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
to us can be adequately expressed in words: only to these, as we shall
see, does the associationist theory apply. External to one another,
they keep up relations among themselves in which the inmost nature
of each of them counts for nothing, relations which can therefore be
classified. It may thus be said that they are associated by contiguity
or for some logical reason. But if, digging below the surface of
contact between the self and external objects, we penetrate into the
depths of the organized and living intelligence, we shall witness the
joining together or rather the blending of many ideas which, when once
dissociated, seem to exclude one another as logically contradictory
terms. The strangest dreams, in which two images overlie one another
and show us at the same time two different persons, who yet make only
one, will hardly give us an idea of the interweaving of concepts which
goes on when we are awake. The imagination of the dreamer, cut off from
the external world, imitates with mere images, and parodies in its own
way, the process which constantly goes on with regard to ideas in the
deeper regions of the intellectual life.
[Sidenote: By separating our conscious states we promote social life,
but raise problems soluble only by recourse to the concrete and living
self.]
Thus may be verified, thus, too, will be illustrated by a further
study of deep-seated psychic phenomena the principle from which we
started: conscious life displays two aspects according as we perceive
it directly or by refraction through space. Considered in themselves,
the deep-seated conscious states have no relation to quantity, they
are pure quality; they intermingle in such a way that we cannot tell
whether they are one or several, nor even examine them from this
point of view without at once altering their nature. The duration
which they thus create is a duration whose moments do not constitute
a numerical multiplicity: to characterize these moments by saying
that they encroach on one another would still be to distinguish them.
If each of us lived a purely individual life, if there were neither
society nor language, would our consciousness grasp the series of inner
states in this unbroken form? Undoubtedly it would not quite succeed,
because we should still retain the idea of a homogeneous space in
which objects are sharply distinguished from one another, and because
it is too convenient to set out in such a medium the somewhat cloudy
states which first attract the attention of consciousness, in order
to resolve them into simpler terms. But mark that the intuition of
a homogeneous space is already a step towards social life. Probably
animals do not picture to themselves, beside their sensations, as we
do, an external world quite distinct from themselves, which is the
common property of all conscious beings. Our tendency to form a clear
picture of this externality of things and the homogeneity of their
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