CHAPTER I

ONTOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY

My reason for coupling these two subjects in one heading is suggested by the following words quoted from the Introduction to _Creative Evolution_: “... _theory of knowledge_ and _theory of life_ seem to us inseparable.” For Bergson, reality is life; and knowledge, of course, is a function of life. “The fundamental character of Bergson’s philosophy,” writes H. Wildon Carr,[99] “is ... to emphasize the primary importance of the conception of life as giving the key to the nature of knowledge.”

All the essential principles of this metaphysics are contained in the first of Bergson’s philosophical books, _Time and Free Will_.[100] The two later books, _Matter and Memory_ and _Creative Evolution_, have not modified it, and have hardly even developed it--in the sense, that is, that no vital corrections or additions to the principles of the _Essai_ have been made.

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In discussing anti-intellectualistic philosophies, in the first part of the present essay, their suspicion and distrust of intellect was attributed to a logical illusion. The philosopher, finding life preeminently satisfactory in an intimate acquaintance with the qualitative aspect of experience, acquires an instinctive faith in the preeminent reality of quality, a faith which is the deepest root of his being. Now, this faith is absolutely justified, of course. It is only necessary that it should be understood. Illusion and error enter in with the neglect of the very preeminence of this character of reality. For evidently nothing can be preeminently real and at the same time real in any sense for which the adverb “preeminently” is either false or meaningless. The sense of “important” is a well accredited, proper meaning, in our language, of the word “real.” But it is a sense perfectly distinct from the metaphysical sense. Teleologically, anything is preeminently real _according to circumstances_. Teleologically, “real” is a synonym of “important,” a relative term capable of degree. Metaphysically, circumstances are irrelevant to the realness of anything. This is a different statement from the statement that circumstances are irrelevant to the _nature_ of anything. It may be that there is nothing whose nature can be independent of, wholly undetermined by, circumstances. That is another question. We have nothing to do with it at present. For in either case, circumstances make it neither more nor less real. Metaphysically, then, “real” is an absolute term, incapable of degree, and the adverb “preeminently” has no meaning when applied to it. The very fitness of the adverb “preeminently” to the intuitionist’s meaning of the realness of quality determines this meaning as a teleological eulogism, and the ultimate significance of intuitionism is not the germination of a logical principle, but an instinctive propagandism in the direction of a favorite emphasis of living, an enthusiasm which has become involved in a logical illusion concerning its own foundation in the nature of things, an illusion which is clearly traceable, on analysis, to this ambiguity in the use of the word “real.”

Later in this study it will appear that Bergson’s interest centers, as the interest of French philosophy has centered ever since the Renaissance, in the problem of freedom. No doubt that very enthusiasm which motivates modern anti-intellectualism and gives it so positive a character, is a prime factor in its popular success. And in the case of Bergson, both the significance of his philosophy itself and the brilliant vogue it has achieved can be rightly appreciated only in the light of this central passion whose appeal to human nature is so universal and so profound. Anti-intellectualism and anti-determinism are one and the same thing. It will appear as we go on that a deep-lying tychism, a horror of determinism, is the specific trait of that motive (described above as a natural affinity for the qualitative aspect of reality, as distinguished from its relational aspect) which strenuously endeavors, in Bergson, to eliminate relation from reality, judgment from knowledge. He protests that freedom cannot be defined without converting it into necessity; for definition is determination. A would-be indeterminist _theory_ of will is as futile as a determinist theory is false: on any _theory_, will is prejudged in favor of determinism. The nature of freedom cannot be known independently of the nature of will, and then attributed or denied to will, as one might attribute or deny redness to an apple. To say, Will is free, would be like saying, Will is voluntary, or, Freedom is free--not, indeed, an untruth, but without meaning and hence not a truth, either.

The one way, then, of getting the true nature of will truly comprehended which is doomed to necessary failure, is to write a psychological treatise on the subject. For, since will has no such determinate character as intellect finds in it or gives to it, a treatise conveying the true nature of will would have to be unintelligible! Now, see in will, as Leibniz[101] and Schopenhauer, as well as Bergson, have seen in it, the whole of life and of reality, and you see how it is Bergson’s tychism that constitutes the specific motive for his anti-intellectualism, and how this so-called method forms, in his philosophy, the supreme doctrine which is the objective of all his discourse.

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Bergson’s critique of intellectualism proceeds by applying to traditional metaphysics and epistemology his purely qualitative criterion of reality. Whether science, the product of intelligence, is physical, biological, or psychological, it is knowledge-about, and not acquaintance-with; its object is relation, and not reality; its objective is action, and not vision; its organ is intelligence, not instinct. But the object of philosophy is reality; its objective is vision; its organ instinct. The timeless, intellectual way in which science knows about, but never knows, is not the way of true philosophy. The philosopher, to know reality, must achieve a vital, sympathetic concurrence with its flow. To be known, reality must be lived, not thought. In _Creative Evolution_ Bergson traces the genesis of instinct and intelligence to a primitive tendency, effort or spring of life (the _élan vital_) whose path bifurcates indefinitely in the course of its evolution. These elementary tendencies, instinct and intelligence, having issued from the same primitive tendency, are both present, at least in rudiment, in all forms of life; and it is the presence, though in a suppressed state, of instinct in man that must save philosophy from the _cognitive emptiness_ of science, and give it a hold on the living fulness of reality.

In _Time and Free Will_ the theory of “real duration,” which is a synonym for intuition, and for life, and for reality, and is the foundation of the Bergsonian philosophy, is enunciated, and in the light of it intellect is shown to falsify the nature of consciousness in applying to conscious states such categories as magnitude, plurality, causation. Each of these categories, in its traditional application, is a quantifying and a spatializing of consciousness. The intensity of a conscious state is nothing but the state itself; the state is pure quality or heterogeneity, incapable of measure and degree. The variousness of conscious states has no analogy with plurality. Plurality is simultaneity and juxtaposition; but conscious states prolong each other in an interpenetrating flow. Finally, the organization of conscious states is nothing like the traditional systematic “coördination” of associationistic psychology. It does not lend itself to laws and principles. It cannot be adequately expressed by words, nor artificially reconstructed by a juxtaposition of simple states, for it is always an absolutely new and original phase of our duration, and is itself a simple thing.

The first chapter of _Time and Free Will_ consists of analyses of all sorts of psychological states, in order to justify the above thesis concerning intensity. They are masterly analyses, and their interest for psychology is great. So far as Bergson’s object is concerned, of showing how intellect falsifies the nature of consciousness in conceiving of sensations as _more_ or _less_ intense, what the chapter proves is no more than that whenever a conscious state varies--which every conscious state does continuously--it varies qualitatively. Which hardly needed to be proved. For the argument does not show that, along with the qualitative change, a quantitative change may not occur; that is, it does not exclude the proposition which Bergson is trying to refute, namely that there is something in the nature of a conscious state that is capable of increasing and decreasing.[102]

In saying that conscious states are pure quality, Bergson means that when one compares a sensation, for instance, with another which is regarded as of the same “kind,” but of greater or less intensity, both the sameness of kind and the difference of magnitude are illusions of intellect, due to attributing the category of magnitude, or quantity, to that whose nature admits of no such determination. A so-called more intense odor, say, it is mere nonsense to call _same_ in any sense with another, supposed to be less intense. The two are distinguishable, that is all; they are not comparable, properly speaking. They are comparable in just the sense, and in no other (it would seem, from Bergson’s treatment of the subject, although the statement is not his, explicitly) that either of the odors can be compared with a sound or a taste. The difference is not one of degree; it is what Bergson calls absolute.

But what, then, exactly, according to Bergson, do we mean when we compare psychic states as more or less intense? In simple states, he says, magnitude of cause is associated, by a thousand experiences, with a certain quality or shade of effect in consciousness, and the former is attributed to the latter. The quantitative scale rubs off color, so to speak, by the operation of association, from the material cause to the psychic effect. In complex states intensity means the amount of our inner life which the state in question colors with its own quality. A passion is deep and intense in the fact that the same objects no longer produce the same impression. In this statement of the case of complex states it will be seen that Bergson fails to avoid attributing quantity to the inner life of consciousness, since the intensity of complex states is measured, by him, by a quantitative standard, the amount of that inner life colored or affected by the quality in question.

The attempt is equally hopeless whether the state in question be simple or complex. Bergson attempts, but fails,[103] to prove that magnitude is a character peculiar to space, and that homogeneity and space are two names for the same conception. Two odors, two sounds are _more_ than one, however; and that homogeneity in them by virtue of which they are more, and two, is not space. Bergson would object that number itself, the twoness of the odors or sounds, is indeed a spatial attribute falsely imputed to them. They are not plural, in themselves; it is conceptualization that accounts for the plurality imputed to them. One evolves continuously, in the flow of consciousness, out of the other. It would be a sufficient answer that such a doctrine contradicts itself in every breath by the terms necessary to any utterance of it,--such terms as sounds, they, them, one, the other--all imputing to the objects of discussion the plurality which it tries to deny. And to fall back on the disabilities of language, due to its being the work of intellect, is only to declare one’s philosophy ineffable. But not only ineffable--unthinkable. Yes, Bergson would admit, unthinkable in the narrow sense of conceptual thought, but not unknowable to immediate intuition. The final rejoinder, I think, is that immediacy is a vanishing-point, a limiting conception of the relation between subject and object, a phase of consciousness in which to use the mathematical analogy, the “coefficient” of consciousness vanishes into zero. We return later in this essay to the amplifying of this point.[104] In brief, if there is no _distinction_ between subject and object, there is no object (as, likewise, no subject, of course); hence, no truth; and Bergson could not have made these ineffable discoveries _about_ the sounds and odors, for he could not have discovered themselves.

It is clear enough that nothing needs to _occupy_ space, in order to be a magnitude. A line, which occupies no space, is even a _spatial_ magnitude, nevertheless. That it is spatial, Bergson would say, is just the fact that it is homogeneous. But is homogeneity the only character of a line, and is its spatiality _therefore_ necessarily the same thing as its homogeneity? Evidently a line has a _quale_ perfectly distinct from its homogeneity, and essential to its linear nature; that _quale_ is its direction. If an interval of time, then, or a mental state, seems not to be spatial, this does not compel us to deny that there is any homogeneity about it: if the interval or the state of mind lacks the determination--the character of direction--which is indispensable to a line and to spatiality as such, this lack determines these objects of thought as non-spatial without the slightest detriment to their homogeneity. But all the evidence of homogeneity in space applies equally to homogeneity in time and consciousness. The evidence is their additiveness: all _seem_ to present numerically distinct cases and quantitative differences. No logical ground has been indicated, for discrimination, in the validity of this seeming, as a warrant for the homogeneity of space and not of time and consciousness. Time and consciousness are homogeneous by the same warrant as space and matter.

I think it is not irrelevant to Bergson’s theory of the associative transfer of quantity in the stimulus to the sensation, to observe that, in the stimulus, there is kind as well as amount. If the shade or quality of the sensation corresponds to the degree of the cause, is there no further determination of the sensation distinctively correlative with the kind of the cause? Such correlate seems indispensable to Bergson’s, as to any, reactive conception of sensation, but, in Bergson’s theory of intensity, it seems to be preempted for correlation with the aspect of quantity in the stimulus.

The case of plural odors and sounds, the case of the line, and an infinity of other cases prove that magnitude is intensive as well as extensive. The contradictory thesis, that of Bergson, reduces, at bottom, to the self-contradiction that consciousness discovers what is no object of consciousness.

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In admitting that sensations are comparable in this sense, that two odors, for instance, regarded as of the same kind, can be compared with each other in the same way as either can be compared with a sound or a taste, Bergson evidently means that they can be distinguished as different; and he regards this as implying that sensations are absolutely heterogeneous with each other, _absolutely_ different. This phrase, I am sure, conceals a bald contradiction. It seems to mean a relation, namely difference, in which, however, the terms are absolute, that is not in relation. Difference cannot be so conceived. Difference, I submit, cannot be conceived without that (_common to the differing terms_) in respect of which they are different. Monsieur Bergson, therefore, in admitting that sensations are comparable in any sense, is still confronted with an element common to all sensations; he has still to eliminate the character of homogeneity from sensation, by virtue of which a purely subjective evaluation of their relative intensities is possible.

The root of the difficulty Monsieur Lévy-Bruhl has shown[105] to be a reific separation of quantity and quality, which are separable in truth only by abstraction of attention. Real existence in absolute homogeneity or space, as Bergson represents the existence of the external world, is as unthinkable as real existence in absolute heterogeneity, which existence is consciousness or life, for Bergson. External things, he says, which do not lapse (“_ne durent pas_”), seem to us, nevertheless, to lapse like us because to each instant of our lapsing duration a new collective whole of those simultaneities which we call the universe corresponds. “Does this not imply,” writes Lévy-Bruhl, “a preestablished harmony much more difficult to accept than that of Leibniz? Leibniz supposes a purely ideal concord between forces of the same nature. Monsieur Bergson asks us to admit an indefinite series of coincidences, for each instant, between ‘a real duration, whose heterogeneous moments compenetrate,’ and a space which, not lapsing, has no moments at all. Monsieur Bergson really places external reality, which does not lapse, in a sort of eternity. He ingeniously shows that everything in space may be treated as quantity and submitted to mathematics. Now, mathematical verities, expressing only relations between given magnitudes, are abstracted from real lapsing duration. All the laws reduce to analytical formulæ. But then they are, according to the saying of Bossuet, eternal verities, and how shall the real be distinguished from the possible?”

This sundering, in Bergson’s theory of reality, of what rightly is one, is already implied, in his theory of knowledge, in the mutual exclusion of the two cognitive modes, intuition and conception. The predicaments into which philosophy falls in reasoning conceptually (and there is no other reasoning) about the subjective “world,” are due. Bergson thinks, not to faults in the use of logic, but to an essential incongruity between the matter and the logical mode of being conscious of it. But such an essential incongruity between any mode of consciousness and what it is aware of would imply that the _modes_ of consciousness, on the one hand, are _parts_ of consciousness, of which accordingly, you can have one without the other (theoretically if not actually); and, on the other hand, there is the corresponding implication for ontology, that what consciousness is aware of is also composed of two parts, which match, respectively, the parts of consciousness. Divide consciousness into two parts, then divide what it is aware of into two parts; suppose that each of your parts of consciousness suits one, and not the other, of your two parts of what it is aware of--all this is necessary before there can be any possibility of incongruous mismatching between consciousness and being. Therefore uneasiness about this incongruity, the very motive of intuitionism, presupposes first the sharpest conceptual treatment of the subjective “world,” and then the flagrant reification of the resulting abstractions. In other words, the indispensable precondition of dialectical defense of intuitionism is an intellectualism of the “vicious” type.

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The first chapter of the _Essai_ having criticized the application of magnitude to consciousness, and found that psychological intensity has nothing quantitative about it, the second chapter proceeds with an analogous criticism of number, and finds that psychological variousness has nothing plural about it. The multiplicity of material objects is number or plurality; the variousness of the facts of mind is nothing of the sort. Numerical multiplicity is distinct and objective, given or thought in space; subjective variousness is indistinct and compenetrating.

The medium of the facts of consciousness being lapsing duration, and not extension, they are never simultaneous in the same consciousness. But then they cannot be counted; to count is to have things together, simultaneously. That, again, is to have them in space. And that, finally, is to have them as objects. Now, the essential nature of psychic facts is to be subjective and not objective. If, therefore, you find yourself counting facts within a consciousness, you are deluded; they cannot be what you take them for; they can only be (spatial) _objects_, symbols by which you are representing facts that are not objective,--because they are subjective!--and not spatial but temporal.

This statement of the case will satisfy few people as it stands. Professor Bergson is aware of this, and he will grant that such alleged facts of consciousness as you distinguish and count may be set in the medium of time rather than in space, if time, as well as space, is a homogeneous medium; but time so understood, he thinks, turns into space. And time is so understood very generally, without any doubt. When we speak of time, says Bergson, we are usually thinking of space; that is, we are thinking of a homogeneous medium, a medium, therefore, in which psychic states are aligned or juxtaposited, as things are in space, forming a distinct multiplicity.

This is, of course, another aspect of what Bergson regards as the same vice, conceptualism, that is discussed in the first chapter of the _Essai_. An intensive magnitude is a distinct concept, sharply bounded; all within is the concept, all without, its other. But no psychic fact is sharply bounded; it penetrates the whole consciousness. The whole consciousness is one with it. We work quantitatively with concepts, always, arithmetically and geometrically. But then we work in space, which is enough, says Bergson, to show that intensity applied to a psychic fact is not a magnitude, since psychic facts are not in space. So here, in the second chapter, the elements which one pretends to count and add _in time_ are, in order to be counted and added--in order merely to be distinguished--distinct concepts. Then they are not in time but in space.

The application of intensive magnitude and of numerical multiplicity to psychic facts is thus the same fallacy in two aspects, the fallacy of conceptualism, the nature of which is to substitute space for time as the form of mental existence.

But Professor Bergson is not altogether dogmatic in saying that conceptual time is a spatialized symbol of real time. He goes on now to show how it is that the nature of real time is nothing like conceptual time. _Durée_, his name for real time, seems a bad term for such a use; for the essence of Bergson’s “_durée_” is change, while duration in every other connection means just the waiting or standing still of the flow of time. Some term like “lapse” seems nearer the idea.

The genetic or empirical theory of space perception regards the sensations by which we succeed in forming the notion of space as themselves unextended and purely qualitative; extension results from their synthesis, as water results from the combination of two elements. Bergson remarks that the fact that water is neither oxygen nor hydrogen nor merely both is just the fact that we embrace the multiplicity of atoms in a single apperception. Eliminate the mind which operates this synthesis and you will at the same time annihilate the water qualities so far as they are other than oxygen and hydrogen qualities; you will, that is, annihilate the aspect under which the synthesis of elementary parts is presented to our consciousness. For space to arise from the coexistence of non-spatial qualities, an act of the mind is necessary, embracing them all together and juxtapositing them--an act which is a Kantian _a priori_ form of sensibility.

This act is the conception of an empty homogeneous medium. It is a principle of differentiation other than qualitative differentiation, enabling us to distinguish qualitatively identical simultaneous sensations. Without this principle, we should have perception of the extended, but we should not have conception of space. That is, simultaneous sensations are never absolutely identical, because the organic elements stimulated are not identical. There are no two points of a homogeneous surface that produce the same impression on sight and touch. So there is a real qualitative difference between any two simultaneous points. This, Bergson says, is enough to give us perception of the extended. But the conception of space is _en outre_. The higher one rises in the series of intelligent beings, the more clearly the independent idea of a homogeneous space stands out. Space is not so homogeneous for the animal as for us. Directions are not purely geometrical; they have their quality. We ourselves distinguish our right and left by a natural feeling. We cannot define them.

Now, the faculty of conceiving a space without quality is not at all an abstraction; on the contrary, to abstract presupposes the intuition of a homogeneous medium. We know two realities of different order, one heterogeneous, that of sensible qualities, the other homogeneous, which is space. The latter enables us to make sharp distinctions, to count, to abstract, perhaps even to speak. Everybody regards time as an indefinite homogeneous medium, and yet everybody regards it as different from space. Is one, then, reducible to the other?

The genetic or empirical school tries to reduce the relations of extension to more or less complex relations of succession in duration. The relations of situation in space are defined as reversible relations of succession in duration. But succession in duration is not reversible. Pure duration is the form of succession of conscious states when one refrains from reflectively setting up a distinctness between the present state and former states. This does not mean being wholly absorbed in the passing sensation or idea, nor forgetting former states; but it means organizing them instead of juxtapositing them; they become like the notes of a melody, which, though they succeed each other, are apperceived in each other; they interpenetrate like the parts of a living being. Succession, then, can be conceived without distinctness, as a mutual penetration, a solidarity, an intimate organization of elements each of which, representative of the whole, is distinguished and isolated therefrom only for a thought capable of abstraction. We introduce the idea of space into our representation of pure succession; we so juxtaposit our states of consciousness as to perceive them simultaneously, not in, but beside each other; we project time upon space, we express duration in terms of extension. Succession then takes the form of a continuous line or of a chain, whose parts touch without interpenetration, which implies a simultaneous before and after instead of a successive--that is, a simultaneous succession, which is a contradiction.

Now, when the genetic school defines the relations of situation in space as reversible relations of succession in duration, it represents succession in duration in this self-contradictory way. You cannot make out an order among terms without distinguishing the terms and comparing the _places_ they occupy, without perceiving them, therefore, as juxtaposited. Then to make out an order in the terms of a succession is to make the succession a simultaneity. So this attempt to represent space by means of time presupposes the representation of space. Of space in three dimensions, moreover; for the representation of two dimensions--that is, of a line--implies that of three dimensions: to perceive a line is to place oneself outside it and account for the void surrounding it.

Pure duration is nothing but a succession of qualitative changes fusing, interpenetrating, without outlines or tendency to externality by interrelation, without any kinship with number. Pure duration is pure heterogeneity.

No time that can be measured is duration, for heterogeneity is not quantity, not measurable. When we measure a minute we represent a quantity and _ipso facto_ exclude a succession. We represent sixty oscillations of a pendulum, for instance, all together, in one apperception, as we represent sixty points of a line. Now, to represent each of these oscillations in succession, just as it is produced in space, no recollection of a preceding oscillation can enter the representation of any one, for space has kept no trace of it. One is confined to the present, and there is no more succession, or duration, in such a representation than in that of the group as a whole. A third way of representing these oscillations is conceivable. Like the first, it involves retention of preceding oscillations; but, unlike the first, it retains preceding oscillations _in_ succeeding ones, instead of alongside of them; they interpenetrate and interorganize, as was just said, like the notes of a melody. Like the conceptual representation, the intuitional involves a multiplicity. A conceptual multiplicity is distinct, homogeneous, quantitative, numerical; an intuitive multiplicity is indistinct, heterogeneous, qualitative, without analogy with number. Now, it is the latter that characterizes reality; and the multiplicity that we represent conceptually is only a symbol of the reality known to intuition.

Oscillations of a pendulum measure nothing; they count simultaneities. Outside of me, in space, there is only a single position of the pendulum; of past positions none remains. Because my duration is an organization and interpenetration of facts, I represent what I call “past” oscillations of the pendulum at the same time that I perceive the actual oscillation. Eliminate the ego, and there is only a single position of the pendulum, and no duration. Eliminate the pendulum, and there is only the heterogeneous duration of the ego. Within the ego is succession without simultaneity or reciprocal externality: without the ego, reciprocal externality without succession, which can exist only for a conscious spectator who remembers the past, and juxtaposits the symbols of the two oscillations in an auxiliary space.

Now, between this succession without externality and this externality without succession a kind of endosmotic commerce goes on. Although the successive phases of our conscious life interpenetrate, some of them correspond to simultaneous oscillations of the pendulum; and since each oscillation is distinct--that is, one is no more when another is produced--we come to make the same distinctness between the successive moments of our conscious life. The oscillations of the pendulum decompose it, as it were, into mutually external parts: hence the erroneous idea of an internal homogeneous duration analogous to space, whose identical moments follow each other without interpenetrating. On the other hand, the pendular oscillations benefit by the influence they have exerted on our conscious life. Thanks to the recollection of their collective whole, which our consciousness has organized, they are preserved and then aligned; in short, we create a fourth dimension of space for them, which we call homogeneous time, and which enables the pendular movement, although produced in a certain spot, to be juxtaposited with itself indefinitely.

There is a real space, without duration, but in which phenomena appear and disappear simultaneously with our states of consciousness. There is a real duration, whose heterogeneous moments interpenetrate, but each of which can touch a state of the external world contemporaneous with it, and so be made separate from other movements. From the comparison of these two realities arises a symbolic representation of duration drawn from space. The trait common to these two terms, space and duration, is simultaneity, the intersection of time and space. This is how duration comes to get the illusory appearance of a homogeneous medium. But time is not measurable.

Neither is motion, the living symbol of time. Like duration, motion is heterogeneous and indivisible. But it is universally confused with the space through which the movable passes. The successive positions of the movable are in space, but the motion is not in space. Motion is passing from one position to another, which operation occupies duration and has reality only for a conscious spectator. Things occupy space; processes occupy duration, because they are mental syntheses and are unextended.

The synthesis which is motion is obviously not a new deploying in another homogeneous medium, of the same positions that have been perceived in space; for if it were such an act, the necessity for resynthesis would be indefinitely repeated. The synthesis which is motion is a qualitative synthesis, a gradual organization of our successive sensations with each other, a unity analogous to that of a melodic phrase. The space traversed is a quantity, indefinitely divisible; the act by which space is traversed is a quality, and indivisible. Again that endosmotic exchange takes place, as between the melodically organized perception of the series of the pendulum’s motions and its distinct objective presence at each instant. That is, we attribute to the motion the divisibility of the space traversed; and we project the act upon space, implying that outside as well as inside of consciousness the past coexists with the present. In space are only parts of space. In any point of space where the movable may be considered, there is only a position. You would search space in vain for motion.

From the fact that motion cannot be in space, Zeno concluded wrongly that motion is impossible. But those who try to answer his arguments by seeking it also in space, find it no more than he. Achilles overtakes the tortoise because each Achilles step and each tortoise step is not a space but a duration, whose nature is not addible nor divisible, and whose production therefore does not presuppose productions of parts of themselves, _ad infinitum_. Their development is not construction. They are entire while they are at all, and since the intersections of their terminal moments with space are not at equal distances, these intersections will coincide, or their spatial relations will be inverted, after a certain number of these simultaneities--whether of Achilles’ steps or of the tortoise’s--with points of the road have been counted; in other words, Achilles will have overtaken or outrun the tortoise after a certain number of steps.

To measure the velocity of a motion is simply to find a simultaneity; to introduce this simultaneity into calculation is to use a convenient means of foreseeing a simultaneity. Just as in duration there is nothing homogeneous except what does not lapse, to wit space in which simultaneities are aligned, so the homogeneous element of motion is that which least pertains to it, to wit the space traversed, which is immobility.

Science can work on time and motion only on condition of first eliminating the essential and qualitative element, duration from time, mobility from motion. Treatises on mechanics never define duration itself, but call two intervals of time equal when two identical bodies in circumstances identical at the commencement of each of these intervals, and subjected to identical actions and influences of every kind, have traversed the same space at the end of these intervals. There is no question, in science, of duration, but only of space and of simultaneities between outer change and certain of our psychic states. That duration does not enter into natural science is seen in the fact that if all the motions of the universe were quicker or slower, then, whereas consciousness would have an indefinable and qualitative intuition of this change, no scientific formulæ would be modified, since the same number of simultaneities would be produced again in space.

Analysis of the idea of velocity proves that mechanics has nothing to do with duration. If, on a trajectory AB, points M, N, P ... such that AM = MN = NP ... are reached at equal intervals of time, as defined above, and AM etc. are smaller than any assignable quantity, the motion is said to be uniform. The velocity of a uniform motion is therefore defined without appeal to notions other than those of space and simultaneity. By a somewhat complicated demonstration[106] the same is shown to be true of the velocity of varying motion. Mechanics necessarily works with equations, and equations always express accomplished facts. It is of the essence of duration and motion to be in formation, so that while mathematics can express any moment of duration or any position taken by a movable in space, duration and motion themselves, being mental syntheses and not things, necessarily remain outside the calculation. The movable occupies the points of a line in turn, but the motion has nothing in common with this line. The positions occupied by the movable vary with the different moments of duration; indeed, the movable creates distinct moments merely by the fact that it occupies different positions; but duration has no identical nor mutually external moments, being essentially heterogeneous and indistinct.

Only space, then, is homogeneous; only things in space are distinctly multiple. There is no succession in space. So-called “successive” states of the outer world exist each alone. Their multiplicity is real only for a consciousness capable of preserving it and then juxtapositing it with others, thus externalizing them by interrelation. They are preserved by consciousness because they give rise to facts of consciousness which connect past and present by their interpenetrating organization. But one ceases when another appears, and so consciousness perceives them in the form of a distinct multiplicity, which amounts to aligning them in the space where each existed separately. Space used in this way is just what is meant by homogeneous time.

The spatial and the temporal kind of multiplicity are just as different as space and the real time that lapses. Spatial multiplicity is always substituted for the temporal kind, in discourse; their distinction cannot be expressed in language, because language is a product of space so that terms are inevitably spatial. Even to speak of “several” conscious states interpenetrating is to characterize them numerically, and so interrelate and mutually externalize or spatialize them.[107] On the other hand, we cannot form the idea of a distinct multiplicity without considering, parallel to it, a qualitative multiplicity. Even in counting units on a homogeneous background, they organize in a dynamic, qualitative way. That is the psychological explanation of the effect of a “marked-down” price. The figures $4.98 have a quality of their own, or rather the price has, that is quite inexpressible by the formula “$5 minus 2¢.” _Quantity has its quality._

In a succession of identical terms, then, each term has two aspects, spatial and temporal, objective and subjective, one always identical with itself, the other specific because of the unique quality its addition gives the collective whole of the series. Now, motion is just such a “qualifying,” the subjective aspect of what, objectively, is a succession of identical terms, to wit the movable in successive positions. It is always the same movable, but in the synthesis, the images of it that memory calls earlier interpenetrate with the actual image; the synthesis, the interpenetration, is motion. Motion is real, and absolute; it is subjective, however, not objective. To represent motion is to objectify it. That is what Zeno did, and what everyone must do for _practical_ purposes. But Zeno’s purpose was speculative, and that, Professor Bergson thinks, is fatally different. When you objectify motion you deny it, for its essence is subjective. Strictly speaking, Zeno was right in finding motion _unthinkable_; he was wrong only in supposing that what is unthinkable is _ipso facto_ impossible.

Evidently, the ego has these two aspects. The ego touches the external world; and its sensations, though fused in each other, retain something of the reciprocal externality which objectively characterizes their causes. Now, in dreaming, the ego does not touch the external world, and, in dreaming, time is not homogeneous; we do not measure time, in dreams, but only feel it. For sleep retards the play of organic functions and modifies the surface of communication between the ego and external things. But we need not sleep, to be thus withdrawn from environment. As I compose this train of thought, the hour strikes. When I notice the striking, I know some strokes have sounded which I did not notice. I know even their number, four. I know it by filling out the “melody,” as it were, of which I am now conscious. I found the “four” in a way that was not counting, at all. The number of strokes has its quality, and anything but four fails to suit, differs in quality. A counted four and a felt four are absolutely different forms of multiplicity, and each is multiplicity. Under the ego of clearly-defined and countable states is the real ego which it symbolizes, in which succession implies fusion and organization. The states of this real ego language cannot seize, for that were to objectify it and fix its mobility. In giving these states the form of those of the symbolic ego, language makes them fall into the common domain of space, where they straightway become common and impersonal. This common and impersonal ego is the social and practical ego; this is the ego that uses language.

To language is due the illusion that qualities are permanent. But objects change by mere familiarity. We dislike, in manhood, smells and tastes which we call the same as those we liked in childhood. But they are not the same. It is only their causes that remain the same. The interpenetrating elements of conscious states are already deformed the moment a numerical multiplicity is discovered in the confused mass. Just now it had a subtle and unique coloration borrowed from its organization in developing life; here it is decolored and ready to receive a name.

This is the error of the associationistic school. Psychology cannot reason concerning facts _being_ accomplished, as it may concerning _accomplished_ facts. The accomplishing of a fact can in no wise enter into discourse. It is unthinkable in precisely the same way as motion; or rather, it is the same case. Psychology cannot present the living ego as an association of terms mutually distinct and juxtaposited in a homogeneous medium.[108] And association is just conceptualism applied to psychology. Its problems of personality have to be absurdly stated, in order to be stated at all. The terms of such problems deny what the problem posits, merely by being terms or names; they name the unnamable and define the indefinable. The solution is to cease thinking spatially of that which is temporal, to take the other attitude.[109] Or, the author says here, using merely a different phrase, the solution is to substitute the real and concrete ego for its symbolic representation.

* * * * *

This second chapter of _Time and Free Will_ undertakes to show that the successiveness of conscious states makes them uncountable. Simultaneity is indispensable to distinctness, and so to number. One can count the spatialized symbols of conscious states because these are not successive, but simultaneous.

Psychic multiplicity is non-numerical in the same sense and for the same reason that psychic intensity is non-quantitative, namely that it is pure heterogeneity and temporality. In the foregoing report, I have sometimes mitigated the baldness of the paradox as it is stated by Bergson, by substituting the term “variousness” for “multiplicity,” in speaking of psychic facts. After all, it was a thankless subterfuge--an impertinence, perhaps, since Bergson himself is frank enough to insist that psychic multiplicity is as genuine multiplicity as the spatial and material sort. The difference is that the former is indistinct and the latter distinct. But this difference is abysmal--indeed, it is absolute. All the power of Bergson’s forceful style is concentrated on it. The point is turned and re-turned in every variety of expression. At the same time, the common _multiplicity_ belonging in both conceptions is emphasized as much as their difference. The thesis thus reduces to this, that two varieties of the same genus are “absolutely different;” for we are explicitly advised, on one hand, that there is a multiplicity which is distinct, and a multiplicity which is indistinct; each is multiplicity. And, on the other hand, one is numerical and the other “_has no analogy with number_.”

In view of the superior qualities of the mind that is guilty of this unreasonableness, the conviction of sincerity which it carries tortures the conscientious critic. One cannot approve of the intolerant scorn of a certain book, in which Bergson’s arguments are vilified as vain display, mere word-play; but patience is overtaxed in finding one’s way through the plausibility of this chapter. The thesis, certainly, may be dismissed from any consideration whatever. Because of it, one knows in advance, beyond peradventure, that there is no validity in any argument in its defense. Yet, in spite of all, the chapter challenges study; and thorough study of it cannot fail to put the truth in clearer light, just because its error is so plausible.

Counting is synthesis, the argument goes; but a synthesized succession is not a succession, it is a simultaneity. And simultaneity presupposes spatial determination in the coexistent elements. From Bergson’s point of view, it is a radical error, however universal an error, to regard the relation of simultaneity as a temporal determination. In fact, there is no such thing as a temporal determination; and every determination, for Bergson, not only is not temporal, but is spatial. Like the argument about non-quantitative intensity, this argument for non-plural multiplicity (save the mark!) turns on the equation of homogeneity with space. But the present argument involves its own peculiar fallacy, as well, namely the fallacy which Professor Perry describes[110] as confusion of a relation symbolized with the relation between symbols. “It is commonly supposed,” Perry writes, “that when a complex is represented by a formula, the elements of the complex must have the same relation as that which subsists between the parts of the formula; whereas, as a matter of fact, _the formula as a whole_ represents or describes a complex other than itself. If I describe _a_ as ‘to the right of _b_,’ does any difficulty arise because in my formula _a_ is to the left of _b_? If I speak of _a_ as greater than _b_, am I to assume that because my symbols are outside one another that _a_ and _b_ must be outside one another? Such a supposition would imply a most naïve acceptance of that very ‘copy theory’ of knowledge which pragmatism has so severely condemned. And yet such a supposition seems everywhere to underlie the anti-intellectualist’s polemic. The intellect is described as substituting for the interpenetration of the real terms [in an “indistinct” psychic multiplicity] the juxtaposition of their symbols; as though analysis discovered terms, and then _conferred_ relations of its own ... Terms are found _in_ relation, and may be thus described without any more artificiality, without any more imposing of the forms of the mind on its subject-matter, than is involved in the bare mention of a single term.

“... one may mean continuity despite the fact that the symbols and words are discrete. The word ‘blue’ may mean blue, although the word is not blue. Similarly, continuity may be an arrangement meant by a discontinuous arrangement of words and symbols.”

So of the simultaneity or coexistence among the conceptual symbols by which successive psychic states are counted: there is nothing in such a relation among the symbols to falsify the process of counting as a cognitive process whose meaning is a non-simultaneous relation among the psychic facts symbolized. As was noted above,[111] the quantitative determination of psychic facts depends solely on an aspect of homogeneity essential to such facts, for which aspect no better evidence is possible than that other aspect which Bergson attributes to them, of heterogeneity; for the two conceptions, instead of excluding each other, imply each other absolutely. All that is necessary, in order that psychic facts should be countable, is that they should possess an aspect of homogeneity. And for this, spatiality is unnecessary; for spatiality is a conception distinct from homogeneity.

Bergson’s identification of homogeneity with spatiality is a case of what Professor Perry calls “definition by initial predication.”[112] Space is homogeneous; therefore homogeneity is space. As if the fact that homogeneity is a character of space were anything against its being a character also of time or anything else. The following is the justification offered by Bergson for identifying homogeneity with space: “If space is to be defined as the homogeneous, it seems that inversely every homogeneous and unbounded medium will be space. For, homogeneity here consisting in the absence of every quality, it is hard to see how two forms of the homogeneous could be distinguished from one another.”[113] The first clause begs the question by defining space as “the” homogeneous. Such identification of space and homogeneity is the point to be proved. The second sentence begs the question again, where homogeneity is supposed “here” (_i. e._ in the case of space) to consist in the absence of every quality. Moreover, as we have noted above (p. 43), space possesses a very determinate quality, direction, which differentiates it from other homogeneity. Finally, it can be true that homogeneity is absence of quality only on the Bergsonian assumptions that quality is exclusively subjective, that homogeneity is exclusively objective, and that only the subjective is positive. Now, if quality is not objective, judgments cannot be made concerning it; but Bergson is constantly making such judgments. And to distinguish, in point of homogeneity or of positivity, between “the subjective” and “the objective” is to reify two equally abstract aspects of positive reality. The quality of the homogeneous is doubtless _simple_, and so indefinable. But Bergson nowhere shows how the homogeneous is less positive than the heterogeneous, although the thesis is the sum and substance of his philosophy. Lacking further light on the point, one can only invoke such experiences as the simple colors, for instance,--or, for that matter, any simple quality--for cases of reality as positive as any heterogeneity, and, obviously, no less qualified. And nothing seems easier than the distinction between redness, for instance, and spatiality. Bergson’s whole dialectic rests on reification of such correlative abstractions as homogeneity and heterogeneity, quality and relation etc. in a “purity” which not only is not concretely experienced, but is not even capable of being conceived, because each concept drags the other ineluctably into its own definition. If either space or homogeneity were indeed absence of quality, they could not be distinguished from time, nor from heterogeneity, nor from anything else; in short, they could not be conceived at all.

The present essay aims to report Bergson’s own work with a fair degree of fulness; but it is beyond my plan to follow exposition with criticism point by point in the details, even, in some cases, when these are of important and wide implication. For discussion of Bergson’s contention (based on analysis of the idea of velocity, as outlined above) that mechanics has nothing to do with time, the reader is referred to pages 255-61 of Perry’s _Present Philosophical Tendencies_. Perry shows, in this passage, that such a contention, again, depends on “confusing the symbol with what it means. To one who falls into this confusion, it may appear that an equation cannot refer to time because the structure of the equation itself is not temporal; because the symbols are simultaneously present in the equation. But if _t_ is one of the terms of the equation, and _t_ _means_ time, then the equation means a temporal process. Furthermore, an equation may define a relation, such as =, <, or >, between temporal quantities, in which case the full meaning of the equation is still temporal. For changes, events, or even pure intervals, may stand in non-temporal relations, such as those above, without its in the least vitiating their temporality.”

Bergson’s solution of Zeno’s paradoxes is another detail of this chapter which is of a good deal of interest; but it applies no new principle to the support of the impossibility of counting psychic facts. Without a clearer conception of the commerce or intersection between time and space, which he characterizes only by the name of “simultaneity,” his reply to Zeno leaves the question of the divisibility of time as problematic as ever. Achilles out-strips the tortoise, he says, “because each of Achilles’ steps and each of the tortoise’s steps are indivisible acts in so far as they are movements, and are different magnitudes in so far as they are space.”[114] They are indivisible in the same sense in which a living organism is indivisible: if you divide them, no division _is_ a part of that which _was_. But the trouble is that they _are divisible_ also in the same sense in which the organism is divisible. It is the most extravagant of assumptions that analysis of a living body into right and left etc.--which, to be sure, is serviceable to activity upon it--is, because of its service to action, not a character of the object itself. And of motion the same sort of analysis is a patent fact of experience: there is an earlier, middle and latter phase. The possibility of this patent fact is the crux of the problem. No extant answer to Zeno is satisfactory to everybody. I shall refer the reader to Professor Fullerton’s treatment of the paradoxes, in Chapter XI of his _System of Metaphysics_, as the solution which seems to me to be at the same time the most closely related of any that I know, to Bergson’s, and free of Bergson’s error. Bergson’s solution has at least this element of truth, that Zeno confuses the space traversed with something else concerned in every case of motion. Fullerton makes a distinction between any actual experience of space or time, and the possibility of indefinitely magnified substitutes for such experience; and shows a way in which motion can be relegated to the former (“apparent” space) and denied to the latter (“real” space) without either denying reality to motion or infinite divisibility to real space and time.

Bergson’s differentiation of temporal succession from spatial seriality gets all its cogency from an exclusive attention, when consciousness is concerned, to the aspects of heterogeneity (quality) and compenetration (continuity) which consciousness shows; and, when space is concerned, to _its_ aspects of homogeneity (quantity) and juxtaposition of parts (discreteness). As always, with correlative abstractions, Bergson reifies them: they exclude each other, for him, whereas, in truth, they imply each other, entering into each other’s definition so that each is unthinkable except by means of the other. Time is continuous, Bergson insists rightly; but jumps to the conclusion that therefore time is not discrete. Time is heterogeneous, therefore not homogeneous. Space is discrete (its parts spread out), therefore not continuous; homogeneous, therefore not heterogeneous. If any demonstration is necessary that these terms do imply each other, instead of excluding each other, the case of heterogeneity and homogeneity is only the case of resemblance and difference (cf. page 44). In regard to the heterogeneity of space, its differentiation by way of direction must not be forgotten. As for the other pair of terms, continuity can manifest itself only _in extenso_, and discreteness requires a separating _medium_.

Wherever Bergson objects to expressing time in terms of space, the real objection is to the expression of time in terms of homogeneity. This he would not only admit, but insist upon. But his demonstration that homogeneity is a character exclusively spatial is a _petitio principii_.[115] Of the attempt to measure a minute, he writes as follows: “I say, _e. g._, that a minute has just elapsed, and I mean by this that a pendulum, beating the seconds, has completed sixty oscillations. If I picture these sixty oscillations to myself all at once, by a single mental perception, I exclude by hypothesis the idea of a succession. I do not think of sixty strokes which succeed one another, but of sixty points on a fixed line, each one of which symbolizes, so to speak, an oscillation of the pendulum. If, on the other hand, I wish to picture these sixty oscillations in succession, but without altering the way they are produced in space, I shall be compelled to think of each oscillation to the exclusion of the recollection of the preceding one, for space has preserved no trace of it; but by doing so I shall condemn myself to remain forever in the present; I shall give up the attempt to think a succession or a duration.”

Notwithstanding his acuteness as a psychologist, Bergson misses the nature of the apperception both of sixty points on a line and of sixty oscillations of a pendulum. And the impossibility of counting psychic facts depends on this misapprehension. He misses the fact that an apperception of sixty points on a line includes, as an essential feature, the _serial_ order, the here-and-there determination (a distinctive qualitative determination) of this spatial fact. And he misses the fact that an apperception of a non-spatial rhythm includes, as an essential feature, the successive _order_, the earlier-and-later determination, of this psychic fact. Now, seriality is not succession, if you like, except in so far as each is order. But this is no more than to say that the two orders, time and space, are distinguishable--are two, in fact. It is not the slightest obstruction to conceiving each as order, and as numerically determined. For there is no evidence except Bergson’s fundamental fallacy of “definition by initial predication,” to show why homogeneity and order, as such, are exclusively spatial. The discreteness of parts of space is thinkable only by the intervening spaces: space is as continuous (as “compenetrative”) as time.[116] On the other hand, the compenetration of time is not only nothing _against_ its divisibility, but divisibility and compenetration (in the only rigorous meaning the word will bear, that is, continuity) are indispensable to each other, inverse aspects of each other. You can divide _only_ what is connected, as you can connect only what is distinct. Time, then, is as discrete as space.

For every instance of temporal “compenetration,” and “solidarity,” its perfect spatial analogue is plain to the inspection of anyone who will only look that way, to anyone whose attention is not hypnotized by an ulterior purpose to its exclusion.[117] Thus the melodic phrase is present in each of its parts as much as, and no more than, the mosaic figure is present in each of its parts. The “felt four” of the clock strokes is felt as four not otherwise, I think, than a four which might figure in the pattern of a frieze. The same limitations, moreover, apply to such felt multiplicity, whether of rhythm or of pattern. It must be a relatively simple complex, to be apperceived, in either case. You could not feel fifty, and the difficulty is the same difficulty in time as in space. One measures a minute or a century just as one measures an inch or the distance from the earth to the sun: the indispensable condition is the continuity and homogeneity which belong to both quantities.

The proposition that oscillations of a pendulum measure nothing, but count simultaneities apparently means that oscillations, as physical facts, have no duration of their own, and so cannot overlie duration as a unit of measurement. This would at least be an intelligible, even if a false, representation; but, if oscillations cannot measure, how can they count? What is just that difference between counting and measuring, by virtue of which that which can count cannot measure? Simultaneity Bergson defines as the intersection of space and time. Now, counting, as well as measuring, implies a continuum. Measuring, certainly, if it is theoretically perfect, can apply only to a continuum; but counting, which obviously presupposes discreteness, then requires also the indispensable condition and correlative of discreteness, which is continuity. The intersection of space and time thus evidently involves equal continuity and discreteness in both; if they can intersect, and their intersections are countable, each is both countable and measurable. The “purely” temporal phenomena of our conscious life, although interpenetrating, “correspond individually” to an oscillation of the pendulum, which, though a “purely” spatial phenomenon, “occurs at the same time with” the former. Such “endosmotic commerce” between psychical and physical events seems to be decisive for a real community of nature between their respective forms, time and space--such, for instance, as common homogeneity and continuity.