Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness — John Shaqi
Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of ConsciousnessBergson, Henri
Philosophy
Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
Bergson, Henri
Consciousness; Free will and determinism; Space and time
accompany it! From these facts and from many others of the same kind we
believe we can deduce the following conclusion: our consciousness of an
increase of muscular effort is reducible to the twofold perception of
a greater number of peripheral sensations, and of a qualitative change
occurring in some of them.
[Sidenote: The same definition of intensity applies to superficial
efforts, deep-seated feelings and states intermediate between the two.]
We are thus led to define the intensity of a superficial effort in
the same way as that of a cases there is a qualitative progress and
an increasing complexity, indistinctly perceived. But consciousness,
accustomed to think in terms of space and to translate its thoughts
into words, will denote the feeling by a single word and will localize
the effort at the exact point where it yields a useful result: it will
then become aware of an effort which is always of the same nature and
increases at the spot assigned to it, and a feeling which, retaining
the same name, grows without changing its nature. Now, the same
illusion of consciousness is likely to be met with again in the case
of the states which are intermediate between superficial efforts and
deep-seated feelings. A large number of psychic states are accompanied,
in fact, by muscular contractions and peripheral sensations. Sometimes
these superficial elements are co-ordinated by a purely speculative
idea, sometimes by an idea of a practical order. In the first case
there is intellectual effort or attention; in the second we have
the emotions which may be called violent or acute: anger, terror,
and certain varieties of joy, sorrow, passion and desire. Let us
show briefly that the same definition of intensity applies to these
intermediate states.
[Sidenote: The intermediate states. Attention and its relation to
muscular contraction.]
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