Humanistic Studies of the University of Kansas, Vol. 1Mitchell, Arthur
Philosophy
Humanistic Studies of the University of Kansas, Vol. 1
Mitchell, Arthur
Humanities
It is clear enough that nothing needs to _occupy_ space, in order to
be a magnitude. A line, which occupies no space, is even a _spatial_
magnitude, nevertheless. That it is spatial, Bergson would say, is just
the fact that it is homogeneous. But is homogeneity the only character
of a line, and is its spatiality _therefore_ necessarily the same thing
as its homogeneity? Evidently a line has a _quale_ perfectly distinct
from its homogeneity, and essential to its linear nature; that _quale_
is its direction. If an interval of time, then, or a mental state,
seems not to be spatial, this does not compel us to deny that there is
any homogeneity about it: if the interval or the state of mind lacks
the determination--the character of direction--which is indispensable
to a line and to spatiality as such, this lack determines these objects
of thought as non-spatial without the slightest detriment to their
homogeneity. But all the evidence of homogeneity in space applies
equally to homogeneity in time and consciousness. The evidence is
their additiveness: all _seem_ to present numerically distinct cases
and quantitative differences. No logical ground has been indicated,
for discrimination, in the validity of this seeming, as a warrant for
the homogeneity of space and not of time and consciousness. Time and
consciousness are homogeneous by the same warrant as space and matter.
I think it is not irrelevant to Bergson’s theory of the associative
transfer of quantity in the stimulus to the sensation, to observe
that, in the stimulus, there is kind as well as amount. If the
shade or quality of the sensation corresponds to the degree of
the cause, is there no further determination of the sensation
distinctively correlative with the kind of the cause? Such correlate
seems indispensable to Bergson’s, as to any, reactive conception of
sensation, but, in Bergson’s theory of intensity, it seems to be
preempted for correlation with the aspect of quantity in the stimulus.
The case of plural odors and sounds, the case of the line, and an
infinity of other cases prove that magnitude is intensive as well as
extensive. The contradictory thesis, that of Bergson, reduces, at
bottom, to the self-contradiction that consciousness discovers what is
no object of consciousness.
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