A New Philosophy : $b Henri BergsonLe Roy, Edouard
Philosophy
A New Philosophy : $b Henri Bergson
Le Roy, Edouard
Bergson, Henri, 1859-1941
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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