A New Philosophy : $b Henri BergsonLe Roy, Edouard
Philosophy
A New Philosophy : $b Henri Bergson
Le Roy, Edouard
Bergson, Henri, 1859-1941
"We do not represent the image to ourselves, again, without supporting
it by a design which resumes its leading features. We do not imagine
this design itself without imagining and, in so doing, sketching certain
movements which would reproduce it. It is this sketch, and this sketch
only, which is represented in the brain. Frame the sketch, there is a
margin for the image. Frame the image again, there remains a margin, and
a still larger margin, for the thought. The thought is thus relatively
free and indeterminate in relation to the activity which conditions it
in the brain, for this activity expresses only the motive articulation
of the idea, and the articulation may be the same for ideas
absolutely different. And yet it is not complete liberty nor absolute
indetermination, since any kind of idea, taken at hazard, would not
present the articulation desired.
"In short, none of the simple concepts furnished us by philosophy could
express the relation we seek, but this relation appears with tolerable
clearness to result from experiment."
The same analysis of facts tells us how the planes of consciousness,
of which I spoke just now, are arranged, the law by which they are
distributed, and the meaning which attaches to their disposition. Let us
neglect the intervening multiples, and look only at the extreme poles of
the series.
We are inclined to imagine too abrupt a severance between gesture and
dream, between action and thought, between body and mind. There are not
two plane surfaces, without thickness or transition, placed one above
the other on different levels; it is by an imperceptible degradation of
increasing depth, and decreasing materiality, that we pass from one term
to the other.
And the characteristics are continually changing in the course of the
transition. Thus our initial problem confronts us again, more acutely
than ever: are the forms of number and space equally suitable on all
planes of consciousness?
Let us consider the most external of these planes of life, and one which
is in contact with the outer world, the one which receives directly the
impressions of external reality. We live as a rule on the surface of
ourselves, in the numerical and spatial dispersion of language and
gesture. Our deeper ego is covered as it were with a tough crust,
hardened in action: it is a skein of motionless and numerable habits,
side by side, and of distinct and solid things, with sharp outlines and
mechanical relations. And it is for the representation of the phenomena
which occur within this dead rind that space and number are valid.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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