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Charles Kingsley - "Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays"

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Henri Bergson

E >> Edouard le Roy >> Henri Bergson




The act of thought is always a complex play of moving representations, an
evolution of life in which incessant inner reactions occur. That is to
say, it is movement. But there are several planes of thought, from
intuition to language, and we must distinguish between the thought which
moves on the surface among terms displayed on a single plane, and the
thought with goes deeper and deeper from one plane to another.

We do not think solely by concepts or images; we think, first of all,
according to Mr Bergson's expression, by dynamic schemes. What is a
dynamic scheme? It is motive rather than representative, inexpressible in
itself, but a source of language containing not so much the images or
concepts in which it will develop as the indication of the path to be
followed in order to obtain them. It is not so much system as movement,
progress, genesis; it does not mark the gaze directed upon the various
points of one plane of deliberate contemplation so much as an effort to
pass through successive planes of thought in a direction leading from
intuition to analysis. We might define it by its function of calling up
images and concepts, representations which, for one and the same scheme,
are neither strictly determined nor anything in particular in themselves,
concurrent representations which have in common one and the same logical
power.

The representations called up form a body to the scheme, and the relation
of the scheme to the concepts and images which it calls up resembles,
mutatis mutandis, the relation pointed out by Mr Bergson between an idea
and its basis in the brain. In short, it is the very act of creative
thought which the dynamic scheme interprets, the act not yet fixed in
"results."

Nothing is easier than to illustrate the existence of this scheme. Let us
merely remark a few facts of current observation. Recall, for example, the
suggestive anxiety we experience when we seek to remember a name; the
precise syllables of the name still escape us, but we feel them
approaching, and already we possess something of them, since we immediately
reject those which do not answer to a certain direction of expectancy; and
by endeavouring to secure a more intimate feeling of this direction we
suddenly arouse the desired recollection.

In the same way, what does it mean to have the sense of a complex situation
in active life, if not that we perceive it, not as a static group of
explicit details, but as a meeting of powers allied or hostile, convergent
or divergent, directed towards this or that, of which the aggregate whole
tends of itself to awaken in us the initial reactions which analyse it?

In the same way again, how do we learn, how can we assimilate a vast system
of conceits or images? Our task is not to concentrate an enumerative
attention on each individual factor; we should never get away from them,
the weight would be too heavy.

What we entrust to memory is really a dynamic scheme permitting us to
"regain" what we should not have succeeded in "retaining." In reality our
only "knowledge" is through such a scheme, which contains in the state of
potential implication an inexhaustible multiplicity ready to be developed
in actual representations.

How, finally, is any discovery made? Finding is solving a problem; and to
solve a problem we must always begin by supposing it solved. But of what
does such a hypothesis consist?

It is not an anticipated view of the solution, for then all would be at an
end; nor is it a simple formula putting in the present indicative what the
enunciation expressed in the future or the imperative, for then nothing
would be begun. It is exactly a dynamic scheme; that is to say, a method
in the state of directed tension; and often, the discovery once realised as
theory or system, capable of unending developments and resurrections,
remains by the best of itself a method and a dynamic scheme.

But one last example will perhaps reveal the truth still more. "Anyone who
has attempted literary composition knows well that when the subject has
been long studied, all the documents collected, all the notes taken, we
need, to embark on the actual work of composition, something more, an
effort, often very painful, to place oneself suddenly in the very heart of
the subject, and to seek as deep down as possible an impulse to which
afterwards we shall only have to let ourselves go. This impulse, once
received, projects the mind on a road where it finds both the information
which it had collected and a thousand other details as well; it develops
and analyses itself in terms, the enumeration of which would have no end;
the further we advance, the more we discover; we shall never succeed in
saying everything; and yet, if we turn sharply round towards the impulse we
feel behind ourselves, to grasp it, it escapes; for it was not a thing but
a direction of movement, and though indefinitely extensible, it is
simplicity itself." (H. Bergson, "Metaphysical and Moral Review", January
1903. The whole critique of language is implicitly contained in this
"Introduction to Metaphysics".)

The thought, then, which proceeds from one representation to another in one
and the same plane is one kind; that which follows one and the same
conceptual direction through descending planes is another. Creative and
fertile thought is the thought which adopts the second kind of work. The
ideal is a continual oscillation from one plane to the other, a restless
alternative of intuitive concentration and conceptual expansion. But our
idleness takes exception to this, for the feeling of effort appears
precisely in the traject from the dynamic scheme to the images and
concepts, in the passing from one plane of thought to another.

Thus the natural tendency is to remain in the last of these planes, that of
language. We know what dangers threaten us there.

Suppose we have some idea or other and the word representing it. Do not
suppose that to this word there is one corresponding sense only, nor even a
finished group of various distinct and rigorously separable senses. On the
contrary, there is a whole scale corresponding, a complete continuous
spectrum of unstable meanings which tend unceasingly to resolve into one
another. Dictionaries attempt to illuminate them. The task is impossible.
They co-ordinate a few guiding marks; but who shall say what infinite
transitions underlie them?

A word designates rather a current of thought than one or several halts on
a logical path. Here again a dynamic continuity exists previous to the
parcelling out of the acceptations. What, then, should be the attitude of
the mind?

A supple moving attitude more attentive to the curve of change than to the
possible halting-points along the road. But this is not the case at all;
the effort would be too great, and what happens, on the contrary, is this.
For the spectrum a chromatic scale of uniform tints is very quickly
substituted. This is in itself an undesirable simplification, for it is
impossible to reconstitute the infinity of real shades by combinations of
fundamental colours each representing the homogeneous shore, which each
region of the spectrum finally becomes.

However cleverly we proportion these averages, we get, at most, some vulgar
counterfeit: orange, for example, is not a mixture of yellow and red,
although this mixture may recall to those who have known it elsewhere the
simple and original sensation of orange. Again, a second simplification,
still more undesirable, succeeds the first.

There are no longer any colours at all; black lines serve as guide-marks.
We are therefore with pure concepts decidedly in full symbolism. And it is
with symbols that we shall henceforward be trying to reconstruct reality.

I need not go back to the general characteristics or the inconveniences of
this method. Concepts resemble photographic views; concrete thickness
escapes them. However exact, varied, or numerous we suppose them, they can
certainly recall their object, but not reveal it to any one who had not had
any direct intuition of it. Nothing is easier than to trace the plan of a
body in four dimensions; all the same, this drawing does not admit
"visualisation in space" as is the case with ordinary bodies, for want of a
previous intuition which it would awaken: thus it is with concepts in
relation to reality. Like photographs and like plans, they are extracted
from reality, but we are not able to say that they were contained in it;
and many of them besides are not so much as extracts; they are simple
systematised notes, in fact, notes made upon notes. In other terms,
concepts do not represent pieces, parts, or elements of reality. Literally
they are nothing but simple symbolic notations. To wish to make integral
factors of them would be as strange an illusion as that of seeing in the
co-ordinates of a geometric point the constitutive essence of that point.

We do not make things with symbols, any more than we should reconstruct a
picture with the qualifications which classify it.

Whence, then, comes the natural inclination of thought towards the concept?
From the fact that thought delights in artifices which facilitate analysis
and language.

The first of these artifices is that from which results the possibility of
decomposition or recomposition according to arbitrary laws. For that we
need a previous substitution of symbols for things. Nothing demonstrates
this better than the celebrated arguments which we owe to Zeno of Elea. Mr
Bergson returns to the discussion of them over and over again. ("Essay on
the Immediate Data", pages 85-86; "Matter and Memory", pages 211-213,
"Creative Evolution", pages 333-337.)

The nerve of the reasoning there consists in the evident absurdity there
would be in conceiving an inexhaustible exhausted, an unachievable
achieved; in short, a total actually completed, and yet obtained by the
successive addition of an infinite number of terms.

But the question is to know whether a movement can be considered as a
numerical multiplicity. Virtual divisibility there is, no doubt, but not
actual division; divisibility is indefinite, whereas an actual division, if
it respects the inner articulations of reality, is bound to halt at a
limited number of phases.

What we divide and measure is the track of the movement once accomplished,
not the movement itself: it is the trajectory, not the traject. In the
trajectory we can count endless positions; that is to say, possible halts.
Let us not suppose that the moving body meets these elements all ready-
marked. Hence what the Eleatic dialectic illustrates is a case of
incommensurability; the radical inability of analysis to end a certain
task; our powerlessness to explain the fact of the transit, if we apply to
it such and such modes of numerical decomposition or recomposition, which
are valid only for space; the impossibility of conceiving becoming as
susceptible of being cut up into arbitrary segments, and afterwards
reconstructed by summing of terms according to some law or other; in short,
it is the nature of movement, which is without division, number, or
concept.

But thought delights in analyses regulated by the sole consideration of
easy language; hence its tendency to an arithmetic and geometry of
concepts, in spite of the disastrous consequences; and thus the Eleatic
paradox is no less instructive in its specious character than in the
solution which it embodies.

At bottom, natural thought, I mean thought which abandons itself to its
double inclination of synthetic idleness and useful industry, is a thought
haunted by anxieties of the operating manual, anxieties of fabrication.

What does it care about the fluxes of reality and dynamic depths? It is
only interested in the outcrops scattered here and there over the firm soil
of the practical, and it solidifies "terms" like stakes plunged in a moving
ground. Hence comes the configuration of its spontaneous logic to a
geometry of solids, and hence come concepts, the instantaneous moments
taken in transitions.

Scientific thought, again, preserves the same habits and the same
preferences. It seeks only what repeats, what can be counted. Everywhere,
when it theorises, it tends to establish static relations between composing
unities which form a homogeneous and disconnected multiplicity.

Its very instruments bias it in that direction. The apparatus of the
laboratory really grasps nothing but arrangement and coincidence; in a
word, states not transitions. Even in cases of contrary appearance, for
example, when we determine a weight by observing the oscillation of a
balance and not its rest, we are interested in regular recurrence, in a
symmetry, in something therefore which is of the nature of an equilibrium
and a fixity all the same. The reason of it is that science, like common-
sense, although in a manner a little different, aims only in actual fact at
obtaining finished and workable results.

Let us imagine reality under the figure of a curve, a rhythmic succession
of phases of which our concepts mark so many tangents. There is contact at
one point, but at one point only. Thus our logic is valid as infinitesimal
analysis, just as the geometry of the straight line allows us to define
each state of curve. It is thus, for example, that vitality maintains a
relation of momentary tangency to the physico-chemical structure. If we
study this relation and analogous relations, this fact remains indisputably
legitimate. Let us not think, however, that such a study, even when
repeated in as many points as we wish, can ever suffice.

We must afterwards by genuine integration attain moving continuity. That
is exactly the task represented by the return to intuition, with its proper
instrument, the dynamic scheme. From this tangential point of view we try
to grasp the genesis of the curve as envelope, or rather, and better still,
the birth of successive tangents as instantaneous directions. Speaking
non-metaphorically, we cling to genetic methods of conceptualisation and
proceed from the generating principle to its conceptual derivatives.

But our thought finds it very difficult to sustain such an effort long. It
is partial to rectilineal deduction, actual becoming horrifies it. It
desires immediately to find "things" sharply determined and very clear.
That is why immediately a tangent is constructed, it follows its movement
in a straight line to infinity. Thus are produced limit-concepts, the
ultimate terms, the atoms of language. As a rule they go in pairs, in
antithetic couples, every analysis being dichotomy, since the discernment
of one path of abstraction determines in contrast, as a complementary
remainder, the opposite path of direction. Hence, according to the
selection effected among concepts, and the relative weight which is
attributed to them, we get the antinomies between which a philosophy of
analysis must for ever remain oscillating and torn in sunder. Hence comes
the parcelling up of metaphysics into systems, and its appearance of
regulated play "between antagonistic schools which get up on the stage
together, each to win applause in turn." (H. Bergson, "Report of the
French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)

The method followed to find a genuine solution must be inverse; not
dialectic combination of pre-existing concepts, but, setting out from a
direct and really lived intuition, a descent to ever new concepts along
dynamic schemes which remain open. From the same intuition spring many
concepts: "As the wind which rushes into the crossroads divides into
diverging currents of air, which are all only one and the same gust."
("Creative Evolution", page 55.)

The antinomies are resolved genetically, whilst in the plane of language
they remain irreducible. With a heterogeneity of shades, when we mix the
tints and neutralise them by one another, we easily create homogeneity; but
take the result of this work, that is to say, the average final colour, and
it will be impossible to reconstitute the wealth of the original.

Do you desire a precise example of the work we must accomplish? Take that
of change; (Cf. two lectures delivered by Mr Bergson at Oxford on "The
Perception of Change", 26th and 27th May 1911.) no other is more
significant or clearer. It shows us two necessary movements in the reform
of our habits of imagination or conception.

Let us try first of all to familiarise ourselves with the images which show
us the fixity deriving from becoming.

Two colliding waves, two rollers meeting, typify rest by extinction and
interference. With the movement of a stone, and the fluidity of running
water, we form the instantaneous position of a ricochet. The very movement
of the stone, seen in the successive positions of the tangent to the
trajectory, is stationary to our view.

What is dynamic stability, except non-variation arising from variation
itself? Equilibrium is produced from speed. A man running solidifies the
moving ground. In short, two moving bodies regulated by each other become
fixed in relation to each other.

After this, let us try to perceive change in itself, and then represent it
to ourselves according to its specific and original nature.

The common conception needs reform on two principal points:

(1) All change is revealed in the light of immediate intuition, not as a
numerical series of states, but a rhythm of phases, each of which
constitutes an indivisible act, in such a way that each change has its
natural inner articulations, forbidding us to break it up according to
arbitrary laws, like a homogeneous length.

(2) Change is self-sufficient; it has no need of a support, a moving body,
a "thing" in motion. There is no vehicle, no substance, no spatial
receptacle, resembling a theatre-scene, no material dummy successively
draped in coloured stuffs; on the contrary, it is the body or the atom
which should be subordinately defined as symbols of completed becoming.

Of movement thus conceived, indivisible and substantial, what better image
can we have than a musical evolution, a phrase in melody? That is how we
must work to conceive reality. If such a conception at first appears
obscure, let us credit experience, for ideas are gradually illuminated by
the very use we make of them, "the clarity of a concept being hardly
anything, at bottom, but the assurance once obtained that we can handle it
profitably." (H. Bergson, "Introduction to Metaphysics".)

If we require to reach a conception of this kind with regard to change, the
Eleatic dialectic is there to establish it beyond dispute, and positive
science comes to the same conclusion, since it shows us everywhere nothing
but movements placed upon movements, never fixed "things," except as
temporary symbols of what we leave at a given moment outside the field of
study.

In any case, the difficulty of such a conception need not stop us; it is
little more than a difficulty of the imaginative order. And as for the
conception itself, or rather the corresponding intuition, it will share the
fate of all its predecessors: to our contemporaries it will be a scandal,
a century later a stroke of genius, after some centuries common evidence,
and finally an instinctive axiom.



V. The Problem of Consciousness. Duration and Liberty.

Armed with the method we have just described, Mr Bergson turned first of
all toward the problem of the ego: taking up his position in the centre of
mind, he has attempted to establish its independent reality by examining
its profound nature.

The first chapter of the "Essay on the Immediate Data" contains a decisive
criticism of the conceptions which claim to introduce number and measure
into the domain of the facts of consciousness.

Not that it is our business to reject as false the notion of psychological
intensity; but this notion demands interpretation, and the least that we
can say against the attempt to turn it into a notion of size is that in
doing so we are misunderstanding the specific character of the object
studied. The same reproach must be levelled against association of ideas,
the system of mechanical psychology of which the type is presented us by
Taine and Stuart Mill. Already in chapters ii. and iii. of the "Essay",
and again all through "Matter and Memory", the system is riddled with
objections, each of which would be sufficient to show its radical flaw.
All the aspects, all the phenomena of mental life come up for successive
review. In respect of each of them we have an illustration of the
insufficiency of the atomism which seeks to recompose the soul with fixed
elements, by a massing of units exterior to one another, everywhere and
always the same: this is a grammatical philosophy which believes reality
to be composed of parts which admit of number just as language is made of
words placed side by side; it is a materialist philosophy which improperly
transfers the proceedings of the physical sciences to the sciences of the
inner life.

On the contrary, we must represent the state of consciousness to ourselves
as variable according to the whole of which it forms a part. Here and
there, although it always bears the same name, it is no longer the same
thing. "The more the ego becomes itself again, the more also do its states
of consciousness, instead of being in juxtaposition, penetrate one another,
blend with one another, and tinge one another with the colouring of all the
rest. Thus each of us has his manner of loving or hating, and this love or
hate reflect our entire personality." ("Essay on the Immediate Data",
pages 125-126.)

At bottom Mr Bergson is bringing forward the necessity, in the case before
us, of substituting a new notion of continuous qualitative heterogeneity
for the old notion of numerical and spatial continuity. Above all, he is
emphasising the still more imperious necessity of regarding each state as a
phase in duration; and we are here touching on his principal and leading
intuition, the intuition of real duration.

Historically this was Mr Bergson's starting-point and the origin of his
thought: a criticism of time under the form in which common-sense imagines
it, in which science employs it. He was the first to notice the fact that
scientific time has no "duration." Our equations really express only
static relations between simultaneous phenomena; even the differential
quotients they may contain in reality mark nothing but present tendencies;
no change would take place in our calculations if the time were given in
advance, instantaneously fulfilled, like a linear whole of points in
numerical order, with no more genuine duration than that contained in the
numerical succession. Even in astronomy there is less anticipation than
judgment of constancy and stability, the phenomena being almost strictly
periodic, while the hazard of prediction bears only upon the minute
divergence between the actual phenomenon and the exact period attributed to
it. Notice under what figure common-sense imagines time: as an inert
receptacle, a homogeneous milieu, neutral and indifferent; in fact, a kind
of space.

The scholar makes use of a like image; for he defines time by its
measurement, and all measurement implies interpretation in space. For the
scholar the hour is not an interval, but a coincidence, an instantaneous
arrangement, and time is resolved into a dust of fixities, as in those
pneumatic clocks in which the hand moves forward in jerks, marking nothing
but a sequence of pauses.

Such symbols are sufficient, at least for a first approximation, when it is
only a question of matter, the mechanism of which, strictly considered,
contains nothing "durable." But in biology and psychology quite different
characteristics become essential; age and memory, heterogeneity of musical
phases, irreversible rhythm "which cannot be lengthened or shortened at
will." ("Creative Evolution", page 10.)

Then it is that the return of time becomes necessary to duration. How are
we to describe this duration? It is a melodious evolution of moments, each
of which contains the resonance of those preceding and announces the one
which is going to follow; it is a process of enriching which never ceases,
and a perpetual appearance of novelty; it is an indivisible, qualitative,
and organic becoming, foreign to space, refractory to number.

Summon the image of a stream of consciousness passing through the
continuity of the spectrum, and becoming tinged successively with each of
its shades. Or rather imagine a symphony having feeling of itself, and
creating itself; that is how we should conceive duration.

That duration thus conceived is really the basis of ourselves Mr Bergson
proves by a thousand examples, and by a marvellous employment of the
introspective method which he has helped to make so popular. We cannot
quote these admirable analyses here. A single one will serve as model,
specially selected as referring to one of the most ordinary moments of our
life, to show plainly that the perception of real duration always
accompanies us in secret.

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