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
Attention is not a purely physiological phenomenon, but we cannot
deny that it is accompanied by movements. These movements are neither
the cause nor the result of the phenomenon; they are part of it, they
express it in terms of space, as Ribot has so remarkably proved.[7]
Fechner had already reduced the effort of attention in a sense-organ
to the muscular feeling "produced by putting in motion, by a sort of
reflex action, the muscles which are correlated with the different
sense organs." He had noticed the very distinct sensation of tension
and contraction of the scalp, the pressure from without inwards over
the whole skull, which we experience when we make a great effort to
recall something. Ribot has studied more closely the movements which
are characteristic of voluntary attention. "Attention contracts the
frontal muscle: this muscle ... draws the eyebrow towards itself,
raises it and causes transverse wrinkles on the forehead.... In
extreme cases the mouth is opened wide. With children and with many
adults eager attention gives rise to a protrusion of the lips, a kind
of pout." Certainly, a purely psychic factor will always enter into
voluntary attention, even if it be nothing more than the exclusion by
the will of all ideas foreign to the one with which the subject wishes
to occupy himself. But, once this exclusion is made, we believe that
we are still conscious of a growing tension of soul, of an immaterial
effort which increases. Analyse this impression and you will find
nothing but the feeling of a muscular contraction which spreads over
a wider surface or changes its nature, so that the tension becomes
pressure, fatigue and pain.
[Sidenote: The intensity of violent emotions as muscular tension.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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