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
"Fear, when strong," says Herbert Spencer, "expresses itself in cries,
in efforts to escape, in palpitations, in tremblings."[10] We go
further, and maintain that these movements form part of the terror
itself: by their means the terror becomes an emotion capable of passing
through different degrees of intensity. Suppress them entirely, and
the more or less intense state of terror will be succeeded by an idea
of terror, the wholly intellectual representation of a danger which it
concerns us to avoid. There are also high degrees of joy and sorrow,
of desire, aversion and even shame, the height of which will be found
to be nothing but the reflex movements begun by the organism and
perceived by consciousness. "When lovers meet," says Darwin, "we know
that their hearts beat quickly, their breathing is hurried and their
faces flushed."[11] Aversion is marked by movements of repugnance
which we repeat without noticing when we think of the object of our
dislike. We blush and involuntarily clench the fingers when we feel
shame, even if it be retrospective. The acuteness of these emotions is
estimated by the number and nature of the peripheral sensations which
accompany them. Little by little, and in proportion as the emotional
state loses its violence and gains in depth, the peripheral sensations
will give place to inner states; it will be no longer our outward
movements but our ideas, our memories, our states of consciousness of
every description, which will turn in larger or smaller numbers in a
definite direction. There is, then, no essential difference from the
point of view of intensity between the deep-seated feelings, of which
we spoke at the beginning, and the acute or violent emotions which we
have just passed in review. To say that love, hatred, desire, increase
in violence is to assert that they are projected outwards, that they
radiate to the surface, that peripheral sensations are substituted for
inner states: but superficial or deep-seated, violent or reflective,
the intensity of these feelings always consists in the multiplicity of
simple states which consciousness dimly discerns in them.
[Sidenote: Magnitude of sensations. Affective and representative
sensations.]
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