Henri-Louis Bergson

“ And a living being which did nothing but live would need no more than this. But, simultaneously with this process of perception and adaptation which ends in the record of the past in the form of motor habits, consciousness, as we have seen, retains the image of the situations through which it has successively travelled, and lays them side by side in the order in which they took place. Of what use are these memory-images? Preserved in memory, reproduced in consciousness, do they not distort the practical character of life, mingling dream with reality? ”

“ Do we passively wait for the impressions to go in search of their images? Do we not rather feel that we are adopting a certain disposition which varies with our interlocutor, with the language he speaks, with the nature of the ideas which he expresses,—and varies, above all, with the general movement of his phrase, as though we were choosing the key in which our own intellect is called upon to play? The motor diagram, emphasizing his utterance, following through all its windings the curve of his thought, shows our thought the road. ”

“ But then how should it be otherwise when I perceive changes of quality in things? Sound differs absolutely from silence, as also one sound from another sound. Between light and darkness, between colours, between shades, the difference is absolute. The passage from one to another is also an absolutely real phenomenon. I hold then the two ends of the chain, muscular sensations within me, the sensible qualities of matter without me, and neither in the one case nor in the other do I see movement, if there be movement, as a mere relation: it is an absolute. ”

“ Without denying to psychology, any more than to metaphysics, the right to make itself into an independent science, we believe that each of these two sciences should set problems to the other and can, in a measure, help it to solve them. How should it be otherwise, if psychology has for its object the study of the human mind working for practical utility, and if metaphysics is but this same mind striving to transcend the conditions of useful action and to come back to itself as to a pure creative energy? ”

“ And as these two aspects of perception, quality and movement, have been made equally obscure, the phenomenon of perception, in which a consciousness, assumed to be shut up in itself and foreign to space, is supposed to translate what occurs in space, becomes a mystery.—But let us, on the contrary, banish all preconceived idea of interpreting or measuring, let us place ourselves face to face with immediate reality: at once we find that there is no impassable barrier, no essential difference, no real distinction even, between perception and the thing perceived, between quality and movement. ”

“ How do we parcel out the continuity of material extensity, given in primary perception, into bodies of which each is supposed to have its substance and individuality? No doubt the aspect of this continuity changes from moment to moment; but why do we not purely and simply realize that the whole has changed, as with the turning of a kaleidoscope? Why, in short, do we seek, in the mobility of the whole, tracks that are supposed to be followed by bodies supposed to be in motion? ”

“ Between the plane of action—the plane in which our body has condensed its past into motor habits,—and the plane of pure memory, where our mind retains in all its details the picture of our past life, we believe that we can discover thousands of different planes of consciousness, a thousand integral and yet diverse repetitions of the whole of the experience through which we have lived. ”

“ Do we not sometimes perceive in ourselves, in sleep, two contemporaneous and distinct persons of whom one sleeps a few minutes, while the other's dream fills days and weeks? And would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution? ”

“ To picture is not to remember. No doubt a recollection, as it becomes actual, tends to live in an image; but the converse is not true, and the image, pure and simple, will not be referred to the past unless, indeed, it was in the past that I sought it, thus following the continuous progress which brought it from darkness into light. This is what psychologists too often forget when they conclude, from the fact that a remembered sensation becomes more actual the more we dwell upon it, that the memory of the sensation is the sensation itself beginning to be. ”

“ Perception is made into a disinterested work of the mind, a pure contemplation. Then, as pure recollection can evidently be only something of this kind (since it does not correspond to a present and urgent reality) , memory and perception become states of the same nature, and between them no other difference than a difference of intensity can be found. But the truth is that our present should not be defined as that which is more intense: it is that which acts on us and which makes us act, it is sensory and it is motor;—our present is, above all, the state of our body. ”

“ We must not go too far; even in the animal it is possible that vague images of the past overflow into the present perception; we can even conceive that its entire past is virtually indicated in its consciousness; but this past does not interest the animal enough to detach it from the fascinating present, and its recognition must be rather lived than thought. To call up the past in the form of an image, we must be able to withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment, we must have the power to value the useless, we must have the will to dream. Man alone is capable of such an effort. ”

“ In vain do we seek its trace in anything actual and already realized: we might as well look for darkness beneath the light. This is, in fact, the error of associationism: placed in the actual, it exhausts itself in vain attempts to discover in a realized and present state the mark of its past origin, to distinguish memory from perception, and to erect into a difference in kind that which it condemned in advance to be but a difference of magnitude. ”

“ Past images, reproduced exactly as they were, with all their details and even with their affective colouring, are the images of idle fancy or of dream: to act is just to induce this memory to shrink, or rather to become thinned and sharpened, so that it presents nothing thicker than the edge of a blade to actual experience, into which it will thus be able to penetrate. In truth, it is because psychology has failed to separate out the motor element in memory, that we have sometimes overlooked and sometimes exaggerated what is automatic in the evocation of remembrances. ”

“ But the brain, in so far as it is an image extended in space, never occupies more than the present moment: it constitutes, with all the rest of the material universe, an ever renewed section of universal becoming. Either, then, you must suppose that this universe dies and is born again miraculously at each moment of duration, or you must attribute to it that continuity of existence which you deny to consciousness, and make of its past a reality which endures and is prolonged into its present. ”

“ Perception, therefore, consists in detaching, from the totality of objects, the possible action of my body upon them. Perception appears, then, as only a choice. It creates nothing; its office, on the contrary, is to eliminate from the totality of images all those on which I can have no hold, and then, from each of those which I retain, all that does not concern the needs of the image which I call my body. Such is, at least, much simplified, the way we explain or describe schematically what we have called pure perception. ”

“ But if the divisibility of matter is entirely relative to our action thereon, that is to say to our faculty of modifying its aspect, if it belongs not to matter itself but to the space which we throw beneath this matter in order to bring it within our grasp, then the difficulty disappears. Extended matter, regarded as a whole, is like a consciousness where everything balances and compensates and neutralizes everything else; it possesses in very truth the indivisibility of our perception; so that, inversely, we may without scruple attribute to perception something of the extensity of matter. ”

“ And, indeed, we see force and matter drawing nearer together the more deeply the physicist has penetrated into their effects. We see force more and more materialized, the atom more and more idealized, the two terms converging towards a common limit and the universe thus recovering its continuity. We may still speak of atoms; the atom may even retain its individuality for our mind which isolates it; but the solidity and the inertia of the atom dissolve either into movements or into lines of force whose reciprocal solidarity brings back to us universal continuity. ”

“ For why should an image which is, by hypothesis, self-sufficient, seek to accrue to itself others either similar or given in contiguity with it? The truth is that this independent image is a late and artificial product of the mind. In fact, we perceive the resemblance before we perceive the individuals which resemble each other; and, in an aggregate of contiguous parts, we perceive the whole before the parts. We go on from similarity to similar objects, embroidering upon the similarity, as on their common stuff or canvas, the variety of individual differences. ”

“ Let us suppose, now, that we have to do a piece of intellectual work, to form a conception, to extract a more or less general idea from the multiplicity of our recollections. A wide margin is left to fancy on the one hand, to logical discernment on the other; but, if the idea is to live, it must touch present reality on some side; that is to say, it must be able, from step to step, and by progressive diminutions or contractions of itself, to be more or less acted by the body at the same time as it is thought by the mind. ”

“ As our daily experience shows us bodies in motion, it appears to us that there ought to be, in order to sustain the elementary movements to which qualities may be reduced, diminutive bodies or corpuscles. Motion becomes then for our imagination no more than an accident, a series of positions, a change of relations; and, as it is a law of our representation that in it the stable drives away the unstable, the important and central element for us becomes the atom, between the successive positions of which movement then becomes a mere link. ”

“ But to touch the reality of spirit we must place ourselves at the point where an individual consciousness, continuing and retaining the past in a present enriched by it, thus escapes the law of necessity, the law which ordains that the past shall ever follow itself in a present which merely repeats it in another form, and that all things shall ever be flowing away. When we pass from pure perception to memory, we definitely abandon matter for spirit. ”

“ We have already said, but we cannot repeat too often, that our theories of perception are entirely vitiated by the idea that if a certain arrangement produces, at a given moment, the illusion of a certain perception, it must always have been able to produce the perception itself;—as if the very function of memory were not to make the complexity of the effect survive the simplification of the cause! ”

“ In vain does our imagination endeavour to go on, to carry division further still, and to quicken, so to speak, the circulation of our inner phenomena: the very effort by which we are trying to effect this further division of our duration lengthens that duration by just so much. And yet we know that millions of phenomena succeed each other while we hardly succeed in counting a few. We know this not from physics alone; the crude experience of the senses allows us to divine it; we are dimly aware of successions in nature much more rapid than those of our internal states. ”

“ Whatever idea we may frame of consciousness in itself, such as it would be if it could work untrammelled, we cannot deny that, in a being which has bodily functions, the chief office of consciousness is to preside over action and to enlighten choice. Therefore it throws light on the immediate antecedents of the decision, and on those past recollections which can usefully combine with it; all else remains in shadow. But we find here once more, in a new form, the ever-recurrent illusion which, throughout this work, we have endeavoured to dispel. ”

“ Every image is within certain images and without others; but of the aggregate of images we cannot say that it is within us or without us, since interiority and exteriority are only relations among images. To ask whether the universe exists only in our thought, or outside of our thought, is to put the problem in terms that are insoluble, even if we suppose them to be intelligible; it is to condemn ourselves to a barren discussion, in which the terms thought, being, universe, will always be taken on either hand in entirely different senses. ”