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
Moreover, the solution given by Kant does not seem to have been
seriously disputed since his time: indeed, it has forced itself,
sometimes without their knowledge, on the majority of those who
have approached the problem anew, whether nativists or empiricists.
Psychologists agree in assigning a Kantian origin to the nativistic
explanation of Johann Müller; but Lotze's hypothesis of local signs,
Bain's theory, and the more comprehensive explanation suggested by
Wundt, may seem at first quite independent of the Transcendental
Aesthetic. The authors of these theories seem indeed to have put aside
the problem of the nature of space, in order to investigate simply
by what process our sensations come to be situated in space and to
be set, so to speak, alongside one another: but this very question
shows that they regard sensations as inextensive and make a radical
distinction, just as Kant did, between the matter of representation
and its form. The conclusion to be drawn from the theories of Lotze
and Bain, and from Wundt's attempt to reconcile them, is that the
sensations by means of which we come to form the notion of space are
themselves unextended and simply qualitative: extensity is supposed
to result from their synthesis, as water from the combination of two
gases. The empirical or genetic explanations have thus taken up the
problem of space at the very point where Kant left it: Kant separated
space from its contents: the empiricists ask how these contents, which
are taken out of space by our thought, manage to get back again. It is
true that they have apparently disregarded the activity of the mind,
and that they are obviously inclined to regard the extensive form under
which we represent things as produced by a kind of alliance of the
sensations with one another: space, without being extracted from the
sensations, is supposed to result from their co-existence. But how can
we explain such an origination without the active intervention of the
mind? The extensive differs by hypothesis from the inextensive: and
even if we assume that extension is nothing but a relation between
inextensive terms, this relation must still be established by a mind
capable of thus associating several terms. It is no use quoting the
example of chemical combinations, in which the whole seems to assume,
of its own accord, a form and qualities which did not belong to any
of the elementary atoms. This form and these qualities owe their
origin just to the fact that we gather up the multiplicity of atoms
in a single perception: get rid of the mind which carries out this
synthesis and you will at once do away with the qualities, that is
to say, the aspect under which the synthesis of elementary parts is
presented to our consciousness. Thus inextensive sensations will remain
what they are, viz., inextensive sensations, if nothing be added to
them. For their co-existence to give rise to space, there must be an
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