CHAPTER II

MIND AND MATTER, SPIRIT AND BODY

Bergson regards knowledge of oneself as the optimal case of knowing; oneself, he thinks, is the sample of reality which best serves for an acquaintance with the nature of reality in general. “The existence of which we are most assured and which we know best is unquestionably our own, for of every other object we have notions which may be considered external and superficial, whereas, of ourselves, our perception is internal and profound.”[118] It is this perfect or optimal relation of identity or inwardness--which one bears to oneself--that is the condition of true (_i. e._ intuitive) knowledge. And in this case we find existence to be a perpetual flow of transition. That we think of our states as distinct from each other is due to the fact that reflection on one’s own existence is, unlike the flow of that existence itself, necessarily discontinuous. It is only now and then that motives arise which turn the attention to the self as an object, like others, for examination. The flow of change is not uniform, to be sure. It is quite imperceptible to our reflective attention most of the time, but if it ever ceased, we should at that moment cease to exist. Only the relatively sudden and interesting periods of transition get our attention. Then we see a new “state of consciousness” which we add to the others that we have mentally strung together in a temporal line. So we conceive of our history as the sum of elements as distinct as beads on a string.

This intellectualistic view of the self eliminates the peculiar characteristic of its reality, namely, its duration, or the flow of its change, like a snowball, accumulating its substance as it rolls, duration goes on preserving itself in incessant change that accumulates all its past. Time, Bergson says, is the very stuff the psychological life is made of. “There is, moreover, no stuff more resistant nor more substantial.”[119]

Life and inertia or matter are two antagonistic principles or tendencies. Life is the positive and active principle; reality and duration are predicable only of life. Matter is an “inversion” or “interruption” of life; its value is negative to life and to reality. “All that which seems _positive_ to the physicist and to the geometrician would become, from this new point of view, an interruption or inversion of true positivity, which would have to be defined in psychological terms.”[120] Matter is a determination of reality in much the same sense as that in which the reality of the Platonic idea suffers diminution under the influence of the principle of not-being, resulting in a world of sensible experience or of appearance. Bergson points out that the real in Plato is the timeless, motionless, definite idea, and the relatively unreal is the ever-changing “infinite” or indefinable datum of experience, to which duration is essential. Bergson reverses the Platonic metaphysics: reality is the ever-changing and indefinable; rather, it is change itself. “There are no things, there are only actions.” “... things and states are only views, taken by our mind, of becoming.”[121] The principle antagonistic to reality gives rise to the timeless, definite concept, which is a view or appearance of reality operated by intelligence in the service of action. As our practical interests break up the continuum of time into discrete states, so they break up the continuum of matter into distinct bodies. The active antagonism of time, which is pure quality or heterogeneity, and space, which is pure quantity or homogeneity, results in the world of our experience, comprising “states” of consciousness and things or objects.

The relation between life and matter in the evolution of the world, Bergson represents by the figure of a generation of steam in a boiler.[122] Life, the positive principle, streams or flows, like the steam, by the force which is its very nature. In its course, this vital impetus is checked, as a jet of steam is checked, by its condensation, and falls back upon itself in drops, retarding, but not annihilating, the flow. But we are warned that the figure must be corrected in that the interruption or inversion of the impetus is due to a principle inherent in the impetus itself, not to an external determination. If there were such an external principle, the two would seem coördinate in reality, but the reality of matter is as the reality of _rest_, which, as the negation of motion, is nothing positive, yet is not a mere naught.

Sometimes, in reading Bergson, it seems very clear that reality and matter must exclude each other, since one is the negation of the other; and perception and conception, whose object is matter, are not knowledge, because that object is unreal. Moreover, not only is the stuff of reality that _psychic process_ which is life and lapsing time, but there is no stuff more resistant nor more substantial. And in numerous other ways the mutual exclusion of reality and matter seems quite fundamental to Bergsonism. One can never remain long in any security about this, however. If Bergsonism is Platonism reversed, it is natural that the peculiarities of the latter should reappear in some form. Platonic not-being is much too important and too active to be denied a coequal positivity with being. Over and above these “worlds,” moreover, there is that one in which we live, with a third status. Perhaps it is this which is most like Bergsonian matter--“nothing positive, yet not a mere naught”! In the letter from which I have already quoted, Monsieur Bergson wrote me, concerning a previous paper of mine:[123] “You give me the choice between ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ whereas I cannot respond with either, but must mix them. In each particular case, the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ have to be apportioned, and this is just why the philosophy I adhere to is susceptible of improvement and progress. For instance, you find that my premises lead to this conclusion: ‘Matter has no duration; but duration is synonymous with reality; therefore matter is not real.’ But, to my mind, matter has exactly the same reality as rest, which exists only as negation of motion, yet is something other than absolute nothingness. All that is positive in my ‘vital impetus’ is motion; stoppage of this motion constitutes materiality; the latter, therefore, is nothing positive, yet not a mere naught, absolute nothingness being no more stoppage than motion.”

If one seek (it is not to be found, I think, in Bergson’s writings) an explanation of this abatement or diminution of the _élan vital_, this tendency toward rest, the problem turns into the very ancient problem of the polarity of being in subject and object. In Platonism, matter arises as product of an eternal antagonism between two coeval principles, the Idea and Not-being. Not-being is thus something efficient, something that is capable of entering as a factor, together with the Idea, into a product, the Sensible Object. The truth is, therefore, that Not-being is something very real: it _is_ something because it _does_ something. It is as real as the Idea, because it is as efficient as the Idea. And in the Bergsonian creative evolution there often seems just such an antagonism as this, between two coördinate, efficient, and therefore real principles. Thus: “The impetus of life ... is confronted with matter, that is to say, with the movement that is the inverse of its own.”[124] And: “Life as a whole ... will appear as a wave which rises, and which is opposed by the descending movement of matter.”[125] But, as with Plato, so with Bergson, dubbing the hated principle “Not-being” or “Negation of Positive Reality” hardly avails against the soundness of its claim to positivity. And the case is not different if the “_élan vital_” is a self-limited absolute instead of an eternal dualism: the philosopher’s selection of one of the two coefficients or poles of this self-polarized absolute, rather than the other, to be snubbed, is arbitrary, instinctive, personal. With Plato it is one, with Bergson the other; no logical principle determines it, in either case.

On no other point, I believe, is criticism of Bergson so clamorous or so unanimous as on his conception of matter. Without doubt, his conception of matter is obscure. Time and space (terms equivalent for Bergson, to life and matter) being essentially antagonistic, must _essentially imply_ each other; and if so, do they not stand in the same rank as real existences? In what sense, then, is either real and the other unreal, except by an arbitrary decree? The ontological obscurity has its corresponding epistemological obscurity as to the cognitive status of knowledge of matter, which is the crux of Bergson’s philosophy. Instinct is suited to life and duration; intelligence, to matter and space. Science says many things about time, but affords no acquaintance with time itself. The duration of the unit of time is a matter of indifference to the meaning and value of any scientific formula.[126] For example, if this unit were made infinity, and the physical process represented by the formula were thus regarded as infinitely quick, _i. e._ an instantaneous, timeless fact, the instantaneity of the fact would be irrelevant to any truth expressed by the formula. The only truth the formula expresses is a system of relations, which remains the same for any unit of time. Science knows no past or future, nothing but an incessantly renewed instantaneous present, without substance. The conclusions of science are given in the premises, mathematically; the world of science is a strict determinism. In the real world of consciousness, on the other hand,--knowledge of which can only be acquaintance with it--the future is essentially contingent and unforseeable, for each new phase is an absolute creation, into which the whole past is incorporated without determining it.

* * * * *

The active principle of life Bergson describes by the phrase _tendency to create_. Its movement is a creative evolution. Life flows, or, as we have said, rolls on like a snowball, in an unceasing production of new forms, each of which retains, while it modifies and adds to, all its previous forms. But the figure of the snowball soon fails. One of the most significant facts of the creative evolution of life is the division of its primitive path into divergent paths. The primitive _élan_ contains elementary virtualities of tendency which can abide together only up to a certain stage of their development. It is of the nature of a tendency to break up in divergent elementary tendencies, as a fountain-jet sprays out. As the primitive tendency develops, elements contained in it which were mutually compatible in one and the same primitive organism, being still in an undeveloped stage, become incompatible as they grow. Hence the indefinite bifurcation of the forms of life into realms, phyla, genera, species, individuals. It is a cardinal error, Bergson thinks, to regard vegetative, instinctive and intellectual life, in the Aristotelian manner, as successive stages in one and the same line of development. They represent three radically different lines of evolution, not three stages along the same line.

A tendency common to all life is to store the constantly diffused solar energy in reservoirs where its equilibrium is unstable. This tendency, of alimentation, is complementary to the tendency to resolve equilibrium of potential energy by sudden, explosive release of energy in actions. As the primitive organism developed (undoubtedly an ambiguous form, partaking of the characters of both the animal and the vegetable) these two tendencies became mutually incompatible in one and the same form of life. Those forms which became vegetables owe their differentiation from ancestral forms to a preponderant leaning toward the manufacture of the explosive, as the animal owes its animality to a leaning toward the release of energy in sudden and intermittent actions.

The vegetable, drawing its nourishment wherever it may find it, from the ground and from the air, has no need of locomotion. The animal, dependent on the vegetable or on other animals for food, must go where it may be found. The animal must move. Now, consciousness emerges _pari passu_ with the ability to act, and torpor is characteristic of fixity. The humblest organism is conscious to the extent to which it can act freely. Actions may be effective either by virtue of an excellence in the use of instruments of action or by virtue of an excellence in adapting the instrument to the need. Action may thus assume either of two very different characters, the one instinctive, self-adaptive reaction, the other intelligent manufacture. The two tendencies have bifurcated within the animal realm. One path reaches its present culmination in certain hymenoptera (_e. g._ ants, bees, wasps), the other in man.

Thus the development of instinct in man has become subordinate; human consciousness is dominated by intelligence. Hence the universality of the vice of intellectualism in philosophy. Man, because he is dominated by intelligence, supposes intelligence to be coextensive with consciousness, whereas it is only one of the elementary tendencies which consciousness comprises, and the one which is impotent to know the flow of reality. Spencer’s evolutionism affords no acquaintance with the reality of life. His so-called evolution starts with the already evolved. Hence all it reaches is the made, the once-for-all, the timeless. It is merely a biological theory, and no advance over positive science. It is not a philosophy.

Having shown the origin of intelligence in the more extensive principle of life, and limited its sphere of operation to inert matter, the author turns to the nature of instinct. The greater part of the psychic life of living beings that are characteristically instinctive Bergson believes to be states which he describes as knowledge in which there is no representation.[127] “Representation is stopped up by action.”[128] A purely instinctive action would be indistinguishable from a mere vital process. When the chick, for example, breaks the shell, it seems merely to keep up the motion that has carried it through the embryonic life. But neither instinct nor intelligence is ever pure, and we have in ourselves a vague experience of what must happen in the consciousness of an animal acting by instinct. We have this experience in phenomena of feeling, in unreflecting sympathies and antipathies. “Instinct is sympathy. If this sympathy could extend its object and also reflect upon itself, it would give us the key to vital operations.... Intuition, to wit, instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely, leads us into the very inwardness of life ... It is true that this æsthetic intuition ... attains only the individual, but we can conceive an inquiry turned in the same direction as art, which would take life _in general_ for its object.”[129]

* * * * *

In _Matter and Memory_, mind is represented as varying, in its states, between two limits, “pure perception,” which is just action, and “dreaming.” The limit of action is where the rôle of mind ceases, the vanishing-point of knowledge. But at the other limit, dreaming, mind is in full swing, having freed itself, by an inner tension, from the obstructive influence of body. Far from vanishing at this limit, as at the other, knowledge is here at its apogee. It is here “pure.”

It is important for Bergson to recognize an organic connection (obstructive to mind, as he Platonically conceives) between mind and body, in order that he may establish the possibility of the state of “pure perception,” in which mind activity coincides with bodily activity by a yielding, relaxed concurrence with the latter’s influence. Mind is here passive; its rôle in the life of the organism ceases in this state. But it is equally important, for the ontological independence of mind, that at the “dreaming” pole the tension which is the very constitution of its knowing should free mind from bodily influence. This tension, at its ideal limit, must so disconnect the mind from the body that the former becomes impotent, as Bergson says, for any efficiency in the physical world. It seems to be, to all intents and purposes, a disembodied state. Knowledge having then no possible end in action is clearly its own end. Intellection is a utility, operating in the world of matter; knowledge is absolute, self-centered identity of subject and object. Such, I suppose, is God’s “thought of thought” in Aristotle’s conception.

This fluctuation of the relation between mind and body, from a connection which is vital to absolute disconnection, is a reappearance of the ambiguity discussed on pages 66-7. At one moment the world seems a Platonic dualism; in the next, a self-limited or polarized absolutism, like Fichte’s or Hegel’s. Whatever the “ideal limit” of mind’s cognitive “tension” may be conceived to be, there ought to be no question of more and less, in the matter of disconnectedness, strictly speaking. We do not understand movement from connection to disconnection, through intermediate stages, as mind is here represented to move, in its states of knowledge. First mind must be like a certain part of matter, so that it can rebound by its “tension” from a certain other part; and then, as soon as it has rebounded, what would be true of the thing that could do this must suddenly become untrue of it, presumably because of the rebound, no other reason being assignable to account for the ensuing disconnection with matter. One bit of matter can rebound from another, but it is then as much connected with _matter_ as before. We do not understand how mind, when it has thus rebounded from one particular material attachment thereby becomes materially unattached.

This is nevertheless a suggestive scheme of relation. It seems to me to be marred with one radical fault: these limits of knowledge are wrongly related. Their negation of each other should be the opposition of antipodes, not of contradictories. The difference is the radical difference between implication and exclusion. They do not exclude each other, but imply each other. Each vanishes without the other.

In activity, there is externalized motion on one hand and resistance, or virtual reaction, on the other. Action and reaction are cases of polarity; they are necessary to each other to give each other form. In the cognitive subject, reaction that were purely virtual, without externalizing implication, would be indeterminate dreaming; motion that were purely externalized, without implication of inner virtuality, would be indeterminate activity. Now, anything that is indeterminate or formless simply is not, if being has any significance whatever; for formless significance is a contradiction; certainly the significance of anything would constitute a formal aspect of it. “Pure” matter or quantity is pure nothing, in the sense that it is quantity of nothing. These “pure” limits thus snuff themselves out. And variation between them is not a progression from not-being to being or _vice versa_, not a strengthening or weakening of the variable function’s essence. Such a notion depends on the absurdity of a not-being that can do things to being, with fluctuating prepotency in the struggle! Strengthening and weakening--degree in any guise--has no application to essence. In any phase, that is, knowledge is itself and nothing else; it cannot be more or less itself.

That which varies concomitantly with the variations in complexion of consciousness, is the dynamic relation between subject and object. It may be expressed as variation of ratio between virtual and real action. At each pole activity vanishes, and consciousness with it. At one pole, where the ratio is zero, it vanishes in the direction of “real” or externalized action, which means that the subject meets no opposing negativity, and so no object; the relation of activity is extinguished through lack of one of its terms. At the other pole, where the ratio is infinity, action vanishes in the direction of “virtuality.” And this means that in the subject there is no positivity, no subjectivity, to oppose to universal negativity or objectivity. The result is the same extinction of the relation through lack of a term. A subject term is lacking in one case, an object in the other.

Knowledge, for Bergson, corresponds only to the ratio infinity, of virtual to real action; all other ratios between them are less than knowledge. To this I object that infinite virtuality is indeterminate virtuality, which is a naught reached in the opposite way from that naught which is infinite and indeterminate actuality. Indeterminate action is nothing, and so is indeterminate knowledge. Identification of knowledge with any specific value of the ratio of virtual to real action is not determined by any logical principle. When a function varies between a positive and a negative pole, neither pole is an apogee where the function is most itself. On the contrary, as in the variation of an including angle, each pole is a limiting position in which the essential nature of the variable is extinguished. Nor is it most itself midway between the poles, nor at any other privileged position, for it is absolutely and fully itself, and nothing else, in every phase. The genuineness of a state of awareness would then depend also on the genuineness of the reciprocity between the terms of this dynamic ratio. Where they are not distinct, where subject and object are identical, awareness vanishes through lack of a quantitative coefficient, as it vanishes at each pole through lack of a qualitative coefficient. In other words, knowledge of a thing by itself, like action of a thing on itself, is a cancelation of terms of opposite sign, a contradiction, and _the subject and object, whether of action or of consciousness, are essentially external to each other_.

Bergson is treating consciousness as such as if it could be more or less conscious, as, indeed, a conscious _subject_ may be. That is, he is treating consciousness as if it could be of a nature more or less aware or cognitive; he is treating variations of phase as if they were augmentations and diminutions of essence; he is treating quality quantitatively, an error which would not have been possible if he had adhered to the purely conceptual distinction between quality and quantity. And he is treating the variations of cognitive complexion or phase as if they depended on variations in a certain relation (the mutual externality of subject and object) which is invariable and absolute--incapable, that is, of degree.

* * * * *

“This book,” says the first sentence of _Matter and Memory_, “affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter.” Lower in the same page, however, it is explained that “Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of ‘images.’ And by ‘image’ we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a _representation_, but less than that which the realist calls a _thing_,--an existence placed half-way between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation.’ ... the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it; image it is, but a self-existing image (pp. vii, viii).

“... memory ... is just the intersection of mind and matter ... the psychical state seems to us to be ... immensely wider than the cerebral state ... our cerebral state contains more or less of our mental state in the measure that we reel off our psychic life into action or wind it up into pure knowledge ... our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it” (pp. xii, xiii, xiv).

The “intersection of mind and matter” suggests a profound dualism, and this Bergson acknowledges to be essential to his theory. It is true that no opportunity is lost, to discount the reality of matter; but the relations which it sustains to mind are such as can exist only between terms whose reality is coördinate. Perception is just that biological reactive function of material organism engaged with material stimulus, which every psychological text-book proclaims it to be. But the actual conscious state always has memory in it, as well as perception; or rather, the state as conscious is nothing but memory; perception itself, “pure” perception, is action pure and simple, and not cognitive at all.

This is an abuse of the word “perception,” but the epistemology can show a good deal of reason. After all, our perceptions (as we call the states of mind in which we are involved with a material stimulus) mean something, necessarily. They mean _something_, I insist, the strangest of them. We sometimes speak otherwise, saying that an object of perception means nothing to us. But, I submit, this is only a manner of speaking. A state that meant _nothing_, absolutely, were genuinely _blank_, empty, contentless; and there is no difference, I take it, between a state without content and a state that is unconscious. Well, then, meaning something, as a conscious state must, what does it mean? Bergson, I am sure, is right in holding that to mean is to recognize, to recall, to remember. This makes of every concrete perceptive state, so-called, a rudimentary deduction, a genuine syllogism, a work of intellect. The major premise is a memory; the minor is an immediate reactive, sensori-motor datum; the conclusion is the subsumption of the present datum under the memory. Thus: The experience to which I attach the name “orange” has such and such characters (remembered major premise); the present reactive state has these characters (perceptive datum, minor premise); therefore this state is a case of the orange experience. The only difficulty is the nature of the process of subsumption of the present datum with the memory. The present datum in its purity as present is a reaction merely, an event in the physical world. Its nature owns nothing psychical. What commerce, then, can it have with mind? To call its commerce with mind “subsumption” is to give a label to a problem. To call memory the “intersection” of the physical world with mind seems another label, of a metaphorical sort, for the same problem.

But, for the present, let us hear the doctrine. To my thinking, it is Bergson’s best work, and full of illuminating suggestion. To the radical dualist, it should be completely satisfactory. As an adherent of a certain double-aspect conception of the body-mind relation, I shall eventually propose a correction and completion, very radical, certainly, but all that is necessary to make Bergson’s treatment of this problem of the highest interest and value to myself.

The body, then, in Bergson’s theory, yes, the brain itself, is no producer, repository nor reproducer of any element of consciousness. The body is a center of reaction, and nothing else. “The size, shape, even the color, of external objects is modified according as my body approaches or recedes from them, ... the strength of an odour, the intensity of a sound, increases or diminishes with distance; finally, ... this very distance represents, above all, the measure in which surrounding bodies are insured, in some sort, against the immediate action of my body. In the degree that my horizon widens, the images which surround me seem to be painted upon a more uniform background and become to me more indifferent. The more I narrow this horizon, the more the objects which it circumscribes space themselves out distinctly according to the greater or less ease with which my body can touch and move them. They send back, then, to my body, as would a mirror, its eventual influence; they take rank in an order corresponding to the growing or decreasing powers of my body. _The objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them._”[130] Cut a sensory nerve, and the reactive process is destroyed, and with it, perception. “Change the objects, or modify their relation to my body, and everything is changed in the interior movements of my perceptive centres. But everything is also changed in ‘my perception.’ My perception is, then, a function of these molecular movements; it depends upon them.”[131] “What then are these movements?... they are, within my body, the movements intended to prepare, while beginning it, the reaction of my body to the action of external objects ... they foreshadow at each successive moment its virtual acts.”[132] It may seem that my reaction to a body is the same whether I perceive it visually or tactually or otherwise. But movements externally identical may differ internally; there is a different organization of the same gross function with different microscopic functions. The _meaning_ has ultimately an important sameness, since meaning is a function of biological adjustment. But different inner organizations are still the explanation of different ways of perceiving what is, in all biologically important respects, the same object.

Serious fault has been found[133] with Bergson’s attempt to establish, by scientific research in the subject of aphasia, the ontological independence of spirit, the seat of memory, from body. But on other grounds than such scientific investigation the issue of this attempt appears to me at best a futile achievement; for the result is in any case the reinstatement, untouched, of that problem of all radical dualism, a problem which Bergson solves only by metaphor whose brilliance may be luminous itself, but has no illumination for the problem, which is how reactive states are also conscious.

There is a theory which relates consciousness and matter to each each other as the opposite sides of a surface in relief. The objection to this “double aspect” theory that has weighed most, in criticism, is that the ground of the parallelism between convexity and concavity--to wit, a logical implication of each other--is obviously absent in the parallelism of consciousness and matter. Whatever parallelism experience actually finds between them is not deducible from either concept: there is nothing in the definition of the sensation blue to suggest an afferent nervous current; nothing in the latter to suggest a sensation. They are incommensurate. But when you conceive convexity, in that fact you conceive concavity also, and _vice versa_. They are related as plus and minus. The objection appeals to analysis of the definition of consciousness or of matter, or challenges the advocate of the theory to study his sensation or his neural process and see if there be in either of them anything of the other.

A difficulty which immediately arises when this challenge is accepted has been understood to be decisive against the theory. It is this: Any definition of consciousness which the advocate of the theory may propose as the concept to be analyzed must, in order to fulfil the first requirement of logical definition, be in terms of that which is not consciousness. And this seems to the critic to beg the question. If you define consciousness so, he objects, you make its definition imply matter; but there is then nothing of consciousness in it; what you have got is only matter. That is to assume an equation between them. You state the value of _x_ in terms of _y_, but then you haven’t got _x_, but only _y_. It is otherwise with terms that really have the correlation you claim for consciousness and matter. Thus you can equate convexity with concavity in terms of either alone, as _m_ = -(-_m_). In this there is no assumption. But what you say of _x_ is that it equals _ay_, which is something _distinguishable_ from _x_ and whose equality to _x_ is just the problem.

But if it be allowed that the disparity between consciousness and matter must be either a distinction between two kinds of reality, or else the distinction between being and not-being, the predicament just described is worse for the critic of the “double aspect” theory than for its advocate. If the distinction is that of being and not-being, whichever is not-being has an internal constitution and structure by virtue of which parts and relations are recognized within it: matter has physical laws and the interaction of bodies; consciousness has interrelated states. Not-being, so interpreted, is hardly distinguished from being. And if the distinction is within being, and exhausts it, either the connotation of consciousness and that of matter are referable to each other--expressible in terms of each other--or else the distinction is only denotative, and they are not distinguished as _different_; for difference is a discursive relation between differents: _dif_fering from each other is a case of _re_ferring to each other.

Excessive emphasis on the “ultimateness” and “absoluteness” of the difference between these two concepts is just the inductive cue that results in the “double aspect” theory. No one can regard consciousness as not different from matter--least of all our critic, who finds them incommensurable. Nay, among real things that are _other_ than each other, experience gives us no fellow to such difference; for difference so utter, they that differ should coincide. And so, in the fact of aspect, we have, indeed, in a thousand forms, disparity that matches the difference between the concepts now before us: _e. g._, right, left; up, down; plus, minus; convex, concave.

We confess three obvious differences between the two equations which we have taken to represent our critic’s conception of the relation of convexity to concavity and the relation of consciousness to matter. In equation (1), which is _m_ = -(-_m_), representing the former relation, the same symbol _m_ stands on both sides; in equation (2) the symbols are different, _x_ on one side, _y_ on the other. In (1) the coefficient also is the same on both sides, namely unity; in (2) the coefficients are different, unity on one side, _a_ on the other. And in (1) the signs are opposite on the two sides, while in (2) the sign is the same on both sides.

What do these differences mean? To begin with, is (1) monomial and (2) binomial? No; in spite of the fact that there is only one symbol in (1), this equation is binomial in precisely the same sense as (2) is binomial; for it means that a certain attitude toward _m_, symbolized by the minus sign, transforms _m_ into something _distinguishable from_ _m_. If equation (1) expressed an identity, it would not represent the relation of convexity to concavity, which are not identical but distinguishable. But what is thus expressed in (1) by difference of sign is expressed in (2) by difference of coefficient; for (2) means that a certain attitude toward the entity symbolized by _x_ (an attitude symbolized by the phrase “divide by _a_”) transforms _x_ into _y_. In short, the connotation differs, on the two sides, _in both equations alike_. But on the other hand, the denotation is the same on both sides in each equation, for such is the nature of all equations, whether binomial or any other kind. Thus we have identity of denotation with difference of connotation in each of these equations, and they are so far homogeneous with each other. Now connotation is aspect, which is determined by subjective attitude; and attitudes are interrelated in determinate and accurately expressible ways; as, for instance, by antagonism or mutual exclusion, or by any of an indefinite number of forms of implication. The difference of attitude called antipodal oppositeness, or polarity, is the specific difference expressed in equation (1); whereas the coefficient _a_, in (2), expresses _mere_ difference of attitude, difference in general, including, therefore, that specific difference which is expressed by opposition of sign. Thus equation (1) is a case of equation (2).

To sum up: The objection, stated in these algebraic symbols, was this: _m_ implies -_m_; _x_ does not imply _y_. Express the fact of relief in terms of _m_ and you have the correlative fact in -_m_ implied in the very definition of _m_; while if you express _x_ in terms of _y_, you have _y_ values, and nothing but _y_. In short, _x_ and _y_ exclude each other; _m_ and -_m_ imply each other. Our answer is that _x_ implies _y_ just as _m_ implies -_m_; for _ay_ is an aspect of the same denotation as _x_; and, since the specificity of every aspect of a given denotation is determinable or definable by relation to all other aspects of the same denotation, any one of such aspects, as _x_, implies, in its definition, every other, and so _y_, instead of excluding _y_.

Turning from such abstract considerations to empirical study of the sensation, the same sort of difficulty reappears. We think we find a dynamic relationship of organic to extra-organic processes; this relationship presents a material aspect, which we call neural activity, and a formal aspect, which we call blue, for instance. But the critic objects that all this is much more than sensation, and that we have read our hypothesis into our data. We must keep to the pure sensation; in that, there is no neural process. So, even as, before, all our attempts to propose a definition of consciousness for analysis were ruled out as begging the question, now every sample of the experience to be observed is rejected as impure. There is no sensation that is pure in such a sense as our critic means, for he means subjectivity that implies no objectivity. If this is more than a word, it is a self-contradiction, since subjectivity is subjectivity only in the fact of correlation with objectivity. Indeed, if our critic were to observe convexity as he proposes that we observe sensation, he would find no implication of concavity in it; nor would he find it convex. His observation would _be_ the convexity; the two would coincide, and so would not be two. Convexity in its essence, as convex, would therein no longer be the object of the observation. You have to get outside of your convexity to observe it and its implication of concavity; just so, you have to get outside of your sensation to know it; in it, you know only the object of it. When convexity is said to imply concavity, convexity is just therein not “pure,” as the sensation is supposed to be. “Pure” convexity, analogous to “pure” sensation or subjectivity, would be convexity without implication of concavity. That would be zero convexity, so to speak--a self-contradiction. Just so, the “pure” sensation, without implication of objectivity, is a fact of consciousness without the essence of consciousness, which is dynamic relatedness to an object. “Pure” consciousness is consciousness of nothing, or no consciousness.

If our critic have his way, we have nothing left us to discuss. Let us invite his attention to a discussable phenomenon of our own designating, and definable in some such way as this: the simultaneous belonging of an experience to an organism and to another material fact, say the sky. The two belongings are distinguished by a _sui generis_ difference of direction or relational “sense,” which unambiguously determines the organism to be the subject of the belonging, the sky the object. We have at least as good a right to call this phenomenon by the name of consciousness, or sensation, as our critic has to name that a sensation which he so defines that its definition is contradicted by the naming.

Now, experience is essentially dynamic, and, for an organism, to be active is to be functionally ordinated or focalized. For example, the eye and other parts may be subservient, in different ways and degrees, to the hand. Then the organism is focalized into an organ of touch, of striking, or whatever it may be. Every other function contributes as accessory to this primary function, in the organism’s present phase.

We have called consciousness the formal aspect of activity, and we mean by “form” applied to activity what we mean elsewhere, determinateness or definableness. Here, in particular, it is that character which depends on resistance or reactivity. Activity without resistance would be without determination; its character or content would have vanished; it would be activity upon nothing, which, like consciousness of nothing, is nothing. So the resistance that factors in activity is not extraneous to the essence of activity, and consciousness and material processes imply each other not only with the same logical necessity but with the same polar oppositeness of mutual relation, as the aspects of relief.

Consciousness is thus the inversion or reciprocal aspect of organic activity, virtual, in distinction from externalized or real, activity. Where attention is focalized, action is most resisted. As action approaches free vent, consciousness of the object of this free activity becomes more and more evanescent. At the limit where action is unresisted, it and consciousness go out, vanish together, in inverse “sense” or directions. Where action approaches “pure” (_i. e._, unresisted) activity, pure positivity, pure subjectivity, consciousness approaches “pure” (_i. e._, unreacting) passivity, pure negativity, pure objectivity. And such “pure” action and consciousness are pure nothing, action on nothing, sensation of nothing. The vanishing of the two relations together is, in each case, for lack of one of its terms inverse to the term lacking in the other case.

This mutual symmetry between action and consciousness is an implicate of their identity of denotation and mutual inversion of aspect; and any study of the fluctuations and transitions of consciousness, with its modulations of attention and inhibition, is accordingly a study in inverse, a perfect logical function, of corresponding modifications of organic activity; for in the play of the organic functions we shall find incessant modulations between their focalization and their dispersion, incessant shifting of their mutual rank and of the position of primacy among them, to correspond with the changes between margin and focus that are always going on among the elements of consciousness.

The organism is structurally and functionally centralized in a sensori-motor system, where the afferent activity is opposed by the efferent, in a common focus, or in coincident foci, in which action and reaction give form to each other. Here organic reaction has its inception in a preformation, schema or design, as Bergson says, of the developed activity. An intricate manifold of functions are organized: interest determines the ascendency or primacy of a certain function, while others are subservient, being inhibited or reinforced in varying degrees. The whole complex process has this character of focal, unifying organization, a unity expressed in opposite aspects as the simple form of activity, on the one hand, and as the simple object of perceptive consciousness on the other.