Bergson’s attempt to repudiate the problem of determinism, as a pseudo-problem, results in his vacillation between the two sides of the controversy. Sometimes he accepts the solidarity of our acts with the rest of our conscious life, sometimes he denies it; which is to vindicate freedom sometimes by determinism, sometimes by indeterminism. In the beginning he founds freedom in the mutual penetration of the states of consciousness; even sensation is a commencement of freedom, because it embraces “the sketching and, as it were, prefiguring of the future automatic movements;”[140] and the free act is defined as that which “springs from the self”[141] without intervention of anything strange. Then, little by little, the contrary thesis takes the upper hand: the act of will becomes a _coup d’état_; “the successive moments of real time are not bound up with one another;”[142] the dynamic conception supposes “that the future is not more closely bound up with the present in the external world than it is in our own inner life.”[143] Bergson maintains, to be sure, that solidarity can be admitted between the past and the present and denied between present and future. Once the event happens it is indeed necessary that we should be able to explain it, and we can always do so by plausible reasons. But this connection is established after the fact for the satisfaction of our discursive reason. The past is fixed, it cannot _not have been_; it has become a _thing_, under the domain of the understanding and of analysis. Whereas, at the moment of enactment, the activity is a _process_, and so not capable of analysis. When the route is traced, we can analyze its directions and windings, but it is not traced in advance of being traced; it is the tracing that makes the route, not the route that determines the tracing. You can explain what is given, but there is no explaining what is not given. Bergson, however, does not keep this point of view. The future, we have just seen, is “prefigured” in the present. Then it is as necessary to the feeling of our freedom to be able to connect our future to our present in our decision, as to be able, once the act is accomplished, to give account of it by reasons drawn from our consciousness. Bergson’s thought vacillates this way because he attributes two incompatible characters to the inner life, qualitative heterogeneity and mutual penetration of its states. Grant the heterogeneity and you have an infinitesimal dust, the very denial of connection and penetration. If the states penetrate there are always two near enough to each other in quality to form an identical whole, while they differ only in degree, as two very near shades of the same color. But then there is a quantitative, and so a homogeneous, aspect of the inner life. CHAPTER IV BERGSON’S ABHORRENCE OF DETERMINATENESS