the conception of an empty homogeneous medium is something far more extra- ordinary, being a kind of reaction against that heterogeneity which is the very ground of our experience." The faculty of conceiving a space without quality is not the faculty of abstraction, for that already implies the intuition of a homogeneous medium. "What we must say is that we have to do with two different kinds of reality, the one heterogeneous, that of sensible qualities, the other homogeneous, namely space. This latter, clearly conceived by the human intellect, enables us to use clean-cut distinctions, to count, to abstract, and perhaps also to speak " (p. 97). If space is the homogeneous, then any homogene- ous and unbounded medium will be space, for, homo- TIME AND FREE WILL 59 geneity here consisting in the absence of quality, it is hard to see how two forms of the homogeneous could be distinguished from one another. Yet time, an unbounded and homogeneous medium, is usually dis- tinguished from space ; so that the homogeneous is supposed to take a double form according as it is filled with co-existence or succession. But when we make time a homogeneous medium in which conscious states unfold themselves, we take it to be given all at once, and therefore as lacking duration. Hence time as a homogeneous medium is a spurious concept ; it is time unconsciously spatialised. Nor can we admit two forms of the homogeneous without asking whether one is not reducible to the other, and a priori we can say that the idea of space is the funda- mental one. Those philosophers who have main- tained the contrary have failed to see that this bastard conception of time is a mere phantom of space haunting the reflective consciousness. There are two possible conceptions of time, the one pure, the other infected by the idea of space. As we listen to a melody without breaking it up into its component notes, so in pure duration we have a succession of states of consciousness without distinguishing between them, a mutual interpene- tration, an intimate interconnection and organisation of elements, none of which is isolated except by abstract thought, a duration which is one and yet changing. But when we unwittingly introduce the idea of space, we set our states of consciousness side by side and perceive them no longer successively but 6o THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON simultaneously; we project time into space, express duration by extensity, and succession becomes a continuous line the parts of which touch one another without interpenetration. An order of succession implies distinction and comparison, and the succession becomes a juxtaposition, a simultan- eity and therefore spatial. Those who attempt to deduce space from time make use of this spatialised concept of duration and assume the space they are seeking to prove. Pure duration on the other hand might be defined as a succession of qualitative changes, which mingle and interpenetrate, which have no precise boundaries and no tendency to separate from one another, no kinship with number ; it is, then, pure heterogeneity. As soon as we attribute the least homogeneity to duration, we surreptitiously introduce space. I say that a minute has elapsed, meaning that the pendulum of a clock has moved sixty times. Let us see what really happens: (i) If I picture these sixty oscillations to myself in one mental act, I exclude by hypothesis any idea of a succession. (2) If I look at them successively, just as they are produced, I have to think of each oscillation without reference to the preceding one, which no longer exists in space ; I am then always in the present. There is neither succession nor duration. (3) Finally, if I join the preceding oscillation to the present one, there are two possibilities, (a) 1 may merely place them side by side, and we then return to the first hypothesis ; or (/>) I shall perceive the one TIME AND FREE WILL 6i penetrating the other and the two combining like the notes of a melody to form a qualitative multi- plicity. In this way I gain the idea of duration, but I have given up that of a homogeneous medium or a measurable quantity. So, too, when the regular oscillations of a pendulum induce sleep, the cause is not the last sound, nor any particular group of sounds, but the rhythmical organisation of the whole. Each increase of stimulus combines with the preceding to form, as it were, a musical phrase. If we assert that it is always the same sensation, we are thinking not of the sensation but of its objective cause in space. Pure duration is not a quantity, and, as soon as we try to measure it, we replace it by space. It is extremely difficult for us to apprehend pure duration, because the external world has, it seems, a duration like our own, and time regarded from this point of view appears to be homogeneous and measurable. Further, time enters into the formulae of mechanics, physics and astronomy. If duration cannot be measured, what is it that the oscillation of a pendulum does actually measure } Granted that inner duration, perceived by consciousness, is nothing but the melting of conscious states into one another and the gradual growth of the ego, but, it may be urged, the time of astronomers, the time measured by clocks, must be a measurable and therefore homo- geneous quantity. A close examination will dispel this last illusion. When I watch the strokes of a pendulum, I am not measuring duration but merely counting simul- 62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON taneities. " Outside of me, in space, there is never more than a single position of the hand and the pendulum, for nothing is left of the past positions. Within myself a process of organisation or inter- penetration of conscious states is going on, which constitutes true duration. . . . Thus, within our ego, there is succession without mutual externality ; outside the ego, in pure space, mutual externality without succession ; mutual externality, since the present oscillation is radically distinct from the previous oscillation, which no longer exists ; but no succession, since succession exists solely for a con- scious spectator who keeps the past in mind and sets the two oscillations or their symbols side by side in an auxiliary space. . . . There is a real space, with- out duration, in which phenomena appear and dis- appear simultaneously with our states of conscious- ness. There is a real duration, the heterogeneous moments of which permeate one another ; each moment, however, can be brought into relation with a state of the external world which is contempora- neous with it, and can be separated from the other moments in consequence of this very process. The comparison of these two realities gives rise to a symbolical representation of duration, derived from space " (p. io8). A moving body occupies successive positions in space, but the process by which it passes from one to another involves duration and is real only for a conscious spectator. Thus motion, as a passage, is a mental synthesis and therefore lacks extensity. TIME AND FREE WILL 63 There are two elements in motion, the space traversed and the act by which we traverse it ; the first (successive positions) is a homogeneous quantity, the second (mental synthesis) is a quality or intensity, with no reality except for consciousness. Bergson attributes the sophisms of the Eleatic school to a confusion of the two. The interval between two points is infinitely divisible, and if motion consisted of parts like those of the interval, the interval would never be crossed. But each step of Achilles is a simple indivisible act ; after a certain number of these acts Achilles will have passed the tortoise. As space can be divided in any manner, the Eleatics thought they were entitled to reconstruct the whole movement of Achilles, not with his own steps, but with tortoise-steps, thus really comparing two tortoises which agree (se condamnent) to make the same kind of steps so as never to meet. " Why does Achilles outstrip the tortoise .? Because each of Achilles' steps and each of the tortoise's steps are indivisible acts in so far as they are movements, and are different magnitudes in so far as they are space : so that addition will soon give a greater length for the space traversed by Achilles than is obtained by adding together the space traversed by the tortoise and the handicap with which it started" (p. 113). So Zeno confused space and motion. Much philo- sophical ingenuity has been expended over this classic puzzle, but there is no need to imagine a limit to the divisibility of concrete space, when we can distinguish between the simultaneous positions 64 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON of two moving bodies, which are in space, and their movements, which are not. Mathematics can calcu- late the simultaneous positions of Achilles and the tortoise at a given moment, or the point at which they will meet, this being also a simultaneity, but it cannot make movement out of any number of immobilities, nor time out of space. Just as in duration there is nothing homogeneous except that which lacks duration, namely space ; so in motion there is nothing homogeneous except the traversed space, which is motionless. For this reason science cannot deal with time and motion except by omitting their essential element. Writers on mechanics are careful to say that they do not define duration itself but only the equality of two durations. We can mark the time when motion begins (i.e. the simultaneity of an external change with one of our psychic states) and the time when it ends (a similar simultaneity) and we can measure the space traversed. Duration does not enter into our calculations at all. If all the movements of the universe went twice as fast, we should not need to alter our formulae. An analysis of velocity leads to similar conclusions, which might indeed have been foreseen from the simple facts that mechanics necessarily deals with equations and that algebraical equations always express something already done, whereas the essence of duration and motion is something that is unceas- ingly being done. We conclude, then, that space alone is homo- TIME AND FREE WILL 65 geneous, that objects in space form a discrete multi- plicity, and that every discrete multiplicity is arrived at by a process of unrolling in space. There is in space neither duration nor even succession ; each of the so-called successive states of the external world exists by itself, and their multiplicity has no reality except for a consciousness which can retain them and set them side by side. The space employed for this purpose is just that which is called homogeneous time. We further conclude that the multiplicity of conscious states has nothing in common with the discrete multiplicity which goes to form a number. Consciousness may distinguish without counting, and we have then multiplicity without quantity ; or it may be concerned with a multiplicity of terms which are counted or are conceived as countable, and then it develops them in space. A melody is a qualitative multiplicity as long as we are conscious of it purely as melody, but when we begin to count or separate the notes it becomes a discrete multi- plicity. It is difficult to express the distinction in ordinary language. When we talk of several states of consciousness blending, the word " several " has already severed the states, isolated them and spatialised them. Thus a qualitative multiplicity, though clear enough for pure reflective thought, cannot be translated into ordinary language. Even a discrete multiplicity cannot be thought without admitting the idea of a qualitative multiplicity, for in adding units there is always in the mind a connecting of them with one another. We regard 66 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON the units as identical, i.e. place them side by side in a homogeneous medium, but the addition of them is impossible without a certain mutual interpene- tration and a progress in some degree qualitative. It is then clear that without some symbolical repre- sentation time would never appear to us as a homo- geneous medium in which the terms of a succession can be separated from one another. In motion we have a series of identical terms, since the moving body is always the same ; but the synthesis formed by con- sciousness between the present position and what our memory calls the previous positions makes these images interpenetrate, complete and continue one another. Hence it is by the aid of motion in particular that duration assumes the form of a homogeneous medium and that time is projected into space ; but in the absence of motion repetition might equally suggest to consciousness the same mode of representation. Conscious life presents itself under a double aspect, according as it is per- ceived directly or by refraction through space. Our ego comes in contact with the external world at its surface, and our superficial psychical life comes to be pictured as set out in a homogeneous medium, but when we consider the inner self which feels, deliberates and decides, we see that its states cannot be separated in space without undergoing a deep alter- ation. But the two selves form one person, and dura- tion therefore seems to be the same thing for both. That our ordinary conception of duration is due to the gradual invasion of pure consciousness by TIME AND FREE WILL 67 space may be seen from what happens in dreams. Then the ego is no longer in touch with external objects. We no longer measure duration but feel it ; from quantity it returns to the state of quality ; in place of a mathematieal estimate of time we have a confused instinct, which, like all instincts, is capable of gross absurdity but also at times of extraordinary skill. Even in the waking state, ex- perience ought to teach us to distinguish between duration as quality, such as consciousness imme- diately apprehends it, and materialised time which has been made quantitative by development in space. " We should therefore distinguish two forms of multiplicity, two very different ways of regarding duration, two aspects of conscious life. Below homogeneous duration, which is the extensive symbol of true duration, a close psychological analysis distinguishes a duration whose heterogene- ous moments permeate one another ; below the numerical multiplicity of conscious states, a quali- tative multiplicity ; below the self with well-defined states, a self in which succeeding each other means melting into one another and forming an organic whole" (p. 128). But the latter, the funda- mental self, is often lost sight of in ordinary life, and a vigorous effort of analysis is necessary to recover it. Our external and, so to speak, social life has more practical importance for us than our inner and individual existence. Our instinct is always to solidify our impressions in order to be able to express them in language. 68 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON If this is true of impressions, it is still more true of simple sensations. I may to-day dislike a flavour which I liked as a child, but I still give the same name to the sensation, and speak as though it had remained the same while roy taste had changed. But really there are neither identical sensations nor multiple tastes. Every sensation becomes modified by repetition, but it may not appear to me to change from day to day because I identify it with its cause or its name. The delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness are thus often tyrannised over by mere brutal words. Bergson proceeds to show the difference between a sentiment felt and a sentiment analysed — a beauti- ful passage which should be read in full (p. 132). Such a substitution of dissociated elements for the real web of consciousness leads directly to the errors of associationism, which will be discussed later. The obstinacy with which we cling to opinions of which we can give no rational account shows that our intellect has its instincts, a force {elari) common to all our ideas, their very interpenetration, some- thing belonging to our real selves. Each of these ideas is individual ; they are not the same for others as they are for us, and they are modified by anything which modifies the self in general. Many of our ideas, however, such as those we accept ready made, are never really assimilated ; they float on the sur- face of the inner self, like dead leaves on the water of a pond; and, being more or less impersonal, they tend to take the form of a numerical multi- TIME AND FREE WILL 69 plicity and to spread out in a homogeneous space. They can be adequately expressed in words and are associated by contiguity or for some logical reason, and to them only does the associationist theory apply. The deep-seated conscious states have no relation to quantity ; they are pure quality ; they inter- mingle in such a way that they cannot even be called one or many. The duration which they thus create is a duration whose moments do not form a numerical multiplicity. Little by little they become transformed into objects or things, and are detached from one another and even from ourselves. Thus is formed a second self which obscures the first ; not that personality can be split up, for it is always one and the same self which first perceives these dis- tinct states and which, by afterwards concentrating its attention, sees them melt together like snowflakes on the hand. A superficial psychology may even describe them without falling into error, provided that it does not present to us the concrete and living self as an association of terms which are distinct from one another and are set side by side in a homo- geneous medium. CHAPTER III Bergson points out that science has made for its own purpose, the study of external things, a very sharp separation between duration and extensity. It has retained only simultaneity and immobility, or in other words space. He proposes for his purpose, the study of inner phenomena before they are separated or set out in space, to make a similar separation, and to retain only duration. " Duration, thus restored to its original purity, will appear as a wholly qualitative multiplicity, an absolute hetero- geneity of elements which pass over into one another." In the introduction to Chapter I it was noticed that this sharp contrast might lead to difficulties. It is not necessary to repeat what was then said, but it may be noted that the assumption which Bergson makes (in Time and Free Will) that there are two distinct spheres of reality, the psychical and the physical, as though each could be understood apart from the other, has given rise to much of the criticism which has been directed against his philo- sophy. We must remember that the division is in some sort artificial and temporary. If the separation were definitive, there would be no degrees of freedom. But if we are to understand TIME AND FREE WILL 71 freedom, the separation must be made, at least pro- visionally. Both those who deny and those who maintain freedom are usually ready to assume that all the conditions can be conceived as given in advance, that is, they treat duration as a homo- geneous medium and qualities as quantities ; all arguments about, and definitions of, freedom con- fuse time with space and succession with simultaneity. If we start from duration, we can get a clear idea of freedom ; if we start from space, we can see nothing but determination. It is very much more difficult to make the separation from the side of duration, because our inner life is so much bound up with our social life and everyday needs that we have an inveterate habit of objectifying and spatialising our interpenetrating conscious states as distinct things to which we can give names. Hence there are two selves ; the self in relation to its environment, when consciousness is concerned with action and therefore with ex- tensity ; and the self whose inner states we reach by introspection, when we see them as living things, permeating and interpenetrating one another, always becoming, always enduring but never distinct. Such moments of introspection are rare, and we are there- fore rarely free. SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTER III The Organisation of Conscious States The Problem of Free Will It is not difficult to see why the question of free will divides the two contrasted systems, mechanism and dynamism. The latter starts from the idea of voluntary activity and has no difficulty in conceiving free force on the one side and matter governed by laws on the other. But mechanism follows the opposite course. It assumes the materials with which it deals to be governed by necessary laws, and never quits the narrow circle in which it has shut itself up. Law is not the same thing for the two systems. Dynamism can imagine facts which elude the control of law ; for it the fact is the absolute reality and the law a symbolical expression. Mechanism regards the fact as constituted by laws, and the law becomes the fundamental reality. The one seeks real affiliation, the other simplicity. And yet the idea of spontaneity is simpler than that of inertia, since the latter can be understood or defined only by means of the former, while the idea of spontaneity is self-sufficient. Each of us has, as a matter of fact, an immediate feeling, real or illusory, of his own free spontaneity, without the idea of TIME AND FREE WILL 73 inertia entering into this feeling. But inertia cannot be defined without reference to the idea of activity, as, for instance, when it is said that a body cannot move itself or stop itself, etc. But definite facts, both physical and psycho- logical, are urged against freedom. Sometimes it is asserted that our actions are necessitated by our feelings, our ideas and the whole preceding series of our conscious states ; sometimes that freedom is incompatible with the fundamental properties of matter, and in particular with the principle of the conservation of energy. Hence two kinds of deter- minism, two apparently different demonstrations of necessity. We shall show that the second is re- ducible to the first, and that all determinism, even physical, implies a psychological hypothesis ; further, that psychological determinism itself, and even the refutations which are given of it, depend upon an inexact conception of the multiplicity of conscious states, or rather of duration. We shall see a self emerge whose activity cannot be compared to that of any other force. Physical determinism is bound up with mechanical or rather kinetic theories of matter. The universe is regarded as a heap of matter, resolved by the imagination into molecules and atoms, to whose movements all physical phenomena may be reduced. The matter of our bodies is subject to the same laws, and even the nervous system is nothing more than molecules and atoms in motion. The brain at a given moment is modified by the shocks 74 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON which the nervous system receives from surround- ing matter ; hence our ideas etc. are mechanical resultants of outside shocks and existing movements. On the other hand our organism may react on its environment ; hence reflex movements and also the actions called free. The principle of the conserva- tion of energy being assumed to be inflexible, there is no atom, either in our nervous system or in the whole universe, whose position is not determined by the sum of the mechanical actions which the other atoms exert upon it. A mathematician, who knew the position of the molecules or atoms of a human body at a given moment and also the position and motion of all the atoms of the universe capable of influencing it, could calculate with infallible pre- cision the past, present and future actions of the person as easily as he can predict an eclipse of the sun. The above conception, we acknowledge, is a very natural deduction from the law of the conservation of energy. If this law applies to all the processes of all living bodies, it matters little what hypothesis we adopt as to the nature of the ultimate elements of matter, for, whatever these may be, their position at a given moment would be rigorously determined by what their position was at the preceding moment. Bergson now proposes to show that even this hypo- thesis does not involve an absolute determination of our conscious states by one another, and, further, that the universality of the principle of the con- servation of energy itself cannot be admitted except in virtue of some psychological hypothesis. TIME AND FREE WILL 75 For it would be necessary, in the first place, to show that to a given cerebral state there corresponds a rigorously determined psychical state, and this has not yet been demonstrated. It is true that a relation exists between certain sensations and their causes, but no one supposes that we are free in regard to these, and to extend the parallelism to our consciousness as a whole is to cut the knot of the problem of freedom a priori. Such a course has been taken even by great thinkers, but not for reasons of a physical order. Leibniz ascribed the correspondence to a pre-established harmony. Spinoza held that modes of thought and modes of extension correspond with but never influence one another. Physical determinism represents conscious- ness as sometimes and somehow disengaged like a phosphorescence from the molecular movements of the brain, but it has never been shown and never will be shown that the psychical state is necessarily determined by the molecular movement. Experi- ence has established a parallelism in a certain number of cases of no great importance for the problem of freedom, and it is easy to understand why physical determinism extends the connexion to all possible cases. We know that the greater part of our actions can be explained by motives, but determination here does not mean necessity since common sense believes in free will. Associationist determinism appeals to this knowledge of ours, and, although a determinism of quality, seeks to ally itself with the mechanism 76 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON of natural movements. By this alliance it becomes more rigorous, and physical mechanism acquires uni- versality. The union is favoured by the fortunate circumstance that sensations appear to be bound up with molecular movements and the bond is extended to include all consciousness. The physical deter- minism thus reached is nothing but psychological determinism seeking to verify itself scientifically. Still, a rigorous application of the principle of the conservation of energy would greatly restrict freedom, for it would determine our movements, if not necessarily our ideas ; and we must therefore inquire whether this principle ought to be' regarded as a universal law. If certain terms are given, the result will always be the same however the sum be worked. Science will always be subject to this law which is a logical law, but it does not follow that everything lends itself to calculation. It may be admitted that the principle of the conservation of energy appears to be applicable to all physico- chemical phenomena, but it is always possible that we may find side by side with kinetic energy and potential energy some new form of energy distin- guished from the other two by the fact that it cannot be calculated. Nor would science lose any of its rigour on that account. The most thorough-going mechanism regards consciousness as an epipheno- menon, something added on, in given circumstances, to certain molecular movements. But if the latter can create sensation out of a zero of consciousness {avec un neant de conscience), why should not con- IIMK AND FREE WILL 'j^ sciousness in its turn create movement either out of a zero of energy or by utilising this energy in its own way ? * Further, the law of the conservation of energy always applies to systems which are rever- sible, at any rate in theory. Time does not affect {fiapas de prise sur) them, but it is quite otherwise in the domain of life. Here duration certainly seems to act like a cause, and the idea of reversibility becomes absurd, since living beings never experience it. Even if the absurdity is in this case only apparent, it will be agreed at any rate that rever- sibility is meaningless in the sphere of consciousness. A sensation, if prolonged, may become unbearable ; the same does not here remain the same, but strengthens and swells {se grossit) with all its past, and this past is a reality for all living bodies per- haps, and certainly for conscious beings. A material system, on the contrary, exists in an eternal present. There is thus a presumption in favour of the hypothesis of a conscious force or free will, which, subject to the action of time and storing up duration, may be thereby exempt from the law of the con- servation of energy. * The epiphenomenalists cannot have it both ways. If con- sciousness is a by-product of cerebral movements it implies an expenditure of energy, for even a by-product cannot be regarded as other than a product. But science cannot regard consciousness as part of the system of movements, for that system is complete without it. It is thus led to look on consciousness as a mysterious nothing. If it took what appears to be the more reasonable view that consciousness is a form of energy which cannot be calculated, it would be compelled to admit that this form of energy might originate movements as well as result from them. Bergson dis- cusseS'Cpiphenomenalism in Matter and Memory. 78 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON If we say that the principle of the conservation of energy should be applied to the totality of pheno- mena so long as psychological facts have not dis- proved it, we are making an unwarranted assumption and are ignoring what appears to be the fundamental difference between the inner and the outer worlds. The most that can be justifiably asserted is that the law may some day be extended to cover all phenomena. Science, properly so-called, has nothing to do with the matter ; we are confronted by an arbitrary con- fusion of two conceptions of duration which Bergson at any rate believes to differ profoundly. So-called physical determinism is therefore reducible to psycho- logical determinism ; and the latter must now be examined. Psychological determinism, as currently held, im- plies an associationist conception of mind. Our present state of consciousness is regarded as necessi- tated by our previous states, but not as deducible a priori, since it and they differ in quality. Refer- ence is therefore made to experience, which, we admit, shows a relation between the two. This relation explains the passage from one state to another, but does it cause it ? A hypnotic subject told to perform an action at a certain time thinks that the action is brought about by the preceding series of his own conscious states. These, however, are not causes but effects ; the future action has determined the psychic states from which it is supposed to proceed. Similar instances show that effects sometimes precede their causes, TIME AND FREE WILL 79 and that there are phenomena of psychical attrac- tion which are not amenable to the known laws of the association of ideas. Associationist determinism represents the self as a collection of psychic states in which the strongest prevails. There is said to be a conflict of motives, or even a conflict between the self desiring a pleasure and the self fearing remorse. Pains and pleasures are weighed as though they had an existence of their own, and this is done even by opponents of determinism. Such a practice, due to difficulties of verbal expression, may lead to grave confusion. The scent of a rose brings to me vague memories of youth ; for me it is more than a scent ; it is a scent charged with memories. Not so, perhaps, for others. You may reply that it is, in any case, the same scent but associated with difi^erent ideas. I am quite willing that you should express yourself in this way ; but, remember what you have done ; you have first removed the personal element from the different impressions which the rose makes on each one of us and have retained only the objective aspect, that part which is common to all and thereby belongs to space. Then, to distinguish my impres- sion from yours, you have to add specific charac- teristics to the general idea of rose-scent, and you now say that our different impressions are due to an association of rose-scent with different memories. But the association of which you speak hardly exists except for you, and as a method of explanation. We are thus brought back to our former distinc- 8o THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON tion between a multiplicity of juxtaposition and a multiplicity of mutual interpenetration. A feeling or idea contains an indefinite plurality of conscious states, but the plurality is not observed unless it is spread out in space. The terms then become ex- ternal to one another ; they are states of conscious- ness no longer, but their symbols, or lather the words which express them. "There is, as we have pointed out, a close connexion between the faculty of conceiving a homogeneous medium, such as space, and that of thinking by means of general ideas. As soon as we try to give an account of a conscious state, to analyse it, this state, which is above all per- sonal, will be resolved into impersonal elements external to one another, each of which calls up the idea of a genus and is expressed by a word. But because our reason, equipped with the idea of space and the power of creating symbols, draws these multiple elements out of the whole, it does not follow that they were contained in it. For within the whole they did not occupy space and did not care to express themselves by means of symbols ; they permeated and melted into one another. Associationism thus makes the mistake of con- stantly replacing the concrete phenomenon which takes place in the mind by the artificial reconstruc- tion of it given by philosophy, and of thus confusing the explanation of the fact with the fact itself" (p. 163). The associationist theory is applicable only to sensations which are quite simple and, so to speak. TIME AND FREE WILL 8i impersonal. My hate is difFerent from your hate, my love from your love ; each reflects an entire per- sonality, but language uses the same word to denote them both. A novelist may attempt to make us understand them in their original and living indi- viduality, but he will never succeed in pourtraying completely what the soul really feels. Thought and language remain incommensurable. The self cannot rightly be described as an aggregate of con- scious states. A single feeling represents the entire soul, in the sense that the whole content of the soul is reflected in it. To say that it determines the soul is then to recognise the fact that the soul de- termines itself. The associationist with his gross psychology, the dupe of language, reduces the self to an aggregate of sensations, feelings and ideas — a mere phantom ego, unless these states are coloured by a personality, and then their association is no longer needed, since the whole personality exists in a single one of them, provided that we know how to choose It. " And the outward manifestation of this inner state will be just what is called a free act, since the self alone will have been the author of it, and since it will express the whole of the self Free- dom, thus understood, is not absolute, as a radically libertarian philosophy would have it ; it admits of degrees" (p. i66). Many feelings and ideas make no impression on the fundamental self, but tend to form a parasitic self which continually encroaches upon the other. So men may live and die without knowing real freedom, which must be an act of the whole soul. F 82 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON Thus understood, free acts are rare, even on the part of those who are most accustomed to self- observation and rational conduct. In much of our daily life we may be conscious automata and our actions, though intelligent, will be of the nature of reflex movements, and to these the associationist theory applies. They combine to form the sub- stratum of our free activity, just as our organic functions do for the whole of our conscious life. Even in grave matters we may abdicate our free- dom, as when we allow ourselves to be controlled by the advice of friends. We think we are acting freely and only recognise our mistake on reflection. But there is often a revolt before action is taken, and the real self breaks through. Hence the diffi- culty of explaining a sudden change of resolution. We cannot find a reason for it, though the best of reasons may be there — the force of our whole past experience. " For the action which has been performed does not then express some superficial idea, almost external to ourselves, distinct and easy to account for : it agrees with the whole of our most intimate feelings, thoughts and aspirations, with that particular conception of life which is the equivalent of all our past experience, in a word, with our personal idea of happiness and of honour " (p. 170). We therefore see the futility of looking for examples of freedom in insignificant actions which can be shown to be bound up with some determining motive. It is difficult to see, on determinist principles. TIME AND FREE WILL 83 why an unchanging self confronted by two un- changing feelings should ever come to a decision at all, or why it should hesitate over it. The truth is that the self is always changing and is conse- quently always modifying the feelings, and there is formed a dynamic series of states which culminates in a free act. The determinist picture of two forces acting on an unchanging self is a mere symbolical representation. In short, we are free when our acts come from our entire personality, when they express it, when they bear to it that indefinable resemblance which we sometimes see existing between the artist and his work. It is useless to say that we are then yielding to our character. Our character is our- selves, and is modified day by day, by all the experiences we make really our own. The act which bears the mark of our personality is truly free. But the determinist usually leaves the act itself and seeks refuge in the past or the future. When we suppose, says J. S. Mill, that we might have acted differently, we are supposing a difference in the antecedents ; and he naturally goes on to see in consciousness a guide to what is and not to what might be. Determinists, further, maintain that, given certain antecedents, only one result is possible. Taking the latter point first, Bergson discusses at length the position of a man hesitating between two courses, and concludes that both those who maintain and those who deny that he could have acted differ- 84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON ently if he had wished , are guilty of a confusion of time with space. For once the act has been completed, it ceases to be a time-process, and the line drawn in space by which we represent it signifies not time which is passing, but time which has passed. The arguments of both determinists and indeterminists in this con- nexion are reducible to the equally puerile state- ments, that an act once performed is performed ; and that an act before being performed was not yet performed. The question of freedom emerges in- tact, for the reason that freedom must be sought in a certain nuance or quality of the action itself, and not in the relation of this act to what it is not or to what it might have been. Both sides represent the deliberation as an oscillation in space, whereas it is really a dynamic progress in which the self and its motives are in a constant state of becoming, like real living beings. The self feels and declares its freedom, but when it seeks to explain it to itself, it no longer perceives itself except by a kind of refraction through space. But determinism returns to the attack, and, setting aside accomplished actions, asks us to con- sider future ones. Could a superior intelligence which knew all the antecedents predict with ab- solute certainty the decision that would result from them ? We must first distinguish between a pro- bable result and an infallible prediction. Every one acts more or less in accordance with his character, that is his past, and his character though always changing rarely changes quite suddenly. To say TIME AND FREE WILL 85 that his action will be in harmony with his character is quite a different thing from predicting the future. Determinists, however, maintain that a complete knowledge of all the antecedents would make the prevision infallible. In a careful analysis Bergson shows that A would not be in a position to predict the action of B unless their souls had had the same history and their experience had been exactly similar, in which case A and B could not be distinguished from one another. They must be one and the same person, and therefore, when the time for action comes, there is no longer any question of predicting but simply of acting.^ The question of freedom again emerges intact. The difficulty rests on two illusions of the reflective consciousness (i) that intensity is a mathematical property of psychic states (2) that we can replace the concrete reality, or the dynamic progress which consciousness perceives, by the material symbol of this progress when completed. When the act is accomplished I can, of course, assign their proper value to all the antecedents and call their interplay a conflict. But to ask whether, the antecedents being known, I can predict the result is to enter a vicious circle ; to forget that we cannot know the value of the antecedents unless the final act is given ; and to suppose wrongly that the symbolical diagram by which the completed act is represented has been automatically drawn by the act itself in the ' If A is B, will A act as B acts ? — a nonsensical conundrum. 86 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON course of its progress. These illusions imply a third, that of spatialised time. The terms of the problem materialise the conditions ; future time becomes a route traced but not traversed. The confusion is natural, indeed almost inevitable, since science appears to embrace future time in, for instance, astronomical prediction, but the very reasons which make astronomical prediction possible make prediction of conduct impossible. If the whole of the movements of the universe went twice as fast, there would be no difference in the equations we use to predict them, for these equations are concerned only with the relation between two durations, i.e. with simultaneities. The ' intervals between the simultaneities count for nothing, but with consciousness the intervals are all important ; they are time lived, duration. The astronomer confines himself to establishing a series of relative positions, of simultaneities and coincidences, of numerical relations ; duration, properly so called, does not enter into the calculation and exists only for a consciousness capable of living the intervals between the simultaneities. The astronomer's time is a number whose units may be regarded as infinitely small, provided that the whole operation is controlled by the same hypothesis. He thus represents future time as present, and says that he has foreseen when he has really only seen. But the psychologist is concerned with the real time, with the intervals and not with their extremities. Consciousness does not measure time, but none the TIME AND FREE WILL Sj less a longer feeling is tor it a different feeling. States of consciousness are living things and change without ceasing ; to cut down their duration by a moment impoverishes them and modifies their quality. No feeling can be properly appreciated unless we have passed through all its phases and lived the whole duration. When we call to mind the past, a series of fails accomplis, we are following the scientific use of time. Astronomical prevision is comparable to such a re- collection of a past state of consciousness, not to the anticipation of a future state. Future duration cannot be abridged ; it can only be lived. Foresight, sight and action here all amount to the same thing. The determinist, driven to his last ditch, will now maintain that every act is determined by its psychical antecedents, or in other words that tacts of consciousness like natural phenomena are subject to laws. He refuses to enter in detail into concrete psychic states lest he find there phenomena which defy all symbolical representation, and consequently all prevision. He is content to assert that as phenomena they are subject to the law of causality, that like causes produce like effects. This is to assume that the same cause or series of causes can recur in consciousness, but our con- ception of duration affirms the radical heterogeneity of deep-seated psychic states and the impossibility of a complete resemblance between any two of them, since they are two different moments of a 88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON history. History never repeats itself; the same moment never comes twice ; a feeling repeated is a new feeling. Any resemblance between two psychic states is delusive, and what causal relation there may be cannot be like natural causation. As the conditions are never the same, the effect must always be different. As the determinist may still reiterate that an act is indissolubly bound up with its antecedents, we must now examine the concept of cause, show the equivoque therein contained and so perhaps reach a less negative idea of freedom than that with which we have hitherto been content. Physical phenomena obey laws : this implies ( i ) that certain phenomena, a, b, c, d, may recur under the same form, and (2) that a phenomenon P, which appeared after the conditions a, b, c, d, and after these conditions only, will always be reproduced when the same conditions are repeated. If this were all that causation implied, as empiricists maintain, it would prove nothing against freedom. For it would be understood that there is determina- tion wherever experience shows us this regularity of sequence, but the whole question at issue is whether such a regularity is found in the domain of consciousness. No regular succession between deep- seated states of consciousness has in point of fact been shown, since we still fail to predict. But empiricists really give a new meaning to the word cause, the one it has for common sense. The regular succession of two phenomena means TIME AND FREE WILL 89 that, the first being given, the second is already perceived. This is too subjective for common sense, which imagines that if the idea of the second phenomenon is already implied in that of the first, it must follow that the second exists objectively, in some form or other, within the first. The causal relation is pictured as a kind of preformation or prefiguring of the future phenomenon in the present conditions. This prefiguring may be understood in two very different ways, and it is here that the equivoque begins. (i) An unlimited number of theorems may be said to be contained in the definition of a circle, waiting there for the mathematician to deduce them. The first equation may be transformed into a multi- tude of new equations, all virtually pre-existing in it. We are here dealing with pure quantity. Phy- sical phenomena, on the other hand, have quality too, but, because their qualitative differences are perceived by the senses, we are led to imagine a homogeneous physical universe behind the hetero- geneity of our sensations. Colour, heat, resistance and even weight are stripped off until we find ourselves confronted with homogeneous extensity, space without body ; and we then proceed to explain the apparent qualities of matter by the shape, position and motion of geometrical figures. Shape, it is true, however tenuous and transparent we may suppose it, constitutes a concrete and therefore irreducible quality of matter. Let us get rid of it and substitute the abstract formula of the move- 90 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON ment which engenders it. By this method of abstraction we reach an entanglement of algebraical relations, whose very complexity produces the effect of concrete, visible and tangible reality — and we shall then have followed out the consequences of the principle of causation, understood as an actual prefiguring of the future in the present. Thus the concrete existence of natural phenomena tends to vanish in algebraical smoke. Understood in this way, the relation of causality is a necessary relation in that it will indefinitely approach the relation of identity, as a curve its asymptote. The principle of identity is the absolute law of our consciousness. It binds only the present to the present. But the principle of causality, as binding the future to the present, can never take the form of a necessary principle ; no logical effort will succeed in proving that what has been will be or will continue to be. Hence the introduction by Descartes of a grace of Providence continually re- newed, and the doctrine of Spinoza that the relation of apparent causality between phenomena was equi- valent to a relation of identity in the absolute. Both agreed with modern scientific theories in seeking to establish a relation of logical identity between cause and effect. The more the effect seems to be necessarily bound up with the cause, the greater the tendency to put it in the cause itself, as a mathematical deduction in its principle, and so to suppress the effect of duration. The more we tend to erect the causal TIME AND FREE WILL 91 relation into a necessary determination, the more do we affirm that things have not duration as we have, and so we accentuate the difference between a psychical series and a physical series. Hence the apparently paradoxical result that, the more we believe in physical determination, the greater should be our faith in human freedom. The last point need not detain us ; our object has been to bring out the first meaning of the word causality, and to show that the prefiguring of the future in the pre- sent is easily^ conceived under a mathematical guise, thanks to a certain conception of duration which, without seeming to be so, is fairly familiar to common sense. (2) But there is a prefiguring of another kind, still more familiar because drawn from our own consciousness. This second form comes from the sense of effort, a peculiar feeling which unites our idea and our act so continuously that it is difficult to say where one begins and the others end. This prefiguring is imperfect, because the action is re- garded not as realised but as realisable ; we can still stop. From this conception of the causal relation it follows a priori that the effect is not given in the cause ; it is only a possibility. The second conception of the relation is more natural than the first. We imagine the causes of things as analogous to our own states of conscious- ness ; give a vague personality to the material universe ; and view changes as taking place in virtue of some internal push or effort. Such was 92 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON the ancient hylozoism,^ which leads to the monadism and pre-established harmony of Leibniz, as the first conception of the causal relation leads to the doctrine of Spinoza. This dynamic conception of the causal relation does not necessarily involve the determination of effects by their causes. It attributes to things a duration like our own, and the future is no more bound up with the present in the external world than it is in our own inner life. As all phenomena, both physical and psychical, are here regarded as having duration, the future exists in the present only as idea, and the passage from the one to the other takes the aspect of an effort, which does not always accomplish the end conceived. In the first conception of causation duration is regarded as peculiar to consciousness ; things do not have it, but change mathematically. In either case human freedom is safeguarded, for the one puts contingence into natural phenomena, and the other implies that the self is free since it has duration. Unfortunately the principle of causation is often taken in both senses at once. Sometimes we have specially in mind the regular succession of physical phenomena and the kind of internal effort by which 1 " A half-hearted and even contradictory hypothesis, which left matter its extensity although attributing to it real conscious states." " Ancient hylozoism . . . explained the regular succession of causes and effects by a real deus ex niachina : sometimes it was a Necessity external to things and hovering over them, sometimes an inner Reason acting by rules somewhat similar to those which govern our own conduct " (pp. 213, 214). TIME AND FREE WILL 93 one becomes another ; at others, their absolute regu- larity and the mathematical necessity into which this r^ularity gradually passes. The blending of the two leads to inextricable difficulties. The idea of force, which really excludes that of necessary determination, becomes associated with the idea of necessity. As far as experience goes, we feel our- selves free and regard force, rightlv or wronglv, as a spontaneity. But when the idea of force has been corrupted by association with the idea of necessity, it is looked upon as absolutely determining coming effects. There is thus a double confusion ; mechani- cal determination assumes the same term as the dynamic relation of our own force to the act to which it gives rise ; and. in return, human action is considered as resulting mechanically, and therefore necessarily, from the force which produces it The fusion is no doubt convenient for common sense, since it has no need to discriminate. But science is more rigorous. The physicist may speak of forces, and even picture their mode of action by analogy with an inner effort, but he will strictly exclude such a confused idea from his scientific explanations. He regards the relation ot external causation as mathematical and as in no way resem- bling the relation of a psychical torce to the act arising from it. The relation of internal causalin." is purely dynamic. External phenomena repeat themselves, and a law can be deduced from the repetition. Psychic states are unique and never reappear. Thus the psychological 94 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON analysis with which we began is confirmed by our study of the notions of causality and duration, viewed in themselves. We can now formulate our conception of freedom. " Freedom is the relation of the concrete self to the act which it performs. This relation is indefin- able, just because we are free. For we can analyse a thing, but not a process ; we can break up extensity, but not duration. Or, if we persist in analysing it, we unconsciously transform the process into a thing and duration into extensity. By the very fact of breaking up concrete time we set out its moments in homogeneous space ; in place of the doing we put the already done ; and, as we have begun by, so to speak, stereotyping the activity of the self, we see spontaneity settle down into inertia and freedom into necessity. Thus, any positive definition of freedom will ensure the victory of determinism " (p. 219). Bergson then discusses several definitions of freedom, and shows that in each case we have to ask whether time can be adequately represented by space. He answers — Yes, if it is past time ; No, if you are speaking of time that is passing. The free act takes place in the latter, not in the former. All the difficulties of the problem, and even the problem itself, arise from a previous confusion of duration with extensity, of succession with simultaneity, and of quality with quantity. It is useless to attempt to render the idea of freedom in a language into which it is clearly untranslatable. NOTES ON TIME AND FREE WILL I. TIME AND SPACE As Bergson makes frequent reference to Kant's doctrine of time and space, it may be useful to begin with a concise statement of what Kant says about them. They are described in the Transcendental Esthetic as a priori forms of our sensibility, the forms without which sensuous experience would be impossible. A stream of hogs, jostled together in indistinguishable confusion, enters a Chicago pork factory and emerges in a well-ordered succession of hams, gammons and tins of brawn. So reality enters our sensibility and emerges as phenomena successive in time and separated in space. A ray of light falls upon a prism and comes out as all the colours of the rainbow. These illustrations are not exact and are not Kant's, but they may serve to give an idea of his meanijig. Our sensibility, like the factory or the prism, imposes its forms of time and space on the sensations which it passively receives. There is some question as to whether Kant meant that our sensa- tions are caused directly by the " thing-in-itself," but the point is not material in connexion with his theory of time and space. 96 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON Kant regards a phenomenon as having two elements ( I ) the matter given to us a posteriori by powers we know not what ; it reaches us empirically, as sensa- tion ; (2) the forms which lie a priori in the mind. These pure perceptions are two, time and space, and they impose their form on sensations given to us a posteriori and so produce external experience. We cannot possibly imagine no space, although we can very well imagine a space empty of objects. Space is therefore a condition of the possibility of external phenomena ; without the idea of space already present in the mind they could not exist for us. Similarly with time, for without the a priori idea of time in the mind we could not know things as having duration, succession or simultaneity. We represent the suc- cession of time by a line drawn to infinity. Space is an a priori condition of external phenomena ; time an a priori condition of all phenomena, immediately of internal or psychical, and mediately of external. Time and space are not receptacles existing in them- selves within us, but active functions for placing our sensations in a certain order ; they are empirically real and transcendentally ideal. Some confusion has arisen from Kant's use of the word space with different meanings (i) as a form of the sensibility, (2) as the receptaculum in which common sense and science imagine objects to exist. Nor is he always consistent ; for in dis- cussing the relation of space to parts of space or spaces, he tells us in one place that space is not a compositum but a totum, because the parts are only TIME AND SPACE 97 possible in the whole, and not the whole through the parts ; in another place he says that space is not a totum but a compositum ideale, for the idea of the part makes the idea of the whole possible and therefore necessarily precedes it. Dr. Ward finds a third view in Kant's writings, that pure or absolute space is not the presupposition of spatial experience, but the consequence of idealising this, and that, in keeping with such a doctrine, we can say that space is both a compositum and a totum. When Kant says that " we can never imagine that there is no space, although we can quite well think that no objects are met with in it," Dr. Ward ^ italicises the words, and holds that they imply someone traversing space and that without this someone there would be nothing left of pure space, for movement is an essential element in our spatial experience. The transition from spatial perception to spatial conception is a passage from the actual experience of spatial relation to the bare idea of pure space. The latter is a conceptual ideal which we can deduce from the former, but not vice versa. Pure space " is absolutely relative, — a system of relations without a fundamentum relationis, and so a non-entity." Common sense and science pre- suppose space when they speak of it as a receptaculum which can be either full or empty, and which is, in fact, partly the one and partly the other. Our first experience is of bodies that are extended ; ^ Naturalism and AgnosHcis/n, ii. 137. See also "Psychology" in Encycl, Brit. 191 1. G 98 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON hence space is not prior to or independent of the objects which are said to be contained in it. Pure space is an ideal ; it is the work of the mind ; has ideality and validity but not reality, and is based on concrete experiences. Bergson notes that Kant has not questioned that the notion of space may be given empirically by sight and touch, but we. have the remarkable fact that our mind " cuts out in it, a priori, figures whose properties we determine a priori: experience, with which we have not kept in touch, yet follows us through the infinite complications of our reasonings and invariably justifies them." Thus extension can- not be an attribute of the same kind as heat, weight, etc., for in the case of the latter we must have recourse to experience. Kant has made this quite clear. H^e represents intelligence as bathed in an atmosphere of spatiality, through which our per- ceptions pass before reaching us. "They have been impregnated in advance by our geometry, so that our faculty of thinking only finds again in matter the mathematical properties which our faculty of perception has already deposed there " (C. E. p. 215). IVTatter yields to our reasonings, because, so far as it is intelligible, it is our own work. Of the thing-in-itself we can know nothing, since we only get its refraction through the forms of our faculty of perceiving. Such is Kant's doctrine of the ideality of space, which enables him to refute "empiricist" theories of knowledge. Bergson agrees with Kant's doctrine in what it TIME AND SPACE 99 denies but not in what it affirms. Kant's space as a ready-made form is " a veritable deus ex machina, of which we see neither how it arises, nor why it is what it is rather than anything else." And his " things-in-themselves " with their projection into our perceptive faculty of a " sensuous mani- fold " capable of fitting it exactly suggest a pre- established harmony — an idle hypothesis, which Kant was right in wishing to avoid. If Kant had distinguished degrees in spatiality, he would not have had to take space ready made as given, nor to sup- pose matter wholly developed into parts absolutely external to one another. Kant's error was to extend to matter what is true only of pure space. Bergson then gives his own solution, that intellect and matter have progressively adapted themselves one to the other in order to attain at last a commor form. In Matter and Memory Bergson maintains that homogeneous space and homogeneous time are neither properties of things nor essential conditions of our faculty of knowing them. If we hold, with Kant, that they are forms of our sensibility, we are compelled to regard matter and spirit as equally unknowable (pp. 280, 281) — which is the conclusion drawn by Spencer and agnosticism generally. The Kantian idealism makes consciousness relative, and the Kantian realism can show no conceivable relation between the " thing-in-itself," that is to say the real, and the "sensuous manifold." It makes space an ideal medium, given to begin with, as the necessary condition of what comes to abide in it (p. 307). loo THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSOX In Time and Free IH/.' we are told that Kant held space to be "a reality as solid as the sensations themselves, although of a different order" (p. 92). He endows space with an existence independent of its content. ''Far from shaking our faith in the reality of space, Kant has shown what it actually means and has even justified it." Bergson holds that Kant's conception differs less than is usually supposed from that of common sense ; that it does not seem to have been seriously disputed since his time, and has forced itself, sometimes without their knowledge, on the majority of those who have approached the problem anew. For co-existence to give rise to space, " there must be an act of the mind which takes them in all at the same time and sets them in juxtaposition : this unique act is very like what Kant calls an a priori form ot sensibility" (p. 94). And Bergson says that this act " consists essentially in the intuition, or rather the conception, of an empty homogeneous medium." In another place (p. -32) he tells us that Kant's great mistake was to take time as a homogeneous medium. " Thus the very distinction which he makes between space and time amounts at bottom to confusing time with space." Time and space on Kant's view would not be any more in us than out- side us ; the very distinction of outside and inside would be the work of time and space. His doc- trine gives a solid foundation to empirical thought, and guarantees that phenomena, as phenomena, are adequately knowable. Kant would probably never TIME AND SPACE loi have made the sharp distinction between matter and form, unless time, like space, had been regarded as a medium indifferent to what fills it. Bergson has " assumed the existence of a homogeneous space, and, with Kant, distinguished this space from the matter which fills it. With him we have admitted that homogeneous space is a ' form of our sensi- bility ' : and we understand by this simply that other minds, e.g. those of animals, although they perceive objects, do not distinguish them so clearly either from one another or from themselves. This intuition of a homogeneous medium, an intuition peculiar to man, enables us to externalise our con- cepts in relation to one another" (p. 236). We may note, in passing, that what was described on p. 94 as " the intuition, or rather the concep- tion " has now become an intuition. And yet if animals perceive objects as we do, though with less precision, does not the conception of homogeneous space arise, like any other conception, from our superior mental powers .? And if so, is it an intui- tion at all ? A child has probably no intuition of this kind ; it perceives objects extended in space, and as it grows up gradually forms a conception of space as an empty homogeneous medium. This concept is formed like, and does not differ from, every other concept, except that it is a limiting or limitative conception. When Bergson's references to Kant are compared together, it will be found that his agreement with Kant amounts to this (C. E. p. 215), that geometrical space is prior to I02 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON experience. It is quite certain that our geometry is always justified by nature, but it does not follow that geometry is not an ideal formed by generations of successive experiences. As we are part of nature, it would be strange if our ideas were not conform- able with nature. As Bergson's views on time and space have already been given in some detail, ^ it is not necessary to repeat them here. His definition of space has his accustomed brilliance and clearness, but we must not let it take us by storm. An empty homo- geneous medium, devoid of every quality whatso- ever, would be indistinguishable from nothing. We may agree to neglect the differences in order to obtain an abstract geometrical space, but this space remains at any rate extensive. When he proceeds to say that time as a homogeneous medium cannot be distinguished from space, we agree to this extent, that it is impossible to distinguish between two nothings, but we do not agree that time has lost all its quality or has ceased to be temporal. We are reminded of Spencer's argument that time and space cannot be non-entities, as we should in that case have two different kinds of non-entity, which is absurd. Dr. Ward, as quoted above, tells us that pure space is a non-entity, and we may, by parity of reasoning, assume that abstract time is a non-entity, and we are then confronted by Spencer's dilemma. We can, however, only call them non-entities, if we strip each of all its qualities and so reduce it to ^ See above, p. 56 ff. TIME AND SPACE 103 nothing. Bergson does strip space of its qualities and yet regards it as a reality. His argument here fails to convince, and the fallacy seems to arise from attempting to regard space apart from the objects contained in it, that is, apart from experience. Dr. Ward's criticism of Kant's empty space applies equally to Bergson's homogeneous medium. Bergson amplifies his definition of space as follows — " What we must say is that we have to do with two different kinds of reality, the one heterogeneous, that of sensible qualities, the other homogeneous, namely space " (T. F. W. p. 97). But as no reality can be wholly homogeneous without sinking into nothingness and ceasing to be a reality, so none can be completely heterogeneous. A reality which is all difference is as difficult to grasp as a reality which is all sameness. In neither case would there be anything for us to take hold of. Action, know- ledge and science would be impossible if we could not discern points of similarity, or identities, in the heterogeneous and points of difference in the homo- geneous. In Matter and Memory (p. 273) Bergson gives a new definition of space — " Abstract space is, indeed, at bottom, nothing but the mental diagram of infi- nite divisibility." " We must throw beneath the con- tinuity of sensible qualities, that is to say, beneath concrete extensity, a network, of which the meshes may be altered to any shape whatsoever and become as small as we please ; this substratum which is merely conceived, this wholly ideal diagram of arbitrary and I04 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON infinite divisibility, is homogeneous space" (p. 278). Thus, what Bergson called a solid reality in Time and Free Will has now become a wholly ideal diagram ; and homogeneous time is described as " a diagram- matic design of succession in general." Homo- geneous time is no longer regarded as identical with homogeneous space ; each retains its specific char- acteristic, and the criticism made of his treatment of homogeneous time and space in Time and. Free Will receives its justification. "They are the diagram- matic design of our eventual action upon matter." " Space is indeed the symbol of fixity and of infinite divisibility." "Homogeneous space ... is then seen to have no other reality than that of a diagram or a symbol." In Dr. Ward's words, it has ideality and validity, but not reality. The theory of space elaborated in Matter and Memory remains substantially the same in Creative Evolution. The conception of space as a homogeneous and empty medium, infinite and infinitely divisible, implies a power to carve reality as we like : this space is the plan of our possible action on things. It is a view taken by the mind and it enables the intellect to decompose according to any law and to recompose into any system (p. 165). On page 212 Bergson tells us that our personality descends in the direction of space when the interpenetration of our conscious states becomes broken up and externalised. The idea which the mind " forms of pure space is only the schema of the limit at which this movement would end" Once formed, TIME AND SPACE 105 we use it as a net to divide up matter according to the needs of our action. In these sentences Bergson clearly recognises that our conception of abstract space is a limiting conception. In discussing deduc- tion and induction (p. 226 f.), Bergson endeavours to show that both these forms of procedure, and therefore all intellect, find their ideal limit in geometry. As there is a concrete space in which we move and an abstract or ideal space which we use for our geometry, so there is a concrete time in which we live and an abstract time which we use for our science. Most writers on time and space put the two on the same plane and reason as if what is true of the one must be true of the other, but when they come to represent time they find, as Kant found, that they can do so only by drawing a line in space. Bergson, struck by this singularity, discovered that science is compelled, in the con- sideration of time, to omit its essential element. Change, the fundamental fact in all our time experience, includes duration, succession and simul- taneity, but of these three science retains only the third. "All the relations which cannot be translated into simultaneity, i.e. into space, are scientifically unknowable." Bergson further observed that this simplification made by science had been attended by brilliant results ; it had, in fact, made science and its ever- growing achievements possible ; and his own method consists in making a similar separation, but from io6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON the other side, and Bergson's separation, it will be admitted, has been attended by results equally brilliant. But we must always bear in mind that a separation of this kind is, in a sense, illegitimate ; that it has been made for the purpose of inquiry, and that we must not assume that what is true of the part is necessarily true of the whole. Such has been the constant error of scientific writers, for they have generally failed to recognise that in their discussions of motion, life and mind, they have omitted to take into account the essential element. In the same way Bergson's contrasts in Time and Free Will are much too definite to be definitive. They are made for a purpose and will require readjustment when his thought is viewed as a whole.^ Bergson defines simultaneity as the intersection of time and space ; it is the connecting link between duration and space, for each moment of duration ' ' can be brought into relation with a state of the external world which is contemporaneous with it, and can be separated from the other moments in consequence of this very process" (T. F. W. p. no). In other 'Dr. McKellar Stewart in his Cri/tcal Exposition seems to me to have overlooked this. His tendency is to give further emphasis to contrasts which Bergson has already over-emphasised, with the result that his analysis, in spite of its acumen, gives rather a distorted view of Bergson's philosophy. Mr. A. D. Lindsay is a more conservative critic. Both books are for the student rather than for the general reader. The treatment in each is more technical than in Bergson himself; although, no doubt, to those who understand them, technical terms are always the clearest. TIME AND SPACE 107 words, our consciousness, when it is not self-con- sciousness, that is purely introspective, is always consciousness of a contemporaneous state of the external world. To be conscious is to think of; it implies the relation between subject and object. But our perception, however instantaneous it may appear to be, always takes time, is always tinged with memory, has duration, brings the past into the present. There is no such thing as an absolute present ; it has passed before we can think it ; our present always includes some memory of the past and some anticipation of the future. In Time and Free Will Bergson represents the external world as always existing in an instantaneous present, absolutely timeless but perpetually renewed, the ideal assumed by science when it represents change by a series of static equations and so eliminates real change altogether. Bergson's attitude here is that of a rigid dualism, although we must remember that this dualism is not maintained in his later books. He illustrates his position from the movements of a pendulum, an illustration which has become classical and whose very clarity lends itself to criticism. It might almost say with Goethe's Margaret, " Schon war ich auch und das war mein Verderben." Simultaneity implies space, as Bergson says, but it implies a time-element as well, for it implies that the things juxtaposed are not only present side by side but present at the same time. We can conceive a juxtaposition in which one thing has disappeared io8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON when the next appears, and we can distinguish a second juxtaposition in which the things are present at the same time. Bergson denies that there is a succession in the former case ; he says, for instance, that one stroke of the pendulum has ceased when the next appears, and that the succession exists only for a conscious spectator. But why should we interpret the juxtaposition as a succession, if it is in fact not a succession at all .'' It may be granted that the succession is recognised only by a conscious spectator, for recognition requires mind, and mind implies duration. But to assert that what we know as succession is not succession is to assert that we have knowledge which is not knowledge, an obvious absurdity unless the knowledge can be shown to be hallucination — and there is, of course, no suggestion of that kind in the present instance. It is, no doubt, the ideal of science to present succession in the form of equations which can be read backwards or forwards and which therefore exclude any idea of succession, but science is not reality. Kant draws a distinction between change and alteration ; and we might say that a succession is a change from the point of view of a conscious observer and an alteration from the point of view of abstract science ; each would imply succession, but change would imply duration as well. Change in that case would be the result of conscious effort ; alteration the result of mechanical movements. In his later works Bergson not only does not maintain that " succession exists only for a conscious TIME AND SPACE 109 spectator" but he maintains the exact opposite. *' Yet succession exists ; I am conscious of it ; it is a fact. When a physical process is going on before my eyes, my perception and my inclination have nothing to do with accelerating or retarding it " (C. E. p. 357). But it is not necessary to labour the point, for in Matter and Memory one of Bergson's main objects is to show that there are real move- ments in the external world. Our inner life endures and the whole universe endures. If there appears to be no duration in the systems with which science deals, it is because science has artificially isolated them from the whole. Some systems are more properly isolable than others, and the truth of science is relative to, and varies with, this compara- tive isolability. In order to measure time, science is compelled to spatialise it and so to ignore its reality, to assume that it does nothing and is nothing. Measurement is the proper province of science, for Bergson, like Kant, regards science as it is exempli- fied in the exact sciences, whose ideal is a universal mathematic. If we are to understand life as a living process, we must go to philosophy, or in other words to a new science, which will not be exact or mathe- matical, but which will bring us into closer touch with reality and enable us to resume the elements which exact science has been compelled to discard. We shall then carve reality at the joints,^ study the • This image is suggested to Bergson by Plato, who compares (Phaedrus 265 E) the good dialectician to a skilful cook carving an animal without breaking its bones, by following the articulations marked out by nature. no THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON real articulation of things, and our knowledge will be no longer abstract and artificial. Bergson has clearly shown the insufficiency of the old method of science to give us a philosophy of life, valuable as its results have been within its own sphere, and the justification of his own philosophy will depend upon the possibihty of the new method of science which he asks us to adopt. II. ZENO AND MOTION Zeno with his " sophisms " gave prominence to a difficulty which modern science has never succeeded, and from the nature of the case will never succeed, in explaining. It is therefore worthy of attention, more especially in view of the light which Bergson throws upon it, for the problem of motion is typical of the other problems of life and evolution before which science stands helpless. Both common sense and science recognise motion as a fact ; science assumes it but cannot explain it, and, when it comes to measure it, is compelled to replace it by im- mobilities. The point of Zeno's paradox has been frequently misapprehended. Most philosophers have had something to say about it, from Aristotle through Hobbes and J. S. Mill down to the present day. Mr. Bertrand Russell deals with it in his Philosophy of Mathematics, and William James has a fairly full discussion in his posthumous Some Problems of Philo- sophy. Mill in his hogic states Zeno's Achilles para- dox substantially as follows : — Let us imagine that Achilles runs ten times as fast as a tortoise, which has a start of a thousand feet. It may then be shown that Achilles will never overtake the tortoise, for by the time he has run those thousand feet the tortoise will have run a hundred, and when Achilles has run those 112 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON hundred the tortoise will have run ten, and so on for ever. Mill says that the argument proves that time must be infinitely divisible, not that an infinite time would be required for Achilles to overtake the tor- toise. But Mill missed the point of Zeno's argument, which was not meant to show that an infinite time would be required, for that is an obvious absurdity. This is made clear in another form of the Eleatic contention, drawn from the flight of an arrow. At each point of time the arrow occupies a certain point of space, or in other words is at rest. Thus the motion of the arrow consists of a number of rests, and the arrow therefore does not move. Zeno is maintaining not that motion could not really take place, but that it could not truly be conceived as taking place by the successive occupancy of points. The real difficulty is the nature of motion. The successive occupancy of points is not motion, but a spatial representation of it for the purpose of measurement or calculation. The movement is a reality which the mathematician does not explain but takes for granted. The arrow passes through the points but is not at a given moment in any one of them. Neither the movement nor the duration it occupies is represented by the space traversed, although common sense and science regard them as being so for the purpose of calculation. Once the process is reduced to a diagram, the motion has disappeared. Mr. Bertrand Russell says : — " We must entirely reject the notion of a state of motion ; motion ZENO AND MOTION 113 consists merely in the occupation of different places at different times. . . . There is no transition from place to place, no consecutive moment or consecutive position." Contrast with this Bergson's view as given in Time and Free Will: — " Motion, regarded as a passage from one point to another, is a mental synthesis, a psychic process ... it has reality only in our consciousness." Now, whatever motion may really be, it is impossible to accept as adequate either the mathematical definition of Russell or the purely subjective view taken in the Essai. We have no difficulty in distinguishing between a change of pre- sentation and a presentation of change, between, as we saw when discussing time and space, a succession in things perceived and a perception of succession, for in the latter case we are aware of something which is itself moving or changing, and the motion or change must be objective and external. It is there- fore independent of our conscious life, although it cannot be properly explained as a series of positions in space. Science may treat it in that way for its own purposes, but the conception is inadequate since it is a conception of motion with the motion omitted. We therefore conclude that the external world has movements of its own and that science is unable to take account of them. We find Bergson adopting this view in his later works and arguing that mathe- matical methods are not the only possible methods in scientific inquiry. His account of motion in Time and Free Will is incomplete and needs to be supple- mented ; otherwise serious misconceptions may arise. H 114 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON In Matter and Memory (p. 246 f.) Bergson begins by observing that every movement is absolutely indivisible. " The senses, left to themselves, pre- sent to us the real movement, between two real halts, as a solid and undivided whole," although the mind, when recomposing the movement, thinks that the moving body has stayed an infinitely short time at every point of its trajectory. (It may be noted that the movement is now regarded as a reality, and not merely as a subjective synthesis as in Time and Free Will ; also, that the senses may perceive a reality when the intelligence cannot — the latter point being really the germ from which Bergson afterwards de- veloped his theory of metaphysics.) We know that the space traversed is infinitely divisible, and we are erroneously led to assume that the motion is simi- larly divisible, thereby making a progress coincide with a thing, a movement with an immobility. This error is facilitated by another. Every movement takes time, i.e. has duration, and this duration, when it has elapsed, may be symbolised by a line drawn in space, but duration as it flows cannot be so symbolised and cannot be properly regarded as composed of separate parts. Both Zeno and common sense make this erroneous assumption. For ordinary folk the confusion is immaterial, since they are concerned only with practical ends, but the philosopher cannot be content to regard movement as immobile. By his first argument (the Dichotomy) Zeno " merely proves that it is impossible to construct, a priori, movement ZENO AND MOTION 115 with im mobilities, a thing no man ever doubted." The second argument (the Achilles) assumes that the movement of the two bodies coincides with their path and may be divided, like the path, in any way we please. Both Achilles and the tortoise run in indivisible bounds, after a certain number of which Achilles will have overtaken the tortoise, but we cannot legitimately disarticulate these bounds and reconstruct them in an arbitrary way. The third fallacy (the Arrow) assumes that we have the right to distinguish indivisible moments in the duration of the movement of a moving body. Bergson also discusses the fourth argument (the Stadium) which has been unjustly disdained because of its obvious absurdity, and he regards it as worth exactly as much as the other three. The mathematician deals only with relative move- ments, which, however, for the physicist are real. No one can deny that there is real motion ; otherwise nothing in the universe would change, and there would be no meaning in the consciousness which we have of our own movements. In Creative Evolution (p. 322 fF.) Bergson intro- duces his remarkably effective comparison of the mechanism of our knowledge to a cinematograph. We can take as many snapshots as we like of a moving body, but each of these is immobile. How- ever many we take and at whatever short intervals of time we take them, the result is the same — there is no movement. By turning the film we reconsti- tute the photographs into a representation of a ii6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON moving body, but — and this is the important point — we have ourselves put the motion into the apparatus. The foregoing is only a very bald statement of Bergson's analogy. He now goes on to show its application to knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner motion of things, we recompose their motion artificially from the out- side. " We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general." The mechanism of our ordinary know- ledge is of a cinematographical kind, and this cinema-method is the only practical method. But the motion, or becoming, or change so obtained is illusive. We are thus brought back to Zeno and his attempt to reconstruct motion out of immo- bilities. The arrow is motionless, if we suppose it can ever be in a point of its course, and if a moving arrow ever coincides with a motionless position. But neither supposition is tenable. The most we can say is that the arrow might be in any point of its course, in this sense, that it passes there and might stop there. In that event it would be at rest and there would no longer be movement. If the arrow in its flight from A to B is in a point C mid- way between A and B, it would stop at C and we ZENO AND MOTION 117 should have two flights instead of one. But, by hypothesis, we are dealing with a single movement ; and this is as simple and undecomposable as the tension of the bow that produces it. All Zeno's arguments consist in applying the movement to the line traversed, and in supposing that what is true of the line is true of the move- ment. We can divide the line as we like, but we cannot articulate the movement as we like and suppose that it is always the same movement. Each step of Achilles and each step of the tortoise must be treated as indivisible. We may take a sub- multiple of the steps of each, if we wish to do so, and so long as we respect the articulations of the two courses, no difficulty will arise. " But Zeno's device is to reconstruct the movement of Achilles according to a law arbitrarily chosen. Achilles with a first step is supposed to arrive at the point where the tortoise was, with a second step at the point which it has moved to while he was making the first, and so on. In this case, Achilles would always have a new step to take. But obviously, to overtake the tortoise, he goes about it in quite another way. The movement considered by Zeno would only be the equivalent of the movement of Achilles if we could treat the movement as we treat the interval passed through, decomposable and recomposable at will. Once you subscribe to this first absurdity, all the others follow " (C. E. p. 328). Bergson has given considerable attention to the Eleatic problems because they illustrate the diffi- ii8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON culties into which exact science falls when it attempts, with what is made, to reconstitute what is being made. In life and evolution the reality is the transition, but we lose sight of the fact because our language is not moulded on reality. We must get rid of our cinema-language and our cinema-thought if we are to avoid the theoretical absurdities raised by the questions of movement, change and any kind of growth. This means that we have to reverse the bent of our intellectual habits, and to "write off" as shipwrecked all philosophies, whether intel- lectualistic or scientific, which are based on the cinematographical method. When we have done that, we may find that the only philosophy left to us is the philosophy of Bergson. III. DURATION AND THE SELF Our English word duration has not the connota- tive richness of the French, and in default of a better, such as " enduration " might possibly be, we have constantly to bear in mind the meaning which Bergson gives to it. By duration he means primarily that element of time with which science is unable to deal, the inability of science in this regard being itself proof of the limitations of science and of the insufficiency of mechanistic systems based upon scientific laws. If we are to know duration we must reflect upon our own conscious states, but the very act of reflection has already to some extent destroyed their flow, for we cannot reflect without separating and externalising conscious states which in duration are one and inseparable. We recognise duration best when we no longer measure it but feel it, when we live it rather than think it. " Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states."^ Bergson further defines it as "a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalise themselves in 1 Time and Free Will, p. loo. I20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON relation to one another, without any affiliation with number." ^ It is pure heterogeneity. Creative Evolution begins with a striking contrast between what we mean by our own existence and- the existence of inert matter. " Sensations, feelings, volitions, ideas — such are the changes into which my existence is divided and which colour it in turns. I change, then, without ceasing." Each of these sensations etc. is itself undergoing change every moment ; if it did not, duration would cease to flow. " My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates." We notice the change only at intervals, but " the state itself is nothing but change," and the transition from one state to another is continuous. Our attention separates these states artificially, and, in order to re-unite them, it has to imagine "a formless ego, indifferent and unchangeable, on which it threads the psychic states which it has set up as independent entities." But this colourless and impassive ego is a mere symbol without any reality ; its only use is to remind us that the discontinuity we have introduced into our psychic states is an artificial discontinuity of our own making, for what we have done is to eliminate real time. And time is just the stuff our psychical life is made of. " There is, moreover, no stuff more resistant nor more substantial. For our duration is not merely one instant replacing another ; if it were, there would ' Time and Free Wilt, p. 104. DURATION AND THE SELF 121 never be anything but the present — no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows with- out ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preserva- tion." Memory is not a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently ; our past is preserved by itself, auto- matically ; it is always there in its entirety, pressing against the portals of consciousness, but the cerebral mechanism admits only what is useful for the pre- sent.^ "It is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will and act." We know our past, as a whole, in its impulse or tendency, and only a small part of it in the form of idea. " Thus our personality shoots, grows and ripens without ceasing. Each of its moments is something new added to what was before. We may go further: it is not only something new, but something unfore- seeable," even by a superhuman intelligence. " That which has never been perceived, and which is at the same time simple, is necessarily unforeseeable." Each of the moments of our life is an original moment of a no less original history ; each is a kind of creation. " For a conscious being to exist is to ' Beneke, who died in 1854, had a theory of memory in some respects like that of Bergson. He held that it is not a faculty, but that ideas persist in the soul as what he called foot-prints. These foot-prints do not come into consciousness until they are revived by means of a transference of stimulus received from without. But his resemblance to Bergson is quite superficial. 122 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly." "Like the universe as a whole, like each conscious being taken separately, the organism which lives is a thing that endures. Its past, in its entirety, is prolonged into its present, and abides there, actual and acting." " Wherever any- thing lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed. This, it will be said, is only a metaphor. — It is of the very essence of mechanism, in fact, to consider as metaphorical every expression which attributes to time an effective- action and a reality of its own. In vain does immediate experience show us that the very basis of our con- scious existence is memory, that is to say, the pro- longation of the past into the present, or, in a word, i^«rafto«, acting and irreversible. . . . Time is assumed to have just as much reality for a living being as for an hour-glass" (p. i8). If time does nothing, it is nothing. Duration " is the foundation of our being, and, as we feel, the very substance of the world in which we live." We must appeal to consciousness, "that which is most indisputable in our experience" (p. 41). "Real duration is that duration which gnaws on things, and leaves on them the mark of its tooth," so that repetition is possible only in the abstract. Intellect, intent on that which repeats, " turns away from the vision of time. . . . We do not think real time. But we live it, because life transcends intellect " (pp. 48, 49). If the reader feels a little confused by this medley DURATION AND THE SELF 123 of images, he must remember that Bergson is endeavouring to express in words something which can only be apprehended immediately as an intuition. No rigid definition is possible, and any attempt at definition must proceed by way of comparison with something we can define, that is, by way of metaphor. Such metaphors are of different values, and may therefore suggest a confusion of thought where none exists. The quotations, moreover, are taken apart from their context, and unless we know the context we cannot tell on what aspect of duration Bergson may be, for the moment, insisting. We cannot argue about an intuition unless we break it up into concepts, but such a breaking up, although unavoid- able, must necessarily impair the original purity of the intuition. Bearing this in mind, we can use both methods, each of which will push on the other indefinitely. If we ask ourselves what our own life is, using the word life in its ordinary meaning, we see that it is essentially a continuous progress from the cradle to the grave, that it is an interpenetration of the past into the present, in the sense that everything we have done or suffered or experienced is carried forward to the present and leaves some impress upon it. By abstracting from the living body we see that the characteristic note of life is that it endures, that it has, or is, duration. When life seems to us to come to an abrupt close in death, we see that what is lost is this duration, this permeation of the present by the past. Similarly, if we consider our inner or 124 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON psychical life, the flow of our conscious states, we again find that the essential feature is a continuous progress, in which the whole of the past influences the present and, in a sense, creates it ; here again we can say with confidence that our inner life endures, that it has, or is, duration. Nor is it difficult to recognise that we cannot separate our inner life into its component parts without stopping its flow and destroying its duration, or, in Bergson's expression, without spatialising it. If we stop to dissect our mental life, we have immobilised it, placed it out on an imaginary table and separated its parts in space ; duration, its essential characteristic, has disappeared in the process. Bergson's conception of duration is thus readily confirmed by our ordinary thought, and so far as his argument in Time and Free Will is concerned we should hardly need to probe it further, for his object throughout that book is to show how our inner life difi^ers from the existence of inert matter. Bergson, then, we may conclude, has abundantly justified his contention that science cannot explain our inner life, for he has shown that the method of science requires that this inner life, which is not itself spatial, should be separated or laid out in space. Hence! the conclusions of science must be false or incomplete, and this is further demonstrated by its inability to deal with motion except as a series of immobilities. Therefore any attempt to erect scientific conclusions into a philosophy must fail, for the scientific view, taken by itself, is almost DURATION AND THE SELF 125 demonstrably insufficient, since there is an undoubted element in our perceptual experience which has no counterpart in the scientific conception of time. When science tells us that a body is composed of chemical elements, we agree ; if it proceeds to main- tain that a living body can be explained as such a composition, we disagree, for we know that there is all the difference in the world between a living body and a dead body, and we can realise that this difference may, and indeed must, consist in the con- tinuous permeation of the present by all the past, or, as Bergson says, in duration. It is significant that Professor Schafer, in his Presidential Address to the British Association, 19 12, drew no distinction between life and living matter, and that he appeared to assume that chemists, when they have made something which imitates the movements of pro- toplasm, have thereby created protoplasm. There is ground for saying that living things as we know them have originated in the course of evolution, but the proper inference to draw from that is, not that life itself has originated, but that we know life only in connexion with matter. Throughout Time and Free Will, Bergson draws a sharp contrast between our psychical life and inert matter, and contends that the former only has duration, while the latter lies completely within the province of science. He adopts the scientific view that things do not endure and that change is a suc- cession only for a conscious spectator. Hence his conception of duration is, so far, very like Professor 126 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON Ward's : — " What the term duration ultimately represents is our immediate subjective experience as actively striving and wearing on : it Implies the actual living, which only is actual in so far as it is not homogeneous and empty but full of changes endured or wrought." ^ But in his later thought Bergson denies that duration is merely subjective ; he maintains that the universe endures as a whole, and that the conclusions of science can be accepted only so far as it is justified in separating parts from this whole and in viewing them out of relation to its duration. Some systems can be regarded, for practical purposes, as isolable. The solar system, although not really isolated, can be so regarded, and the conclusions which science draws from the repetition of its movements will be free from serious error. But science cannot afford to neglect real time in dealing with the universe as a whole, or with living things of which duration is an essential characteristic. It matters little in Time and Free Will whether we regard our inner life as having, or as being, duration, but when time becomes the keystone of Bergson's philosophy the distinction is ^ The Realut of Ends, p. 306. Dr. Hastings Rashdall says : — " Empty time is of course unreal, but temporality enters into all our experience, and is an element in our experience as real as anything we know or can conceive. ... I recognise this [insistence on the reality of experience as seen from the inside, and on change and temporality as inherent elements in that reality] as one of the most permanent and valuable elements in the philosophy of M. Bergson . . . although there may be not an equal insistence on the complementary principle that change implies something per- manent." The Metaphysic of Mr. F. H. Bradley, p. 24. DURATION AND THE SELF 127 important, for in the first alternative duration would be but an aspect of reality, while in the second it would be reality itself. A consideration of the quotations already given seems to show that Bergson regards duration in both lights, at one time as identical with our psychical activity, at another as a force acting on that activity. Perhaps the most definite statement is that quoted from Creative Evolution, p. 17, ". . . the very basis of our conscious existence is memory, that is to say, the prolongation of the past into the present, or in a word, duration, acting and irrever- sible." Here duration is made identical with memory, which is spirit ; and spirit, the psychic force or activity at the very basis of our conscious existence, is the prolongation of the past into the present. Elsewhere we are told that reality is life, that life is " of the psychological order," or in other words a psychic force. On p. 287 duration is described as the very stuff of reality, and reality, whether matter or mind, as a perpetual becoming. We must distinguish between life in general, which " is mobility itself," and particular manifestations of life which " accept this mobility reluctantly," and are therefore relatively stable. Life is " conscious- ness launched into matter," and " consciousness is distinct from the organism it animates, although it must undergo its vicissitudes." Consciousness is essentially free, " but it cannot pass through matter without settling on it, without adapting itself to it." This adaptation is intellectuality, and the intellect i-^S THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON in its turn makes consciousness enter into conceptual forms. Thus consciousness as we reflect upon it is not pure duration, and a vigorous eftort ot the will is necessary if we are to grasp the idea of pure dura- tion, for it is an idea which we cannot know but which we can live. Adequately to discuss the relations of the various terms given above would be to rewrite Or.: rive Evolution, and the purpose of the present note is the more modest one of endeavouring to show the difference between time as pure duration and time as the measurement of simultaneities, the latter being the form in which it is known intellectually and in science. Bergson tells us (T. F. W. pp. 126, 127) that when we dream we feel dur.ition as quality/ but the value of this reference to dreams is dis- counted by the statement in Mtif/er and Manory that dreams imitate insanity. Nor are we helped very much by the suggestion that our feeling of duration is a confused instinct and that it is probably what animals perceive. Consciousness signifies hesitation or choice (C. E. p. 152) ; it arises as an interruption of duration and when we are confronted by action. It would seem to follow from this that we can never be really conscious of duration, and that the idea of duration must be a limit which, as we try to grasp it, ever flees before us. We may seek it in sleep or in dreams, for we are then nearly uncon- 1 Compare Nietzsche : " Nothing contains more of your own work than your dreams ; nothing belongs to you so much.'' DURATION AND THE SELF 129 scious. When we are quite unconscious our dura- tion will still be flowing, although no longer adding new memories to the old ones ; and even in death there may be a duration, and our memories, forlorn ghosts of the past, will still be there, pressing against the portals of a consciousness which will nevermore be open to them. It is, however, clear, from these and similar considerations, that we must rid consciousness of all cognition and intellect before we can intuite duration in its purity. By gradually extracting these apparently essential elements of our conscious life, we shall approach at the limit the idea of existence as a continuous flow in which the whole of the past Is in the present and creating the future. Bergson then takes this residuum of con- sciousness and pictures it as the ultimate basis of evolu- tion. Hence we may say that he finds in duration the substance of a universe whose reality is change. The psychic force which wells up in our conscious- ness as duration is the world-spirit. God is " un- ceasing life, action, freedom," and Bergson likens God to " a centre from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fire-works display — provided, however, that I do not present this centre as a thing, but as a continuity of shooting out" (C. E. p. 262). Bergson's conception of time as the stufi^ of reality has naturally aroused much criticism, with which we are not concerned here, but it is not in itself less thinkable than other theories, and it has the merit of avoiding many difficulties by which they are con- I30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSOX fronted.^ It is true that it is not easy to see how evolution makes a start. Srencer's nebula had to rotate itself, and Berjson is compelled to assume an interruption to his current of creative activity before it c?.n beJin to work, for orhervrise there would seem to be no reaso- whv it should not flow on for ever, like a placid tide until it meets a shoal. No doubt something must be assumed, but Bergson appears to make a double assumption, and with two principles at work tiie rest ou^ht to be easv. If we could posit both a principle of good and a principle of e%-il, theolojv would be child's plav. But when Bergson essays to engender matter, that is to explain its genesis or birth, he should have taken particular pains to make clear to his readers that he was nor assuming — imder however ethereal a form — the matter he was seeking to deduce. - Our consciousness is a continuous flow of sensa- tions, volitions, ideas, which we camiot call one or ' Mr. Bertrand RujfeU, d.scussint; the questions of appearance and reality aroused by the contemplation of such an ordinary' ob;ect as a table, well says: — " Stich questions are bewildering, and it is difficult to know that even the strangest hypotheses may not be true. Thus our familiar table, which has roused but the slijrbtest thoughts in us hitherto, has become a problem fall of sur- prising possibilities. The one thing we know about it is that it is not what it seenis. Beyond this modest result, so far, we ha\-e the most complete libertj- of conjecture. Leibniz tells us it is a community of souls; Berkeley tells tts it is an idea in the mind of God ; sober science, scarcely less wonderful, tells us it is a vast collection of electric charges in violent motion. Among these surprising possibilities, doubt suggests that perhaps there is no table at all."' Thi Prob'ans cf Fiiiiosc>ph\\ p. 24, * For criticism on this and other points the reader should refer to Dr, Stewart's analysis, and to Mr. B.Jsiliie's Ex.i'n:n