The Misuse of Mind

A Study of Bergson’s
Attack on Intellectualism

by Karin Stephen

_Formerly Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge_

With a Prefatory Letter by
HENRI BERGSON

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD
NEW YORK: HARCOURT. BRACE & COMPANY. INC.

1922

_To Professor Henri Bergson
With respect and gratitude_

Contents

 PREFATORY NOTE
 PREFACE
 CHAPTER I. EXPLANATION
 CHAPTER II. FACT
 CHAPTER III. MATTER AND MEMORY




PREFATORY  NOTE


_Being an extract from a letter by Professor Henri Bergson_


Ayant lu de près le travail de Mrs. Stephen je le trouve intéressant au
plus haut point. C’est une interprétation personelle et originale de
l’ensemble de mes vues—interprétation qui vaut par elle-même,
indépendamment de ce qui j’ ai écrit. L’auteur s’est assimilé
_l’esprit_ de la doctrine, puis, se dégageant de la matérialité du
texte elle a développé à sa manière, dans la direction qu’elle avait
choisi, des idées qui lui paraissaient fondamentales. Grâce à la
distinction qu’elle “établit entre “ fact “ et “ matter, “ elle a pu
ramener à l’unité, et présenter avec une grande rigueur logique, des
vues que j’avais été obligé, en raison de ma méthode de recherche,
d’isoler les unes des autres. Bref, son travail a une grande valeur; il
témoigne d’une rare force de pensée.

HENRI BERGSON.




PREFACE


The immense popularity which Bergson’s philosophy enjoys is sometimes
cast up against him, by those who do not agree with him, as a reproach.
It has been suggested that Berg-son’s writings are welcomed simply
because they offer a theoretical justification for a tendency which is
natural in all of us but against which philosophy has always fought,
the tendency to throw reason overboard and just let ourselves go.
Bergson is regarded by rationalists almost as a traitor to philosophy,
or as a Bolshevik inciting the public to overthrow what it has taken
years of painful effort to build up.

It is possible that some people who do not understand this philosophy
may use Bergson’s name as a cloak for giving up all self-direction and
letting themselves go intellectually to pieces, just as hooligans may
use a time of revolution to plunder in the name of the Red Guard. But
Bergson’s philosophy is in reality as far from teaching mere laziness
as Communism is from being mere destruction of the old social order.

Bergson attacks the use to which we usually put our minds, but he most
certainly does not suggest that a philosopher should not use his mind
at all; he is to use it for all it is worth, only differently, more
efficiently for the purpose he has in view, the purpose of knowing for
its own sake.

There is, of course, a sense in which doing anything in the right way
is simply letting one’s self go, for after all it is easier to do a
thing well than badly—it certainly takes much less effort to produce
the same amount of result. So to know in the way which Bergson
recommends does in a sense come more easily than attempting to get the
knowledge we want by inappropriate methods. If this saving of waste
effort is a fault, then Bergson must plead guilty. But as the field of
knowledge open to us is far too wide for any one mind to explore, the
new method of knowing, though it requires less effort than the old to
produce the same result, does not thereby let us off more easily, for
with a better instrument it becomes possible to work for a greater
result.

It is not because it affords an excuse for laziness that Bergson’s
philosophy is popular but because it gives expression to a feeling
which is very widespread at the present time, a distrust of systems,
theories, logical constructions, the assumption of premisses and then
the acceptance of everything that follows logically from them. There is
a sense of impatience with thought and a thirst for the actual, the
concrete. It is because the whole drift of Bergson’s writing is an
incitement to throw over abstractions and get back to facts that so
many people read him, hoping that he will put into words and find an
answer to the unformulated doubt that haunts them.

It was in this spirit that the writer undertook the study of Bergson.
On the first reading he appeared at once too persuasive and too vague,
specious and unsatisfying: a closer investigation revealed more and
more a coherent theory of reality and a new and promising method of
investigating it. The apparent unsatisfactoriness of the first reading
arose from a failure to realize how entirely new and unfamiliar the
point of view is from which Bergson approaches metaphysical
speculation. In order to understand Bergson it is necessary to adopt
his attitude and that is just the difficulty, for his attitude is the
exact reverse of that which has been inculcated in us by the traditions
of our language and education and now comes to us naturally. This
common sense attitude is based on certain assumptions which are so
familiar that we simply take them for granted without expressly
formulating them, and indeed, for the most part, without even realizing
that we have been making any assumptions at all.

Bergson’s principal aim is to direct our attention to the reality which
he believes we all actually know already, but misinterpret and
disregard because we are biassed by preconceived ideas. To do this
Bergson has to offer some description of what this reality is, and this
description will be intelligible only if we are willing and able to
make a profound change in our attitude, to lay aside the old
assumptions which underlie our every day common sense point of view and
adopt, at least for the time being, the assumptions from which Bergson
sets out. This book begins with an attempt to give as precise an
account as possible of the old assumptions which we must discard and
the new ones which we must adopt in order to understand Bergson’s
description of reality. To make the complete reversal of our ordinary
mental habits needed, for understanding what Bergson has to say
requires a very considerable effort from anyone, but the feat is
perhaps most difficult of all for those who have carefully trained
themselves in habits of rigorous logical criticism. In attempting to
describe what we actually know in the abstract logical terms which are
the only means of intercommunication that human beings possess, Bergson
is driven into perpetual self-contradiction, indeed, paradoxical though
it may sound, unless he contradicted himself his description could not
be a true one. It is easier for the ordinary reader to pass over the
self contradictions, hardly even being aware of them, and grasp the
underlying meaning: the trained logician is at once pulled up by the
nonsensical form of the description and the meaning is lost in a welter
of conflicting words. This, I think, is the real reason why some of the
most brilliant intellectual thinkers have been able to make nothing of
Bergson s philosophy: baffled by the self-contradictions into which he
is necessarily driven in the attempt to convey his meaning they have
hastily assumed that Bergson had no meaning to convey.

The object of this book is to set out the relation between explanations
and the actual facts which we want to explain and thereby to show
exactly why Bergson _must_ use self-contradictory terms if the
explanation of reality which he offers is to be a true one.

Having first shown what attitude Bergson requires us to adopt I have
gone on to describe what he thinks this new way of looking at reality
will reveal. This at once involves me in the difficulty with which
Bergson wrestles in all his attempts to describe reality, the
difficulty which arises from the fundamental discrepancy between what
he sees the actual fact to be and the abstract notions which are all he
has with which to describe it. I have attempted to show how it comes
about that we are in fact able to perform this apparently impossible
feat of describing the indescribable, using Bergson’s descriptions of
sensible perception and the relations of matter and memory to
illustrate my point. If we succeed in ridding ourselves of our
common-sense preconceptions, Bergson tells us that we may expect to
know the old facts in a new way, face to face, as it were, instead of
seeing them through a web of our own intellectual interpretations. I
have not attempted to offer any proof whether or not Bergson’s
description of reality is in fact true: having understood the meaning
of the description it remains for each of us to decide for himself
whether or not it fits the facts.

KARIN STEPHEN.

Cambridge, January, 1922.




CHAPTER I
EXPLANATION


In order to understand Bergson it is not necessary to have any previous
acquaintance with philosophy, indeed the less the reader knows of
current metaphysical notions the easier it may perhaps be for him to
adopt the mental attitude required for understanding Bergson. For
Bergson says that the tradition of philosophy is all wrong and must be
broken with: according to his view philosophical knowledge can only be
obtained by “a reversal of the usual work of the intellect.”[1]

 [1] _Introduction to Metaphysics_, page 34.


The usual work of the intellect consists in analysis and
classification: if you have anything presented to you which you do not
understand the obvious question to put yourself is, “what is it?”
Suppose in a dark room which you expected to find empty you stumble
against something, the natural thing to do is to begin at once to try
to fit your experience into some class already familiar to you. You
find it has a certain texture which you class as rather rough, a
temperature which you class as warm, a size which you class as about
two feet high, a peculiar smell which you recognise and you finally
jump to the answer to your question: it is “a dog.” This intellectual
operation is a sample of the way in which it comes natural to us to set
to work whenever we find ourselves confronted with any situation which
we are not able to classify off hand, we are not easy till we can say
_what_ the situation is, and saying _what_ consists in hitting upon
some class with which we are already familiar to which it belongs: in
this instance the question was answered when you succeeded in
describing the situation to yourself as “stumbling upon a dog.” Now you
were only able to class what was stumbled upon as a dog after you had
recognised a certain number of properties as being those shared by
dogs—the rough texture, the size, the smell. You analysed the situation
as containing these qualities and thereupon classified what had been
stumbled upon as a dog.

Analysis and classification are the two methods which we are accustomed
to rely upon for improving our knowledge in unfamiliar situations and
we are accustomed to take it that they improve our knowledge of the
whole situation: anyone who said that after you were able to say what
you had stumbled upon you knew less of the whole situation than you
knew before would find it difficult to get you to agree. And yet this
is very much the position which Bergson takes up. Analysis and
classification, he would admit, are the way to get more knowledge, of a
kind; they enable us to describe situations and they are the starting
point of all explanation and prediction. After analysis and
classification you were able to say, “I have stumbled upon a dog,” and
having got so far you could then pass on to whatever general laws you
knew of as applying to the classes into which you had fitted the
situation, and by means of these laws still more of the situation could
be classified and explained. Thus by means of the general law, “dogs
lick,” you would be furnished with an explanation if perhaps you felt
something warm and damp on your hand, or again knowledge of this law
might lead you to expect such a feeling. When what we want is to
describe or to explain a situation in general terms then Bergson agrees
that analysis and classification are the methods to employ, but he
maintains that these methods which are useful for describing and
explaining are no use for finding out the actual situation which we may
want to describe or explain. And he goes a step further. Not only do
these methods fail to reveal the situation but the intellectual
attitude of abstraction to which they accustom us seriously handicaps
us when we want not merely to explain the situation but to know it. Now
it is the business of science to explain situations in terms of general
laws and so the intellectual method of abstract-ion is the right one
for scientists to employ. Bergson claims, however, that philosophy has
a task quite distinct from that of science. In whatever situation he
finds himself a man may take up one of two attitudes, he may either
adopt a practical attitude, in which case he will set to work to
explain the situation in order that he may know what to do under the
circumstances, or he may take a speculative interest in it and then he
will devote himself to knowing it simply for the sake of knowing. It is
only, according to Bergson, in the former case, when his interest is
practical, that he will attain his object by using the intellectual
method of abstraction which proceeds by analysis and classification.
These intellectual operations have such prestige, however, they have
proved so successful in discovering explanations, that we are apt to
take it for granted that they must be the best way to set, to work
whatever sort of knowledge we want: we might almost be tempted, off
hand, to imagine that they were our only way of knowing at all, but a
moment’s reflection will show that this, at any rate, would be going
too far.

Before we can analyse and classify and explain we must have something
to analyse, some material to work upon: these operations, are based
upon something which we know directly, what we see, for instance, or
touch or feel. This something is the foundation of knowledge, the
intellectual operations of analysis classification and the framing of
general laws are simply an attempt to describe and explain it. It is
the business of science to explain and intellectual methods are the
appropriate ones for science to employ. But the business of philosophy,
according to Bergson, is not to explain reality but to know it. For
this a different kind of mental effort is required. Analysis and
classification, instead of increasing our direct knowledge, tend rather
to diminish it. They must always start from some direct knowledge, but
they proceed, not by widening the field of this knowledge but by
leaving out more and more of it. Moreover, unless we are constantly on
the alert, the intellectual habit of using all our direct knowledge as
material for analysis and classification ends by completely misleading
us as to what it is that we do actually know. So that the better we
explain the less, in the end, we know.

There can be no doubt that something is directly known but disputes
break out as soon as we try to say what that something is. Is it the
“real” world of material objects, or a mental copy of these objects, or
are we altogether on the wrong track in looking for two kinds of
realities, the “real” world and “our mental states,” and is it
perceived events alone that are “real?” This something which we know
directly has been given various names: “the external object,” “sense
data,” “phenomena,” and so on, each more or less coloured by
implications belonging to one or other of the rival theories as to what
it is. We shall call it “the facts” to emphasise its indubitable
reality, and avoid, as far as possible, any other implications.

Controversy about “the facts” has been mainly as to what position they
occupy in the total scheme of reality. As to what they are at the
moment when we are actually being acquainted with them one would have
thought there could have been no two opinions; it seems impossible that
we should make any mistake about that. No doubt it is impossible to
have such a thing as a false experience, an experience is what it is,
only judgments can be false. But it is quite possible to make a false
judgment as to what experience we are actually having, or, still more
commonly, simply to take for granted that our experience must be such
and such, without ever looking to see whether it is or not. A small
child taken to a party and told that parties are great fun if
questioned afterwards will very likely say it has enjoyed itself
though, if you happened to have been there, you may have seen clearly
that it was really bewildered or bored. Even when we grow up names
still have a tendency to impose upon us and disguise from us the actual
nature of our experiences. There are not very many people who, if
invited to partake, for instance, of the last bottle of some famous
vintage wine, would have the courage to admit, even to themselves, that
it was nasty, even though it was, in fact, considerably past its prime.
Cases of this kind, with which we are all familiar, are enough to make
us realize that it is actually quite possible to make mistakes even
about facts which we know directly, to overlook the actual fact
altogether because we have made up our minds in advance as to what it
is sure to be.

Now Bergson says that such errors are not confined to stray instances,
such as we have noticed, in which the imposition of preconceived ideas
can readily be detected by a little closer attention to the actual
facts. He believes that a falsification due to preconceived ideas, runs
right through the whole of our direct experience. He lays the blame
both for this falsification and for our failure to detect it upon our
intellectual habit of relying upon explanation rather than upon direct
knowledge, and that is one of the reasons why he says that our
intellectual attitude is an obstacle to direct knowledge of the facts.
The intellectual method of abstraction by which we analyse and classify
is the foundation of all description and explanation in terms of
general laws, and the truth is that we are, as a rule, much more
preoccupied with explaining the facts which we know than with the
actual experiencing of them.

This preoccupation is natural enough. The bare fact which we know
directly is not enough to enable us to carry on our everyday lives, we
cannot get on unless we supplement it with some sort of explanation
and, if it comes to choosing between fact and explanation, the
explanation is often of more practical use than the fact. So it comes
about that we are inclined to use the facts which we know directly
simply as material for constructing explanations and to pay so little
attention to them for their own sakes that we simply take it for
granted that they must be what our explanations lead us to suppose they
are.

Now according to Bergson the attitude of mind required for explaining
the facts conflicts with that which is required for knowing them. From
the point of view simply of knowing, the facts are all equally
important and we cannot afford to discriminate, but for explanation
some facts are very much more important than others. When we want to
explain, therefore, rather than simply to know, we tend to concentrate
our attention upon these practically important facts and pass over the
rest. For in order to describe and explain a situation we have to
classify it, and in order to do this we must pick out in it properties
required for membership of some one or other of the classes known to
us. In the situation which we originally considered by way of
illustration, for instance, you had to pick out the qualities of
roughness, warmth and so on, in order to classify what you had stumbled
upon as “a dog.” Now the picking out of these particular qualities is
really an operation of abstraction from the situation as a whole: they
were the important features of the situation from the point of view of
classifying what you had stumbled upon, but they by no means exhausted
the whole situation. Our preoccupation with explaining the facts, then,
leads us to treat what we know directly as so much material for
abstraction.

This intellectual attitude, as Bergson calls it, though practically
useful, has, according to him, two grave drawbacks from the point of
view of speculation. By focussing our attention upon anything less than
the whole fact, and so isolating a part from the rest, he says we
distort what we knew originally: furthermore just in so far as we make
a selection among the facts, attending to some and passing over others,
we limit the field of direct knowledge which we might otherwise have
enjoyed. For these two reasons Bergson insists that it is the business
of philosophy to reverse the intellectual habit of mind and return to
the fullest possible direct knowledge of the fact. “May not the task of
philosophy, “he says,” be to bring us back to a fuller perception of
reality by a certain displacement of our attention? What would be
required would be to turn our attention _away_ from the practically
interesting aspect of the universe in order to turn it _back_ to what,
from a practical point of view, is useless. And this conversion of
attention would be philosophy itself.”[2]

 [2] _La Perception du Changement_, page 13. 24


At first sight it appears paradoxical and absurd to maintain that our
efforts to analyse, classify and explain the facts tend rather to limit
than to extend our knowledge, and furthermore distort even such facts
as we still remain acquainted with. Common sense has no doubt that, far
from limiting and distorting our knowledge, explanation is the only
possible way in which we can get beyond the little scraps of fact which
are all that we can ever know directly.

If the views of common sense on this question were formulated, which,
for the most part, they are not, they would be something like this.
Until we begin to think the facts which we know directly are all
muddled together and confused: first of all it is necessary to sort
them by picking out qualities from the general confusion in which they
are at first concealed. It is possible that during this process, which
is what is called analysis, we may be obliged, at first, to overlook
some of what we already know in a vague sort of way, but this
insignificant loss is compensated by the clarity of what remains, and
is, in any case, only temporary. For as the analysis proceeds we
gradually replace the whole of the original mere muddle by clear and
definite things and qualities. At first we may be able to distinguish
only a few qualities here and there, and our preoccupation with these
may possibly lead us, for a time, to pay insufficient attention to the
rest of the muddle which we know directly but have not yet succeeded in
analysing. But when the analysis is completed the distinct things and
qualities which we shall then know will contain _all_ that we
originally knew, and more besides, since the analysis will have
revealed much that was originally concealed or only implicit in the
original unanalysed fact. If, for instance, you look at a very modern
painting, at first what you are directly aware of may be little more
than a confused sight: bye and bye, as you go on looking, you will be
able to distinguish colours and shapes, one by one objects may be
recognised until finally you may be able to see the whole picture at a
glance as composed of four or five different colours arranged in
definite shapes and positions. You may even be able to make out that it
represents a human figure, or a landscape. Common sense would tell you
that if your analysis is complete these colours and shapes will exhaust
the whole of what you originally knew and moreover that in the course
of it much will have been discovered which originally you could hardly
be said to have known at all, so that analysis, far from limiting your
direct knowledge, will have added to it considerably. Starting, then,
originally, from a very meagre stock of direct knowledge, analysis,
according to the common sense view, by discovering more and more
qualities, builds up for us more and more direct knowledge.

Bergson begins just the other way up. He starts from the idea of a
whole field of direct knowledge vastly more extended than the actual
facts of which we are normally aware as making up our direct
experience. He calls this whole field of knowledge “virtual knowledge.”
This field of virtual knowledge contains the whole of the actions and
reactions of matter in which our body has its part at any moment, the
multitude of stimulations which actually assail the senses but which we
normally disregard, together with all the responses by which our bodies
adjust themselves to these stimulations, and, in addition, the whole of
our past. For Bergson the problem is to explain, not how we increase
our direct knowledge, but how we limit it: not how we remember, but how
we forget. “Our knowledge,” he says, “far from being built up by a
gradual combination of simple elements, is the result of a sharp
dissociation. From the infinitely vast field of our virtual knowledge
we have selected, to turn into actual knowledge, whatever concerns our
action upon things; the rest we have neglected. The brain appears to
have been constructed on purpose for this work of selection. It is easy
enough to show that this is so in the case of memory. Our past, as we
shall show in the next lecture, is necessarily preserved,
automatically. It survives in its entirety. But it is to our practical
interest to put it aside, or at any rate only to accept just so much of
it as can more or less usefully throw light on the present situation
and complete it. The brain enables us to make this selection: it
materialises the useful memories and keeps those which would be of no
use below the threshold of consciousness. The same thing may be said of
perception: perception is the servant of action and out of the whole of
reality it isolates only what interests us; it shows us not so much the
things themselves as what we can make of them. In advance it classifies
them, in advance it arranges them; we barely look at the object, it is
enough for us to know to what category it belongs.”[3]

 [3] _La Perception du Changement_, pages 12 and 13. 27


According to Bergson the facts which we actually know directly in the
ordinary course are discriminated out of a very much wider field which
we must also be said in a sense to know directly though most of it lies
outside the clear focus of attention. This whole field of virtual
knowledge is regarded as standing to the actual facts to which we
usually devote our attention, much as, for instance, the whole
situation of stumbling upon something in a dark room stood to the
single quality of roughness: in both cases there is a central point in
the full focus of attention which we are apt to look upon as the fact
directly known, but this central point is really surrounded by a vastly
wider context and this too is known in some sense though it is commonly
ignored.

For all philosophies, whether they be Bergson’s or the view of common
sense or any other, the actual facts which require to be explained are
the same, and, though any positive assertion as to what these facts are
may be hotly disputed, it will probably be admitted that as we
ordinarily know them they consist in some direct experience, undeniable
as far as it goes. The point at issue between Bergson and common sense
is, precisely, how far it does go. Both sides would admit that, in this
fact directly known, what is in the full focus of attention at any
given moment is very limited; on the other hand both would admit that
this fully focussed fact is set in a context, or fringe, with no
clearly defined limits which also goes to make up the whole fact
directly known though we do not usually pay much attention to it. The
fact directly known being given the problem is to find out what it is
and how it comes to be known. What is actually given and needs to be
accounted for is the fact clearly focussed, with its less clearly
defined fringe: Bergson’s sweeping assumption of the existence of a
further vast field of virtual knowledge in order to account for it,
does, at first sight, seem arbitrary and unwarranted and in. need of
considerable justification before it can be accepted. For him the
problem then becomes, not to account for our knowing as much as we do,
but to see why it is that we do not know a great deal more: why our
actual knowledge does not cover the whole field of our virtual
knowledge. Common sense, on, the other hand, sets out from the
assumption of ignorance, absence of awareness, as being, as it were,
natural and not needing any accounting for, and so it regards the
problem as being to explain why any experience ever occurs at all. The
assumption of ignorance as being the natural thing seems at first sight
to need no justification, but this may well be due merely to our having
grown accustomed to the common sense point of view. When one begins to
question this assumption it begins to appear just as arbitrary as the
contrary standpoint adopted by Bergson. The actual facts are neither
ignorance nor full knowledge and in accounting for them it is really
just as arbitrary to assume one of these two extremes as the other. The
truth appears to be that in order to account for the facts one must
make some assumptions, and these, not being facts actually given, are
bound to be more or less arbitrary. They seem more or less “natural”
according as we are more or less accustomed to the idea of them, but
they are really justified only according to the success with which they
account for the actual facts.

This idea of putting the problem of knowledge in terms exactly the
reverse of those in which it seems “natural” to put it was originally
suggested to Bergson by his study of the important work on amnesia
carried out by Charcot and his pupils, and also by such evidence as was
to be had at the time when he wrote on the curious memory phenomena
revealed by the use of hypnotism and by cases of spontaneous
dissociation. It is impossible to prove experimentally that no
experience is ever destroyed but it is becoming more and more firmly
established that enormous numbers of past experiences, which are
inaccessible to ordinary memory and which therefore it would seem
“natural” to suppose destroyed, can, if the right methods are employed,
be revived even with amazing fullness of detail.

In recent years since Bergson’s books were first published, great
strides have been made in the experimental investigation of the whole
subject of memory, and the evidence thus obtained, far from upsetting
the theory of memory suggested to him by the less extensive evidence
which was available at the time when he wrote, lends it striking
support.

It appears to be accepted by doctors who use hypnotism in psychotherapy
that under hypnotism many patients can perfectly well be taken back in
memory to any period of their lives which the doctor chooses to ask
for, and can be made not only to remember vaguely a few incidents which
occurred at the time but actually to re-live the whole period in the
fullest possible detail, feeling over again with hallucinatory
vividness all the emotions experienced at the time.

This re-living of past experience can, with some patients, be made to
go on indefinitely, through the whole day, if the doctor has time to
attend to it, every little incident being faithfully recalled though
the actual event may have taken place 20 or 30 years previously. And
this happens not simply in the case of some very striking event or
great crisis which the patient has been through, indeed it is just the
striking events that are often hardest to recover. Some doctors, in
order to get at the crisis, have found it useful occasionally to put
patients back through one birthday after another right back even as
early as their second year, to see at what point in their lives some
particular nervous symptom first appeared, and each successive birthday
is lived through again in the utmost detail.[4]

 [4] See _Psychology and Psychotherapy_ by Dr. William Brown.


Evidence of this kind does not, of course, prove that literally
_nothing_ is ever lost but it goes far towards upsetting the ordinary
view that it is the rule for past experience to be annihilated and the
exception for fragments here and there to be preserved in memory. The
evidence which has so far been collected and which is rapidly
accumulating at least seems to justify us in reversing this rule and
saying rather that to be preserved is the rule for experience and to be
lost would be the exception, if indeed any experience ever really is
lost at all.

This way of regarding the field of memory is further supported by such
evidence as has been collected with regard to the influence of past
experience in dreams, phobias and various forms of insanity, but in
these cases, of course, it is only isolated past experiences here and
there whose activity can be observed, and so, while helping to upset
the most natural assumption that whatever cannot be recalled by
ordinary efforts of memory may be assumed to have been destroyed, they
do not lend very much support to the wider view put forward by Bergson,
that no experience, however trivial, is ever destroyed but that all of
it is included in the field out of which memory makes its practical
selection.

Taking all the evidence with regard to the preservation of past
experience which is at present available, then, it is safe to say that,
while it cannot, in the nature of things, absolutely prove Bergson’s
theory of knowledge, it in no way conflicts with it and even supports
it, positively in the sense that the theory does fit the facts well
enough to explain them (though it goes further than the actual facts
and makes assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved by an
appeal to them) and negatively in the sense that what we now know about
memory actually conflicts with the “natural” view that past experience
which we are unable to recall has been destroyed, which is commonly
appealed to to show the absurdity of the rival theory put forward by
Bergson.

On the assumption which Bergson makes of a much wider field of direct
knowledge than that which contains what we are accustomed to regard as
the actual facts which we know directly, Bergson’s problem becomes how
to account for these facts being so much less than the whole field
which we might have expected to have known. The answer, according to
him, is to be found in our practical need of being prepared in advance
for what is to come, at whatever sacrifice of direct knowledge of past
and present facts. For practical purposes it is essential to use
present and past facts as signs of what is coming so that we may be
ready for it. To this end it is far more important to know the general
laws according to which facts occur than to experience the facts
themselves in their fullness. Our intellectual habits which prompt us
to set to work at once in every unfamiliar situation to analyse and
classify it fit us for discovering these laws: in so far as we are
intellectual we incline to regard facts mainly as material for arriving
at descriptions which themselves form the material out of which, by a
further intellectual effort, explanations are framed in terms of
general laws, which we need to know if we are to be ready for what is
going to happen. Now these laws are general laws applying to whole
classes of facts of one kind, or another. Facts, therefore, only form
material for discovering laws in so far as they can be classified into
kinds.

The first step in classifying a fact is called analysis and consists in
discovering common qualities which the fact possesses. According to
Bergson the discovery of common qualities in a fact consists simply in
learning to overlook everything in that fact except the respects in
which it can be said to be of the same kind, and so to belong to the
same class, as other facts. Far from adding to our direct knowledge, as
common sense supposes, he holds that analysis consists in shutting our
eyes to the individuality of facts in order to dwell only upon what
they have in common with one another. Starting, then, from the wider
field of knowledge which he assumes Bergson explains how we reach the
limited facts, which are all that we ordinarily know, by saying that
these facts are arrived at by selection out of this much wider field.
It is not the disinterested love of knowledge that determines how much
we shall actually attend to: our selection from the whole field of what
facts we will attend to is determined by the pressing need of being
prepared in advance for the facts which are to come. We attend only to
so much of the whole of what is, in some sense, directly known to us as
will be useful for framing the general laws which enable us to prepare
in advance for what is coming. This practical utility explains why
analysis and classification seem to us to be the obvious way of dealing
with what we know.

The work of abstraction by which, treating the facts directly known as
so much material for framing explanations, we pass from these actual
facts to the general laws which explain them, falls into four stages,
and at each stage, according to Bergson, as we go further and further
from the original fact directly known, the two vices of the
intellectual method, limitation and distortion of the actual fact,
become more and more apparent.

Starting from the fact directly known, the first thing, as we have
seen, is to learn to distinguish common qualities which it shares in
common with some, but not all, other facts; the next thing is to
classify it by fitting it into the further groups to which these
various qualities entitle it to belong. The moment a quality has been
distinguished in a fact that fact has been fitted into a class, the
class which consists of all the facts in which that quality can be
distinguished. Thus, in our original illustration, when you first
distinguished warmth, etc., you were beginning to fit your fact into
classes: when you perceived warmth you fitted it into the class of warm
objects, and it was the same with the other qualities of roughness,
size and smell. This fitting of facts into classes according to the
common qualities distinguished in them might be called a preliminary
classification, but we shall use the term analysis for this preliminary
grouping of facts according to their qualities, keeping the term
classification for the next step, which you took when you realized
“this is a dog,” which consists in the discovery not of mere
disconnected qualities but of “real things.” Just as every quality,
such as “warm” or “hairy” or “sweet” or “cold” is a class of actual
facts, so every “real thing” such as “a dog” or “an ice cream” is a
class of qualities. Thus a quality is once, and a “real thing” is
twice, removed from actual fact, and the more energetically we pursue
the intellectual work of abstraction the further we get from the fact
itself from which we began. The point of grouping facts into classes,
whether by analysing them into qualities or classifying them into “real
things,” is that we can then apply to the particular fact all that we
know to be true in general of whatever belongs to these various
classes: in a word, once we have fitted a fact into a class we can
apply to it all the general laws which are known to apply to that
class.

Common sense, as we saw, tells us that when we distinguish qualities in
any given fact we obtain fuller knowledge than was given in the mere
unanalysed fact, and this knowledge is supposed to become fuller still
when we go on to classify these qualities into “real things.” Bergson,
on the contrary, says that common qualities are arrived at by leaving
out much of the fact originally known, while each successive stage in
the process of abstraction by which we explain facts, though it enables
us to apply more and more general laws, yet leaves out more and more of
the actual fact itself. Analysis begins this whittling away of the
actual fact by confining our attention to qualities which do not
exhaust the whole content of the actual fact. At this preliminary
stage, however, though we concentrate our attention on the quality, we
still remain aware of the whole fact in which the quality has its
setting. Classification carries the work of limitation a stage further.
“Things” are a stage further removed from actual fact than qualities
are since, while qualities are classes of facts, “things” are only
classes of qualities. For classification into “things” therefore only
the qualities in a fact will be of any use, and so, when we have
reached the stage of classification, we need no longer burden our
attention with the actual facts themselves in their entirety, we need
pay attention only to the qualities which distinguish one group from
another, For the purpose of classification into “things” the quality
can stand for the whole fact: thus, as Bergson points out, we begin to
lose contact with the whole fact originally known, since all the rest
of it except the respects in which it can be analysed will henceforth
tend to be ignored.

The third stage in explaining facts in terms of general laws is called
induction and consists in observing and formulating the relations of
“things.” “Things” are related to each other through their qualities.
Qualities do not give us the whole fact, because, when we have
distinguished qualities, we are inclined to concentrate our attention
on the quality at the expense of the rest of the fact; nevertheless
while we attend to actual qualities we have not lost contact with fact
altogether. Induction, which consists in framing general laws of the
relations of “things,” though it does not involve attention to the
whole fact, does at least demand attention to qualities, and so, while
we are occupied with induction, we do still keep touch with fact to
some extent.

Once the relations of qualities have been observed and formulated,
however, we need no longer attend to any part of the fact at all.
Instead of the actual qualities we now take symbols, words, for
example, or letters, or other signs, and with these symbols we make for
ourselves diagrams of the relations in which we have observed that the
qualities which they represent have stood to each other. Thus we might
use the words “lightning before thunder” or first an L and then a T, to
express the fact that in a storm we usually observe the quality of
flashing before the quality of rumbling. Such laws do not actually
reveal new facts to us, they can only tell us, provided we actually
know a fact belonging to a given class, to what other class facts which
we shall know bye and bye will belong. Thus, once we have classified
facts as belonging to two classes, daylight and darkness, and have
observed the invariable alternation of facts belonging to these
classes, then, whenever we know directly facts which can be classed as
daylight, we can predict, according to our law of the alternation of
the two classes, that bye and bye these facts will give place to others
which can be classed as darkness and that bye and bye these in their
turn will be replaced by facts which can again be classed as daylight.
The practical value of being able to make even such elementary
predictions as these is obviously enormous, and this value increases as
applied science, which is built up simply by the formulation of more
and more comprehensive general laws of this type, widens the field of
facts which can be explained. Once the laws are known, moreover, we are
able to say to what class the facts must have belonged which preceded a
fact of any given class just as easily as we can say to what class the
facts which are to follow it will belong. Thus, given a fact which can
be classed as daylight, we can infer, by means of the law of the
alternation of the classes daylight and darkness, not only that facts
which can be classed as darkness will follow bye and bye, but also that
facts of that class must have gone before. In this way we can explain
the causes of all classifiable facts equally with their effects and so
bridge over the gaps in our direct knowledge by creating a unified plan
of the interrelations of all the classes to which facts can belong. By
means of this plan we can explain any fact (that is classify its causes
and effects), provided we can fit it into one or other of the known
classes. This again is of enormous practical use because, when we know
to what class present facts must belong if they are to be followed by
the class of facts which we want, or not to be followed by those which
we do not want, we can arrange our present facts accordingly.

Bergson would not think of denying that this intellectual method, in
which facts are used as material for abstraction, is of the utmost
practical use for explaining facts and so enabling us to control them.
He suggests, however, that our preoccupation with these useful
abstractions, classes and their relations, misleads us as to the facts
themselves. What actually takes place, he thinks, is a kind of
substitution of the explanation for the fact which was to be explained,
analogous with what happens when a child at a party, or a guest at
dinner, is misled about his actual sensations, only this substitution
of which Bergson speaks, being habitual, is much harder to see through.
Explanation, as we have seen, consists in constructing a plan or map in
terms of such abstractions as classes and their relations, or
sometimes, when the abstraction has been carried a step further, in
terms simply of words or symbols, by means of which we represent the
causal relations between such of the actual directly known facts as can
be classified. This plan is more comprehensive and complete than the
actual facts which we know directly in the ordinary course of things,
for which it stands, and it enables us to explain these facts in terms
of the classes of causes from which they follow, and the classes of
effects which they produce. No explanation, of course, can actually
acquaint us directly with the real antecedent or consequent facts
themselves: it can only tell us to what classes these facts must
belong. The terms of the plan by which we explain the facts, the
classes, for instance, daylight and darkness, and their relation of
alternation, or the words or symbols which stand for classes and
relations are not themselves facts but abstractions. We cannot think in
terms of actual facts: the intellectual activity by which we formulate
general laws can only work among abstractions, and in order to explain
a fact we are obliged to substitute for it either a class or word or
other symbol. All description and explanation of facts consists in
substitutions of this kind. The explanation applies provided the
abstraction is based on fact, that is, provided it is possible to fit
the fact to which the explanation is intended to apply into the class
employed to explain it: the general law, for instance, about the
alternation of the classes daylight and darkness will explain any facts
which can be fitted into one or other of these classes, or again
general laws about dogs, such as “dogs lick” will apply to whatever
fact belongs at once to all the simpler classes, “warm,” “rough,” “of a
certain size, and smell,” out of which the class “dog” is constructed.
The general law itself, however, does not consist of such facts but of
abstractions substituted for the facts themselves. Such substitution is
extremely useful and perfectly legitimate so long as we keep firm hold
of the fact as well, and are quite clear about what is fact and what
only symbol. The danger is, however, that, being preoccupied with
describing and explaining and having used abstractions so successfully
for these purposes, we may come to lose our sense of fact altogether
and fail to distinguish between actual facts and the symbols which we
use to explain them.

This, indeed, is just what Bergson thinks really does happen. No doubt
an intelligent physicist is perfectly aware that the vibrations and
wave lengths and electrons and forces by which he explains the changes
that take place in the material world are fictions, and does not
confuse them with the actual facts in which his actual knowledge of the
material world consists. But it is much more doubtful whether he
distinguishes between these actual facts and the common sense material
objects, such as lumps of lead, pieces of wood, and so on, which he
probably believes he knows directly but which are really only
abstractions derived from the facts in order to explain them just as
much as his own vibrations and wave lengths. When a scientist frames a
hypothesis he employs the intellectual method of substitution with full
consciousness of what he is about; he recognises that its terms are
abstractions and not facts. But the intellectual method of explaining
by substituting general abstractions for particular facts is not
confined to science. All description and explanation, from the first
uncritical assumptions of common sense right up to the latest
scientific hypothesis employs the intellectual method of substituting
abstractions for actual facts. The common sense world of things,
events, qualities, minds, feelings, and so on, in which we all pass our
every day lives is an early and somewhat crude attempt to describe the
continually changing fact which each of us experiences directly, but it
is perhaps more misleading than the later elaborate constructions of
chemistry, physics, biology or physchology in that things and qualities
are more easily mistaken for facts than more obviously hypothetical
assumptions. Bergson points out that the various things of which this
common sense world consists, solid tables, green grass, anger, hope,
etc., are not facts: these things, he insists, are only abstractions.
They are convenient for enabling us to describe and explain the actual
facts which each of us experiences directly, and they are based upon
these facts in the sense of being abstracted from them. The objection
to them is that we are too much inclined to take it for granted that
these things and qualities and events actually are facts themselves,
and in so doing to lose sight of the real facts altogether. In support
of his view that things having qualities in successive relations are
mere abstractions Bergson points out that whenever we stop to examine
what it actually is that we know directly we can see at once that this
fact does not consist of things and qualities at all: things and
qualities are clearly marked off one from another,; they change as a
series of distinct terms, but in what we know directly there are no
clear cut distinctions and so no series. The assumption which we
usually make that the facts must consist of such things as events and
qualities and material objects is not based upon the evidence of direct
knowledge: we make the assumption that the facts must be of this kind
simply because they can be explained in these terms.

It is true that there is some correspondence between the actual facts
and the common sense world of solid tables and so on, and we usually
jump to the conclusion that this correspondence would not be possible
unless the facts had common qualities. There is no denying that facts
can be classified and it seems only natural to take it for granted that
whatever can be classified must share some quality with whatever
belongs to the same class, that, indeed, it is just on account of all
sharing the same common quality that facts can be classified as being
all of the same kind. Thus common sense takes it for granted that all
facts which can be classified as red, and so explained by all the
general laws which we know about the relation of red things to other
things, must share a common quality of redness. It seems only natural
to make this assumption because we are so used to making it, but if we
stop to examine the facts which we know directly we discover that they
do not bear it out, and we are gradually driven to the conclusion that
it is quite unwarranted. It is only bit by bit, as we gradually
accustom ourselves to doubting what we have been accustomed to take for
granted, that we realize how ill this assumption fits the facts.




CHAPTER II
FACT


Common sense starts out with the assumption that what we know directly
is such things as trees, grass, anger, hope and so on, and that these
things have qualities such as solidity, greenness, unpleasantness and
so on, which are also facts directly known. It is not very difficult to
show that, if we examine the facts which we know directly, we cannot
find in them any such things as trees, grass, or minds, over and above
the various qualities which we say belong to them. I see one colour and
you see another: both of them are colours belonging to the grass but
neither of us can find anything among the facts known to him
corresponding to this grass, regarded as something over and above its
various qualities, to which those qualities are supposed to belong.

This drives common sense back unto its second line of defence where it
takes up the much stronger position of asserting that, while trees,
grass, minds, etc., are not among the facts directly known, their
qualities of solidity, greenness, etc., are. It is usual to add that
these qualities are signs of real trees, grass, etc., which exist
independently but are only known to us through their qualities.

It is much harder to attack this position, but its weakness is best
exposed by considering change as we know it directly, and comparing
this with change as represented in terms of qualities. Change, when
represented in terms of qualities, forms a series in which different
qualities are strung together one after the other by the aid of
temporal relations of before and after. The change perceived when we
look at the spectrum would thus have to be described in terms of a
series of colours, red before orange, orange before yellow, yellow
before green, and so on. We might certainly go into greater detail than
this, distinguishing any number of shades in each of the colours
mentioned, but the description would still have to be given in the same
form, that of a series of different colours, or shades of colour,
strung together by relations of before and after. Now the fact which we
know directly does not change so: it forms a continuous becoming which
is not made up of any number, however great, of fixed stages. When we
want to represent this changing fact in terms of qualities we have to
put together a series of qualities, such as red, orange, etc., and then
say that “the colour” changes from one of these to another. We pretend
that there is “a colour” which is not itself either red or green or
orange or blue, which changes into all these different colours one
after another. It is not very difficult to see that this abstract
colour which is neither red nor orange nor green nor blue is not a fact
but only an abstraction which is convenient for purposes of
description: it is not quite so easy to see that this criticism applies
equally to each of the separate colours, red, orange, etc., and yet a
little attention shows that these also are really nothing but
abstractions. With reference to the whole changing fact which is known
directly through any period the change in respect of colour is clearly
an abstraction. But just as there is no “colour” over and above the
red, the orange, the green, etc., which we say we see, so there is
really no “red,” “orange,” “green,” over and above the changing process
with which we are directly acquainted. Each of these, the red, the
orange, and so on, just like the abstract “colour,” is simply a
fictitious stage in the process of changing which it is convenient to
abstract when we want to describe the process but which does not itself
occur as a distinct part in the actual fact.

Change, as we know it directly, does not go on between fixed points
such as these stages which we abstract, it goes on impartially, as it
were, through the supposed stages just as much as in between them. But
though fixed stages are not needed to enable change to occur, simply as
a fact, they are needed if we are to describe change and explain it in
terms of general laws. Qualities are assumptions required, not in order
that change may take place, but in order that we may describe, explain,
and so control it. Such particular qualities as red and green are
really no more facts directly known than such still more general, and
so more obviously fictitious notions as a colour which is of no
particular shade, or a table, or a mind, apart from its qualities or
states. All these fixed things are alike abstractions required for
explaining facts directly known but not occurring as actual parts of
those facts or stages in their change.

Thus it appears that the common sense world of things and qualities and
events is in the same position, with regard to the actual facts
directly known as scientific hypotheses such as forces, electrons, and
so on, in their various relations: none of these actually form parts of
the fact, all of them are abstractions from the fact itself which are
useful for explaining and so controlling it. Common sense stops short
at things and qualities and events; science carries the abstraction
further, that is all the difference: the aim in both cases is the same,
the practical one of explaining and so controlling facts directly
known. In both cases the method employed is the intellectual method of
abstraction which begins by discriminating within the whole field
directly known in favour of just so much as will enable us to classify
it and ignoring the rest, and then proceeds to confuse even this
selected amount of the actual fact with the abstract classes or other
symbols in terms of which it is explained. We have just seen how the
result, the worlds of common sense or science, differ from the actual
facts in the way in which they change: these worlds of abstractions
represent change as a series of fixed stages united by temporal
relations, while the actual fact forms a continuous process of becoming
which does not contain any such fixed points, as stages in relations.

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

The unsatisfactoriness of such descriptions is no new discovery: the
logical difficulties connected with the attempt to describe change in
terms of series of successive things or events have been familiar since
the time when Zeno invented the famous dilemma of Achilles’ race with
the tortoise. Mathematicians have been in the habit of telling us that
these difficulties depend simply on the fact that we imagine the series
of positions at which Achilles and the tortoise find themselves from
moment to moment as finite: the device of the infinite series, they
say, satisfies all the requirements needed for representing change and
solves all the logical difficulties which arise from it. Bergson’s
difficulties, however, cannot be solved in this way for they are not
based upon the discovery of logical absurdities but upon the
discrepancy between the description and the fact. What he maintains is
that the description of change in terms of an infinite series of stages
leaves out the change altogether. Zeno’s logical dilemma as to how
Achilles could ever catch up with the tortoise provided the tortoise
was given a start, however small, may be countered by the ingenuity of
the mathematicians’ infinite series. Bergson’s difficulty turns on a
question of fact, not of logic, and cannot be so met. He solves the
problem simply by denying that Achilles or the tortoise ever are at
particular points at particular moments. Such a description of change,
he says, leaves out the real changing. And the introduction of the
notion of an infinite series only makes the matter worse. For stages do
not change, and so, if there is to be any change, it must, presumably,
take place in between one stage and the next. But in between any two
stages of an infinite series there are supposed to be an infinite
number of other stages, so that to any given stage there _is_ no next
stage. Change, therefore, cannot take place between one stage and the
next one, there being no next one, and since it is equally impossible
that it should take place at any one of the stages themselves it
follows that an infinite series of stages leaves out change altogether.
Similarly a series of instants before and after one another leaves out
of time just the element of passage, becoming, which is its essence.

The truth, Bergson says, is that with fixed stages, no matter how many
you take, and no matter in what relation you arrange them, you cannot
reproduce the change and time which actually occur as facts directly
known. If Achilles or the tortoise are ever at different places at
different moments then neither of them really moves at all. Change and
time, as represented by abstractions, according to the intellectual
method, consist of stages in relations of succession, but the fact does
not happen by stages and is not held together by relations: if we
compare the representation with the fact we find that they differ
profoundly in their form.

According to Bergson this difference in form is one of the two
essential respects in which abstractions fail to represent facts and in
which, consequently, we are led into error as to the facts if we fail
to distinguish them from the abstractions in terms of which we explain
them, or take for granted that they correspond exactly with our
explanations.

Bergson gives the name “space” to the form which belongs to
abstractions but not to actual facts: abstractions, he says, are
“spatial,” but facts are not. This use of the word “space” is peculiar
and perhaps unfortunate. Even as it is ordinarily used the word “space”
is ambiguous, it may mean either the pure space with which higher
mathematics is concerned, or the public space which contains the common
sense things and objects and their qualities which make up the every
day world, or the private space of sensible perception. When Bergson
speaks of “space,” however, he does not mean either pure or public or
private space, he means an _a priori_ form imposed by intellectual
activity upon its object. This resembles Kant’s use of the word, but
Bergson’s “space” is not, like Kant’s, the _a priori_ form of sense
acquaintance, but of thought, in other words logical form. For Bergson
“spatial” means “logical,” and since so much misunderstanding seems to
have been caused by his using the word “space” in this peculiar sense
we shall perhaps do better in what follows to use the word “logical”
instead.

Now whatever is logical is characterised by consisting of distinct,
mutually exclusive terms in external relations: all schemes, for
instance, and diagrams, such as a series of dots one above the other,
or one below the other, or one behind, or in front of the other, or a
series of instants one after the other, or a series of numbers, or
again any arrangements of things or qualities according to their
relations, such as colours or sounds arranged according to their
resemblance or difference; in all these each dot or instant or number
or colour-shade or note, is quite distinct from all the others, and the
relations which join it to the others and give it its position in the
whole series are external to it in the sense that if you changed its
position or included it in quite another series it would nevertheless
still be just the same dot or instant or number or quality as before.

These two logical characteristics of mutual distinction of terms and
externality of relations certainly do belong to the abstractions
employed in explanations, and we commonly suppose that they belong to
everything else besides. Bergson, however, believes that these logical
characteristics really only belong to abstractions and are not
discovered in facts but are imposed upon them by our intellectual bias,
in the sense that we take it for granted that the facts which we know
directly must have the same form as the abstractions which serve to
explain them.

This habit of taking it for granted that not only our abstractions but
also the actual facts have the logical characteristics of consisting of
mutually exclusive terms joined by external relations is, according to
Bergson, one of the two serious respects in which our intellectual bias
distorts our direct acquaintance with actual fact. He points out, as we
saw, that the facts with which we are acquainted are in constant
process of changing, and that, when we examine carefully what is
actually going on, we discover that this change does not really form a
series of distinct qualities or percepts or states, united by external
relations of time, resemblance, difference, and so on, but a continuous
process which has what we might call a qualitative flavour but in which
distinct qualities, states and so on do not occur.

“Considered in themselves” he says, “profound states of consciousness
have no relation to quantity: they are mingled in such a way that it is
impossible to say whether they are one or many, or indeed to examine
them from that point of view without distorting them.” Now, strictly
speaking, of course, these “states of consciousness” ought not to be
referred to in the plural, it is, in fact, a contradiction to speak of
“states of consciousness” having “no relation to quantity”: a plurality
must always form some quantity. This contradiction is the natural
consequence of attempting to put what is non-logical into words. It
would have been just as bad to have referred to “the state of
consciousness,” in the singular, while at the same time insisting that
it contained resemblance and difference. The fact is that plurality and
unity, like distinct terms and external relations, apply only to
whatever has logical form, and Bergson’s whole point is to deny that
the fact (or facts) directly known have this form, and so that any of
these notions apply to it (or them.)

This, of course, raises difficulties when we try to describe the facts
in words, since words stand for abstractions and carry their logical
implications. All descriptions in words of what is non-logical are
bound to be a mass of contradictions, for, having applied any word it
is necessary immediately to guard against its logical implications by
adding another which contradicts them. Thus we say our experience is of
facts, and must then hastily add that nevertheless they are not plural,
and we must further qualify this statement by adding that neither are
they singular. A description of what is non-logical can only convey its
meaning if we discount all the logical implications of the words which,
for want of a better medium of expression, we are driven to employ. Our
whole intellectual bias urges us towards describing everything that
comes within our experience, even if the description is only for our
own private benefit Unfortunately the language in which these
descriptions have to be expressed is so full of logical implications
that, unless we are constantly on our guard, we are liable to be
carried away by them, and then, at once, we lose contact with the
actual facts.

In order to get round this almost universal tendency to confuse
abstractions with facts Bergson sometimes tries to get us to see the
facts as they actually are by using metaphor instead of description in
terms of abstract general notions. He has been much criticised for this
but there is really a good deal to be said for attempting to convey
facts by substituting metaphors for them rather than by using the
ordinary intellectual method of substituting abstractions reached by
analysis. Those who have criticised the use of metaphor have for the
most part not realized how little removed such description is from the
ordinary intellectual method of analysis. They have supposed that in
analysis we stick to the fact itself, whereas in using metaphor we
substitute for the fact to be described some quite different fact which
is only connected with it by a more or less remote analogy. If
Bergson’s view of the intellectual method is right, however, when we
describe in abstract terms arrived at by analysis we are not sticking
to the facts at all, we are substituting something else for them just
as much as if we were using an out and out metaphor. Qualities and all
abstract general notions are, indeed, nothing but marks of analogies
between a given fact and all the other facts belonging to the same
class: they may mark rather closer analogies than those brought out by
an ordinary metaphor, but on the other hand in a frank metaphor we at
least stick to the concrete, we substitute fact for fact and we are in
no danger of confusing the fact introduced by the metaphor with the
actual fact to which the metaphor applies. In description in terms of
abstract general notions such as common qualities we substitute for
fact something which is not fact at all, we lose touch with the
concrete and, moreover, we are strongly tempted to confuse fact with
abstraction and believe that the implications of the abstraction apply
to the fact, or even that the abstraction is itself a real part of the
fact.

Language plays a most important part in forming our habit of treating
all facts as material for generalisation, and it is largely to the
influence of the words which we use for describing facts that Bergson
attributes our readiness to take it for granted that facts have the
same logical form as abstractions. It is language again which makes it
so difficult to point out that this assumption is mistaken, because,
actually, the form of facts is non-logical, a continuous process and
not a series. The only way to point this out is by describing the
nature of the non-logical facts as contrasted with a logical series,
but the language in which our description of the non-logical facts has
to be conveyed is itself full of logical implications which contradict
the very point we are trying to bring out. Descriptions of non-logical
processes will only be intelligible if we discount the logical
implications inherent in the words employed, but in order to be willing
to discount these implications it is necessary first to be convinced
that there is anything non-logical to which such a description could
apply. And yet how can we be convinced without first understanding the
description? It appears to be a vicious circle, and so it would be if
our knowledge of change as a process really depended upon our
understanding anybody’s description of it. According to Bergson,
however, we all do know such a process directly; in fact, if he is
right, we know nothing else directly at all. The use of description is
not to give us knowledge of the process, that we already have, but only
to remind us of what we really knew all along, but had rather lost
contact with and misinterpreted because of our preoccupation with
describing and explaining it. Bergson’s criticism of our intellectual
methods turns simply upon a question of fact, to be settled by direct
introspection. If, when we have freed ourselves from the preconceptions
created by our normal common sense intellectual point of view, we find
that what we know directly is a non-logical process of becoming, then
we must admit that intellectual thinking is altogether inappropriate
and even mischievous as a method of speculation.

It is one of Bergson’s chief aims to induce us to regain contact with
our direct experience, and it is with this in view that he spends so
much effort in describing what the form of this experience actually is,
and how it compares with the logical form which belongs to
abstractions, that is with what he calls “space.”

The form which belongs to facts but not to abstractions Bergson calls
“duration.” Duration can be described negatively by saying that it is
non-logical, but when we attempt any positive description language
simply breaks down and we can do nothing but contradict ourselves.
Duration does not contain parts united by external relations: it does
not contain parts at all, for parts would constitute fixed stages,
whereas duration changes continuously.

But in order to describe duration at all we have logically only two
alternatives, either to speak of it as a plurality, and that implies
having parts, or else as a unity, and that by implication, excludes
change. Being particularly concerned to emphasise the changing nature
of what we know directly Bergson rejects the latter alternative: short
of simply giving up the attempt to describe it he has then no choice
but to treat this process which he calls duration as a plurality and
this drives him into speaking of it as if it had parts. To correct this
false impression he adds that these parts are united, not, like logical
parts, by external relations, but in quite a new way, by “synthesis.”
“Parts” united by synthesis have not the logical characteristics of
mutual distinction and externality of relations, they interpenetrate
and modify one another. In a series which has duration (such a thing is
a contradiction in terms, but the fault lies with the logical form of
language which, in spite of its unsatisfactoriness we are driven to
employ if we want to describe at all) the “later parts” are not
distinct from the “earlier”: “earlier and” “later” are not mutually
exclusive relations.

Bergson says, then, that the process of duration which we know
directly, if it is to be called a series at all, must be described as a
series whose “parts” interpenetrate, and this is the first important
respect in which non-logical duration differs from a logical series. In
“a series” which is used to describe duration not only are the “parts”
not distinct but “their relations” are not external in the sense,
previously explained, in which logical relations are external to the
terms which they relate. A logical term in a logical series can change
its position or enter into a wholly different series and still remain
the same term. But the terms in a series which has duration (again this
is absurd) are what they are just because of their position in the
whole stream of duration to which they belong: to transfer them from
one position in the series to another would be to alter their whole
flavour which depends upon having had just that particular past and no
other. As illustration we might take the last bar of a tune. By itself,
or following upon other sounds not belonging to the tune, this last bar
would not be itself, its particular quality depends upon coming at the
end of that particular tune. In a process of duration, then, such as
tune, the “later” bars are not related externally to the “earlier” but
depend for their character upon their position in the whole tune. In
actual fact, of course, the tune progresses continuously, and not by
stages, such as distinct notes or bars, but if, for the sake of
description, we speak of it as composed of different bars, we must say
that any bar we choose to distinguish is modified by the whole of the
tune which has gone before it: change its position in the whole stream
of sound to which it belongs and you change its character absolutely.

This means that in change such as this, change, that is, which has
duration, repetition is out of the question. Take a song in which the
last line is sung twice over as a refrain: the notes, we say, are
repeated, but the second time the line occurs the actual effect
produced is different, and that, indeed, is the whole point of a
refrain. This illustrates the second important difference which Bergson
wants to bring out between the forms of change which belong
respectively to non-logical facts and to the logical abstractions by
which we describe them, that is between duration as contrasted with a
logical series of stages. The notes are abstractions assumed to explain
the effect produced, which is the actual fact directly known. The notes
are stages in a logical series of change, but their effects, the actual
fact, changes as a process of duration. From this difference in their
ways of changing there follows an important difference between fact and
abstraction, namely that, while the notes can be repeated over again,
the effect will never be the same as before. This is because the notes,
being abstractions, are not affected by their relations which give them
their position in the logical series which they form, while their
effect, being a changing process, depends for its flavour upon its
position in the whole duration to which it belongs: this flavour grows
out of the whole of what has gone before, and since this whole is
itself always growing by the addition of more and more “later stages,”
the effect which it goes to produce can never be the same twice over.

This is why Bergson calls duration “creative.”

No “two” positions in a creative process of duration can have an
identical past history, every “later” one will have more history, every
“earlier” one less. In a logical series, on the other hand, there is no
reason why the same term should not occur over and over again at
different points in the course of the series, since in a logical series
every term, being distinct from every other and only joined to it by
external relations, is what it is independently of its position.

If Bergson is right therefore in saying that abstractions change as a
logical series while the actual facts change as a creative process of
duration, it follows that, while our descriptions and explanations may
contain repetitions the actual fact to which we intend these
explanations to apply, cannot. This, if true, is a very important
difference between facts and abstractions which common sense entirely
overlooks when it assumes that we are directly acquainted with common
qualities.

We have seen that this assumption is taken for granted in the account
which is ordinarily given (or would be given if people were in the
habit of putting their common sense assumptions into words) of how it
is that facts come to be classified: facts are supposed to fall into
classes because they share common qualities, that is because, in the
changing fact directly known, the same qualities recur over and over
again. There is no doubt that the fact with which we are directly
acquainted can be classified, and it is equally undeniable that this
fact is always changing, but if this change has the form of creative
duration then its classification cannot be based upon the repetition of
qualities at different “stages” in its course. It follows that either
the fact with which we are directly acquainted does not change as a
creative process, or else that we are quite wrong in assuming, as we
ordinarily do, that we actually know qualities directly and that it is
these qualities which form the basis of classification, and hence of
all description and explanation. We have already seen that this
assumption, though at first sight one naturally supposes it to be based
on direct acquaintance, may really depend not on any fact directly
known but on our preoccupation with explanation rather than with mere
knowing.

But if we never really are acquainted with qualities, if qualities are,
as Bergson says, mere abstractions, how come we to be able to make
these abstractions, and why do they apply to actual facts? If
classification is not based on common qualities discovered by analysis
and repeated over and over as actual facts directly known, on what is
it based? We certainly can classify facts and these abstract common
qualities, if abstractions they be, certainly correspond to something
in the facts since they apply to them: what is the foundation in
directly knowu fact which accounts for this correspondence between
abstractions and facts if it is not qualities actually given as part of
the facts? These questions are so very pertinent and at the same time
so difficult to answer satisfactorily that one is tempted to throw over
the view that the changing fact which we know directly forms a creative
duration. This view is impossible to express without self-contradiction
and it does not fit in with our accustomed habits of mind: nevertheless
if we do not simply reject it at once as patently absurd but keep it in
mind for a while and allow ourselves time to get used to it, it grows
steadily more and more convincing: we become less and less able to
evade these difficult questions by accepting the common sense account
of what we know directly as consisting of a series of qualities which
are repeated over and over, and more and more driven to regard it as a
process in creative duration which does not admit of repetitions. There
is no difficulty in seeing, the moment we pay attention, that what we
know directly certainly does change all the time: but if we try to pin
this change down and hold it so as to examine it we find it slipping
through our fingers, and the more we look into the supposed stages,
such as things and qualities and events, by means of which common sense
assumes that this change takes place, the more it becomes apparent that
these stages are all of them mere arbitrary abstractions dragged from
their context in a continuous process, fictitious halting places in a
stream of change which goes on unbroken. Unbiassed attention to the
actual fact cannot fail to convince us that what we know directly
changes as a process and not by a series of stages.

The creativeness of this process is perhaps at first not quite so
obvious, but if we look into the fact once more, with the object of
observing repetitions in it, we realize that we cannot find any. It is
true that you can pick out qualities which at first appear to recur:
you may, for example, see a rose and then a strawberry ice cream, and
you may be inclined to say that here you saw the quality pink twice
over. But you can only say that what you saw was the same both times by
abstracting what we call the colour from the whole context in which it
actually appeared on the two different occasions. In reality the colour
is not known in isolation: it has its place, in the whole changing fact
in a particular context which you may describe in abstract terms as
consisting of the shape and smell and size of the object together with
all the rest of your state of mind at the moment, which were not the
same on the two different occasions, while further this pink colour was
modified on each occasion by its position in the whole changing fact
which may again be described in abstract terms by saying, for instance,
that the pink on the occasion of your seeing the strawberry ice cream,
coming after the pink on the occasion of your seeing the rose, had a
peculiar flavour of “seen before” which was absent on the previous
occasion. Thus although, by isolating “parts” of the whole process of
changing which you know directly, you may bring yourself for a moment
to suppose that you are acquainted with repetitions, when you look at
the whole fact as it actually is, you see that what you know is never
the same twice over, and that your direct experience forms, not a
series of repetitions, but a creative process.

But, once you grant that the fact which you know directly really
changes, there is, according to Bergson, no getting away from the
conclusion that it must form a creative process of duration. For he
thinks that creative duration is the only possible way in which the
transition between past and present, which is the essential feature of
change and time, could be accomplished: all passing from past to
present, all change, therefore, and all time, _must_, he says, form a
creative process of duration. The alternative is to suppose that time
and change form logical series of events in temporal relations of
before and after, but, according to Bergson, this not only leaves out
the transition altogether but is, even as it stands, unintelligible.
The argument is this.

If time and change are real, then, when the present is, the past simply
is not. But it is impossible to see how, in that case, there can be any
relation between past and present, for a relation requires at least two
terms in between which it holds, while in this case there could never
be more than one term, the present, _ipso facto_, abolishing the past.
If, on the other hand, the past is preserved, distinct from the
present, then temporal relations can indeed hold between them, but in
that case there is no real change nor time at all.

This dilemma all follows, of course, from regarding “past” and
“present” as mutually exclusive and distinct, and requiring to be
united by external relations, in short as terms in a logical series:
for Bergson himself this difficulty simply does not arise since he
denies that, within the actual changing fact directly known, there are
any clear cut logical distinctions such as the words “past” and
“present” imply. But when it comes to describing this changing fact
distinct terms have to be employed because there are no others, and
this creates pseudo-problems such as this question of how, assuming
past and present to be distinct, the transition between them ever can
be effected. The real answer is that the transition never is effected
because past and present are, in fact, not distinct.

According to Bergson a very large proportion of the problems over which
philosophers have been accustomed to dispute have really been
pseudo-problems simply arising out of this confusion between facts and
the abstractions by which we describe them. When once we have realized
how they arise these pseudo-problems no longer present any
difficulties; they are in fact no longer problems at all, they melt
away and cease to interest us. If Bergson is right this would go far to
explain the suspicion which, in spite of the prestige of philosophy,
still half unconsciously colours the feeling of the “plain man” for the
“intellectual,” and which even haunts the philosopher himself, in
moments of discouragement, the suspicion that the whole thing is
trivial, a dispute about words of no real importance or dignity. If
Bergson is right this suspicion is, in many cases, all too well
founded: the discussion of pseudo-problems is not worth while. But then
the discussion of pseudo-problems is not real philosophy: the thinker
who allows himself to be entangled in pseudo-problems has lost his way.

In this, however, the “intellectuals” are not the only ones at fault.
“Plain men” are misled by abstractions about facts just as much, only
being less thorough, their mistake has less effect: at the expense of a
little logical looseness their natural sense of fact saves them from
all the absurdities which follow from their false assumptions. For the
“intellectual” there is not this loophole through which the sense of
fact may undo some of the work of false assumptions: the “intellectual”
follows out ruthlessly the implications of his original assumptions and
if these are false his very virtues lead him into greater absurdities
than those committed by “plain men.”

One of the most important tasks of philosophy is to show up the
pseudo-problems so that they may no longer waste our time and we may be
free to pursue the real aim of philosophy which is the reconquest of
the field of virtual knowledge. Getting rid of the pseudo-problems,
however, is no easy task: we may realize, for example, that the
difficulty of seeing how the transition between past and present ever
can be effected is a pseudo-problem because in fact past and present
are not distinct and so no transition between them is needed. But since
we have constantly to be using words which carry the implication of
distinctness we are constantly liable to forget this simple answer when
new problems, though in fact they all spring from this fundamental
discrepancy between facts and the abstractions by which we describe
them, present themselves in some slightly different form.

The notion of duration as consisting of “parts” united by “creative
synthesis” is a device, not for explaining how the transition from past
to present really takes place (this does not need explaining since,
“past” and “present” being mere abstractions, no transition between
them actually takes place at all), but for enabling us to employ the
abstractions “past” and “present” without constantly being taken in by
their logical implications. The notion of “creative synthesis” as what
joins “past” and “present” in a process of duration is an antidote to
the logical implications of these two distinct terms: creative
synthesis, unlike logical relations, is not external to the “parts”
which it joins; “parts” united by creative synthesis are not distinct
and mutually exclusive. Such a notion as this of creative synthesis
contradicts the logical implications contained in the notion of parts.
The notion of “parts” united by “creative synthesis” is really a hybrid
which attempts to combine the two incompatible notions of logical
distinction and duration. The result is self-contradictory and this
contradiction acts as a reminder warning us against confusing the
actual changing fact with the abstractions in terms of which we
describe it and so falling into the mistake of taking it for granted
that this changing fact must form a series of distinct stages or things
or events or qualities, which can be repeated over and over again.

At the same time there is no getting away from the fact that this
changing fact lends itself to classification and that explanations in
terms of abstractions really do apply to it most successfully. We are
therefore faced with the necessity of finding some way of accounting
for this, other than by assuming that the facts which we know directly
consist of qualities which recur over and over again.




CHAPTER III
MATTER AND MEMORY


We have seen that, according to the theory of change which is
fundamental for Bergson’s philosophy, the changing fact which we know
directly is described as a process of becoming which does not contain
parts nor admit of repetitions. On the other hand this changing fact
certainly does lend itself to analysis and classification and
explanation and, at first sight at any rate, it is natural to suppose
that whatever can be classified and explained must consist of
qualities, that is distinct parts which can be repeated on different
occasions. The problem for Bergson, if he is to establish his theory of
change, is to show that the fact that a changing process can be
analysed and classified does not necessarily imply that such a process
must consist of distinct qualities which can be repeated. Bergson’s
theory of the relation of matter to memory suggests a possible solution
of this problem as to how it is possible to analyse and so apply
general laws to and explain duration: it becomes necessary, therefore,
to give some account of this theory.

Like all other descriptions and explanations, such an account must, of
course, be expressed in terms of abstractions, and so is liable to be
misunderstood unless the false implications of these abstractions are
allowed for and discounted.

According to Bergson the only actual reality is the changing fact
itself, everything else is abstraction: this reality however is not
confined to the fragment called “our present experience” which is in
the full focus of consciousness and is all that we usually suppose
ourselves to know directly; it includes besides everything that we are
in a sense aware of but do not pay attention to, together with our
whole past: for Bergson, in fact, reality coincides with the field of
virtual knowledge, anything short of this whole field is an abstraction
and so falsified. Even to say “we know this fact” is unsatisfactory as
implying ourselves and the fact as distinct things united by an
external relation of knowing: to say “the fact is different from the
abstraction by which it is explained” similarly implies logically
distinct terms in an external relation of difference, and so on. If
Bergson is right in claiming that the actual fact is non-logical then
obviously all attempts to describe it, since they must be expressed in
terms of abstractions, will teem with false implications which must be
discounted if the description is to convey the meaning intended.

Bergson’s claim is that if we allow ourselves to attend to the changing
fact with which we are actually acquainted we are driven to a theory of
reality different from the theory of things and relations accepted by
common sense. The two abstractions by means of which he attempts to
express this new theory are matter and memory. In the actual fact
Bergson would hold that both these notions are combined by synthesis in
such a way as no longer to be distinct, or rather, for this implies
that they started distinct and then became merged, it would perhaps be
better to say that these two notions are abstractions from two
tendencies which are present in the actual fact. In the actual fact
they combine and, as it were, counteract one another and the result is
something different from either taken alone, but when we abstract them
we release them from each other’s modifying influence and the result is
an exaggeration of one or other tendency which does not really
represent anything which actually occurs but can be used, in
combination with the contrary exaggeration, to explain the actual fact
which may be described as being like what would result from a
combination of these two abstractions.

We will take matter first.

Matter, for Bergson, is an exaggeration of the tendency in reality,
(that is in the actual changing fact directly known) towards logical
distinctness, what he calls “spatiality.” His use of the word “matter”
in this sense is again, perhaps, like his use of the word “space,”
rather misleading. Actual reality, according to him, is never purely
material, the only purely material things are abstractions, and these
are not real at all but simply fictions. Bergson really means the same
thing by “matter” as by “space” and that is simply mutual distinctness
of parts and externality of relations, in a word logical complexity.
Matter, according to this definition of the word, has no duration and
so cannot last through any period of time or change: it simply _is_ in
the present, it does not endure but is perpetually destroyed and
recreated.

The complementary exaggeration which, taken together with matter,
completes Berg-son’s explanation of reality, is memory. Just as matter
is absolute logical complexity memory is absolute creative synthesis.
Together they constitute the hybrid notion of creative duration whose
“parts” interpenetrate which, according to Bergson, comes nearest to
giving a satisfactory description of the actual fact directly known
which is, for him, the whole reality.

The best way to accustom one’s mind to these two complementary
exaggerations, matter and memory, and to see in more detail the use
that Bergson makes of them in explaining the actual facts, will be to
examine his theory of sensible perception, since it is just in the act
of sensible perception that memory comes in contact with matter.

The unsophisticated view is that in sensible perception we become
acquainted with things which exist whether we perceive them or not, and
these things, taken all together, are commonly called the material
world. According to Bergson’s theory also sensible perception is direct
acquaintance with matter. The unsophisticated view holds further,
however, that this material world with which sensible perception
acquaints us is the common sense world of solid tables, green grass,
anger and other such states and things and qualities, but we have
already seen that this common sense world is really itself only one
among the various attempts which science and common sense are
continually making to explain the facts in terms of abstractions. The
worlds of electrons, vibrations, forces, and so on, constructed by
physics, are other attempts to do the same thing and the common sense
world of “real” things and qualities has no more claim to actual
existence than have any of these scientific hypotheses. Berg-son’s
matter is not identified with any one of these constructions, it is
that in the facts which they are all attempts to explain in terms of
abstractions, the element in the facts upon which abstractions are
based and which makes facts classifiable and so explicable.

The words by which we describe and explain the material element in the
facts in terms of series of distinct stages or events in external
relations would leave out change if their implications were followed
out consistently, but it is only a few “intellectuals” who have ever
been able to bring themselves to follow out this implication to the
bitter end and accept the conclusion, however absurd. Since it is
obvious that the facts do change the usual way of getting round the
difficulty is to say that some of these stages are “past” and some
“present,” and then, not clearly realizing that the explanations we
construct are not really facts at all, to take it for granted that a
transition between past and present, though there is no room for it in
the logical form of the explanation, yet somehow manages actually to
take place. Bergson agrees that change does actually take place but not
as a transition between abstractions such as “past” and “present.” We
think that “past” and “present” must be real facts because we do not
realize clearly how these notions have been arrived at. Once we have
grasped the idea that these notions, and indeed all clear concepts, are
only abstractions, we see that it is not necessary to suppose that
these abstractions really change at all. Between the abstractions “the
past” and “the present” there is no transition, and it is the same with
events and things and qualities: all these, being nothing but
convenient fictions, stand outside the stream of actual fact which is
what really changes and endures.

Matter, then, is the name which Bergson gives to that element in the
fact upon which the purely logical form appropriate to abstractions is
based. The actual facts are not purely logical but neither are they
completely interpenetrated since they lend themselves to
classification: they tend to logical form on the one hand and to
complete inter-penetration on the other without going the whole way in
either direction. What Bergson does in the description of the facts
which he offers is to isolate each of these tendencies making them into
two separate distinct abstractions, one called matter and the other
mind. Isolated, what in the actual fact was blended becomes
incompatible. Matter and mind, the clear cut abstractions, are mutually
contradictory and it becomes at once a pseudo-problem to see how they
ever could combine to constitute the actual fact.

The matter which Bergson talks about, being what would be left of the
facts if memory were abstracted, has no past: it simply is in the
present moment. If there is any memory which can retain previous
moments then this memory may compare these previous moments with the
present moment and call them the past of matter, but in itself, apart
from memory, (and so isolated in a way in which this tendency in the
actual fact never could be isolated) matter has no past.

Noticing how very different the actual facts which we know directly are
from any of the material worlds by which we explain them, each of which
lays claim to being “the reality with which sensible perception
acquaints us,” some philosophers have put forward the view that in
sensible perception we become acquainted, not with matter itself, but
with signs which stand for a material world which exists altogether
outside perception. This view Bergson rejects. He says that in sensible
perception we are not acquainted with mere signs but, in so far as
there is any matter at all, what we know in sensible perception is that
matter itself. The facts which we know directly are matter itself and
would be nothing but matter if they were instantaneous. For Bergson,
however, an instantaneous fact is out of the question: every fact
contains more than the mere matter presented at the moment of
perception. Facts are distinguished from matter by lasting through a
period of duration, this is what makes the difference between the
actual fact and any of the material worlds in terms of which we
describe them: matter, is, as we have said, only an abstraction of one
element or tendency in the changing fact which is the sole reality:
memory is the complementary abstraction. Apart from the actual fact
neither matter nor memory have independent existence. This is where
Berg-son disagrees with the philosophers who regard the facts as signs
of an independent material world, or as phenomena which misrepresent
some “thing” in “itself” which is what _really_ exists but which is not
known directly but only inferred from the phenomena. For Bergson it is
the fact directly known that _really_ exists, and matter and memory,
solid tables, green grass, electrons, forces, the absolute, and all the
other abstract ideas by which we explain it are misrepresentations of
it, not it of them.

Even Bergson, however, does not get away from the distinction between
appearance and reality. The fact is for him the reality, the
abstraction the appearance. But then the fact which is the reality is
not the fact which we ordinarily suppose ourselves to know, the little
fragment which constitutes “our experience at the present moment.” This
is itself an abstraction from the vastly wider fact of our virtual
knowledge, and it is this wider field of knowledge which is the
reality. Abstraction involves falsification and so the little fragment
of fact to which our attention is usually confined is not, as it
stands, reality: it is appearance. We should only know reality as it is
if we could replace this fragment in its proper context in the whole
field of virtual knowledge (or reality) where it belongs. What we
should then know would not be appearance but reality itself. It is at
this knowledge, according to Bergson, that philosophy aims. Philosophy
is a reversal of our ordinary intellectual habits: ordinarily thought
progresses from abstraction to abstraction steadily getting further
from concrete facts: according to Bergson the task of philosophy should
be to put abstractions back again into their context so as to obtain
the fullest possible knowledge of actual fact.

In order to describe and explain this fact, however, we have to make
use of abstractions. Bergson describes the fact known directly by
sensible perception as a contraction of a period of the duration of
matter in which the “past” states of matter are preserved along with
the “present” and form a single whole with it. It is memory which makes
this difference between matter and the actual facts by preserving
“past” matter and combining it with “the present.” A single perceived
fact, however, does not contain memories as distinct from present
material: the distinction between “past” and “present” does not hold
inside facts whose duration forms a creative whole and not a logical
series. Of course it is incorrect to describe facts as “containing past
and present matter,” but, as we have often pointed out, misleading
though their logical implications are, we are obliged to replace facts
by abstractions when we want to describe them.

An example may perhaps convey what is meant by saying that a fact is a
contraction of a period of the duration of matter. Consider red,
bearing in mind that, when we are speaking of the fact actually
perceived when we see red we must discount the logical implications of
our words. Science says that red, the material, is composed of
immensely rapid vibrations of ether: red, the fact, we know as a simple
colour. Bergson accepts the scientific abstractions in terms of which
to describe matter, making the reservation that, if we are to talk of
matter as composed of vibrations, we must not say that these vibrations
last through a period of time or change by themselves, apart from any
memory which retains and so preserves the “past” vibrations. If matter
is to be thought of at all as existing apart from any memory it must be
thought of as consisting of a single vibration in a perpetual present
with no past. We might alter the description and say that this present
moment of matter should be thought of as being perpetually destroyed
and recreated.

Now according to Bergson the red which we know directly _is_ a period
of the vibrations of matter contracted by memory so as to produce an
actual perceived fact. As matter red does not change, it is absolutely
discrete and complex, in a word, logical: as fact it is non-logical and
forms a creative process of duration. The difference between matter and
the actual fact is made by the mental act which holds matter as it were
in tension through a period of duration, when a fact is produced, but
which would have had to be absent if there had been no fact but simply
present matter. Bergson calls this act memory: memory, he says, turns
matter into fact by preserving its past along with its present. Without
memory there would be no duration and so no change and no time. Matter,
apart from memory would have no duration and it is just in this that it
is distinguished from actual fact.

It is, however, of course, only by making abstractions that we can say
what things would be like if something were taken away which actually
is not taken away. Matter never really does exist without memory nor
memory without its content, matter: the actual fact can only be
described as a combination of the two elements, but this description
must not lead us into supposing that the abstractions, matter and
memory, actually have independent existence apart from the fact which
they explain. Only the actual fact exists and it is not really made up
of two elements, matter and memory, but only described in terms of
these two abstractions.

Bergson’s account of perception differs from the account ordinarily
given in that perception is not described as a relation which is
supposed to hold between a subject and an object: for Bergson there is
no “I,” distinct from what is perceived, standing to it in a relation
of perception. For an object, to be perceived consists, not in being
related to a perceiver, but in being combined in a new way with other
objects. If an object is combined by synthesis with other objects then
it is perceived and so becomes a fact. But there is no mind over and
above the objects which perceives them by being related to them, or
even by performing an act of synthesis upon them. To speak of “our”
perceiving objects is a mere fiction: when objects are combined by
synthesis they become perceptions, facts, and this is the same as
saying that they are minds. For Bergson a mind _is_ nothing but a
synthesis of objects. This explains what he means by saying that in
direct knowledge the perceiver is the object perceived.

Actually he thinks such notions as the perceiver and the object and the
relation which unites them, or again matter and the act of synthesis
which turns matter into fact, are nothing but abstractions: the only
thing there really is is simply the fact itself. These abstractions,
however, do somehow apply to the actual facts, and this brings us back
to our problem as to how it is that the actual fact, which is in
creative duration, lends itself to classification: how it is that
general laws in terms of abstractions which can be repeated over and
over again, can apply to the actual fact which does not contain
repetitions?

Facts lend themselves to explanation when they are perceived as
familiar. In this perceived familiarity, which is the basis of all
abstraction, and so of all description and explanation, past as well as
present is involved, the present owing its familiarity to our memory of
past facts. The obvious explanation of perceived familiarity, would be,
of course, to say that it results from our perceiving similar qualities
shared by past and present facts, or relations of similarity holding
between them. But Bergson must find some other explanation than this
since he denies that there can be repetition in actual facts directly
known.

Whenever there is actual fact there is memory, and memory creates
duration which excludes repetition. Perceived familiarity depends upon
memory but memory, according to Bergson, does not work by preserving a
series of repetitions for future reference. If we say that memory
connects “the past” with “the present” we must add that it destroys
their logical distinctness. But of course this is putting it very
badly: there is really no “logical distinctness” in the actual fact for
memory to “destroy”: our language suggests that first there was matter,
forming a logical series of distinct qualities recurring over and over,
and then memory occurred and telescoped the series, squeezing “earlier”
and “later” moments into one another to make a creative duration. Such
a view is suggested by our strong bias towards regarding abstractions
as having independent existence apart from the real fact from which
they have been abstracted: if we can overcome this bias the description
will do well enough.

According to Bergson, as we have just seen, every actual fact must
contain some memory otherwise it would not be a fact but simply matter,
since it is an act of memory that turns matter into perceived fact. Our
ordinary more or less familiar facts, however, contain much more than
this bare minimum. The facts of everyday life are perceived as familiar
and classified from a vast number of points of view. When you look at a
cherry you recognise its colour, shape, etc., you know it is edible,
what it would taste like, whether it is ripe, and much more besides,
all at a glance. All this knowledge depends on memory, memory gives
meaning to what we might call bare sensation (which is the same thing
as Bergson’s present matter) as opposed to the full familiar fact
actually experienced. Now the meaning is ordinarily contained in the
actual fact along with the bare sensation not as a multiplicity of
memories distinct from the bare sensation, but, as we put it, at a
glance. This peculiar flavour of a familiar fact can be analysed out as
consisting of memories of this or that past experience, if we choose to
treat it in that way, just as a fact can be analysed into qualities.
According to Bergson this analysis of the meaning of a familiar fact
into memories would have the same drawbacks as the analysis of a
present fact into qualities: it would leave out much of the meaning and
distort the rest. Bergson holds that wherever there is duration the
past must be preserved since it is just the preservation of the past,
the creation of fact by a synthesis of what, out of synthesis, would be
past and present, which constitutes duration. The essential point about
mental life is just the performing of this act of synthesis which makes
duration: wherever there is mental life there is duration and so
wherever there is mental life the past is preserved. “Above
everything,” Bergson says, “consciousness signifies memory. At this
moment as I discuss with you I pronounce the word “discussion.” It is
clear that my consciousness grasps this word altogether; if not it
would not see it as a unique word and would not make sense of it. And
yet when I pronounce the last syllable of the word the two first ones
have already been pronounced; relatively to this one, which must then
be called present, they are past. But this last syllable “sion” was not
pronounced instantaneously; the time, however short, during which I was
saying it, can be split up into parts and these parts are past,
relatively to the last of them, and this last one would be present if
it were not that it too can be further split up: so that, do what you
will, you cannot draw any line of demarcation between past and present,
and so between memory and consciousness. Indeed when I pronounce the
word “discussion” I have before my mind, not only the beginning, the
middle and the end of the word, but also the preceding words, also the
whole of the sentence which I have already spoken; if it were not so I
should have lost the thread of my speech. Now if the punctuation of the
speech had been different my sentence might have begun earlier; it
might, for instance, have contained the previous sentence and my
“present” would have been still further extended into the past. Let us
push this reasoning to its conclusion: let us suppose that my speech
has lasted for years, since the first awakening of my consciousness,
that it has consisted of a single sentence, and that my consciousness
has been sufficiently detached from the future, sufficiently
disinterested to occupy itself exclusively in taking in the meaning of
the sentence: in that case I should not look for any explanation of the
total conservation of this sentence any more than I look for one of the
survival of the first two syllables of the word “discussion” when I
pronounce the last one. Well, I think that our whole inner life is like
a single sentence, begun from the first awakening of consciousness, a
sentence scattered with commas, but nowhere broken by a full stop. And
so I think that our whole past is there, subconscious—I mean present to
us in such a way that our consciousness, to become aware of it, need
not go outside itself nor add anything foreign: to perceive clearly all
that it contains, or rather all that it is, it has only to put aside an
obstacle, to lift a veil.”[5]

 [5] _L’Energie Spirituelle_—“L’Ame et le Corps,” pages 59 and 60.


If this theory of memory be correct, the occurrence of any present bare
sensation itself suffices to recall, in some sense, the whole past. But
this is no use for practical purposes, just as the whole of the fact
given in present perception is useless for practical purposes until it
has been analysed into qualities. According to Bergson we treat the
material supplied by memory in much the same way as that supplied by
perception. The whole field of the past which the present calls up is
much wider than what we actually remember clearly: what we actually
remember is arrived at by ignoring all the past except such scraps as
appear to form useful precedents for behaviour in the present situation
in which we find ourselves. Perhaps this explains why sometimes, at the
point of death, when useful behaviour is no longer possible, this
selection breaks down and the whole of the past floods back into
memory. The brain, according to Bergson, is the organ whose function it
is to perform this necessary work of selection out of the whole field
of virtual memory of practically useful fragments, and so long as the
brain is in order, only these are allowed to come through into
consciousness as clear memories. The passage just quoted goes on to
speak of “the part played by the brain in memory.” “The brain does not
serve to preserve the past but primarily to obscure it, and then to let
just so much as is practically useful slip through.”

But the setting of the whole past, though it is ignored for
convenience, still makes itself felt in the peculiar qualitative
flavour which belongs to every present fact by reason of its past. Even
in the case of familiar facts this flavour is no mere repetition but is
perpetually modified as the familiarity increases, and it is just in
this progressively changing flavour that their familiarity consists.

An inspection of what we know directly, then, does not bear out the
common sense theory that perceived familiarity, upon which abstraction
and all description and explanation are based, consists in the
perception of similar qualities shared by present matter and the matter
retained by memory. A familiar fact appears to be, not a repetition,
but a _new_ fact. This new fact may be described as containing present
and past bare sensations, but it must be added that these bare
sensations do not remain distinct things but are synthesised by the act
of perception into a fresh whole which is not the sum of the bare
sensations which it may be described as containing. Such a perceived
whole will be familiar, and so lend itself to abstraction and
explanation, in so far as the present bare sensation which it contains,
taken as mere matter (that is apart from the act of perception which
turns it from mere matter into actual fact), would have been a
repetition of some of the past bare sensations which go to form its
meaning and combine with it to create the fact actually known. For bare
sensation now may be a repetition of past bare sensation though the
full fact will always be something fresh, its flavour changing as it
grows more and more familiar by taking up into itself more and more
bare sensation which, taken in abstraction, apart from the act of
synthesis which turns it into actual fact, would be repetitions. To
take the example which we have already used of perceiving first a rose
and then a strawberry ice cream: let us suppose that the rose was the
very first occasion on which you saw pink. The perceived fact on that
occasion would, like all perceived facts, be a combination of / past
and present bare sensations. It would I not be familiar because the
elements of present bare sensation would not be repetitions of the
elements of past bare sensation (always assuming, as we must for
purposes of explanation, that past and present bare sensations ever
could be isolated from the actual fact and still both exist, which,
however, is not possible). But when you saw the strawberry ice cream
the past perceived rose would be among the memories added to this bare
sensation which constitute its meaning and, by forming a synthesis with
it, turn it from mere matter into fact. The pink would now be perceived
as familiar because the pink of the rose (which as bare sensation is
similar to the bare sensation of strawberry-ice-cream-pink) would be
included, along with the present bare sensation of pink, in the whole
fact of the perception of strawberry ice cream.

Perceived fact, then, combines meaning and present bare sensation to
form a whole with a qualitative flavour which is itself always unique,
but which lends itself to abstraction in so far as the bare sensations,
past and present, which go to produce it, would, as matter in
isolation, be repetitions.

This qualitative flavour, however, is, of course, not a quality in the
logical sense which implies distinctness and externality of relations.
Facts have logical qualities only if they are taken in abstraction
isolated from their context. This is not how fact actually occurs.
Every fact occurs in the course of the duration of some mental life
which itself changes as a process of duration and not as a logical
series. The mental life of an individual is, as it were, a
comprehensive fact which embraces all the facts directly known to that
individual in a single process of creative duration. Facts are to the
mental life of an individual what bare sensation is to the actual fact
directly known in perception: facts are, as it were, the matter of
mental life. Imagine a fact directly known, such as we have described
in discussing sensible perception, lasting on and on, perpetually
taking up new bare sensations and complicating them with meaning which
consists of all the past which it already contains so as to make out of
this combination of past and present fresh fact, that will give you
some idea of the way in which Bergson thinks that mental life is
created out of matter by memory. Only this description is still
unsatisfactory because it is obliged to speak of what is created either
in the plural or in the singular and so fails to convey either the
differentiation contained in mental life or else its unbroken
continuity as all one fact progressively modified by absorbing more and
more matter.

If Bergson’s account of the way in which memory works is true there is
a sense in which the whole past of every individual is preserved in
memory and all unites with any present bare sensation to constitute the
fact directly known to him at any given moment. If the continuity of
duration is really unbroken there is no possibility of any of the past
being lost.

This is why Bergson maintains that the whole of our past is contained
in our virtual knowledge: what he means by our virtual knowledge is
simply everything which enters into the process of duration which
constitutes our whole mental life. Besides our whole past this virtual
knowledge must also contain much more of present bare sensation than we
are usually aware of.

We said that, for Bergson, actual fact directly known was the only
reality; this actual fact, however, does not mean merely what is
present to the perception of a given individual at any given moment,
but the whole of our virtual knowledge. The field of virtual knowledge
would cover much the same region as the subconscious, which plays such
an important part in modern psychology. The limits of this field are
impossible to determine. Once you give up limiting direct knowledge to
the fact actually present in perception at any given moment it is
difficult to draw the line anywhere. And yet to draw the line at the
present moment is impossible for “the present moment” is clearly an
abstract fiction. For practical purposes “the present” is what is known
as “the specious present,” which covers a certain ill-defined period of
duration from which the instantaneous “present moment” is recognised to
be a mere abstraction. According to Bergson, however, just as “the
present moment” is only an abstraction from a wider specious present so
this specious present itself is an abstraction from a continuous
process of duration from which other abstractions, days, weeks, years,
can be made, but which is actually unbroken and forms a single
continuous changing whole. And just as facts are only abstractions from
the whole mental life of an individual so individuals must be regarded
as abstractions from some more comprehensive mental whole and thus our
virtual knowledge seems not merely to extend over the whole of what is
embraced by our individual acts of perception and preserved by our
individual memories but overflows even these limits and must be
regarded as co-extensive with the duration of the whole of reality.

It may be open to question how much of this virtual knowledge of both
past and present we ever could know directly in any sense comparable to
the way in which we know the fact actually presented at some given
moment, however perfectly we might succeed in ridding ourselves with
our intellectual pre-occupation with explaining instead of knowing;
but, if reality forms an unbroken whole in duration, we cannot in
advance set any limits, short of the whole of reality, to the field of
virtual knowledge. And it does really seem as if our pre-occupation
with discovering repetitions in the interests of explanation had
something to do with the limited extent of the direct knowledge which
we ordinarily enjoy, so that, if we could overcome this bias, we might
know more than we do now, though how much more it is not possible, in
advance, to predict. For in the whole field of virtual knowledge, which
appears to be continuous with the little scrap of fact which is all
that we usually attend to, present bare sensation and such bare
sensations as resemble it, form very insignificant elements: for
purposes of abstraction and explanation, however, it is only these
insignificant elements that are of any use. So long, therefore, as we
are preoccupied with abstraction, we must bend all our energies towards
isolating these fragments from the context which extends out and out
over the whole field of virtual knowledge, rivetting our attention on
them and, as far as possible, ignoring all the rest. If Bergson’s
theory of virtual knowledge is correct, then, it does seem as if
normally our efforts were directed towards shutting out most of our
knowledge rather than towards enjoying it, towards forgetting the
greater part of what memory contains rather than towards remembering
it.

If we really could reverse this effort and concentrate upon knowing the
whole field of past and present as fully as possible, instead of
classifying it, which involves selecting part of the field and ignoring
the rest, it is theoretically conceivable that we might succeed in
knowing directly the whole of the process of duration which constitutes
the individual mental life of each one of us. And it is not even
certain that our knowledge must necessarily be confined within the
limits of what we have called our individual mental life. Particular
facts, as we have seen, are not really distinct parts of a single
individual mental life: the notion of separateness applies only to
abstractions and it is only because we are much more pre-occupied with
abstractions than with actual facts that we come to suppose that facts
can ever really be separate from one another. When we shake off our
common sense assumptions and examine the actual facts which we know
directly we find that they form a process and not a logical series of
distinct facts one after the other. Now on analogy it seems possible
that what we call individual mental lives are, to the wider process
which contains and constitutes the whole of reality, as particular
facts are to the whole process which constitutes each individual mental
life. The whole of reality may contain individual lives as these
contain particular facts, not as separate distinct units in logical
relations, but as a process in which the line of demarcation between
“the parts” (if we must speak of “parts”) is not clear cut. If this
analogy holds then it is impossible in advance to set any limits to the
field of direct knowledge which it may be in our power to secure by
reversing our usual mental attitude and devoting our energies simply to
knowing, instead of to classifying and explaining.

But without going beyond the limits of our individual experience, and
even without coming to know directly the whole field of past and
present fact which that experience contains, it is still a considerable
gain to our direct knowledge if we realize what false assumptions our
preoccupation with classification leads us to make even about the very
limited facts to which our direct knowledge is ordinarily confined. We
then realize that, besides being considerably less than what we
probably have it in our power to know, these few facts that we do know
are themselves by no means what we commonly suppose them to be.

The two fundamental errors into which common sense leads us about the
facts are the assumptions that they have the logical form, that is
contain mutually exclusive parts in external relations, and that these
parts can be repeated over and over again. These two false assumptions
are summed up in the common sense view that the fact which we know
directly actually consists of events, things, states, qualities.
Bergson tells us that when once we have realized that this is not the
case we have begun to be philosophers.

Having stripped the veil of common sense assumptions from what we know
directly our task will then be to hold this direct knowledge before us
so as to know as much as possible. The act by which we know directly is
the very same act by which we perceive and remember; these are all
simply acts of synthesis, efforts to turn matter into creative
duration. What we have to do is, as it were, to make a big act of
perception to embrace as wild a field as possible of past and present
as a single fact directly known. This act of synthesis Bergson calls
“intuition.”

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

The effort of intuition is the reversal of the intellectual effort to
abstract and explain which is our usual way of treating facts, and
these two ways of attending are incompatible and cannot both be carried
on together. Intuition, (or, to give it a more familiar name, direct
knowledge,) reveals fact: intellectual attention analyses and
classifies this fact in order to explain it in general terms, that is
to explain it by substituting abstractions for the actual fact.
Obviously we cannot perform acts of analysis without some fact to serve
as material: analysis uses the facts supplied by direct knowledge as
its material. Bergson maintains that in so doing it limits and distorts
these facts and he says that if we are looking for speculative
knowledge we must go back to direct knowledge, or, as he calls it,
intuition.

But bare acquaintance is in-communicable, moreover it requires a great
effort to maintain it. In order to communicate it and retain the power
of getting the facts back again after we have relaxed our grip on them
we are obliged, once we have obtained the fullest direct knowledge of
which we are capable, to apply the intellectual method to the fact thus
revealed and attempt to describe it in general terms.

Now the directly known forms a creative duration whose special
characteristics are that it is non-logical, (i.e., is not made up of
distinct mutually exclusive terms united by external relations) and
does not contain parts which can be repeated over and over, while on
the other hand the terms which we have to substitute for it if we want
to describe it only stand for repetitions and have the logical form. It
looks, therefore, as if our descriptions could not, as they stand, be
very successful in conveying to others the fact known to us directly,
or in recalling it to ourselves.

In order that the description substituted by our intellectual activity
for the facts which we want to describe may convey these facts it is
necessary to perform an act of synthesis on the description analogous
to the act of perception which originally created the fact itself out
of mere matter. The words used in a description should be to the hearer
what mere matter is to the perceiver: in order that matter may be
perceived an act of synthesis must be performed by which the matter is
turned into fact in duration: similarly in order to gather what a
description of a fact means the hearer must take the general terms
which are employed not as being distinct and mutually exclusive but as
modifying one another and interpenetrating in the way in which the
“parts” of a process of creative duration interpenetrate. In the same
way by understanding the terms employed synthetically and not
intellectually we can use a description to recall any fact which we
have once known directly. Thus our knowledge advances by alternate acts
of direct acquaintance and analysis.

Philosophy must start from a fresh effort of acquaintance creating, if
possible, a fact wider and fuller than the facts which we are content
to know for the purposes of everyday life. But analysis is essential if
the fact thus directly known is to be conveyed to others and recalled.
By analysis the philosopher fixes this wider field in order that he may
communicate and recall it. Starting later from the description of some
fact obtained by a previous effort of acquaintance, or from several
facts obtained at different times, and also from the facts described by
others, and using all these descriptions as material, it may be
possible, by a fresh effort, to perform acts of acquaintance, (or
synthesis) embracing ever wider and wider fields of knowledge. This,
according to Bergson, is the way in which philosophical knowledge
should be built up, facts, obtained by acts of acquaintance, being
translated into descriptions only that these descriptions may again be
further synthesised so directing our attention to more and more
comprehensive facts.

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

The first step, in any case, towards obtaining the wider acquaintance
at which philosophy aims consists in making the effort necessary to rid
ourselves of the practical preoccupation which gives us our bias
towards explaining everything long before we have allowed ourselves
time to pay proper attention to it, in order that we may at least get
back to such actual facts as we do already know directly. When this has
been accomplished (and our intellectual habits are so deeply ingrained
that the task is by no means easy) we can then go on to other
philosophers’ descriptions of the facts with which their own efforts to
widen their direct knowledge have acquainted them and, by synthesising
the general terms which they have been obliged to employ, we also may
come to know these more comprehensive facts. Unless it is understood
synthetically, however, a philosopher’s description of the facts with
which he has acquainted himself will be altogether unsatisfactory and
misleading. It is in this way that Bergson’s own analysis of the fact
which we all know directly into matter and the act of memory by which
matter is turned into a creative process should be understood. The
matter and the act of memory are both abstractions from the actual
fact: he does not mean that over and above the fact there is either any
matter or any force or activity called memory nor are these things
supposed to be in the actual fact: they are simply abstract terms in
which the fact is described.

Bergson tries elsewhere to put the same point by saying that there are
two tendencies in reality, one towards space (that is logical form) and
the other towards duration, and that the actual fact which we know
directly “tends” now towards “space” and now towards duration. The two
faculties intellect and intuition are likewise fictions which are not
really supposed to exist, distinct from the fact to which they are
applied, but are simply abstract notions invented for the sake of
description.

Whatever the description by which a philosopher attempts to convey what
he has discovered we shall only understand it if we remember that the
terms in which the fact is described are not actually parts of the fact
itself and can only convey the meaning intended if they are grasped by
synthesis and not intellectually understood.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE DEVONSHIRE PRESS, TORQUAY




International Library of Psychology Philosophy and Scientific Method

GENERAL EDITOR - - - - C. K. OGDEN, M. A.

(_Magdalene College, Cambridge_).

_VOLUMES ALREADY ARRANGED:_

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
_by_ Q. E. MOORE, Litt. D.

CONFLICT AND DREAM
_by_ W. H. R. RIVERS, F. R. S.

THE MEASUREMENT OF EMOTION
_by_ W. WHATELY SMITH _Introduction by William Brown_.

THE ANALYSIS OF MATTER
_by_ BERTRAND RUSSELL, F. R. S.

MATHEMATICS FOR PHILOSOPHERS
_by_ G. H. HARDY, F. R. S.

PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES
_by_ C. G. JONG, M. D., LL. D.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REASONING
_by_ EUGENIO RIGNANO

THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY
_by_ WILLIAM BROWN, M. D., D. Sc.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
_by_ E. VON HARTMANN

THE FOUNDATIONS OF MUSICAL AESTHETICS
_by_ W. POLE, F. R. S. _Edited by Edward J. Dent_.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MUSIC
_by_ EDWARD J. DENT

SOME CONCEPTS OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
_by_ C. D. BROAD, Litt. D.

PHILOSOPHICAL LOGIC
_by_ L. WITTGENSTEIN _Introduction by Bertrand Russell_.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ' AS IF
_by_ H. VAIHINGER

THE LAWS OF FEELING
_by_ F. PAULHAN

THE HISTORY OF MATERIALISM
_by_ F. A. LANGE

COLOUR-HARMONY
_by_ JAMES WOOD and C. K. OGDEN

THE STATISTICAL METHOD IN ECONOMICS AND POLITICS
_by_ P. SARGANT FLORENCE

THE PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM
_by_ I. A. RICHARDS