Karin Stephen

“ If we succeed in ridding ourselves of our common-sense preconceptions, Bergson tells us that we may expect to know the old facts in a new way, face to face, as it were, instead of seeing them through a web of our own intellectual interpretations. I have not attempted to offer any proof whether or not Bergson’s description of reality is in fact true: having understood the meaning of the description it remains for each of us to decide for himself whether or not it fits the facts. ”

“ Intuition may be described as turning past and present into fact directly known by transforming it from mere matter into a creative process of duration: but, of course, actually, there is not, first matter, then an act of intuition which synthesises it, and finally a fact in duration, there is simply the duration, and the matter and the act of intuition are only abstractions by which we describe and explain it. ”

“ To speak of “our” perceiving objects is a mere fiction: when objects are combined by synthesis they become perceptions, facts, and this is the same as saying that they are minds. For Bergson a mind is nothing but a synthesis of objects. This explains what he means by saying that in direct knowledge the perceiver is the object perceived.
Actually he thinks such notions as the perceiver and the object and the relation which unites them, or again matter and the act of synthesis which turns matter into fact, are nothing but abstractions: the only thing there really is is simply the fact itself. ”

“ If Bergson’s account of the way in which memory works is true there is a sense in which the whole past of every individual is preserved in memory and all unites with any present bare sensation to constitute the fact directly known to him at any given moment. ”

“ So long, therefore, as we are preoccupied with abstraction, we must bend all our energies towards isolating these fragments from the context which extends out and out over the whole field of virtual knowledge, rivetting our attention on them and, as far as possible, ignoring all the rest. If Bergson’s theory of virtual knowledge is correct, then, it does seem as if normally our efforts were directed towards shutting out most of our knowledge rather than towards enjoying it, towards forgetting the greater part of what memory contains rather than towards remembering it. ”

“ This intellectual attitude, as Bergson calls it, though practically useful, has, according to him, two grave drawbacks from the point of view of speculation. By focussing our attention upon anything less than the whole fact, and so isolating a part from the rest, he says we distort what we knew originally: furthermore just in so far as we make a selection among the facts, attending to some and passing over others, we limit the field of direct knowledge which we might otherwise have enjoyed. ”

“ Qualities are assumptions required, not in order that change may take place, but in order that we may describe, explain, and so control it. Such particular qualities as red and green are really no more facts directly known than such still more general, and so more obviously fictitious notions as a colour which is of no particular shade, or a table, or a mind, apart from its qualities or states. All these fixed things are alike abstractions required for explaining facts directly known but not occurring as actual parts of those facts or stages in their change. ”

“ Bergson, on the contrary, says that common qualities are arrived at by leaving out much of the fact originally known, while each successive stage in the process of abstraction by which we explain facts, though it enables us to apply more and more general laws, yet leaves out more and more of the actual fact itself. Analysis begins this whittling away of the actual fact by confining our attention to qualities which do not exhaust the whole content of the actual fact. ”

“ For Bergson, however, an instantaneous fact is out of the question: every fact contains more than the mere matter presented at the moment of perception. Facts are distinguished from matter by lasting through a period of duration, this is what makes the difference between the actual fact and any of the material worlds in terms of which we describe them: matter, is, as we have said, only an abstraction of one element or tendency in the changing fact which is the sole reality: memory is the complementary abstraction. Apart from the actual fact neither matter nor memory have independent existence. ”

“ The usual work of the intellect consists in analysis and classification: if you have anything presented to you which you do not understand the obvious question to put yourself is, “what is it?” Suppose in a dark room which you expected to find empty you stumble against something, the natural thing to do is to begin at once to try to fit your experience into some class already familiar to you. ”

“ Inevitably, of course, these facts themselves, being less than all the stream of creative duration to which they belong, will be abstractions, if taken apart from that whole stream, and so distorted. This flaw in what we know even by direct acquaintance can never be wholly remedied short of our succeeding in becoming acquainted with the whole of duration. It is something, however, to be aware of the flaw, even if we cannot wholly remedy it, and the wider the acquaintance the less is the imperfection in the fact known. ”

“ It may be open to question how much of this virtual knowledge of both past and present we ever could know directly in any sense comparable to the way in which we know the fact actually presented at some given moment, however perfectly we might succeed in ridding ourselves with our intellectual pre-occupation with explaining instead of knowing; but, if reality forms an unbroken whole in duration, we cannot in advance set any limits, short of the whole of reality, to the field of virtual knowledge. ”

“ Facts are to the mental life of an individual what bare sensation is to the actual fact directly known in perception: facts are, as it were, the matter of mental life. Imagine a fact directly known, such as we have described in discussing sensible perception, lasting on and on, perpetually taking up new bare sensations and complicating them with meaning which consists of all the past which it already contains so as to make out of this combination of past and present fresh fact, that will give you some idea of the way in which Bergson thinks that mental life is created out of matter by memory. ”

“ The common sense world of things, events, qualities, minds, feelings, and so on, in which we all pass our every day lives is an early and somewhat crude attempt to describe the continually changing fact which each of us experiences directly, but it is perhaps more misleading than the later elaborate constructions of chemistry, physics, biology or physchology in that things and qualities are more easily mistaken for facts than more obviously hypothetical assumptions. ”

“ The same thing may be said of perception: perception is the servant of action and out of the whole of reality it isolates only what interests us; it shows us not so much the things themselves as what we can make of them. ”

“ When a scientist frames a hypothesis he employs the intellectual method of substitution with full consciousness of what he is about; he recognises that its terms are abstractions and not facts. But the intellectual method of explaining by substituting general abstractions for particular facts is not confined to science. All description and explanation, from the first uncritical assumptions of common sense right up to the latest scientific hypothesis employs the intellectual method of substituting abstractions for actual facts. ”

“ The more we shake ourselves free from the common sense and scientific bias towards substituting explanations for actual facts the more clearly we see that this continuous process of changing is the very essence of what we know directly, and the more we realize how unlike such a continuous process is to any series of stages in relation of succession. ”

“ It follows that either the fact with which we are directly acquainted does not change as a creative process, or else that we are quite wrong in assuming, as we ordinarily do, that we actually know qualities directly and that it is these qualities which form the basis of classification, and hence of all description and explanation. We have already seen that this assumption, though at first sight one naturally supposes it to be based on direct acquaintance, may really depend not on any fact directly known but on our preoccupation with explanation rather than with mere knowing. ”

“ This whole field of virtual knowledge is regarded as standing to the actual facts to which we usually devote our attention, much as, for instance, the whole situation of stumbling upon something in a dark room stood to the single quality of roughness: in both cases there is a central point in the full focus of attention which we are apt to look upon as the fact directly known, but this central point is really surrounded by a vastly wider context and this too is known in some sense though it is commonly ignored. ”

“ It is not because it affords an excuse for laziness that Bergson’s philosophy is popular but because it gives expression to a feeling which is very widespread at the present time, a distrust of systems, theories, logical constructions, the assumption of premisses and then the acceptance of everything that follows logically from them. There is a sense of impatience with thought and a thirst for the actual, the concrete. ”

“ Particular facts, as we have seen, are not really distinct parts of a single individual mental life: the notion of separateness applies only to abstractions and it is only because we are much more pre-occupied with abstractions than with actual facts that we come to suppose that facts can ever really be separate from one another. When we shake off our common sense assumptions and examine the actual facts which we know directly we find that they form a process and not a logical series of distinct facts one after the other. ”

“ If matter is to be thought of at all as existing apart from any memory it must be thought of as consisting of a single vibration in a perpetual present with no past. We might alter the description and say that this present moment of matter should be thought of as being perpetually destroyed and recreated. ”

“ Moreover, unless we are constantly on the alert, the intellectual habit of using all our direct knowledge as material for analysis and classification ends by completely misleading us as to what it is that we do actually know. ”

“ Mathematicians have been in the habit of telling us that these difficulties depend simply on the fact that we imagine the series of positions at which Achilles and the tortoise find themselves from moment to moment as finite: the device of the infinite series, they say, satisfies all the requirements needed for representing change and solves all the logical difficulties which arise from it. Bergson’s difficulties, however, cannot be solved in this way for they are not based upon the discovery of logical absurdities but upon the discrepancy between the description and the fact. ”