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
perception of magnetic currents which would enable the animal to take
its bearings like a living compass. This amounts to saying that space
is not so homogeneous for the animal as for us, and that determinations
of space, or directions, do not assume for it a purely geometrical
form. Each of these directions might appear to it with its own shade,
its peculiar quality. We shall understand how a perception of this
kind is possible if we remember that we ourselves distinguish our right
from our left by a natural feeling, and that these two parts of our own
extensity do then appear to us as if they bore a different _quality;_
in fact, this is the very reason why we cannot give a proper definition
of right and left. In truth, qualitative differences exist everywhere
in nature, and I do not see why two concrete directions should not be
as marked in immediate perception as two colours. But the conception of
an empty homogeneous medium is something far more extraordinary, being
a kind of reaction against that heterogeneity which is the very ground
of our experience. Therefore, instead of saying that animals have a
special sense of direction, we may as well say that men have a special
faculty of perceiving or conceiving a space without quality. This
faculty is not the faculty of abstraction: indeed, if we notice that
abstraction assumes clean-cut distinctions and a kind of externality
of the concepts or their symbols with regard to one another, we shall
find that the faculty of abstraction already implies the intuition
of a homogeneous medium. What we must say is that we have to do
with two different kinds of reality, the one heterogeneous, that of
sensible qualities, the other homogeneous, namely space. This latter,
clearly conceived by the human intellect, enables us to use clean-cut
distinctions, to count, to abstract, and perhaps also to speak.
[Sidenote: Time, in so far as it is a homogenious medium, and not
concrete duration, is reducible to space.]
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