THE CINEMATOGRAPHICAL MECHANISM OF THOUGHT AND THE MECHANISTIC
ILLUSION--A GLANCE AT THE HISTORY OF SYSTEMS[96]--REAL BECOMING AND
FALSE EVOLUTIONISM.
It remains for us to examine in themselves two theoretical illusions
which we have frequently met with before, but whose consequences rather
than principle have hitherto concerned us. Such is the object of the
present chapter. It will afford us the opportunity of removing certain
objections, of clearing up certain misunderstandings, and, above all, of
defining more precisely, by contrasting it with others, a philosophy
which sees in duration the very stuff of reality.
Matter or mind, reality has appeared to us as a perpetual becoming. It
makes itself or it unmakes itself, but it is never something made. Such
is the intuition that we have of mind when we draw aside the veil which
is interposed between our consciousness and ourselves. This, also, is
what our intellect and senses themselves would show us of matter, if
they could obtain a direct and disinterested idea of it. But,
preoccupied before everything with the necessities of action, the
intellect, like the senses, is limited to taking, at intervals, views
that are instantaneous and by that very fact immobile of the becoming of
matter. Consciousness, being in its turn formed on the intellect, sees
clearly of the inner life what is already made, and only feels
confusedly the making. Thus, we pluck out of duration those moments that
interest us, and that we have gathered along its course. These alone we
retain. And we are right in so doing, while action only is in question.
But when, in _speculating_ on the _nature_ of the real, we go on
regarding it as our practical interest requires us to regard it, we
become unable to perceive the true evolution, the radical becoming. Of
becoming we perceive only states, of duration only instants, and even
when we speak of duration and of becoming, it is of another thing that
we are thinking. Such is the most striking of the two illusions we wish
to examine. It consists in supposing that we can think the unstable by
means of the stable, the moving by means of the immobile.
The other illusion is near akin to the first. It has the same origin,
being also due to the fact that we import into speculation a procedure
made for practice. All action aims at getting something that we feel the
want of, or at creating something that does not yet exist. In this very
special sense, it fills a void, and goes from the empty to the full,
from an absence to a presence, from the unreal to the real. Now the
unreality which is here in question is purely relative to the direction
in which our attention is engaged, for we are immersed in realities and
cannot pass out of them; only, if the present reality is not the one we
are seeking, we speak of the _absence_ of this sought-for reality
wherever we find the _presence_ of another. We thus express what we have
as a function of what we want. This is quite legitimate in the sphere of
action. But, whether we will or no, we keep to this way of speaking,
and also of thinking, when we speculate on the nature of things
independently of the interest they have for us. Thus arises the second
of the two illusions. We propose to examine this first. It is due, like
the other, to the static habits that our intellect contracts when it
prepares our action on things. Just as we pass through the immobile to
go to the moving, so we make use of the void in order to think the full.
We have met with this illusion already in dealing with the fundamental
problem of knowledge. The question, we then said, is to know why there
is order, and not disorder, in things. But the question has meaning only
if we suppose that disorder, understood as an absence of order, is
possible, or imaginable, or conceivable. Now, it is only order that is
real; but, as order can take two forms, and as the presence of the one
may be said to consist in the absence of the other, we speak of disorder
whenever we have before us that one of the two orders for which we are
not looking. The idea of disorder is then entirely practical. It
corresponds to the disappointment of a certain expectation, and it does
not denote the absence of all order, but only the presence of that order
which does not offer us actual interest. So that whenever we try to deny
order completely, absolutely, we find that we are leaping from one kind
of order to the other indefinitely, and that the supposed suppression of
the one and the other implies the presence of the two. Indeed, if we go
on, and persist in shutting our eyes to this movement of the mind and
all it involves, we are no longer dealing with an idea; all that is left
of disorder is a word. Thus the problem of knowledge is complicated, and
possibly made insoluble, by the idea that order fills a void and that
its actual presence is superposed on its virtual absence. We go from
absence to presence, from the void to the full, in virtue of the
fundamental illusion of our understanding. That is the error of which we
noticed one consequence in our last chapter. As we then anticipated, we
must come to close quarters with this error, and finally grapple with
it. We must face it in itself, in the radically false conception which
it implies of negation, of the void and of the nought.[97]
Philosophers have paid little attention to the idea of the nought. And
yet it is often the hidden spring, the invisible mover of philosophical
thinking. From the first awakening of reflection, it is this that pushes
to the fore, right under the eyes of consciousness, the torturing
problems, the questions that we cannot gaze at without feeling giddy and
bewildered. I have no sooner commenced to philosophize than I ask myself
why I exist; and when I take account of the intimate connection in which
I stand to the rest of the universe, the difficulty is only pushed back,
for I want to know why the universe exists; and if I refer the universe
to a Principle immanent or transcendent that supports it or creates it,
my thought rests on this principle only a few moments, for the same
problem recurs, this time in its full breadth and generality: Whence
comes it, and how can it be understood, that anything exists? Even here,
in the present work, when matter has been defined as a kind of descent,
this descent as the interruption of a rise, this rise itself as a
growth, when finally a Principle of creation has been put at the base of
things, the same question springs up: How--why does this principle exist
rather than nothing?
Now, if I push these questions aside and go straight to what hides
behind them, this is what I find:--Existence appears to me like a
conquest over nought. I say to myself that there might be, that indeed
there ought to be, nothing, and I then wonder that there is something.
Or I represent all reality extended on nothing as on a carpet: at first
was nothing, and being has come by superaddition to it. Or, yet again,
if something has always existed, nothing must always have served as its
substratum or receptacle, and is therefore eternally prior. A glass may
have always been full, but the liquid it contains nevertheless fills a
void. In the same way, being may have always been there, but the nought
which is filled, and, as it were, stopped up by it, pre-exists for it
none the less, if not in fact at least in right. In short, I cannot get
rid of the idea that the full is an embroidery on the canvas of the
void, that being is superimposed on nothing, and that in the idea of
"nothing" there is _less_ than in that of "something." Hence all the
mystery.
It is necessary that this mystery should be cleared up. It is more
especially necessary, if we put duration and free choice at the base of
things. For the disdain of metaphysics for all reality that endures
comes precisely from this, that it reaches being only by passing through
"not-being," and that an existence which endures seems to it not strong
enough to conquer non-existence and itself posit itself. It is for this
reason especially that it is inclined to endow true being with a
_logical_, and not a psychological nor a physical existence. For the
nature of a purely logical existence is such that it seems to be
self-sufficient and to posit itself by the effect alone of the force
immanent in truth. If I ask myself why bodies or minds exist rather than
nothing, I find no answer; but that a logical principle, such as A=A,
should have the power of creating itself, triumphing over the nought
throughout eternity, seems to me natural. A circle drawn with chalk on
a blackboard is a thing which needs explanation: this entirely physical
existence has not by itself wherewith to vanquish non-existence. But the
"logical essence" of the circle, that is to say, the possibility of
drawing it according to a certain law--in short, its definition--is a
thing which appears to me eternal: it has neither place nor date; for
nowhere, at no moment, has the drawing of a circle begun to be possible.
Suppose, then, that the principle on which all things rest, and which
all things manifest possesses an existence of the same nature as that of
the definition of the circle, or as that of the axiom A=A: the mystery
of existence vanishes, for the being that is at the base of everything
posits itself then in eternity, as logic itself does. True, it will cost
us rather a heavy sacrifice: if the principle of all things exists after
the manner of a logical axiom or of a mathematical definition, the
things themselves must go forth from this principle like the
applications of an axiom or the consequences of a definition, and there
will no longer be place, either in the things nor in their principle,
for efficient causality understood in the sense of a free choice. Such
are precisely the conclusions of a doctrine like that of Spinoza, or
even that of Leibniz, and such indeed has been their genesis.
Now, if we could prove that the idea of the nought, in the sense in
which we take it when we oppose it to that of existence, is a
pseudo-idea, the problems that are raised around it would become
pseudo-problems. The hypothesis of an absolute that acts freely, that in
an eminent sense endures, would no longer raise up intellectual
prejudices. The road would be cleared for a philosophy more nearly
approaching intuition, and which would no longer ask the same sacrifices
of common sense.
Let us then see what we are thinking about when we speak of "Nothing."
To represent "Nothing," we must either imagine it or conceive it. Let us
examine what this image or this idea may be. First, the image.
I am going to close my eyes, stop my ears, extinguish one by one the
sensations that come to me from the outer world. Now it is done; all my
perceptions vanish, the material universe sinks into silence and the
night.--I subsist, however, and cannot help myself subsisting. I am
still there, with the organic sensations which come to me from the
surface and from the interior of my body, with the recollections which
my past perceptions have left behind them--nay, with the impression,
most positive and full, of the void I have just made about me. How can I
suppress all this? How eliminate myself? I can even, it may be, blot out
and forget my recollections up to my immediate past; but at least I keep
the consciousness of my present reduced to its extremest poverty, that
is to say, of the actual state of my body. I will try, however, to do
away even with this consciousness itself. I will reduce more and more
the sensations my body sends in to me: now they are almost gone; now
they are gone, they have disappeared in the night where all things else
have already died away. But no! At the very instant that my
consciousness is extinguished, another consciousness lights up--or
rather, it was already alight: it had arisen the instant before, in
order to witness the extinction of the first; for the first could
disappear only for another and in the presence of another. I see myself
annihilated only if I have already resuscitated myself by an act which
is positive, however involuntary and unconscious. So, do what I will, I
am always perceiving something, either from without or from within. When
I no longer know anything of external objects, it is because I have
taken refuge in the consciousness that I have of myself. If I abolish
this inner self, its very abolition becomes an object for an imaginary
self which now perceives as an external object the self that is dying
away. Be it external or internal, some object there always is that my
imagination is representing. My imagination, it is true, can go from one
to the other, I can by turns imagine a nought of external perception or
a nought of internal perception, but not both at once, for the absence
of one consists, at bottom, in the exclusive presence of the other. But,
from the fact that two relative noughts are imaginable in turn, we
wrongly conclude that they are imaginable together: a conclusion the
absurdity of which must be obvious, for we cannot imagine a nought
without perceiving, at least confusedly, that we are imagining it,
consequently that we are acting, that we are thinking, and therefore
that something still subsists.
The image, then, properly so called, of a suppression of everything is
never formed by thought. The effort by which we strive to create this
image simply ends in making us swing to and fro between the vision of an
outer and that of an inner reality. In this coming and going of our mind
between the without and the within, there is a point, at equal distance
from both, in which it seems to us that we no longer perceive the one,
and that we do not yet perceive the other: it is there that the image of
"Nothing" is formed. In reality, we then perceive both, having reached
the point where the two terms come together, and the image of Nothing,
so defined, is an image full of things, an image that includes at once
that of the subject and that of the object and, besides, a perpetual
leaping from one to the other and the refusal ever to come to rest
finally on either. Evidently this is not the nothing that we can oppose
to being, and put before or beneath being, for it already includes
existence in general.
But we shall be told that, if the representation of Nothing, visible or
latent, enters into the reasonings of philosophers, it is not as an
image, but as an idea. It may be agreed that we do not imagine the
annihilation of everything, but it will be claimed that we can conceive
it. We conceive a polygon with a thousand sides, said Descartes,
although we do not see it in imagination: it is enough that we can
clearly represent the possibility of constructing it. So with the idea
of the annihilation of everything. Nothing simpler, it will be said,
than the procedure by which we construct the idea of it. There is, in
fact, not a single object of our experience that we cannot suppose
annihilated. Extend this annihilation of a first object to a second,
then to a third, and so on as long as you please: the nought is the
limit toward which the operation tends. And the nought so defined is the
annihilation of everything. That is the theory. We need only consider it
in this form to see the absurdity it involves.
An idea constructed by the mind is an idea only if its pieces are
capable of coexisting; it is reduced to a mere word if the elements that
we bring together to compose it are driven away as fast as we assemble
them. When I have defined the circle, I easily represent a black or a
white circle, a circle in cardboard, iron, or brass, a transparent or an
opaque circle--but not a square circle, because the law of the
generation of the circle excludes the possibility of defining this
figure with straight lines. So my mind can represent any existing thing
whatever as annihilated;--but if the annihilation of anything by the
mind is an operation whose mechanism implies that it works on a part of
the whole, and not on the whole itself, then the extension of such an
operation to the totality of things becomes self-contradictory and
absurd, and the idea of an annihilation of everything presents the same
character as that of a square circle: it is not an idea, it is only a
word. So let us examine more closely the mechanism of the operation.
In fact, the object suppressed is either external or internal: it is a
thing or it is a state of consciousness. Let us consider the first case.
I annihilate in thought an external object: in the place where it was,
there is no longer anything.--No longer anything of that object, of
course, but another object has taken its place: there is no absolute
void in nature. But admit that an absolute void is possible: it is not
of that void that I am thinking when I say that the object, once
annihilated, leaves its place unoccupied; for by the hypothesis it is a
_place_, that is a void limited by precise outlines, or, in other words,
a kind of _thing_. The void of which I speak, therefore, is, at bottom,
only the absence of some definite object, which was here at first, is
now elsewhere and, in so far as it is no longer in its former place,
leaves behind it, so to speak, the void of itself. A being unendowed
with memory or prevision would not use the words "void" or "nought;" he
would express only what is and what is perceived; now, what is, and what
is perceived, is the _presence_ of one thing or of another, never the
_absence_ of anything. There is absence only for a being capable of
remembering and expecting. He remembered an object, and perhaps expected
to encounter it again; he finds another, and he expresses the
disappointment of his expectation (an expectation sprung from
recollection) by saying that he no longer finds anything, that he
encounters "nothing." Even if he did not expect to encounter the object,
it is a possible expectation of it, it is still the falsification of his
eventual expectation that he expresses by saying that the object is no
longer where it was. What he perceives in reality, what he will succeed
in effectively thinking of, is the presence of the old object in a new
place or that of a new object in the old place; the rest, all that is
expressed negatively by such words as "nought" or the "void," is not so
much thought as feeling, or, to speak more exactly, it is the tinge that
feeling gives to thought. The idea of annihilation or of partial
nothingness is therefore formed here in the course of the substitution
of one thing for another, whenever this substitution is thought by a
mind that would prefer to keep the old thing in the place of the new, or
at least conceives this preference as possible. The idea implies on the
subjective side a preference, on the objective side a substitution, and
is nothing else but a combination of, or rather an interference between,
this feeling of preference and this idea of substitution.
Such is the mechanism of the operation by which our mind annihilates an
object and succeeds in representing in the external world a partial
nought. Let us now see how it represents it within itself. We find in
ourselves phenomena that are produced, and not phenomena that are not
produced. I experience a sensation or an emotion, I conceive an idea, I
form a resolution: my consciousness perceives these facts, which are so
many _presences_, and there is no moment in which facts of this kind are
not present to me. I can, no doubt, interrupt by thought the course of
my inner life; I may suppose that I sleep without dreaming or that I
have ceased to exist; but at the very instant when I make this
supposition, I conceive myself, I imagine myself watching over my
slumber or surviving my annihilation, and I give up perceiving myself
from within only by taking refuge in the perception of myself from
without. That is to say that here again the full always succeeds the
full, and that an intelligence that was only intelligence, that had
neither regret nor desire, whose movement was governed by the movement
of its object, could not even conceive an absence or a void. The
conception of a void arises here when consciousness, lagging behind
itself, remains attached to the recollection of an old state when
another state is already present. It is only a comparison between what
is and what could or ought to be, between the full and the full. In a
word, whether it be a void of matter or a void of consciousness, _the
representation of the void is always a representation which is full and
which resolves itself on analysis into two positive elements: the idea,
distinct or confused, of a substitution, and the feeling, experienced or
imagined, of a desire or a regret_.
It follows from this double analysis that the idea of the absolute
nought, in the sense of the annihilation of everything, is a
self-destructive idea, a pseudo-idea, a mere word. If suppressing a
thing consists in replacing it by another, if thinking the absence of
one thing is only possible by the more or less explicit representation
of the presence of some other thing, if, in short, annihilation
signifies before anything else substitution, the idea of an
"annihilation of everything" is as absurd as that of a square circle.
The absurdity is not obvious, because there exists no particular object
that cannot be supposed annihilated; then, from the fact that there is
nothing to prevent each thing in turn being suppressed in thought, we
conclude that it is possible to suppose them suppressed altogether. We
do not see that suppressing each thing in turn consists precisely in
replacing it in proportion and degree by another, and therefore that the
suppression of absolutely everything implies a downright contradiction
in terms, since the operation consists in destroying the very condition
that makes the operation possible.
But the illusion is tenacious. Though suppressing one thing consists _in
fact_ in substituting another for it, we do not conclude, we are
unwilling to conclude, that the annihilation of a thing _in thought_
implies the substitution in thought of a new thing for the old. We agree
that a thing is always replaced by another thing, and even that our mind
cannot think the disappearance of an object, external or internal,
without thinking--under an indeterminate and confused form, it is
true--that another object is substituted for it. But we add that the
representation of a disappearance is that of a phenomenon that is
produced in space or at least in time, that consequently it still
implies the calling up of an image, and that it is precisely here that
we have to free ourselves from the imagination in order to appeal to the
pure understanding. "Let us therefore no longer speak," it will be said,
"of disappearance or annihilation; these are physical operations. Let us
no longer represent the object A as annihilated or absent. Let us say
simply that we think it "non-existent." To annihilate it is to act on it
in time and perhaps also in space; it is to accept, consequently, the
condition of spatial and temporal existence, to accept the universal
connection that binds an object to all others, and prevents it from
disappearing without being at the same time replaced. But we can free
ourselves from these conditions; all that is necessary is that by an
effort of abstraction we should call up the idea of the object A by
itself, that we should agree first to consider it as existing, and then,
by a stroke of the intellectual pen, blot out the clause. The object
will then be, by our decree, non-existent."
Very well, let us strike out the clause. We must not suppose that our
pen-stroke is self-sufficient--that it can be isolated from the rest of
things. We shall see that it carries with it, whether we will or no,
all that we tried to abstract from. Let us compare together the two
ideas--the object A supposed to exist, and the same object supposed
"non-existent."
The idea of the object A, supposed existent, is the representation pure
and simple of the object A, for we cannot represent an object without
attributing to it, by the very fact of representing it, a certain
reality. Between thinking an object and thinking it existent, there is
absolutely no difference. Kant has put this point in clear light in his
criticism of the ontological argument. Then, what is it to think the
object A non-existent? To represent it non-existent cannot consist in
withdrawing from the idea of the object A the idea of the attribute
"existence," since, I repeat, the representation of the existence of the
object is inseparable from the representation of the object, and indeed
is one with it. To represent the object A non-existent can only consist,
therefore, in _adding_ something to the idea of this object: we add to
it, in fact, the idea of an _exclusion_ of this particular object by
actual reality in general. To think the object A as non-existent is
first to think the object and consequently to think it existent; it is
then to think that another reality, with which it is incompatible,
supplants it. Only, it is useless to represent this latter reality
explicitly; we are not concerned with what it is; it is enough for us to
know that it drives out the object A, which alone is of interest to us.
That is why we think of the expulsion rather than of the cause which
expels. But this cause is none the less present to the mind; it is there
in the implicit state, that which expels being inseparable from the
expulsion as the hand which drives the pen is inseparable from the
pen-stroke. The act by which we declare an object unreal therefore
posits the existence of the real in general. In other words, to
represent an object as unreal cannot consist in depriving it of every
kind of existence, since the representation of an object is necessarily
that of the object existing. Such an act consists simply in declaring
that the existence attached by our mind to the object, and inseparable
from its representation, is an existence wholly ideal--that of a mere
_possible_. But the "ideality" of an object, and the "simple
possibility" of an object, have meaning only in relation to a reality
that drives into the region of the ideal, or of the merely possible, the
object which is incompatible with it. Suppose the stronger and more
substantial existence annihilated: it is the attenuated and weaker
existence of the merely possible that becomes the reality itself, and
you will no longer be representing the object, then, as non-existent. In
other words, and however strange our assertion may seem, _there is_
more, _and not_ less, _in the idea of an object conceived as "not
existing" than in the idea of this same object conceived as "existing";
for the idea of the object "not existing" is necessarily the idea of the
object "existing" with, in addition, the representation of an exclusion
of this object by the actual reality taken in block_.
But it will be claimed that our idea of the non-existent is not yet
sufficiently cut loose from every imaginative element, that it is not
negative enough. "No matter," we shall be told, "though the unreality of
a thing consist in its exclusion by other things; we want to know
nothing about that. Are we not free to direct our attention where we
please and how we please? Well then, after having called up the idea of
an object, and thereby, if you will have it so, supposed it existent, we
shall merely couple to our affirmation a 'not,' and that will be enough
to make us think it non-existent. This is an operation entirely
intellectual, independent of what happens outside the mind. So let us
think of anything or let us think of the totality of things, and then
write in the margin of our thought the 'not,' which prescribes the
rejection of what it contains: we annihilate everything mentally by the
mere fact of decreeing its annihilation."--Here we have it! The very
root of all the difficulties and errors with which we are confronted is
to be found in the power ascribed here to negation. We represent
negation as exactly symmetrical with affirmation. We imagine that
negation, like affirmation, is self-sufficient. So that negation, like
affirmation, would have the power of creating ideas, with this sole
difference that they would be negative ideas. By affirming one thing,
and then another, and so on _ad infinitum_, I form the idea of "All;"
so, by denying one thing and then other things, finally by denying All,
I arrive at the idea of Nothing.--But it is just this assimilation which
is arbitrary. We fail to see that while affirmation is a complete act of
the mind, which can succeed in building up an idea, negation is but the
half of an intellectual act, of which the other half is understood, or
rather put off to an indefinite future. We fail to see that while
affirmation is a purely intellectual act, there enters into negation an
element which is not intellectual, and that it is precisely to the
intrusion of this foreign element that negation owes its specific
character.
To begin with the second point, let us note that to deny always consists
in setting aside a possible affirmation.[98] Negation is only an
attitude taken by the mind toward an eventual affirmation. When I say,
"This table is black," I am speaking of the table; I have seen it
black, and my judgment expresses what I have seen. But if I say, "This
table is not white," I surely do not express something I have perceived,
for I have seen black, and not an absence of white. It is therefore, at
bottom, not on the table itself that I bring this judgment to bear, but
rather on the judgment that would declare the table white. I judge a
judgment and not the table. The proposition, "This table is not white,"
implies that you might believe it white, that you did believe it such,
or that I was going to believe it such. I warn you or myself that this
judgment is to be replaced by another (which, it is true, I leave
undetermined). Thus, while affirmation bears directly on the thing,
negation aims at the thing only indirectly, through an interposed
affirmation. An affirmative proposition expresses a judgment on an
object; a negative proposition expresses a judgment on a judgment.
_Negation, therefore, differs from affirmation properly so called in
that it is an affirmation of the second degree: it affirms something of
an affirmation which itself affirms something of an object._
But it follows at once from this that negation is not the work of pure
mind, I should say of a mind placed before objects and concerned with
them alone. When we deny, we give a lesson to others, or it may be to
ourselves. We take to task an interlocutor, real or possible, whom we
find mistaken and whom we put on his guard. He was affirming something:
we tell him he ought to affirm something else (though without specifying
the affirmation which must be substituted). There is no longer then,
simply, a person and an object; there is, in face of the object, a
person speaking to a person, opposing him and aiding him at the same
time; there is a beginning of society. Negation aims at some one, and
not only, like a purely intellectual operation, at some thing. It is of
a pedagogical and social nature. It sets straight or rather warns, the
person warned and set straight being possibly, by a kind of doubling,
the very person that speaks.
So much for the second point; now for the first. We said that negation
is but the half of an intellectual act, of which the other half is left
indeterminate. If I pronounce the negative proposition, "This table is
not white," I mean that you ought to substitute for your judgment, "The
table is white," another judgment. I give you an admonition, and the
admonition refers to the necessity of a substitution. As to what you
ought to substitute for your affirmation, I tell you nothing, it is
true. This may be because I do not know the color of the table; but it
is also, it is indeed even more, because the white color is that alone
that interests us for the moment, so that I only need to tell you that
some other color will have to be substituted for white, without having
to say which. A negative judgment is therefore really one which
indicates a need of substituting for an affirmative judgment another
affirmative judgment, the nature of which, however, is not specified,
sometimes because it is not known, more often because it fails to offer
any actual interest, the attention bearing only on the substance of the
first.
Thus, whenever I add a "not" to an affirmation, whenever I deny, I
perform two very definite acts: (1) I interest myself in what one of my
fellow-men affirms, or in what he was going to say, or in what might
have been said by another _Me_, whom I anticipate; (2) I announce that
some other affirmation, whose content I do not specify, will have to be
substituted for the one I find before me. Now, in neither of these two
acts is there anything but affirmation. The _sui generis_ character of
negation is due to superimposing the first of these acts upon the
second. It is in vain, then, that we attribute to negation the power of
creating ideas _sui generis_, symmetrical with those that affirmation
creates, and directed in a contrary sense. No idea will come forth from
negation, for it has no other content than that of the affirmative
judgment which it judges.
To be more precise, let us consider an existential, instead of an
attributive, judgment. If I say, "The object A does not exist," I mean
by that, first, that we might believe that the object A exists: how,
indeed, can we think of the object A without thinking it existing, and,
once again, what difference can there be between the idea of the object
A existing and the idea pure and simple of the object A? Therefore,
merely by saying "The object A," I attribute to it some kind of
existence, though it be that of a mere _possible_, that is to say, of a
pure idea. And consequently, in the judgment "The object A is not,"
there is at first an affirmation such as "The object A has been," or
"The object A will be," or, more generally, "The object A exists at
least as a mere _possible_." Now, when I add the two words "is not," I
can only mean that if we go further, if we erect the possible object
into a real object, we shall be mistaken, and that the possible of which
I am speaking is excluded from the actual reality as incompatible with
it. Judgments that posit the non-existence of a thing are therefore
judgments that formulate a contrast between the possible and the actual
(that is, between two kinds of _existence_, one thought and the other
found), where a person, real or imaginary, wrongly believes that a
certain possible is realized. Instead of this possible, there is a
reality that differs from it and rejects it: the negative judgment
expresses this contrast, but it expresses the contrast in an
intentionally incomplete form, because it is addressed to a person who
is supposed to be interested exclusively in the possible that is
indicated, and is not concerned to know by what kind of reality the
possible is replaced. The expression of the substitution is therefore
bound to be cut short. Instead of affirming that a second term is
substituted for the first, the attention which was originally directed
to the first term will be kept fixed upon it, and upon it alone. And,
without going beyond the first, we shall implicitly affirm that a second
term replaces it in saying that the first "is not." We shall thus judge
a judgment instead of judging a thing. We shall warn others or warn
ourselves of a possible error instead of supplying positive information.
Suppress every intention of this kind, give knowledge back its
exclusively scientific or philosophical character, suppose in other
words that reality comes itself to inscribe itself on a mind that cares
only for things and is not interested in persons: we shall affirm that
such or such a thing is, we shall never affirm that a thing is not.
How comes it, then, that affirmation and negation are so persistently
put on the same level and endowed with an equal objectivity? How comes
it that we have so much difficulty in recognizing that negation is
subjective, artificially cut short, relative to the human mind and still
more to the social life? The reason is, no doubt, that _both_ negation
and affirmation are expressed in propositions, and that _any_
proposition, being formed of _words_, which symbolize _concepts_, is
something relative to social life and to the human intellect. Whether I
say "The ground is damp" or "The ground is not damp," in both cases the
terms "ground" and "damp" are concepts more or less artificially created
by the mind of man--extracted, by his free initiative, from the
continuity of experience. In both cases the concepts are represented by
the same conventional words. In both cases we can say indeed that the
proposition aims at a social and pedagogical end, since the first would
propagate a truth as the second would prevent an error. From this point
of view, which is that of formal logic, to affirm and to deny are indeed
two mutually symmetrical acts, of which the first establishes a relation
of agreement and the second a relation of disagreement between a subject
and an attribute. But how do we fail to see that the symmetry is
altogether external and the likeness superficial? Suppose language
fallen into disuse, society dissolved, every intellectual initiative,
every faculty of self-reflection and of self-judgment atrophied in man:
the dampness of the ground will subsist none the less, capable of
inscribing itself automatically in sensation and of sending a vague idea
to the deadened intellect. The intellect will still affirm, in implicit
terms. And consequently, neither distinct concepts, nor words, nor the
desire of spreading the truth, nor that of bettering oneself, are of the
very essence of the affirmation. But this passive intelligence,
mechanically keeping step with experience, neither anticipating nor
following the course of the real, would have no wish to deny. It could
not receive an imprint of negation; for, once again, that which exists
may come to be recorded, but the non-existence of the non-existing
cannot. For such an intellect to reach the point of denying, it must
awake from its torpor, formulate the disappointment of a real or
possible expectation, correct an actual or possible error--in short,
propose to teach others or to teach itself.
It is rather difficult to perceive this in the example we have chosen,
but the example is indeed the more instructive and the argument the more
cogent on that account. If dampness is able automatically to come and
record itself, it is the same, it will be said, with non-dampness; for
the dry as well as the damp can give impressions to sense, which will
transmit them, as more or less distinct ideas, to the intelligence. In
this sense the negation of dampness is as objective a thing, as purely
intellectual, as remote from every pedagogical intention, as
affirmation.--But let us look at it more closely: we shall see that the
negative proposition, "The ground is not damp," and the affirmative
proposition, "The ground is dry," have entirely different contents. The
second implies that we know the dry, that we have experienced the
specific sensations, tactile or visual for example, that are at the base
of this idea. The first requires nothing of the sort; it could equally
well have been formulated by an intelligent fish, who had never
perceived anything but the wet. It would be necessary, it is true, that
this fish should have risen to the distinction between the real and the
possible, and that he should care to anticipate the error of his
fellow-fishes, who doubtless consider as alone possible the condition of
wetness in which they actually live. Keep strictly to the terms of the
proposition, "The ground is not damp," and you will find that it means
two things: (1) that one might believe that the ground is damp, (2) that
the dampness is replaced in fact by a certain quality _x_. This quality
is left indeterminate, either because we have no positive knowledge of
it, or because it has no actual interest for the person to whom the
negation is addressed. To deny, therefore, always consists in presenting
in an abridged form a system of two affirmations: the one determinate,
which applies to a certain _possible_; the other indeterminate,
referring to the unknown or indifferent reality that supplants this
possibility. The second affirmation is virtually contained in the
judgment we apply to the first, a judgment which is negation itself. And
what gives negation its subjective character is precisely this, that in
the discovery of a replacement it takes account only of the replaced,
and is not concerned with what replaces. The replaced exists only as a
conception of the mind. It is necessary, in order to continue to see it,
and consequently in order to speak of it, to turn our back on the
reality, which flows from the past to the present, advancing from
behind. It is this that we do when we deny. We discover the change, or
more generally the substitution, as a traveller would see the course of
his carriage if he looked out behind, and only knew at each moment the
point at which he had ceased to be; he could never determine his actual
position except by relation to that which he had just quitted, instead
of grasping it in itself.
To sum up, for a mind which should follow purely and simply the thread
of experience, there would be no void, no nought, even relative or
partial, no possible negation. Such a mind would see facts succeed
facts, states succeed states, things succeed things. What it would note
at each moment would be things existing, states appearing, events
happening. It would live in the actual, and, if it were capable of
judging, it would never affirm anything except the existence of the
present.
Endow this mind with memory, and especially with the desire to dwell on
the past; give it the faculty of dissociating and of distinguishing: it
will no longer only note the present state of the passing reality; it
will represent the passing as a change, and therefore as a contrast
between what has been and what is. And as there is no essential
difference between a past that we remember and a past that we imagine,
it will quickly rise to the idea of the "possible" in general.
It will thus be shunted on to the siding of negation. And especially it
will be at the point of representing a disappearance. But it will not
yet have reached it. To represent that a thing has disappeared, it is
not enough to perceive a contrast between the past and the present; it
is necessary besides to turn our back on the present, to dwell on the
past, and to think the contrast of the past with the present in terms of
the past only, without letting the present appear in it.
The idea of annihilation is therefore not a pure idea; it implies that
we regret the past or that we conceive it as regrettable, that we have
some reason to linger over it. The idea arises when the phenomenon of
substitution is cut in two by a mind which considers only the first
half, because that alone interests it. Suppress all interest, all
feeling, and there is nothing left but the reality that flows, together
with the knowledge ever renewed that it impresses on us of its present
state.
From annihilation to negation, which is a more general operation, there
is now only a step. All that is necessary is to represent the contrast
of what is, not only with what has been, but also with all that might
have been. And we must express this contrast as a function of what might
have been, and not of what is; we must affirm the existence of the
actual while looking only at the possible. The formula we thus obtain no
longer expresses merely a disappointment of the individual; it is made
to correct or guard against an error, which is rather supposed to be the
error of another. In this sense, negation has a pedagogical and social
character.
Now, once negation is formulated, it presents an aspect symmetrical with
that of affirmation; if affirmation affirms an objective reality, it
seems that negation must affirm a non-reality equally objective, and, so
to say, equally real. In which we are both right and wrong: wrong,
because negation cannot be objectified, in so far as it is negative;
right, however, in that the negation of a thing implies the latent
affirmation of its replacement by something else, which we
systematically leave on one side. But the negative form of negation
benefits by the affirmation at the bottom of it. Bestriding the positive
solid reality to which it is attached, this phantom objectifies itself.
Thus is formed the idea of the void or of a partial nought, a thing
being supposed to be replaced, not by another thing, but by a void which
it leaves, that is, by the negation of itself. Now, as this operation
works on anything whatever, we suppose it performed on each thing in
turn, and finally on all things in block. We thus obtain the idea of
absolute Nothing. If now we analyze this idea of Nothing, we find that
it is, at bottom, the idea of Everything, together with a movement of
the mind that keeps jumping from one thing to another, refuses to stand
still, and concentrates all its attention on this refusal by never
determining its actual position except by relation to that which it has
just left. It is therefore an idea eminently comprehensive and full, as
full and comprehensive as the idea of _All_, to which it is very closely
akin.
How then can the idea of Nought be opposed to that of All? Is it not
plain that this is to oppose the full to the full, and that the
question, "Why does something exist?" is consequently without meaning, a
pseudo-problem raised about a pseudo-idea? Yet we must say once more why
this phantom of a problem haunts the mind with such obstinacy. In vain
do we show that in the idea of an "annihilation of the real" there is
only the image of all realities expelling one another endlessly, in a
circle; in vain do we add that the idea of non-existence is only that of
the expulsion of an imponderable existence, or a "merely possible"
existence, by a more substantial existence which would then be the true
reality; in vain do we find in the _sui generis_ form of negation an
element which is not intellectual--negation being the judgment of a
judgment, an admonition given to some one else or to oneself, so that it
is absurd to attribute to negation the power of creating ideas of a new
kind, viz. ideas without content;--in spite of all, the conviction
persists that before things, or at least under things, there is
"Nothing." If we seek the reason of this fact, we shall find it
precisely in the feeling, in the social and, so to speak, practical
element, that gives its specific form to negation. The greatest
philosophic difficulties arise, as we have said, from the fact that the
forms of human action venture outside of their proper sphere. We are
made in order to act as much as, and more than, in order to think--or
rather, when we follow the bent of our nature, it is in order to act
that we think. It is therefore no wonder that the habits of action give
their tone to those of thought, and that our mind always perceives
things in the same order in which we are accustomed to picture them when
we propose to act on them. Now, it is unquestionable, as we remarked
above, that every human action has its starting-point in a
dissatisfaction, and thereby in a feeling of absence. We should not act
if we did not set before ourselves an end, and we seek a thing only
because we feel the lack of it. Our action proceeds thus from "nothing"
to "something," and its very essence is to embroider "something" on the
canvas of "nothing." The truth is that the "nothing" concerned here is
the absence not so much of a thing as of a utility. If I bring a visitor
into a room that I have not yet furnished, I say to him that "there is
nothing in it." Yet I know the room is full of air; but, as we do not
sit on air, the room truly contains nothing that at this moment, for the
visitor and for myself, counts for anything. In a general way, human
work consists in creating utility; and, as long as the work is not
done, there is "nothing"--nothing that we want. Our life is thus spent
in filling voids, which our intellect conceives under the influence, by
no means intellectual, of desire and of regret, under the pressure of
vital necessities; and if we mean by void an absence of utility and not
of things, we may say, in this quite relative sense, that we are
constantly going from the void to the full: such is the direction which
our action takes. Our speculation cannot help doing the same; and,
naturally, it passes from the relative sense to the absolute sense,
since it is exercised on things themselves and not on the utility they
have for us. Thus is implanted in us the idea that reality fills a void,
and that Nothing, conceived as an absence of everything, pre-exists
before all things in right, if not in fact. It is this illusion that we
have tried to remove by showing that the idea of Nothing, if we try to
see in it that of an annihilation of all things, is self-destructive and
reduced to a mere word; and that if, on the contrary, it is truly an
idea, then we find in it as much matter as in the idea of All.
* * * * *
This long analysis has been necessary to show that _a self-sufficient
reality is not necessarily a reality foreign to duration_. If we pass
(consciously or unconsciously) through the idea of the nought in order
to reach that of being, the being to which we come is a logical or
mathematical essence, therefore non-temporal. And, consequently, a
static conception of the real is forced on us: everything appears given
once for all, in eternity. But we must accustom ourselves to think being
directly, without making a detour, without first appealing to the
phantom of the nought which interposes itself between it and us. We must
strive to see in order to see, and no longer to see in order to act.
Then the Absolute is revealed very near us and, in a certain measure,
in us. It is of psychological and not of mathematical nor logical
essence. It lives with us. Like us, but in certain aspects infinitely
more concentrated and more gathered up in itself, it _endures_.
But do we ever think true duration? Here again a direct taking
possession is necessary. It is no use trying to approach duration: we
must install ourselves within it straight away. This is what the
intellect generally refuses to do, accustomed as it is to think the
moving by means of the unmovable.
The function of the intellect is to preside over actions. Now, in
action, it is the result that interests us; the means matter little
provided the end is attained. Thence it comes that we are altogether
bent on the end to be realized, generally trusting ourselves to it in
order that the idea may become an act; and thence it comes also that
only the goal where our activity will rest is pictured explicitly to our
mind: the movements constituting the action itself either elude our
consciousness or reach it only confusedly. Let us consider a very simple
act, like that of lifting the arm. Where should we be if we had to
imagine beforehand all the elementary contractions and tensions this act
involves, or even to perceive them, one by one, as they are
accomplished? But the mind is carried immediately to the end, that is to
say, to the schematic and simplified vision of the act supposed
accomplished. Then, if no antagonistic idea neutralizes the effect of
the first idea, the appropriate movements come of themselves to fill out
the plan, drawn in some way by the void of its gaps. The intellect,
then, only represents to the activity ends to attain, that is to say,
points of rest. And, from one end attained to another end attained, from
one rest to another rest, our activity is carried by a series of leaps,
during which our consciousness is turned away as much as possible from
the movement going on, to regard only the anticipated image of the
movement accomplished.
Now, in order that it may represent as unmovable the result of the act
which is being accomplished, the intellect must perceive, as also
unmovable, the surroundings in which this result is being framed. Our
activity is fitted into the material world. If matter appeared to us as
a perpetual flowing, we should assign no termination to any of our
actions. We should feel each of them dissolve as fast as it was
accomplished, and we should not anticipate an ever-fleeting future. In
order that our activity may leap from an _act_ to an _act_, it is
necessary that matter should pass from a _state_ to a _state_, for it is
only into a state of the material world that action can fit a result, so
as to be accomplished. But is it thus that matter presents itself?
_A priori_ we may presume that our perception manages to apprehend
matter with this bias. Sensory organs and motor organs are in fact
coördinated with each other. Now, the first symbolize our faculty of
perceiving, as the second our faculty of acting. The organism thus
evidences, in a visible and tangible form, the perfect accord of
perception and action. So if our activity always aims at a _result_ into
which it is momentarily fitted, our perception must retain of the
material world, at every moment, only a _state_ in which it is
provisionally placed. This is the most natural hypothesis. And it is
easy to see that experience confirms it.
From our first glance at the world, before we even make our _bodies_ in
it, we distinguish _qualities_. Color succeeds to color, sound to sound,
resistance to resistance, etc. Each of these qualities, taken
separately, is a state that seems to persist as such, immovable until
another replaces it. Yet each of these qualities resolves itself, on
analysis, into an enormous number of elementary movements. Whether we
see in it vibrations or whether we represent it in any other way, one
fact is certain, it is that every quality is change. In vain, moreover,
shall we seek beneath the change the thing which changes: it is always
provisionally, and in order to satisfy our imagination, that we attach
the movement to a mobile. The mobile flies for ever before the pursuit
of science, which is concerned with mobility alone. In the smallest
discernible fraction of a second, in the almost instantaneous perception
of a sensible quality, there may be trillions of oscillations which
repeat themselves. The permanence of a sensible quality consists in this
repetition of movements, as the persistence of life consists in a series
of palpitations. The primal function of perception is precisely to grasp
a series of elementary changes under the form of a quality or of a
simple state, by a work of condensation. The greater the power of acting
bestowed upon an animal species, the more numerous, probably, are the
elementary changes that its faculty of perceiving concentrates into one
of its instants. And the progress must be continuous, in nature, from
the beings that vibrate almost in unison with the oscillations of the
ether, up to those that embrace trillions of these oscillations in the
shortest of their simple perceptions. The first feel hardly anything but
movements; the others perceive quality. The first are almost caught up
in the running-gear of things; the others react, and the tension of
their faculty of acting is probably proportional to the concentration of
their faculty of perceiving. The progress goes on even in humanity
itself. A man is so much the more a "man of action" as he can embrace in
a glance a greater number of events: he who perceives successive events
one by one will allow himself to be led by them; he who grasps them as
a whole will dominate them. In short, the qualities of matter are so
many stable views that we take of its instability.
Now, in the continuity of sensible qualities we mark off the boundaries
of bodies. Each of these bodies really changes at every moment. In the
first place, it resolves itself into a group of qualities, and every
quality, as we said, consists of a succession of elementary movements.
But, even if we regard the quality as a stable state, the body is still
unstable in that it changes qualities without ceasing. The body
pre-eminently--that which we are most justified in isolating within the
continuity of matter, because it constitutes a relatively closed
system--is the living body; it is, moreover, for it that we cut out the
others within the whole. Now, life is an evolution. We concentrate a
period of this evolution in a stable view which we call a form, and,
when the change has become considerable enough to overcome the fortunate
inertia of our perception, we say that the body has changed its form.
But in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather,
there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement.
What is real is the continual _change of_ form: _form is only a snapshot
view of a transition_. Therefore, here again, our perception manages to
solidify into discontinuous images the fluid continuity of the real.
When the successive images do not differ from each other too much, we
consider them all as the waxing and waning of a single _mean_ image, or
as the deformation of this image in different directions. And to this
mean we really allude when we speak of the _essence_ of a thing, or of
the thing itself.
Finally things, once constituted, show on the surface, by their changes
of situation, the profound changes that are being accomplished within
the Whole. We say then that they _act_ on one another. This action
appears to us, no doubt, in the form of movement. But from the mobility
of the movement we turn away as much as we can; what interests us is, as
we said above, the unmovable plan of the movement rather than the
movement itself. Is it a simple movement? We ask ourselves _where_ it is
going. It is by its direction, that is to say, by the position of its
provisional end, that we represent it at every moment. Is it a complex
movement? We would know above all _what_ is going on, _what_ the
movement is doing--in other words, the _result_ obtained or the
presiding _intention_. Examine closely what is in your mind when you
speak of an action in course of accomplishment. The idea of change is
there, I am willing to grant, but it is hidden in the penumbra. In the
full light is the motionless plan of the act supposed accomplished. It
is by this, and by this only, that the complex act is distinguished and
defined. We should be very much embarrassed if we had to imagine the
movements inherent in the actions of eating, drinking, fighting, etc. It
is enough for us to know, in a general and indefinite way, that all
these acts are movements. Once that side of the matter has been settled,
we simply seek to represent the _general plan_ of each of these complex
movements, that is to say the _motionless design_ that underlies them.
Here again knowledge bears on a state rather than on a change. It is
therefore the same with this third case as with the others. Whether the
movement be qualitative or evolutionary or extensive, the mind manages
to take stable views of the instability. And thence the mind derives, as
we have just shown, three kinds of representations: (1) qualities, (2)
forms of essences, (3) acts.
To these three ways of seeing correspond three categories of words:
_adjectives_, _substantives_, and _verbs_, which are the primordial
elements of language. Adjectives and substantives therefore symbolize
_states_. But the verb itself, if we keep to the clear part of the idea
it calls up, hardly expresses anything else.
* * * * *
Now, if we try to characterize more precisely our natural attitude
towards Becoming, this is what we find. Becoming is infinitely varied.
That which goes from yellow to green is not like that which goes from
green to blue: they are different _qualitative_ movements. That which
goes from flower to fruit is not like that which goes from larva to
nymph and from nymph to perfect insect: they are different
_evolutionary_ movements. The action of eating or of drinking is not
like the action of fighting: they are different _extensive_ movements.
And these three kinds of movement themselves--qualitative, evolutionary,
extensive--differ profoundly. The trick of our perception, like that of
our intelligence, like that of our language, consists in extracting from
these profoundly different becomings the single representation of
becoming _in general_, undefined becoming, a mere abstraction which by
itself says nothing and of which, indeed, it is very rarely that we
think. To this idea, always the same, and always obscure or unconscious,
we then join, in each particular case, one or several clear images that
represent _states_ and which serve to distinguish all becomings from
each other. It is this composition of a specified and definite state
with change general and undefined that we substitute for the specific
change. An infinite multiplicity of becomings variously colored, so to
speak, passes before our eyes: we manage so that we see only differences
of color, that is to say, differences of state, beneath which there is
supposed to flow, hidden from our view, a becoming always and everywhere
the same, invariably colorless.
Suppose we wish to portray on a screen a living picture, such as the
marching past of a regiment. There is one way in which it might first
occur to us to do it. That would be to cut out jointed figures
representing the soldiers, to give to each of them the movement of
marching, a movement varying from individual to individual although
common to the human species, and to throw the whole on the screen. We
should need to spend on this little game an enormous amount of work, and
even then we should obtain but a very poor result: how could it, at its
best, reproduce the suppleness and variety of life? Now, there is
another way of proceeding, more easy and at the same time more
effective. It is to take a series of snapshots of the passing regiment
and to throw these instantaneous views on the screen, so that they
replace each other very rapidly. This is what the cinematograph does.
With photographs, each of which represents the regiment in a fixed
attitude, it reconstitutes the mobility of the regiment marching. It is
true that if we had to do with photographs alone, however much we might
look at them, we should never see them animated: with immobility set
beside immobility, even endlessly, we could never make movement. In
order that the pictures may be animated, there must be movement
somewhere. The movement does indeed exist here; it is in the apparatus.
It is because the film of the cinematograph unrolls, bringing in turn
the different photographs of the scene to continue each other, that each
actor of the scene recovers his mobility; he strings all his successive
attitudes on the invisible movement of the film. The process then
consists in extracting from all the movements peculiar to all the
figures an impersonal movement abstract and simple, _movement in
general_, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and we
reconstitute the individuality of each particular movement by combining
this nameless movement with the personal attitudes. Such is the
contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our
knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of
things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their
becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing
reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only
to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated
at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what
there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception,
intellection, language so proceed in general. Whether we would think
becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else
than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us. We may therefore sum
up what we have been saying in the conclusion that the _mechanism of our
ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind_.
Of the altogether practical character of this operation there is no
possible doubt. Each of our acts aims at a certain insertion of our will
into the reality. There is, between our body and other bodies, an
arrangement like that of the pieces of glass that compose a
kaleidoscopic picture. Our activity goes from an arrangement to a
rearrangement, each time no doubt giving the kaleidoscope a new shake,
but not interesting itself in the shake, and seeing only the new
picture. Our knowledge of the operation of nature must be exactly
symmetrical, therefore, with the interest we take in our own operation.
In this sense we may say, if we are not abusing this kind of
illustration, that _the cinematographical character of our knowledge of
things is due to the kaleidoscopic character of our adaptation to them_.
The cinematographical method is therefore the only practical method,
since it consists in making the general character of knowledge form
itself on that of action, while expecting that the detail of each act
should depend in its turn on that of knowledge. In order that action may
always be enlightened, intelligence must always be present in it; but
intelligence, in order thus to accompany the progress of activity and
ensure its direction, must begin by adopting its rhythm. Action is
discontinuous, like every pulsation of life; discontinuous, therefore,
is knowledge. The mechanism of the faculty of knowing has been
constructed on this plan. Essentially practical, can it be of use, such
as it is, for speculation? Let us try with it to follow reality in its
windings, and see what will happen.
I take of the continuity of a particular becoming a series of views,
which I connect together by "becoming in general." But of course I
cannot stop there. What is not determinable is not representable: of
"becoming in general" I have only a verbal knowledge. As the letter _x_
designates a certain unknown quantity, whatever it may be, so my
"becoming in general," always the same, symbolizes here a certain
transition of which I have taken some snapshots; of the transition
itself it teaches me nothing. Let me then concentrate myself wholly on
the transition, and, between any two snapshots, endeavor to realize what
is going on. As I apply the same method, I obtain the same result; a
third view merely slips in between the two others. I may begin again as
often as I will, I may set views alongside of views for ever, I shall
obtain nothing else. The application of the cinematographical method
therefore leads to a perpetual recommencement, during which the mind,
never able to satisfy itself and never finding where to rest, persuades
itself, no doubt, that it imitates by its instability the very movement
of the real. But though, by straining itself to the point of giddiness,
it may end by giving itself the illusion of mobility, its operation has
not advanced it a step, since it remains as far as ever from its goal.
In order to advance with the moving reality, you must replace yourself
within it. Install yourself within change, and you will grasp at once
both change itself and the successive states in which _it might_ at any
instant be immobilized. But with these successive states, perceived from
without as real and no longer as potential immobilities, you will never
reconstitute movement. Call them _qualities_, _forms_, _positions_, or
_intentions_, as the case may be, multiply the number of them as you
will, let the interval between two consecutive states be infinitely
small: before the intervening movement you will always experience the
disappointment of the child who tries by clapping his hands together to
crush the smoke. The movement slips through the interval, because every
attempt to reconstitute change out of states implies the absurd
proposition, that movement is made of immobilities.
Philosophy perceived this as soon as it opened its eyes. The arguments
of Zeno of Elea, although formulated with a very different intention,
have no other meaning.
Take the flying arrow. At every moment, says Zeno, it is motionless, for
it cannot have time to move, that is, to occupy at least two successive
positions, unless at least two moments are allowed it. At a given
moment, therefore, it is at rest at a given point. Motionless in each
point of its course, it is motionless during all the time that it is
moving.
Yes, if we suppose that the arrow can ever _be_ in a point of its
course. Yes again, if the arrow, which is moving, ever coincides with a
position, which is motionless. But the arrow never _is_ in any point of
its course. The most we can say is that it might be there, in this
sense, that it passes there and might stop there. It is true that if it
did stop there, it would be at rest there, and at this point it is no
longer movement that we should have to do with. The truth is that if the
arrow leaves the point A to fall down at the point B, its movement AB is
as simple, as indecomposable, in so far as it is movement, as the
tension of the bow that shoots it. As the shrapnel, bursting before it
falls to the ground, covers the explosive zone with an indivisible
danger, so the arrow which goes from A to B displays with a single
stroke, although over a certain extent of duration, its indivisible
mobility. Suppose an elastic stretched from A to B, could you divide its
extension? The course of the arrow is this very extension; it is equally
simple and equally undivided. It is a single and unique bound. You fix a
point C in the interval passed, and say that at a certain moment the
arrow was in C. If it had been there, it would have been stopped there,
and you would no longer have had a flight from A to B, but _two_
flights, one from A to C and the other from C to B, with an interval of
rest. A single movement is entirely, by the hypothesis, a movement
between two stops; if there are intermediate stops, it is no longer a
single movement. At bottom, the illusion arises from this, that the
movement, _once effected_, has laid along its course a motionless
trajectory on which we can count as many immobilities as we will. From
this we conclude that the movement, _whilst being effected_, lays at
each instant beneath it a position with which it coincides. We do not
see that the trajectory is created in one stroke, although a certain
time is required for it; and that though we can divide at will the
trajectory once created, we cannot divide its creation, which is an act
in progress and not a thing. To suppose that the moving body _is_ at a
point of its course is to cut the course in two by a snip of the
scissors at this point, and to substitute two trajectories for the
single trajectory which we were first considering. It is to distinguish
two successive acts where, by the hypothesis, there is only one. In
short, it is to attribute to the course itself of the arrow everything
that can be said of the interval that the arrow has traversed, that is
to say, to admit _a priori_ the absurdity that movement coincides with
immobility.
We shall not dwell here on the three other arguments of Zeno. We have
examined them elsewhere. It is enough to point out that they all consist
in applying the movement to the line traversed, and supposing that what
is true of the line is true of the movement. The line, for example, may
be divided into as many parts as we wish, of any length that we wish,
and it is always the same line. From this we conclude that we have the
right to suppose the movement articulated as we wish, and that it is
always the same movement. We thus obtain a series of absurdities that
all express the same fundamental absurdity. But the possibility of
applying the movement _to_ the line traversed exists only for an
observer who keeping outside the movement and seeing at every instant
the possibility of a stop, tries to reconstruct the real movement with
these possible immobilities. The absurdity vanishes as soon as we adopt
by thought the continuity of the real movement, a continuity of which
every one of us is conscious whenever he lifts an arm or advances a
step. We feel then indeed that the line passed over between two stops is
described with a single indivisible stroke, and that we seek in vain to
practice on the movement, which traces the line, divisions
corresponding, each to each, with the divisions arbitrarily chosen of
the line once it has been traced. The line traversed by the moving body
lends itself to any kind of division, because it has no internal
organization. But all movement is articulated inwardly. It is either an
indivisible bound (which may occupy, nevertheless, a very long duration)
or a series of indivisible bounds. Take the articulations of this
movement into account, or give up speculating on its nature.
When Achilles pursues the tortoise, each of his steps must be treated as
indivisible, and so must each step of the tortoise. After a certain
number of steps, Achilles will have overtaken the tortoise. There is
nothing more simple. If you insist on dividing the two motions further,
distinguish both on the one side and on the other, in the course of
Achilles and in that of the tortoise, the _sub-multiples_ of the steps
of each of them; but respect the natural articulations of the two
courses. As long as you respect them, no difficulty will arise, because
you will follow the indications of experience. But Zeno's device is to
reconstruct the movement of Achilles according to a law arbitrarily
chosen. Achilles with a first step is supposed to arrive at the point
where the tortoise was, with a second step at the point which it has
moved to while he was making the first, and so on. In this case,
Achilles would always have a new step to take. But obviously, to
overtake the tortoise, he goes about it in quite another way. The
movement considered by Zeno would only be the equivalent of the movement
of Achilles if we could treat the movement as we treat the interval
passed through, decomposable and recomposable at will. Once you
subscribe to this first absurdity, all the others follow.[99]
Nothing would be easier, now, than to extend Zeno's argument to
qualitative becoming and to evolutionary becoming. We should find the
same contradictions in these. That the child can become a youth, ripen
to maturity and decline to old age, we understand when we consider that
vital evolution is here the reality itself. Infancy, adolescence,
maturity, old age, are mere views of the mind, _possible stops_ imagined
by us, from without, along the continuity of a progress. On the
contrary, let childhood, adolescence, maturity and old age be given as
integral parts of the evolution, they become _real stops_, and we can no
longer conceive how evolution is possible, for rests placed beside rests
will never be equivalent to a movement. How, with what is made, can we
reconstitute what is being made? How, for instance, from childhood once
posited as a _thing_, shall we pass to adolescence, when, by the
hypothesis, childhood only is given? If we look at it closely, we shall
see that our habitual manner of speaking, which is fashioned after our
habitual manner of thinking, leads us to actual logical
dead-locks--dead-locks to which we allow ourselves to be led without
anxiety, because we feel confusedly that we can always get out of them
if we like: all that we have to do, in fact, is to give up the
cinematographical habits of our intellect. When we say "The child
becomes a man," let us take care not to fathom too deeply the literal
meaning of the expression, or we shall find that, when we posit the
subject "child," the attribute "man" does not yet apply to it, and
that, when we express the attribute "man," it applies no more to the
subject "child." The reality, which is the _transition_ from childhood
to manhood, has slipped between our fingers. We have only the imaginary
stops "child" and "man," and we are very near to saying that one of
these stops _is_ the other, just as the arrow of Zeno _is_, according to
that philosopher, at all the points of the course. The truth is that if
language here were molded on reality, we should not say "The child
becomes the man," but "There is becoming from the child to the man." In
the first proposition, "becomes" is a verb of indeterminate meaning,
intended to mask the absurdity into which we fall when we attribute the
state "man" to the subject "child." It behaves in much the same way as
the movement, always the same, of the cinematographical film, a movement
hidden in the apparatus and whose function it is to superpose the
successive pictures on one another in order to imitate the movement of
the real object. In the second proposition, "becoming" is a subject. It
comes to the front. It is the reality itself; childhood and manhood are
then only possible stops, mere views of the mind; we now have to do with
the objective movement itself, and no longer with its cinematographical
imitation. But the first manner of expression is alone conformable to
our habits of language. We must, in order to adopt the second, escape
from the cinematographical mechanism of thought.
We must make complete abstraction of this mechanism, if we wish to get
rid at one stroke of the theoretical absurdities that the question of
movement raises. All is obscure, all is contradictory when we try, with
states, to build up a transition. The obscurity is cleared up, the
contradiction vanishes, as soon as we place ourselves along the
transition, in order to distinguish states in it by making cross cuts
therein in thought. The reason is that there is _more_ in the transition
than the series of states, that is to say, the possible cuts--_more_ in
the movement than the series of positions, that is to say, the possible
stops. Only, the first way of looking at things is conformable to the
processes of the human mind; the second requires, on the contrary, that
we reverse the bent of our intellectual habits. No wonder, then, if
philosophy at first recoiled before such an effort. The Greeks trusted
to nature, trusted the natural propensity of the mind, trusted language
above all, in so far as it naturally externalizes thought. Rather than
lay blame on the attitude of thought and language toward the course of
things, they preferred to pronounce the course of things itself to be
wrong.
Such, indeed, was the sentence passed by the philosophers of the Eleatic
school. And they passed it without any reservation whatever. As becoming
shocks the habits of thought and fits ill into the molds of language,
they declared it unreal. In spatial movement and in change in general
they saw only pure illusion. This conclusion could be softened down
without changing the premisses, by saying that the reality changes, but
that it _ought not_ to change. Experience confronts us with becoming:
that is _sensible_ reality. But the _intelligible_ reality, that which
_ought_ to be, is more real still, and that reality does not change.
Beneath the qualitative becoming, beneath the evolutionary becoming,
beneath the extensive becoming, the mind must seek that which defies
change, the definable quality, the form or essence, the end. Such was
the fundamental principle of the philosophy which developed throughout
the classic age, the philosophy of Forms, or, to use a term more akin to
the Greek, the philosophy of Ideas.
The word [Greek: eidos], which we translate here by "Idea," has, in
fact, this threefold meaning. It denotes (1) the quality, (2) the form
or essence, (3) the end or _design_ (in the sense of _intention_) of the
act being performed, that is to say, at bottom, the _design_ (in the
sense of _drawing_) of the act supposed accomplished. _These three
aspects are those of the adjective, substantive and verb, and correspond
to the three essential categories of language._ After the explanations
we have given above, we might, and perhaps we ought to, translate
[Greek: eidos] by "view" or rather by "moment." For [Greek: eidos] is
the stable view taken of the instability of things: the _quality_, which
is a moment of becoming; the _form_, which is a moment of evolution; the
_essence_, which is the mean form above and below which the other forms
are arranged as alterations of the mean; finally, the intention or
_mental design_ which presides over the action being accomplished, and
which is nothing else, we said, than the _material design_, traced out
and contemplated beforehand, of the action accomplished. To reduce
things to Ideas is therefore to resolve becoming into its principal
moments, each of these being, moreover, by the hypothesis, screened from
the laws of time and, as it were, plucked out of eternity. That is to
say that we end in the philosophy of Ideas when we apply the
cinematographical mechanism of the intellect to the analysis of the
real.
But, when we put immutable Ideas at the base of the moving reality, a
whole physics, a whole cosmology, a whole theology follows necessarily.
We must insist on the point. Not that we mean to summarize in a few
pages a philosophy so complex and so comprehensive as that of the
Greeks. But, since we have described the cinematographical mechanism of
the intellect, it is important that we should show to what idea of
reality the play of this mechanism leads. It is the very idea, we
believe, that we find in the ancient philosophy. The main lines of the
doctrine that was developed from Plato to Plotinus, passing through
Aristotle (and even, in a certain measure, through the Stoics), have
nothing accidental, nothing contingent, nothing that must be regarded as
a philosopher's fancy. They indicate the vision that a systematic
intellect obtains of the universal becoming when regarding it by means
of snapshots, taken at intervals, of its flowing. So that, even to-day,
we shall philosophize in the manner of the Greeks, we shall rediscover,
without needing to know them, such and such of their general
conclusions, in the exact proportion that we trust in the
cinematographical instinct of our thought.
* * * * *
We said there is _more_ in a movement than in the successive positions
attributed to the moving object, _more_ in a becoming than in the forms
passed through in turn, _more_ in the evolution of form than the forms
assumed one after another. Philosophy can therefore derive terms of the
second kind from those of the first, but not the first from the second:
from the first terms speculation must take its start. But the intellect
reverses the order of the two groups; and, on this point, ancient
philosophy proceeds as the intellect does. It installs itself in the
immutable, it posits only Ideas. Yet becoming exists: it is a fact. How,
then, having posited immutability alone, shall we make change come forth
from it? Not by the addition of anything, for, by the hypothesis, there
exists nothing positive outside Ideas. It must therefore be by a
diminution. So at the base of ancient philosophy lies necessarily this
postulate: that there is more in the motionless than in the moving, and
that we pass from immutability to becoming by way of diminution or
attenuation.
It is therefore something negative, or zero at most, that must be added
to Ideas to obtain change. In that consists the Platonic "non-being,"
the Aristotelian "matter"--a metaphysical zero which, joined to the
Idea, like the arithmetical zero to unity, multiplies it in space and
time. By it the motionless and simple Idea is refracted into a movement
spread out indefinitely. In right, there ought to be nothing but
immutable Ideas, immutably fitted to each other. In fact, matter comes
to add to them its void, and thereby lets loose the universal becoming.
It is an elusive nothing, that creeps between the Ideas and creates
endless agitation, eternal disquiet, like a suspicion insinuated between
two loving hearts. Degrade the immutable Ideas: you obtain, by that
alone, the perpetual flux of things. The Ideas or Forms are the whole of
intelligible reality, that is to say, of truth, in that they represent,
all together, the theoretical equilibrium of Being. As to sensible
reality, it is a perpetual oscillation from one side to the other of
this point of equilibrium.
Hence, throughout the whole philosophy of Ideas there is a certain
conception of duration, as also of the relation of time to eternity. He
who installs himself in becoming sees in duration the very life of
things, the fundamental reality. The Forms, which the mind isolates and
stores up in concepts, are then only snapshots of the changing reality.
They are moments gathered along the course of time; and, just because we
have cut the thread that binds them to time, they no longer endure. They
tend to withdraw into their own definition, that is to say, into the
artificial reconstruction and symbolical expression which is their
intellectual equivalent. They enter into eternity, if you will; but what
is eternal in them is just what is unreal. On the contrary, if we treat
becoming by the cinematographical method, the Forms are no longer
snapshots taken of the change, they are its constitutive elements, they
represent all that is positive in Becoming. Eternity no longer hovers
over time, as an abstraction; it underlies time, as a reality. Such is
exactly, on this point, the attitude of the philosophy of Forms or
Ideas. It establishes between eternity and time the same relation as
between a piece of gold and the small change--change so small that
payment goes on for ever without the debt being paid off. The debt could
be paid at once with the piece of gold. It is this that Plato expresses
in his magnificent language when he says that God, unable to make the
world eternal, gave it Time, "a moving image of eternity."[100]
Hence also arises a certain conception of extension, which is at the
base of the philosophy of Ideas, although it has not been so explicitly
brought out. Let us imagine a mind placed alongside becoming, and
adopting its movement. Each successive state, each quality, each form,
in short, will be seen by it as a mere cut made by thought in the
universal becoming. It will be found that form is essentially extended,
inseparable as it is from the extensity of the becoming which has
materialized it in the course of its flow. Every form thus occupies
space, as it occupies time. But the philosophy of Ideas follows the
inverse direction. It starts from the Form; it sees in the Form the very
essence of reality. It does not take Form as a snapshot of becoming; it
posits Forms in the eternal; of this motionless eternity, then, duration
and becoming are supposed to be only the degradation. Form thus posited,
independent of time, is then no longer what is found in a perception; it
is a _concept_. And, as a reality of the conceptual order occupies no
more of extension than it does of duration, the Forms must be stationed
outside space as well as above time. Space and time have therefore
necessarily, in ancient philosophy, the same origin and the same value.
The same diminution of being is expressed both by extension in space and
detention in time. Both of these are but the distance between what is
and what ought to be. From the standpoint of ancient philosophy, space
and time can be nothing but the field that an incomplete reality, or
rather a reality that has gone astray from itself, needs in order to run
in quest of itself. Only it must be admitted that the field is created
as the hunting progresses, and that the hunting in some way deposits the
field beneath it. Move an imaginary pendulum, a mere mathematical point,
from its position of equilibrium: a perpetual oscillation is started,
along which points are placed next to points, and moments succeed
moments. The space and time which thus arise have no more "positivity"
than the movement itself. They represent the remoteness of the position
artificially given to the pendulum from its normal position, _what it
lacks_ in order to regain its natural stability. Bring it back to its
normal position: space, time and motion shrink to a mathematical point.
Just so, human reasonings are drawn out into an endless chain, but are
at once swallowed up in the truth seized by intuition, for their
extension in space and time is only the distance, so to speak, between
thought and truth.[101] So of extension and duration in relation to pure
Forms or Ideas. The sensible forms are before us, ever about to recover
their ideality, ever prevented by the matter they bear in them, that is
to say, by their inner void, by the interval between what they are and
what they ought to be. They are for ever on the point of recovering
themselves, for ever occupied in losing themselves. An inflexible law
condemns them, like the rock of Sisyphus, to fall back when they are
almost touching the summit, and this law, which has projected them into
space and time, is nothing other than the very constancy of their
original insufficiency. The alternations of generation and decay, the
evolutions ever beginning over and over again, the infinite repetition
of the cycles of celestial spheres--this all represents merely a certain
fundamental deficit, in which materiality consists. Fill up this
deficit: at once you suppress space and time, that is to say, the
endlessly renewed oscillations around a stable equilibrium always aimed
at, never reached. Things re-enter into each other. What was extended in
space is contracted into pure Form. And past, present, and future shrink
into a single moment, which is eternity.
This amounts to saying that physics is but logic spoiled. In this
proposition the whole philosophy of Ideas is summarized. And in it also
is the hidden principle of the philosophy that is innate in our
understanding. If immutability is more than becoming, form is more than
change, and it is by a veritable fall that the logical system of Ideas,
rationally subordinated and coördinated among themselves, is scattered
into a physical series of objects and events accidentally placed one
after another. The generative idea of a poem is developed in thousands
of imaginations which are materialized in phrases that spread themselves
out in words. And the more we descend from the motionless idea, wound on
itself, to the words that unwind it, the more room is left for
contingency and choice. Other metaphors, expressed by other words, might
have arisen; an image is called up by an image, a word by a word. All
these words run now one after another, seeking in vain, by themselves,
to give back the simplicity of the generative idea. Our ear only hears
the words: it therefore perceives only accidents. But our mind, by
successive bounds, leaps from the words to the images, from the images
to the original idea, and so gets back, from the perception of
words--accidents called up by accidents--to the conception of the Idea
that posits its own being. So the philosopher proceeds, confronted with
the universe. Experience makes to pass before his eyes phenomena which
run, they also, one behind another in an accidental order determined by
circumstances of time and place. This physical order--a degeneration of
the logical order--is nothing else but the fall of the logical into
space and time. But the philosopher, ascending again from the percept to
the concept, sees condensed into the logical all the positive reality
that the physical possesses. His intellect, doing away with the
materiality that lessens being, grasps being itself in the immutable
system of Ideas. Thus Science is obtained, which appears to us, complete
and ready-made, as soon as we put back our intellect into its true
place, correcting the deviation that separated it from the intelligible.
Science is not, then, a human construction. It is prior to our
intellect, independent of it, veritably the generator of Things.
And indeed, if we hold the Forms to be simply snapshots taken by the
mind of the continuity of becoming, they must be relative to the mind
that thinks them, they can have no independent existence. At most we
might say that each of these Ideas is an _ideal_. But it is in the
opposite hypothesis that we are placing ourselves. Ideas must then exist
by themselves. Ancient philosophy could not escape this conclusion.
Plato formulated it, and in vain did Aristotle strive to avoid it. Since
movement arises from the degradation of the immutable, there could be no
movement, consequently no sensible world, if there were not, somewhere,
immutability realized. So, having begun by refusing to Ideas an
independent existence, and finding himself nevertheless unable to
deprive them of it, Aristotle pressed them into each other, rolled them
up into a ball, and set above the physical world a Form that was thus
found to be the Form of Forms, the Idea of Ideas, or, to use his own
words, the Thought of Thought. Such is the God of Aristotle--necessarily
immutable and apart from what is happening in the world, since he is
only the synthesis of all concepts in a single concept. It is true that
no one of the manifold concepts could exist apart, such as it is in the
divine unity: in vain should we look for the ideas of Plato within the
God of Aristotle. But if only we imagine the God of Aristotle in a sort
of refraction of himself, or simply inclining toward the world, at once
the Platonic Ideas are seen to pour themselves out of him, as if they
were involved in the unity of his essence: so rays stream out from the
sun, which nevertheless did not contain them. It is probably this
_possibility of an outpouring_ of Platonic Ideas from the Aristotelian
God that is meant, in the philosophy of Aristotle, by the active
intellect, the [Greek: nous] that has been called [Greek:
poiêtikos]--that is, by what is essential and yet unconscious in human
intelligence. The [Greek: nous poiêtikos] is Science entire, posited all
at once, which the conscious, discursive intellect is condemned to
reconstruct with difficulty, bit by bit. There is then within us, or
rather behind us, a possible vision of God, as the Alexandrians said, a
vision always virtual, never actually realized by the conscious
intellect. In this intuition we should see God expand in Ideas. This it
is that "does everything,"[102] playing in relation to the discursive
intellect, which moves in time, the same rôle as the motionless Mover
himself plays in relation to the movement of the heavens and the course
of things.
There is, then, immanent in the philosophy of Ideas, a particular
conception of causality, which it is important to bring into full
light, because it is that which each of us will reach when, in order to
ascend to the origin of things, he follows to the end the natural
movement of the intellect. True, the ancient philosophers never
formulated it explicitly. They confined themselves to drawing the
consequences of it, and, in general, they have marked but points of view
of it rather than presented it itself. Sometimes, indeed, they speak of
an _attraction_, sometimes of an _impulsion_ exercised by the prime
mover on the whole of the world. Both views are found in Aristotle, who
shows us in the movement of the universe an aspiration of things toward
the divine perfection, and consequently an ascent toward God, while he
describes it elsewhere as the effect of a contact of God with the first
sphere and as descending, consequently, from God to things. The
Alexandrians, we think, do no more than follow this double indication
when they speak of _procession_ and _conversion_. Everything is derived
from the first principle, and everything aspires to return to it. But
these two conceptions of the divine causality can only be identified
together if we bring them, both the one and the other, back to a third,
which we hold to be fundamental, and which alone will enable us to
understand, not only why, in what sense, things move in space and time,
but also why there is space and time, why there is movement, why there
are things.
This conception, which more and more shows through the reasonings of the
Greek philosophers as we go from Plato to Plotinus, we may formulate
thus: _The affirmation of a reality implies the simultaneous affirmation
of all the degrees of reality intermediate between it and nothing._ The
principle is evident in the case of number: we cannot affirm the number
10 without thereby affirming the existence of the numbers 9, 8, 7, ...,
etc.--in short, of the whole interval between 10 and zero. But here our
mind passes naturally from the sphere of quantity to that of quality.
It seems to us that, a certain perfection being given, the whole
continuity of degradations is given also between this perfection, on the
one hand, and the nought, on the other hand, that we think we conceive.
Let us then posit the God of Aristotle, thought of thought--that is,
thought _making a circle_, transforming itself from subject to object
and from object to subject by an instantaneous, or rather an eternal,
circular process: as, on the other hand, the nought appears to posit
itself, and as, the two extremities being given, the interval between
them is equally given, it follows that all the descending degrees of
being, from the divine perfection down to the "absolute nothing," are
realized automatically, so to speak, when we have posited God.
Let us then run through this interval from top to bottom. First of all,
the slightest diminution of the first principle will be enough to
precipitate Being into space and time; but duration and extension, which
represent this first diminution, will be as near as possible to the
divine inextension and eternity. We must therefore picture to ourselves
this first degradation of the divine principle as a sphere turning on
itself, imitating, by the perpetuity of its circular movement, the
eternity of the circle of the divine thought; creating, moreover, its
own place, and thereby place in general,[103] since it includes without
being included and moves without stirring from the spot; creating also
its own duration, and thereby duration in general, since its movement is
the measure of all motion.[104] Then, by degrees, we shall see the
perfection decrease, more and more, down to our sublunary world, in
which the cycle of birth, growth and decay imitates and mars the
original circle for the last time. So understood, the causal relation
between God and the world is seen as an attraction when regarded from
below, as an impulsion or a contact when regarded from above, since the
first heaven, with its circular movement, is an imitation of God and all
imitation is the reception of a form. Therefore, we perceive God as
efficient cause or as final cause, according to the point of view. And
yet neither of these two relations is the ultimate causal relation. The
true relation is that which is found between the two members of an
equation, when the first member is a single term and the second a sum of
an endless number of terms. It is, we may say, the relation of the
gold-piece to the small change, if we suppose the change to offer itself
automatically as soon as the gold piece is presented. Only thus can we
understand why Aristotle has demonstrated the necessity of a first
motionless mover, not by founding it on the assertion that the movement
of things must have had a beginning, but, on the contrary, by affirming
that this movement could not have begun and can never come to an end. If
movement exists, or, in other words, if the small change is being
counted, the gold piece is to be found somewhere. And if the counting
goes on for ever, having never begun, the single term that is eminently
equivalent to it must be eternal. A perpetuity of mobility is possible
only if it is backed by an eternity of immutability, which it unwinds in
a chain without beginning or end.
Such is the last word of the Greek philosophy. We have not attempted to
reconstruct it _a priori_. It has manifold origins. It is connected by
many invisible threads to the soul of ancient Greece. Vain, therefore,
the effort to deduce it from a simple principle.[105] But if everything
that has come from poetry, religion, social life and a still rudimentary
physics and biology be removed from it, if we take away all the light
material that may have been used in the construction of the stately
building, a solid framework remains, and this framework marks out the
main lines of a metaphysic which is, we believe, the natural metaphysic
of the human intellect. We come to a philosophy of this kind, indeed,
whenever we follow to the end, the cinematographical tendency of
perception and thought. Our perception and thought begin by substituting
for the continuity of evolutionary change a series of unchangeable forms
which are turn by turn, "caught on the wing," like the rings at a
merry-go-round, which the children unhook with their little stick as
they are passing. Now, how can the forms be passing, and on what "stick"
are they strung? As the stable forms have been obtained by extracting
from change everything that is definite, there is nothing left, to
characterize the instability on which the forms are laid, but a negative
attribute, which must be indetermination itself. Such is the first
proceeding of our thought: it dissociates each change into two
elements--the one stable, definable for each particular case, to wit,
the Form; the other indefinable and always the same, Change in general.
And such, also, is the essential operation of language. Forms are all
that it is capable of expressing. It is reduced to taking as understood
or is limited to _suggesting_ a mobility which, just because it is
always unexpressed, is thought to remain in all cases the same.--Then
comes in a philosophy that holds the dissociation thus effected by
thought and language to be legitimate. What can it do, except objectify
the distinction with more force, push it to its extreme consequences,
reduce it into a system? It will therefore construct the real, on the
one hand, with definite Forms or immutable elements, and, on the other,
with a principle of mobility which, being the negation of the form,
will, by the hypothesis, escape all definition and be the purely
indeterminate. The more it directs its attention to the forms delineated
by thought and expressed by language, the more it will see them rise
above the sensible and become subtilized into pure concepts, capable of
entering one within the other, and even of being at last massed together
into a single concept, the synthesis of all reality, the achievement of
all perfection. The more, on the contrary, it descends toward the
invisible source of the universal mobility, the more it will feel this
mobility sink beneath it and at the same time become void, vanish into
what it will call the "non-being." Finally, it will have on the one hand
the system of ideas, logically coördinated together or concentrated into
one only, on the other a quasi-nought, the Platonic "non-being" or the
Aristotelian "matter."--But, having cut your cloth, you must sew it.
With supra-sensible Ideas and an infra-sensible non-being, you now have
to reconstruct the sensible world. You can do so only if you postulate a
kind of metaphysical necessity in virtue of which the confronting of
this All with this Zero _is equivalent_ to the affirmation of all the
degrees of reality that measure the interval between them--just as an
undivided number, when regarded as a difference between itself and zero,
is revealed as a certain sum of units, and with its own affirmation
affirms all the lower numbers. That is the natural postulate. It is that
also that we perceive as the base of the Greek philosophy. In order then
to explain the specific characters of each of these degrees of
intermediate reality, nothing more is necessary than to measure the
distance that separates it from the integral reality. Each lower degree
consists in a diminution of the higher, and the _sensible_ newness that
we perceive in it is resolved, from the point of view of the
_intelligible_, into a new quantity of negation which is superadded to
it. The smallest possible quantity of negation, that which is found
already in the highest forms of sensible reality, and consequently _a
fortiori_ in the lower forms, is that which is expressed by the most
general attributes of sensible reality, extension and duration. By
increasing degradations we will obtain attributes more and more special.
Here the philosopher's fancy will have free scope, for it is by an
arbitrary decree, or at least a debatable one, that a particular aspect
of the sensible world will be equated with a particular diminution of
being. We shall not necessarily end, as Aristotle did, in a world
consisting of concentric spheres turning on themselves. But we shall be
led to an analogous cosmology--I mean, to a construction whose pieces,
though all different, will have none the less the same relations between
them. And this cosmology will be ruled by the same principle. The
physical will be defined by the logical. Beneath the changing phenomena
will appear to us, by transparence, a closed system of concepts
subordinated to and coördinated with each other. Science, understood as
the system of concepts, will be more real than the sensible reality. It
will be prior to human knowledge, which is only able to spell it letter
by letter; prior also to things, which awkwardly try to imitate it. It
would only have to be diverted an instant from itself in order to step
out of its eternity and thereby coincide with all this knowledge and all
these things. Its immutability is therefore, indeed, the cause of the
universal becoming.
Such was the point of view of ancient philosophy in regard to change
and duration. That modern philosophy has repeatedly, but especially in
its beginnings, had the wish to depart from it, seems to us
unquestionable. But an irresistible attraction brings the intellect back
to its natural movement, and the metaphysic of the moderns to the
general conclusions of the Greek metaphysic. We must try to make this
point clear, in order to show by what invisible threads our mechanistic
philosophy remains bound to the ancient philosophy of Ideas, and how
also it responds to the requirements, above all practical, of our
understanding.
* * * * *
Modern, like ancient, science proceeds according to the
cinematographical method. It cannot do otherwise; all science is subject
to this law. For it is of the essence of science to handle _signs_,
which it substitutes for the objects themselves. These signs undoubtedly
differ from those of language by their greater precision and their
higher efficacy; they are none the less tied down to the general
condition of the sign, which is to denote a fixed aspect of the reality
under an arrested form. In order to think movement, a constantly renewed
effort of the mind is necessary. Signs are made to dispense us with this
effort by substituting, for the moving continuity of things, an
artificial reconstruction which is its equivalent in practice and has
the advantage of being easily handled. But let us leave aside the means
and consider only the end. What is the essential object of science? It
is to enlarge our influence over things. Science may be speculative in
its form, disinterested in its immediate ends; in other words we may
give it as long a credit as it wants. But, however long the day of
reckoning may be put off, some time or other the payment must be made.
It is always then, in short, practical utility that science has in view.
Even when it launches into theory, it is bound to adapt its behavior to
the general form of practice. However high it may rise, it must be ready
to fall back into the field of action, and at once to get on its feet.
This would not be possible for it, if its rhythm differed absolutely
from that of action itself. Now action, we have said, proceeds by leaps.
To act is to re-adapt oneself. To know, that is to say, to foresee in
order to act, is then to go from situation to situation, from
arrangement to rearrangement. Science may consider rearrangements that
come closer and closer to each other; it may thus increase the number of
moments that it isolates, but it always isolates moments. As to what
happens in the interval between the moments, science is no more
concerned with that than are our common intelligence, our senses and our
language: it does not bear on the interval, but only on the extremities.
So the cinematographical method forces itself upon our science, as it
did already on that of the ancients.
Wherein, then, is the difference between the two sciences? We indicated
it when we said that the ancients reduced the physical order to the
vital order, that is to say, laws to genera, while the moderns try to
resolve genera into laws. But we have to look at it in another aspect,
which, moreover, is only a transposition, of the first. Wherein consists
the difference of attitude of the two sciences toward change? We may
formulate it by saying that _ancient science thinks it knows its object
sufficiently when it has noted of it some privileged moments, whereas
modern science considers the object at any moment whatever_.
The forms or ideas of Plato or of Aristotle correspond to privileged or
salient moments in the history of things--those, in general, that have
been fixed by language. They are supposed, like the childhood or the old
age of a living being, to characterize a period of which they express
the quintessence, all the rest of this period being filled by the
passage, of no interest in itself, from one form to another form. Take,
for instance, a falling body. It was thought that we got near enough to
the fact when we characterized it as a whole: it was a movement
_downward_; it was the tendency toward a _centre_; it was the _natural_
movement of a body which, separated from the earth to which it belonged,
was now going to find its place again. They noted, then, the final term
or culminating point ([Greek: telos, akmê]) and set it up as the
essential moment: this moment, that language has retained in order to
express the whole of the fact, sufficed also for science to characterize
it. In the physics of Aristotle, it is by the concepts "high" and "low,"
spontaneous displacement and forced displacement, own place and strange
place, that the movement of a body shot into space or falling freely is
defined. But Galileo thought there was no essential moment, no
privileged instant. To study the falling body is to consider it at it
matters not what moment in its course. The true science of gravity is
that which will determine, for any moment of time whatever, the position
of the body in space. For this, indeed, signs far more precise than
those of language are required.
We may say, then, that our physics differs from that of the ancients
chiefly in the indefinite breaking up of time. For the ancients, time
comprises as many undivided periods as our natural perception and our
language cut out in it successive facts, each presenting a kind of
individuality. For that reason, each of these facts admits, in their
view, of only a _total_ definition or description. If, in describing it,
we are led to distinguish phases in it, we have several facts instead of
a single one, several undivided periods instead of a single period; but
time is always supposed to be divided into determinate periods, and the
mode of division to be forced on the mind by apparent crises of the
real, comparable to that of puberty, by the apparent release of a new
form.--For a Kepler or a Galileo, on the contrary, time is not divided
objectively in one way or another by the matter that fills it. It has no
natural articulations. We can, we ought to, divide it as we please. All
moments count. None of them has the right to set itself up as a moment
that represents or dominates the others. And, consequently, we know a
change only when we are able to determine what it is about at any one of
its moments.
The difference is profound. In fact, in a certain aspect it is radical.
But, from the point of view from which we are regarding it, it is a
difference of degree rather than of kind. The human mind has passed from
the first kind of knowledge to the second through gradual perfecting,
simply by seeking a higher precision. There is the same relation between
these two sciences as between the noting of the phases of a movement by
the eye and the much more complete recording of these phases by
instantaneous photography. It is the same cinematographical mechanism in
both cases, but it reaches a precision in the second that it cannot have
in the first. Of the gallop of a horse our eye perceives chiefly a
characteristic, essential or rather schematic attitude, a form that
appears to radiate over a whole period and so fill up a time of gallop.
It is this attitude that sculpture has fixed on the frieze of the
Parthenon. But instantaneous photography isolates any moment; it puts
them all in the same rank, and thus the gallop of a horse spreads out
for it into as many successive attitudes as it wishes, instead of
massing itself into a single attitude, which is supposed to flash out in
a privileged moment and to illuminate a whole period.
From this original difference flow all the others. A science that
considers, one after the other, undivided periods of duration, sees
nothing but phases succeeding phases, forms replacing forms; it is
content with a _qualitative_ description of objects, which it likens to
organized beings. But when we seek to know what happens within one of
these periods, at any moment of time, we are aiming at something
entirely different. The changes which are produced from one moment to
another are no longer, by the hypothesis, changes of quality; they are
_quantitative_ variations, it may be of the phenomenon itself, it may be
of its elementary parts. We were right then to say that modern science
is distinguishable from the ancient in that it applies to magnitudes and
proposes first and foremost to measure them. The ancients did indeed try
experiments, and on the other hand Kepler tried no experiment, in the
proper sense of the word, in order to discover a law which is the very
type of scientific knowledge as we understand it. What distinguishes
modern science is not that it is experimental, but that it experiments
and, more generally, works only with a view to measure.
For that reason it is right, again, to say that ancient science applied
to _concepts_, while modern science seeks _laws_--constant relations
between variable magnitudes. The concept of circularity was sufficient
to Aristotle to define the movement of the heavenly bodies. But, even
with the more accurate concept of elliptical form, Kepler did not think
he had accounted for the movement of planets. He had to get a law, that
is to say, a constant relation between the quantitative variations of
two or several elements of the planetary movement.
Yet these are only consequences--differences that follow from the
fundamental difference. It did happen to the ancients accidentally to
experiment with a view to measuring, as also to discover a law
expressing a constant relation between magnitudes. The principle of
Archimedes is a true experimental law. It takes into account three
variable magnitudes: the volume of a body, the density of the liquid in
which the body is immersed, the vertical pressure that is being exerted.
And it states indeed that one of these three terms is a function of the
other two.
The essential, original difference must therefore be sought elsewhere.
It is the same that we noticed first. The science of the ancients is
static. Either it considers in block the change that it studies, or, if
it divides the change into periods, it makes of each of these periods a
block in its turn: which amounts to saying that it takes no account of
time. But modern science has been built up around the discoveries of
Galileo and of Kepler, which immediately furnished it with a model. Now,
what do the laws of Kepler say? They lay down a relation between the
areas described by the heliocentric radius-vector of a planet and the
_time_ employed in describing them, a relation between the longer axis
of the orbit and the _time_ taken up by the course. And what was the
principle discovered by Galileo? A law which connected the space
traversed by a falling body with the _time_ occupied by the fall.
Furthermore, in what did the first of the great transformations of
geometry in modern times consist, if not in introducing--in a veiled
form, it is true--time and movement even in the consideration of
figures? For the ancients, geometry was a purely static science. Figures
were given to it at once, completely finished, like the Platonic Ideas.
But the essence of the Cartesian geometry (although Descartes did not
give it this form) was to regard every plane curve as described by the
movement of a point on a movable straight line which is displaced,
parallel to itself, along the axis of the abscissae--the displacement of
the movable straight line being supposed to be uniform and the abscissa
thus becoming representative of the time. The curve is then defined if
we can state the relation connecting the space traversed on the movable
straight line to the time employed in traversing it, that is, if we are
able to indicate the position of the movable point, on the straight line
which it traverses, at any moment whatever of its course. This relation
is just what we call the equation of the curve. To substitute an
equation for a figure consists, therefore, in seeing the actual position
of the moving points in the tracing of the curve at any moment whatever,
instead of regarding this tracing all at once, gathered up in the unique
moment when the curve has reached its finished state.
Such, then, was the directing idea of the reform by which both the
science of nature and mathematics, which serves as its instrument, were
renewed. Modern science is the daughter of astronomy; it has come down
from heaven to earth along the inclined plane of Galileo, for it is
through Galileo that Newton and his successors are connected with
Kepler. Now, how did the astronomical problem present itself to Kepler?
The question was, knowing the respective positions of the planets at a
given moment, how to calculate their positions at any other moment. So
the same question presented itself, henceforth, for every material
system. Each material point became a rudimentary planet, and the main
question, the ideal problem whose solution would yield the key to all
the others was, the positions of these elements at a particular moment
being given, how to determine their relative positions at any moment. No
doubt the problem cannot be put in these precise terms except in very
simple cases, for a schematized reality; for we never know the
respective positions of the real elements of matter, supposing there are
real elements; and, even if we knew them at a given moment, the
calculation of their positions at another moment would generally require
a mathematical effort surpassing human powers. But it is enough for us
to know that these elements might be known, that their present
positions might be noted, and that a superhuman intellect might, by
submitting these data to mathematical operations, determine the
positions of the elements at any other moment of time. This conviction
is at the bottom of the questions we put to ourselves on the subject of
nature, and of the methods we employ to solve them. That is why every
law in static form seems to us as a provisional instalment or as a
particular view of a dynamic law which alone would give us whole and
definitive knowledge.
Let us conclude, then, that our science is not only distinguished from
ancient science in this, that it seeks laws, nor even in this, that its
laws set forth relations between magnitudes: we must add that the
magnitude to which we wish to be able to relate all others is time, and
that _modern science must be defined pre-eminently by its aspiration to
take time as an independent variable_. But with what time has it to do?
We have said before, and we cannot repeat too often, that the science of
matter proceeds like ordinary knowledge. It perfects this knowledge,
increases its precision and its scope, but it works in the same
direction and puts the same mechanism into play. If, therefore, ordinary
knowledge, by reason of the cinematographical mechanism to which it is
subjected, forbears to follow becoming in so far as becoming is moving,
the science of matter renounces it equally. No doubt, it distinguishes
as great a number of moments as we wish in the interval of time it
considers. However small the intervals may be at which it stops, it
authorizes us to divide them again if necessary. In contrast with
ancient science, which stopped at certain so-called essential moments,
it is occupied indifferently with any moment whatever. But it always
considers moments, always virtual stopping-places, always, in short,
immobilities. Which amounts to saying that real time, regarded as a
flux, or, in other words, as the very mobility of being, escapes the
hold of scientific knowledge. We have already tried to establish this
point in a former work. We alluded to it again in the first chapter of
this book. But it is necessary to revert to it once more, in order to
clear up misunderstandings.
When positive science speaks of time, what it refers to is the movement
of a certain mobile T on its trajectory. This movement has been chosen
by it as representative of time, and it is, by definition, uniform. Let
us call T_{1}, T_{2}, T_{3}, ... etc., points which divide the trajectory
of the mobile into equal parts from its origin T_0. We shall say that 1, 2,
3, ... units of time have flowed past, when the mobile is at the points
T_{1}, T_{2}, T_{3}, ... of the line it traverses. Accordingly, to consider
the state of the universe at the end of a certain time _t_, is to
examine where it will be when T is at the point T_t of its course. But
of the _flux_ itself of time, still less of its effect on consciousness,
there is here no question; for there enter into the calculation only the
points T_{1}, T_{2}, T_{3}, ... taken on the flux, never the flux itself.
We may narrow the time considered as much as we will, that is, break up at
will the interval between two consecutive divisions T_{n} and T_{n-|-1};
but it is always with points, and with points only, that we are dealing.
What we retain of the movement of the mobile T are positions taken on
its trajectory. What we retain of all the other points of the universe
are their positions on their respective trajectories. To each _virtual
stop_ of the moving body T at the points of division T_{1}, T_{2}, T_{3},
... we make correspond a _virtual stop_ of all the other mobiles at the
points where they are passing. And when we say that a movement or any
other change has occupied a time _t_, we mean by it that we have noted a
number _t_ of correspondences of this kind. We have therefore counted
simultaneities; we have not concerned ourselves with the flux that goes
from one to another. The proof of this is that I can, at discretion,
vary the rapidity of the flux of the universe in regard to a
consciousness that is independent of it and that would perceive the
variation by the quite qualitative _feeling_ that it would have of it:
whatever the variation had been, since the movement of T would
participate in this variation, I should have nothing to change in my
equations nor in the numbers that figure in them.
Let us go further. Suppose that the rapidity of the flux becomes
infinite. Imagine, as we said in the first pages of this book, that the
trajectory of the mobile T is given at once, and that the whole history,
past, present and future, of the material universe is spread out
instantaneously in space. The same mathematical correspondences will
subsist between the moments of the history of the world unfolded like a
fan, so to speak, and the divisions T_{1}, T_{2}, T_{3}, ... of the line
which will be called, by definition, "the course of time." In the eyes of
science nothing will have changed. But if, time thus spreading itself
out in space and succession becoming juxtaposition, science has nothing
to change in what it tells us, we must conclude that, in what it tells
us, it takes account neither of _succession_ in what of it is specific
nor of _time_ in what there is in it that is fluent. It has no sign to
express what strikes our consciousness in succession and duration. It no
more applies to becoming, so far as that is moving, than the bridges
thrown here and there across the stream follow the water that flows
under their arches.
Yet succession exists; I am conscious of it; it is a fact. When a
physical process is going on before my eyes, my perception and my
inclination have nothing to do with accelerating or retarding it. What
is important to the physicist is the _number_ of units of duration the
process fills; he does not concern himself about the units themselves
and that is why the successive states of the world might be spread out
all at once in space without his having to change anything in his
science or to cease talking about time. But for us, conscious beings, it
is the units that matter, for we do not count extremities of intervals,
we feel and live the intervals themselves. Now, we are conscious of
these intervals as of _definite_ intervals. Let me come back again to
the sugar in my glass of water:[106] why must I wait for it to melt?
While the duration of the phenomenon is _relative_ for the physicist,
since it is reduced to a certain number of units of time and the units
themselves are indifferent, this duration is an _absolute_ for my
consciousness, for it coincides with a certain degree of impatience
which is rigorously determined. Whence comes this determination? What is
it that obliges me to wait, and to wait for a certain length of
psychical duration which is forced upon me, over which I have no power?
If succession, in so far as distinct from mere juxtaposition, has no
real efficacy, if time is not a kind of force, why does the universe
unfold its successive states with a velocity which, in regard to my
consciousness, is a veritable absolute? Why with this particular
velocity rather than any other? Why not with an infinite velocity? Why,
in other words, is not everything given at once, as on the film of the
cinematograph? The more I consider this point, the more it seems to me
that, if the future is bound to _succeed_ the present instead of being
given alongside of it, it is because the future is not altogether
determined at the present moment, and that if the time taken up by this
succession is something other than a number, if it has for the
consciousness that is installed in it absolute value and reality, it is
because there is unceasingly being created in it, not indeed in any such
artificially isolated system as a glass of sugared water, but in the
concrete whole of which every such system forms part, something
unforeseeable and new. This duration may not be the fact of matter
itself, but that of the life which reascends the course of matter; the
two movements are none the less mutually dependent upon each other. _The
duration of the universe must therefore be one with the latitude of
creation which can find place in it._
When a child plays at reconstructing a picture by putting together the
separate pieces in a puzzle game, the more he practices, the more and
more quickly he succeeds. The reconstruction was, moreover,
instantaneous, the child found it ready-made, when he opened the box on
leaving the shop. The operation, therefore, does not require a definite
time, and indeed, theoretically, it does not require any time. That is
because the result is given. It is because the picture is already
created, and because to obtain it requires only a work of recomposing
and rearranging--a work that can be supposed going faster and faster,
and even infinitely fast, up to the point of being instantaneous. But,
to the artist who creates a picture by drawing it from the depths of his
soul, time is no longer an accessory; it is not an interval that may be
lengthened or shortened without the content being altered. The duration
of his work is part and parcel of his work. To contract or to dilate it
would be to modify both the psychical evolution that fills it and the
invention which is its goal. The time taken up by the invention, is one
with the invention itself. It is the progress of a thought which is
changing in the degree and measure that it is taking form. It is a vital
process, something like the ripening of an idea.
The painter is before his canvas, the colors are on the palette, the
model is sitting--all this we see, and also we know the painter's
style: do we foresee what will appear on the canvas? We possess the
elements of the problem; we know in an abstract way, how it will be
solved, for the portrait will surely resemble the model and will surely
resemble also the artist; but the concrete solution brings with it that
unforeseeable nothing which is everything in a work of art. And it is
this nothing that takes time. Nought as matter, it creates itself as
form. The sprouting and flowering of this form are stretched out on an
unshrinkable duration, which is one with their essence. So of the works
of nature. Their novelty arises from an internal impetus which is
progress or succession, which confers on succession a peculiar virtue or
which owes to succession the whole of its virtue--which, at any rate,
makes succession, or _continuity of interpenetration_ in time,
irreducible to a mere instantaneous juxtaposition in space. This is why
the idea of reading in a present state of the material universe the
future of living forms, and of unfolding now their history yet to come,
involves a veritable absurdity. But this absurdity is difficult to bring
out, because our memory is accustomed to place alongside of each other,
in an ideal space, the terms it perceives in turn, because it always
represents _past_ succession in the form of juxtaposition. It is able to
do so, indeed, just because the past belongs to that which is already
invented, to the dead, and no longer to creation and to life. Then, as
the succession to come will end by being a succession past, we persuade
ourselves that the duration to come admits of the same treatment as past
duration, that it is, even now, unrollable, that the future is there,
rolled up, already painted on the canvas. An illusion, no doubt, but an
illusion that is natural, ineradicable, and that will last as long as
the human mind!
_Time is invention or it is nothing at all._ But of time-invention
physics can take no account, restricted as it is to the
cinematographical method. It is limited to counting simultaneities
between the events that make up this time and the positions of the
mobile T on its trajectory. It detaches these events from the whole,
which at every moment puts on a new form and which communicates to them
something of its novelty. It considers them in the abstract, such as
they would be outside of the living whole, that is to say, in a time
unrolled in space. It retains only the events or systems of events that
can be thus isolated without being made to undergo too profound a
deformation, because only these lend themselves to the application of
its method. Our physics dates from the day when it was known how to
isolate such systems. To sum up, _while modern physics is distinguished
from ancient physics by the fact that it considers any moment of time
whatever, it rests altogether on a substitution of time-length for
time-invention_.
It seems then that, parallel to this physics, a second kind of knowledge
ought to have grown up, which could have retained what physics allowed
to escape. On the flux itself of duration science neither would nor
could lay hold, bound as it was to the cinematographical method. This
second kind of knowledge would have set the cinematographical method
aside. It would have called upon the mind to renounce its most cherished
habits. It is within becoming that it would have transported us by an
effort of sympathy. We should no longer be asking where a moving body
will be, what shape a system will take, through what state a change will
pass at a given moment: the moments of time, which are only arrests of
our attention, would no longer exist; it is the flow of time, it is the
very flux of the real that we should be trying to follow. The first kind
of knowledge has the advantage of enabling us to foresee the future and
of making us in some measure masters of events; in return, it retains
of the moving reality only eventual immobilities, that is to say, views
taken of it by our mind. It symbolizes the real and transposes it into
the human rather than expresses it. The other knowledge, if it is
possible, is practically useless, it will not extend our empire over
nature, it will even go against certain natural aspirations of the
intellect; but, if it succeeds, it is reality itself that it will hold
in a firm and final embrace. Not only may we thus complete the intellect
and its knowledge of matter by accustoming it to install itself within
the moving, but by developing also another faculty, complementary to the
intellect, we may open a perspective on the other half of the real. For,
as soon as we are confronted with true duration, we see that it means
creation, and that if that which is being unmade endures, it can only be
because it is inseparably bound to what is making itself. Thus will
appear the necessity of a continual growth of the universe, I should say
of a _life_ of the real. And thus will be seen in a new light the life
which we find on the surface of our planet, a life directed the same way
as that of the universe, and inverse of materiality. To intellect, in
short, there will be added intuition.
The more we reflect on it, the more we shall find that this conception
of metaphysics is that which modern science suggests.
For the ancients, indeed, time is theoretically negligible, because the
duration of a thing only manifests the degradation of its essence: it is
with this motionless essence that science has to deal. Change being only
the effort of a form toward its own realization, the realization is all
that it concerns us to know. No doubt the realization is never complete:
it is this that ancient philosophy expresses by saying that we do not
perceive form without matter. But if we consider the changing object at
a certain essential moment, at its apogee, we may say that there it
just touches its intelligible form. This intelligible form, this ideal
and, so to speak, limiting form, our science seizes upon. And possessing
in this the gold-piece, it holds eminently the small money which we call
becoming or change. This change is less than being. The knowledge that
would take it for object, supposing such knowledge were possible, would
be less than science.
But, for a science that places all the moments of time in the same rank,
that admits no essential moment, no culminating point, no apogee, change
is no longer a diminution of essence, duration is not a dilution of
eternity. The flux of time is the reality itself, and the things which
we study are the things which flow. It is true that of this flowing
reality we are limited to taking instantaneous views. But, just because
of this, scientific knowledge must appeal to another knowledge to
complete it. While the ancient conception of scientific knowledge ended
in making time a degradation, and change the diminution of a form given
from all eternity--on the contrary, by following the new conception to
the end, we should come to see in time a progressive growth of the
absolute, and in the evolution of things a continual invention of forms
ever new.
It is true that it would be to break with the metaphysics of the
ancients. They saw only one way of knowing definitely. Their science
consisted in a scattered and fragmentary metaphysics, their metaphysics
in a concentrated and systematic science. Their science and metaphysics
were, at most, two species of one and the same genus. In our hypothesis,
on the contrary, science and metaphysics are two opposed although
complementary ways of knowing, the first retaining only moments, that is
to say, that which does not endure, the second bearing on duration
itself. Now, it was natural to hesitate between so novel a conception
of metaphysics and the traditional conception. The temptation must have
been strong to repeat with the new science what had been tried on the
old, to suppose our scientific knowledge of nature completed at once, to
unify it entirely, and to give to this unification, as the Greeks had
already done, the name of metaphysics. So, beside the new way that
philosophy might have prepared, the old remained open, that indeed which
physics trod. And, as physics retained of time only what could as well
be spread out all at once in space, the metaphysics that chose the same
direction had necessarily to proceed as if time created and annihilated
nothing, as if duration had no efficacy. Bound, like the physics of the
moderns and the metaphysics of the ancients, to the cinematographical
method, it ended with the conclusion, implicitly admitted at the start
and immanent in the method itself: _All is given._
That metaphysics hesitated at first between the two paths seems to us
unquestionable. The indecision is visible in Cartesianism. On the one
hand, Descartes affirms universal mechanism: from this point of view
movement would be relative,[107] and, as time has just as much reality
as movement, it would follow that past, present and future are given
from all eternity. But, on the other hand (and that is why the
philosopher has not gone to these extreme consequences), Descartes
believes in the free will of man. He superposes on the determinism of
physical phenomena the indeterminism of human actions, and,
consequently, on time-length a time in which there is invention,
creation, true succession. This duration he supports on a God who is
unceasingly renewing the creative act, and who, being thus tangent to
time and becoming, sustains them, communicates to them necessarily
something of his absolute reality. When he places himself at this
second point of view, Descartes speaks of movement, even spatial, as of
an absolute.[108]
He therefore entered both roads one after the other, having resolved to
follow neither of them to the end. The first would have led him to the
denial of free will in man and of real will in God. It was the
suppression of all efficient duration, the likening of the universe to a
thing given, which a superhuman intelligence would embrace at once in a
moment or in eternity. In following the second, on the contrary, he
would have been led to all the consequences which the intuition of true
duration implies. Creation would have appeared not simply as
_continued_, but also as _continuous_. The universe, regarded as a
whole, would really evolve. The future would no longer be determinable
by the present; at most we might say that, once realized, it can be
found again in its antecedents, as the sounds of a new language can be
expressed with the letters of an old alphabet if we agree to enlarge the
value of the letters and to attribute to them, retro-actively, sounds
which no combination of the old sounds could have produced beforehand.
Finally, the mechanistic explanation might have remained universal in
this, that it can indeed be extended to as many systems as we choose to
cut out in the continuity of the universe; but mechanism would then have
become a _method_ rather than a _doctrine_. It would have expressed the
fact that science must proceed after the cinematographical manner, that
the function of science is to scan the rhythm of the flow of things and
not to fit itself into that flow.--Such were the two opposite
conceptions of metaphysics which were offered to philosophy.
It chose the first. The reason of this choice is undoubtedly the mind's
tendency to follow the cinematographical method, a method so natural to
our intellect, and so well adjusted also to the requirements of our
science, that we must feel doubly sure of its speculative impotence to
renounce it in metaphysics. But ancient philosophy also influenced the
choice. Artists for ever admirable, the Greeks created a type of
supra-sensible truth, as of sensible beauty, whose attraction is hard to
resist. As soon as we incline to make metaphysics a systematization of
science, we glide in the direction of Plato and of Aristotle. And, once
in the zone of attraction in which the Greek philosophers moved, we are
drawn along in their orbit.
Such was the case with Leibniz, as also with Spinoza. We are not blind
to the treasures of originality their doctrines contain. Spinoza and
Leibniz have poured into them the whole content of their souls, rich
with the inventions of their genius and the acquisitions of modern
thought. And there are in each of them, especially in Spinoza, flashes
of intuition that break through the system. But if we leave out of the
two doctrines what breathes life into them, if we retain the skeleton
only, we have before us the very picture of Platonism and
Aristotelianism seen through Cartesian mechanism. They present to us a
systematization of the new physics, constructed on the model of the
ancient metaphysics.