CHAPTER II. FACT
CHAPTER III. MATTER AND MEMORY
PREFATORY NOTE
_Being an extract from a letter by Professor Henri Bergson_
Ayant lu de près le travail de Mrs. Stephen je le trouve intéressant au
plus haut point. C’est une interprétation personelle et originale de
l’ensemble de mes vues—interprétation qui vaut par elle-même,
indépendamment de ce qui j’ ai écrit. L’auteur s’est assimilé
_l’esprit_ de la doctrine, puis, se dégageant de la matérialité du
texte elle a développé à sa manière, dans la direction qu’elle avait
choisi, des idées qui lui paraissaient fondamentales. Grâce à la
distinction qu’elle “établit entre “ fact “ et “ matter, “ elle a pu
ramener à l’unité, et présenter avec une grande rigueur logique, des
vues que j’avais été obligé, en raison de ma méthode de recherche,
d’isoler les unes des autres. Bref, son travail a une grande valeur; il
témoigne d’une rare force de pensée.
HENRI BERGSON.
PREFACE
The immense popularity which Bergson’s philosophy enjoys is sometimes
cast up against him, by those who do not agree with him, as a reproach.
It has been suggested that Berg-son’s writings are welcomed simply
because they offer a theoretical justification for a tendency which is
natural in all of us but against which philosophy has always fought,
the tendency to throw reason overboard and just let ourselves go.
Bergson is regarded by rationalists almost as a traitor to philosophy,
or as a Bolshevik inciting the public to overthrow what it has taken
years of painful effort to build up.
It is possible that some people who do not understand this philosophy
may use Bergson’s name as a cloak for giving up all self-direction and
letting themselves go intellectually to pieces, just as hooligans may
use a time of revolution to plunder in the name of the Red Guard. But
Bergson’s philosophy is in reality as far from teaching mere laziness
as Communism is from being mere destruction of the old social order.
Bergson attacks the use to which we usually put our minds, but he most
certainly does not suggest that a philosopher should not use his mind
at all; he is to use it for all it is worth, only differently, more
efficiently for the purpose he has in view, the purpose of knowing for
its own sake.
There is, of course, a sense in which doing anything in the right way
is simply letting one’s self go, for after all it is easier to do a
thing well than badly—it certainly takes much less effort to produce
the same amount of result. So to know in the way which Bergson
recommends does in a sense come more easily than attempting to get the
knowledge we want by inappropriate methods. If this saving of waste
effort is a fault, then Bergson must plead guilty. But as the field of
knowledge open to us is far too wide for any one mind to explore, the
new method of knowing, though it requires less effort than the old to
produce the same result, does not thereby let us off more easily, for
with a better instrument it becomes possible to work for a greater
result.
It is not because it affords an excuse for laziness that Bergson’s
philosophy is popular but because it gives expression to a feeling
which is very widespread at the present time, a distrust of systems,
theories, logical constructions, the assumption of premisses and then
the acceptance of everything that follows logically from them. There is
a sense of impatience with thought and a thirst for the actual, the
concrete. It is because the whole drift of Bergson’s writing is an
incitement to throw over abstractions and get back to facts that so
many people read him, hoping that he will put into words and find an
answer to the unformulated doubt that haunts them.
It was in this spirit that the writer undertook the study of Bergson.
On the first reading he appeared at once too persuasive and too vague,
specious and unsatisfying: a closer investigation revealed more and
more a coherent theory of reality and a new and promising method of
investigating it. The apparent unsatisfactoriness of the first reading
arose from a failure to realize how entirely new and unfamiliar the
point of view is from which Bergson approaches metaphysical
speculation. In order to understand Bergson it is necessary to adopt
his attitude and that is just the difficulty, for his attitude is the
exact reverse of that which has been inculcated in us by the traditions
of our language and education and now comes to us naturally. This
common sense attitude is based on certain assumptions which are so
familiar that we simply take them for granted without expressly
formulating them, and indeed, for the most part, without even realizing
that we have been making any assumptions at all.
Bergson’s principal aim is to direct our attention to the reality which
he believes we all actually know already, but misinterpret and
disregard because we are biassed by preconceived ideas. To do this
Bergson has to offer some description of what this reality is, and this
description will be intelligible only if we are willing and able to
make a profound change in our attitude, to lay aside the old
assumptions which underlie our every day common sense point of view and
adopt, at least for the time being, the assumptions from which Bergson
sets out. This book begins with an attempt to give as precise an
account as possible of the old assumptions which we must discard and
the new ones which we must adopt in order to understand Bergson’s
description of reality. To make the complete reversal of our ordinary
mental habits needed, for understanding what Bergson has to say
requires a very considerable effort from anyone, but the feat is
perhaps most difficult of all for those who have carefully trained
themselves in habits of rigorous logical criticism. In attempting to
describe what we actually know in the abstract logical terms which are
the only means of intercommunication that human beings possess, Bergson
is driven into perpetual self-contradiction, indeed, paradoxical though
it may sound, unless he contradicted himself his description could not
be a true one. It is easier for the ordinary reader to pass over the
self contradictions, hardly even being aware of them, and grasp the
underlying meaning: the trained logician is at once pulled up by the
nonsensical form of the description and the meaning is lost in a welter
of conflicting words. This, I think, is the real reason why some of the
most brilliant intellectual thinkers have been able to make nothing of
Bergson s philosophy: baffled by the self-contradictions into which he
is necessarily driven in the attempt to convey his meaning they have
hastily assumed that Bergson had no meaning to convey.
The object of this book is to set out the relation between explanations
and the actual facts which we want to explain and thereby to show
exactly why Bergson _must_ use self-contradictory terms if the
explanation of reality which he offers is to be a true one.
Having first shown what attitude Bergson requires us to adopt I have
gone on to describe what he thinks this new way of looking at reality
will reveal. This at once involves me in the difficulty with which
Bergson wrestles in all his attempts to describe reality, the
difficulty which arises from the fundamental discrepancy between what
he sees the actual fact to be and the abstract notions which are all he
has with which to describe it. I have attempted to show how it comes
about that we are in fact able to perform this apparently impossible
feat of describing the indescribable, using Bergson’s descriptions of
sensible perception and the relations of matter and memory to
illustrate my point. If we succeed in ridding ourselves of our
common-sense preconceptions, Bergson tells us that we may expect to
know the old facts in a new way, face to face, as it were, instead of
seeing them through a web of our own intellectual interpretations. I
have not attempted to offer any proof whether or not Bergson’s
description of reality is in fact true: having understood the meaning
of the description it remains for each of us to decide for himself
whether or not it fits the facts.
KARIN STEPHEN.
Cambridge, January, 1922.
CHAPTER I
EXPLANATION
In order to understand Bergson it is not necessary to have any previous
acquaintance with philosophy, indeed the less the reader knows of
current metaphysical notions the easier it may perhaps be for him to
adopt the mental attitude required for understanding Bergson. For
Bergson says that the tradition of philosophy is all wrong and must be
broken with: according to his view philosophical knowledge can only be
obtained by “a reversal of the usual work of the intellect.”[1]
[1] _Introduction to Metaphysics_, page 34.
The usual work of the intellect consists in analysis and
classification: if you have anything presented to you which you do not
understand the obvious question to put yourself is, “what is it?”
Suppose in a dark room which you expected to find empty you stumble
against something, the natural thing to do is to begin at once to try
to fit your experience into some class already familiar to you. You
find it has a certain texture which you class as rather rough, a
temperature which you class as warm, a size which you class as about
two feet high, a peculiar smell which you recognise and you finally
jump to the answer to your question: it is “a dog.” This intellectual
operation is a sample of the way in which it comes natural to us to set
to work whenever we find ourselves confronted with any situation which
we are not able to classify off hand, we are not easy till we can say
_what_ the situation is, and saying _what_ consists in hitting upon
some class with which we are already familiar to which it belongs: in
this instance the question was answered when you succeeded in
describing the situation to yourself as “stumbling upon a dog.” Now you
were only able to class what was stumbled upon as a dog after you had
recognised a certain number of properties as being those shared by
dogs—the rough texture, the size, the smell. You analysed the situation
as containing these qualities and thereupon classified what had been
stumbled upon as a dog.
Analysis and classification are the two methods which we are accustomed
to rely upon for improving our knowledge in unfamiliar situations and
we are accustomed to take it that they improve our knowledge of the
whole situation: anyone who said that after you were able to say what
you had stumbled upon you knew less of the whole situation than you
knew before would find it difficult to get you to agree. And yet this
is very much the position which Bergson takes up. Analysis and
classification, he would admit, are the way to get more knowledge, of a
kind; they enable us to describe situations and they are the starting
point of all explanation and prediction. After analysis and
classification you were able to say, “I have stumbled upon a dog,” and
having got so far you could then pass on to whatever general laws you
knew of as applying to the classes into which you had fitted the
situation, and by means of these laws still more of the situation could
be classified and explained. Thus by means of the general law, “dogs
lick,” you would be furnished with an explanation if perhaps you felt
something warm and damp on your hand, or again knowledge of this law
might lead you to expect such a feeling. When what we want is to
describe or to explain a situation in general terms then Bergson agrees
that analysis and classification are the methods to employ, but he
maintains that these methods which are useful for describing and
explaining are no use for finding out the actual situation which we may
want to describe or explain. And he goes a step further. Not only do
these methods fail to reveal the situation but the intellectual
attitude of abstraction to which they accustom us seriously handicaps
us when we want not merely to explain the situation but to know it. Now
it is the business of science to explain situations in terms of general
laws and so the intellectual method of abstract-ion is the right one
for scientists to employ. Bergson claims, however, that philosophy has
a task quite distinct from that of science. In whatever situation he
finds himself a man may take up one of two attitudes, he may either
adopt a practical attitude, in which case he will set to work to
explain the situation in order that he may know what to do under the
circumstances, or he may take a speculative interest in it and then he
will devote himself to knowing it simply for the sake of knowing. It is
only, according to Bergson, in the former case, when his interest is
practical, that he will attain his object by using the intellectual
method of abstraction which proceeds by analysis and classification.
These intellectual operations have such prestige, however, they have
proved so successful in discovering explanations, that we are apt to
take it for granted that they must be the best way to set, to work
whatever sort of knowledge we want: we might almost be tempted, off
hand, to imagine that they were our only way of knowing at all, but a
moment’s reflection will show that this, at any rate, would be going
too far.
Before we can analyse and classify and explain we must have something
to analyse, some material to work upon: these operations, are based
upon something which we know directly, what we see, for instance, or
touch or feel. This something is the foundation of knowledge, the
intellectual operations of analysis classification and the framing of
general laws are simply an attempt to describe and explain it. It is
the business of science to explain and intellectual methods are the
appropriate ones for science to employ. But the business of philosophy,
according to Bergson, is not to explain reality but to know it. For
this a different kind of mental effort is required. Analysis and
classification, instead of increasing our direct knowledge, tend rather
to diminish it. They must always start from some direct knowledge, but
they proceed, not by widening the field of this knowledge but by
leaving out more and more of it. Moreover, unless we are constantly on
the alert, the intellectual habit of using all our direct knowledge as
material for analysis and classification ends by completely misleading
us as to what it is that we do actually know. So that the better we
explain the less, in the end, we know.
There can be no doubt that something is directly known but disputes
break out as soon as we try to say what that something is. Is it the
“real” world of material objects, or a mental copy of these objects, or
are we altogether on the wrong track in looking for two kinds of
realities, the “real” world and “our mental states,” and is it
perceived events alone that are “real?” This something which we know
directly has been given various names: “the external object,” “sense
data,” “phenomena,” and so on, each more or less coloured by
implications belonging to one or other of the rival theories as to what
it is. We shall call it “the facts” to emphasise its indubitable
reality, and avoid, as far as possible, any other implications.
Controversy about “the facts” has been mainly as to what position they
occupy in the total scheme of reality. As to what they are at the
moment when we are actually being acquainted with them one would have
thought there could have been no two opinions; it seems impossible that
we should make any mistake about that. No doubt it is impossible to
have such a thing as a false experience, an experience is what it is,
only judgments can be false. But it is quite possible to make a false
judgment as to what experience we are actually having, or, still more
commonly, simply to take for granted that our experience must be such
and such, without ever looking to see whether it is or not. A small
child taken to a party and told that parties are great fun if
questioned afterwards will very likely say it has enjoyed itself
though, if you happened to have been there, you may have seen clearly
that it was really bewildered or bored. Even when we grow up names
still have a tendency to impose upon us and disguise from us the actual
nature of our experiences. There are not very many people who, if
invited to partake, for instance, of the last bottle of some famous
vintage wine, would have the courage to admit, even to themselves, that
it was nasty, even though it was, in fact, considerably past its prime.
Cases of this kind, with which we are all familiar, are enough to make
us realize that it is actually quite possible to make mistakes even
about facts which we know directly, to overlook the actual fact
altogether because we have made up our minds in advance as to what it
is sure to be.
Now Bergson says that such errors are not confined to stray instances,
such as we have noticed, in which the imposition of preconceived ideas
can readily be detected by a little closer attention to the actual
facts. He believes that a falsification due to preconceived ideas, runs
right through the whole of our direct experience. He lays the blame
both for this falsification and for our failure to detect it upon our
intellectual habit of relying upon explanation rather than upon direct
knowledge, and that is one of the reasons why he says that our
intellectual attitude is an obstacle to direct knowledge of the facts.
The intellectual method of abstraction by which we analyse and classify
is the foundation of all description and explanation in terms of
general laws, and the truth is that we are, as a rule, much more
preoccupied with explaining the facts which we know than with the
actual experiencing of them.
This preoccupation is natural enough. The bare fact which we know
directly is not enough to enable us to carry on our everyday lives, we
cannot get on unless we supplement it with some sort of explanation
and, if it comes to choosing between fact and explanation, the
explanation is often of more practical use than the fact. So it comes
about that we are inclined to use the facts which we know directly
simply as material for constructing explanations and to pay so little
attention to them for their own sakes that we simply take it for
granted that they must be what our explanations lead us to suppose they
are.
Now according to Bergson the attitude of mind required for explaining
the facts conflicts with that which is required for knowing them. From
the point of view simply of knowing, the facts are all equally
important and we cannot afford to discriminate, but for explanation
some facts are very much more important than others. When we want to
explain, therefore, rather than simply to know, we tend to concentrate
our attention upon these practically important facts and pass over the
rest. For in order to describe and explain a situation we have to
classify it, and in order to do this we must pick out in it properties
required for membership of some one or other of the classes known to
us. In the situation which we originally considered by way of
illustration, for instance, you had to pick out the qualities of
roughness, warmth and so on, in order to classify what you had stumbled
upon as “a dog.” Now the picking out of these particular qualities is
really an operation of abstraction from the situation as a whole: they
were the important features of the situation from the point of view of
classifying what you had stumbled upon, but they by no means exhausted
the whole situation. Our preoccupation with explaining the facts, then,
leads us to treat what we know directly as so much material for
abstraction.
This intellectual attitude, as Bergson calls it, though practically
useful, has, according to him, two grave drawbacks from the point of
view of speculation. By focussing our attention upon anything less than
the whole fact, and so isolating a part from the rest, he says we
distort what we knew originally: furthermore just in so far as we make
a selection among the facts, attending to some and passing over others,
we limit the field of direct knowledge which we might otherwise have
enjoyed. For these two reasons Bergson insists that it is the business
of philosophy to reverse the intellectual habit of mind and return to
the fullest possible direct knowledge of the fact. “May not the task of
philosophy, “he says,” be to bring us back to a fuller perception of
reality by a certain displacement of our attention? What would be
required would be to turn our attention _away_ from the practically
interesting aspect of the universe in order to turn it _back_ to what,
from a practical point of view, is useless. And this conversion of
attention would be philosophy itself.”[2]
[2] _La Perception du Changement_, page 13. 24
At first sight it appears paradoxical and absurd to maintain that our
efforts to analyse, classify and explain the facts tend rather to limit
than to extend our knowledge, and furthermore distort even such facts
as we still remain acquainted with. Common sense has no doubt that, far
from limiting and distorting our knowledge, explanation is the only
possible way in which we can get beyond the little scraps of fact which
are all that we can ever know directly.
If the views of common sense on this question were formulated, which,
for the most part, they are not, they would be something like this.
Until we begin to think the facts which we know directly are all
muddled together and confused: first of all it is necessary to sort
them by picking out qualities from the general confusion in which they
are at first concealed. It is possible that during this process, which
is what is called analysis, we may be obliged, at first, to overlook
some of what we already know in a vague sort of way, but this
insignificant loss is compensated by the clarity of what remains, and
is, in any case, only temporary. For as the analysis proceeds we
gradually replace the whole of the original mere muddle by clear and
definite things and qualities. At first we may be able to distinguish
only a few qualities here and there, and our preoccupation with these
may possibly lead us, for a time, to pay insufficient attention to the
rest of the muddle which we know directly but have not yet succeeded in
analysing. But when the analysis is completed the distinct things and
qualities which we shall then know will contain _all_ that we
originally knew, and more besides, since the analysis will have
revealed much that was originally concealed or only implicit in the
original unanalysed fact. If, for instance, you look at a very modern
painting, at first what you are directly aware of may be little more
than a confused sight: bye and bye, as you go on looking, you will be
able to distinguish colours and shapes, one by one objects may be
recognised until finally you may be able to see the whole picture at a
glance as composed of four or five different colours arranged in
definite shapes and positions. You may even be able to make out that it
represents a human figure, or a landscape. Common sense would tell you
that if your analysis is complete these colours and shapes will exhaust
the whole of what you originally knew and moreover that in the course
of it much will have been discovered which originally you could hardly
be said to have known at all, so that analysis, far from limiting your
direct knowledge, will have added to it considerably. Starting, then,
originally, from a very meagre stock of direct knowledge, analysis,
according to the common sense view, by discovering more and more
qualities, builds up for us more and more direct knowledge.
Bergson begins just the other way up. He starts from the idea of a
whole field of direct knowledge vastly more extended than the actual
facts of which we are normally aware as making up our direct
experience. He calls this whole field of knowledge “virtual knowledge.”
This field of virtual knowledge contains the whole of the actions and
reactions of matter in which our body has its part at any moment, the
multitude of stimulations which actually assail the senses but which we
normally disregard, together with all the responses by which our bodies
adjust themselves to these stimulations, and, in addition, the whole of
our past. For Bergson the problem is to explain, not how we increase
our direct knowledge, but how we limit it: not how we remember, but how
we forget. “Our knowledge,” he says, “far from being built up by a
gradual combination of simple elements, is the result of a sharp
dissociation. From the infinitely vast field of our virtual knowledge
we have selected, to turn into actual knowledge, whatever concerns our
action upon things; the rest we have neglected. The brain appears to
have been constructed on purpose for this work of selection. It is easy
enough to show that this is so in the case of memory. Our past, as we
shall show in the next lecture, is necessarily preserved,
automatically. It survives in its entirety. But it is to our practical
interest to put it aside, or at any rate only to accept just so much of
it as can more or less usefully throw light on the present situation
and complete it. The brain enables us to make this selection: it
materialises the useful memories and keeps those which would be of no
use below the threshold of consciousness. The same thing may be said of
perception: perception is the servant of action and out of the whole of
reality it isolates only what interests us; it shows us not so much the
things themselves as what we can make of them. In advance it classifies
them, in advance it arranges them; we barely look at the object, it is
enough for us to know to what category it belongs.”[3]
[3] _La Perception du Changement_, pages 12 and 13. 27
According to Bergson the facts which we actually know directly in the
ordinary course are discriminated out of a very much wider field which
we must also be said in a sense to know directly though most of it lies
outside the clear focus of attention. This whole field of virtual
knowledge is regarded as standing to the actual facts to which we
usually devote our attention, much as, for instance, the whole
situation of stumbling upon something in a dark room stood to the
single quality of roughness: in both cases there is a central point in
the full focus of attention which we are apt to look upon as the fact
directly known, but this central point is really surrounded by a vastly
wider context and this too is known in some sense though it is commonly
ignored.
For all philosophies, whether they be Bergson’s or the view of common
sense or any other, the actual facts which require to be explained are
the same, and, though any positive assertion as to what these facts are
may be hotly disputed, it will probably be admitted that as we
ordinarily know them they consist in some direct experience, undeniable
as far as it goes. The point at issue between Bergson and common sense
is, precisely, how far it does go. Both sides would admit that, in this
fact directly known, what is in the full focus of attention at any
given moment is very limited; on the other hand both would admit that
this fully focussed fact is set in a context, or fringe, with no
clearly defined limits which also goes to make up the whole fact
directly known though we do not usually pay much attention to it. The
fact directly known being given the problem is to find out what it is
and how it comes to be known. What is actually given and needs to be
accounted for is the fact clearly focussed, with its less clearly
defined fringe: Bergson’s sweeping assumption of the existence of a
further vast field of virtual knowledge in order to account for it,
does, at first sight, seem arbitrary and unwarranted and in. need of
considerable justification before it can be accepted. For him the
problem then becomes, not to account for our knowing as much as we do,
but to see why it is that we do not know a great deal more: why our
actual knowledge does not cover the whole field of our virtual
knowledge. Common sense, on, the other hand, sets out from the
assumption of ignorance, absence of awareness, as being, as it were,
natural and not needing any accounting for, and so it regards the
problem as being to explain why any experience ever occurs at all. The
assumption of ignorance as being the natural thing seems at first sight
to need no justification, but this may well be due merely to our having
grown accustomed to the common sense point of view. When one begins to
question this assumption it begins to appear just as arbitrary as the
contrary standpoint adopted by Bergson. The actual facts are neither
ignorance nor full knowledge and in accounting for them it is really
just as arbitrary to assume one of these two extremes as the other. The
truth appears to be that in order to account for the facts one must
make some assumptions, and these, not being facts actually given, are
bound to be more or less arbitrary. They seem more or less “natural”
according as we are more or less accustomed to the idea of them, but
they are really justified only according to the success with which they
account for the actual facts.
This idea of putting the problem of knowledge in terms exactly the
reverse of those in which it seems “natural” to put it was originally
suggested to Bergson by his study of the important work on amnesia
carried out by Charcot and his pupils, and also by such evidence as was
to be had at the time when he wrote on the curious memory phenomena
revealed by the use of hypnotism and by cases of spontaneous
dissociation. It is impossible to prove experimentally that no
experience is ever destroyed but it is becoming more and more firmly
established that enormous numbers of past experiences, which are
inaccessible to ordinary memory and which therefore it would seem
“natural” to suppose destroyed, can, if the right methods are employed,
be revived even with amazing fullness of detail.
In recent years since Bergson’s books were first published, great
strides have been made in the experimental investigation of the whole
subject of memory, and the evidence thus obtained, far from upsetting
the theory of memory suggested to him by the less extensive evidence
which was available at the time when he wrote, lends it striking
support.
It appears to be accepted by doctors who use hypnotism in psychotherapy
that under hypnotism many patients can perfectly well be taken back in
memory to any period of their lives which the doctor chooses to ask
for, and can be made not only to remember vaguely a few incidents which
occurred at the time but actually to re-live the whole period in the
fullest possible detail, feeling over again with hallucinatory
vividness all the emotions experienced at the time.
This re-living of past experience can, with some patients, be made to
go on indefinitely, through the whole day, if the doctor has time to
attend to it, every little incident being faithfully recalled though
the actual event may have taken place 20 or 30 years previously. And
this happens not simply in the case of some very striking event or
great crisis which the patient has been through, indeed it is just the
striking events that are often hardest to recover. Some doctors, in
order to get at the crisis, have found it useful occasionally to put
patients back through one birthday after another right back even as
early as their second year, to see at what point in their lives some
particular nervous symptom first appeared, and each successive birthday
is lived through again in the utmost detail.[4]
[4] See _Psychology and Psychotherapy_ by Dr. William Brown.
Evidence of this kind does not, of course, prove that literally
_nothing_ is ever lost but it goes far towards upsetting the ordinary
view that it is the rule for past experience to be annihilated and the
exception for fragments here and there to be preserved in memory. The
evidence which has so far been collected and which is rapidly
accumulating at least seems to justify us in reversing this rule and
saying rather that to be preserved is the rule for experience and to be
lost would be the exception, if indeed any experience ever really is
lost at all.
This way of regarding the field of memory is further supported by such
evidence as has been collected with regard to the influence of past
experience in dreams, phobias and various forms of insanity, but in
these cases, of course, it is only isolated past experiences here and
there whose activity can be observed, and so, while helping to upset
the most natural assumption that whatever cannot be recalled by
ordinary efforts of memory may be assumed to have been destroyed, they
do not lend very much support to the wider view put forward by Bergson,
that no experience, however trivial, is ever destroyed but that all of
it is included in the field out of which memory makes its practical
selection.
Taking all the evidence with regard to the preservation of past
experience which is at present available, then, it is safe to say that,
while it cannot, in the nature of things, absolutely prove Bergson’s
theory of knowledge, it in no way conflicts with it and even supports
it, positively in the sense that the theory does fit the facts well
enough to explain them (though it goes further than the actual facts
and makes assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved by an
appeal to them) and negatively in the sense that what we now know about
memory actually conflicts with the “natural” view that past experience
which we are unable to recall has been destroyed, which is commonly
appealed to to show the absurdity of the rival theory put forward by
Bergson.
On the assumption which Bergson makes of a much wider field of direct
knowledge than that which contains what we are accustomed to regard as
the actual facts which we know directly, Bergson’s problem becomes how
to account for these facts being so much less than the whole field
which we might have expected to have known. The answer, according to
him, is to be found in our practical need of being prepared in advance
for what is to come, at whatever sacrifice of direct knowledge of past
and present facts. For practical purposes it is essential to use
present and past facts as signs of what is coming so that we may be
ready for it. To this end it is far more important to know the general
laws according to which facts occur than to experience the facts
themselves in their fullness. Our intellectual habits which prompt us
to set to work at once in every unfamiliar situation to analyse and
classify it fit us for discovering these laws: in so far as we are
intellectual we incline to regard facts mainly as material for arriving
at descriptions which themselves form the material out of which, by a
further intellectual effort, explanations are framed in terms of
general laws, which we need to know if we are to be ready for what is
going to happen. Now these laws are general laws applying to whole
classes of facts of one kind, or another. Facts, therefore, only form
material for discovering laws in so far as they can be classified into
kinds.
The first step in classifying a fact is called analysis and consists in
discovering common qualities which the fact possesses. According to
Bergson the discovery of common qualities in a fact consists simply in
learning to overlook everything in that fact except the respects in
which it can be said to be of the same kind, and so to belong to the
same class, as other facts. Far from adding to our direct knowledge, as
common sense supposes, he holds that analysis consists in shutting our
eyes to the individuality of facts in order to dwell only upon what
they have in common with one another. Starting, then, from the wider
field of knowledge which he assumes Bergson explains how we reach the
limited facts, which are all that we ordinarily know, by saying that
these facts are arrived at by selection out of this much wider field.
It is not the disinterested love of knowledge that determines how much
we shall actually attend to: our selection from the whole field of what
facts we will attend to is determined by the pressing need of being
prepared in advance for the facts which are to come. We attend only to
so much of the whole of what is, in some sense, directly known to us as
will be useful for framing the general laws which enable us to prepare
in advance for what is coming. This practical utility explains why
analysis and classification seem to us to be the obvious way of dealing
with what we know.
The work of abstraction by which, treating the facts directly known as
so much material for framing explanations, we pass from these actual
facts to the general laws which explain them, falls into four stages,
and at each stage, according to Bergson, as we go further and further
from the original fact directly known, the two vices of the
intellectual method, limitation and distortion of the actual fact,
become more and more apparent.
Starting from the fact directly known, the first thing, as we have
seen, is to learn to distinguish common qualities which it shares in
common with some, but not all, other facts; the next thing is to
classify it by fitting it into the further groups to which these
various qualities entitle it to belong. The moment a quality has been
distinguished in a fact that fact has been fitted into a class, the
class which consists of all the facts in which that quality can be
distinguished. Thus, in our original illustration, when you first
distinguished warmth, etc., you were beginning to fit your fact into
classes: when you perceived warmth you fitted it into the class of warm
objects, and it was the same with the other qualities of roughness,
size and smell. This fitting of facts into classes according to the
common qualities distinguished in them might be called a preliminary
classification, but we shall use the term analysis for this preliminary
grouping of facts according to their qualities, keeping the term
classification for the next step, which you took when you realized
“this is a dog,” which consists in the discovery not of mere
disconnected qualities but of “real things.” Just as every quality,
such as “warm” or “hairy” or “sweet” or “cold” is a class of actual
facts, so every “real thing” such as “a dog” or “an ice cream” is a
class of qualities. Thus a quality is once, and a “real thing” is
twice, removed from actual fact, and the more energetically we pursue
the intellectual work of abstraction the further we get from the fact
itself from which we began. The point of grouping facts into classes,
whether by analysing them into qualities or classifying them into “real
things,” is that we can then apply to the particular fact all that we
know to be true in general of whatever belongs to these various
classes: in a word, once we have fitted a fact into a class we can
apply to it all the general laws which are known to apply to that
class.
Common sense, as we saw, tells us that when we distinguish qualities in
any given fact we obtain fuller knowledge than was given in the mere
unanalysed fact, and this knowledge is supposed to become fuller still
when we go on to classify these qualities into “real things.” Bergson,
on the contrary, says that common qualities are arrived at by leaving
out much of the fact originally known, while each successive stage in
the process of abstraction by which we explain facts, though it enables
us to apply more and more general laws, yet leaves out more and more of
the actual fact itself. Analysis begins this whittling away of the
actual fact by confining our attention to qualities which do not
exhaust the whole content of the actual fact. At this preliminary
stage, however, though we concentrate our attention on the quality, we
still remain aware of the whole fact in which the quality has its
setting. Classification carries the work of limitation a stage further.
“Things” are a stage further removed from actual fact than qualities
are since, while qualities are classes of facts, “things” are only
classes of qualities. For classification into “things” therefore only
the qualities in a fact will be of any use, and so, when we have
reached the stage of classification, we need no longer burden our
attention with the actual facts themselves in their entirety, we need
pay attention only to the qualities which distinguish one group from
another, For the purpose of classification into “things” the quality
can stand for the whole fact: thus, as Bergson points out, we begin to
lose contact with the whole fact originally known, since all the rest
of it except the respects in which it can be analysed will henceforth
tend to be ignored.
The third stage in explaining facts in terms of general laws is called
induction and consists in observing and formulating the relations of
“things.” “Things” are related to each other through their qualities.
Qualities do not give us the whole fact, because, when we have
distinguished qualities, we are inclined to concentrate our attention
on the quality at the expense of the rest of the fact; nevertheless
while we attend to actual qualities we have not lost contact with fact
altogether. Induction, which consists in framing general laws of the
relations of “things,” though it does not involve attention to the
whole fact, does at least demand attention to qualities, and so, while
we are occupied with induction, we do still keep touch with fact to
some extent.
Once the relations of qualities have been observed and formulated,
however, we need no longer attend to any part of the fact at all.
Instead of the actual qualities we now take symbols, words, for
example, or letters, or other signs, and with these symbols we make for
ourselves diagrams of the relations in which we have observed that the
qualities which they represent have stood to each other. Thus we might
use the words “lightning before thunder” or first an L and then a T, to
express the fact that in a storm we usually observe the quality of
flashing before the quality of rumbling. Such laws do not actually
reveal new facts to us, they can only tell us, provided we actually
know a fact belonging to a given class, to what other class facts which
we shall know bye and bye will belong. Thus, once we have classified
facts as belonging to two classes, daylight and darkness, and have
observed the invariable alternation of facts belonging to these
classes, then, whenever we know directly facts which can be classed as
daylight, we can predict, according to our law of the alternation of
the two classes, that bye and bye these facts will give place to others
which can be classed as darkness and that bye and bye these in their
turn will be replaced by facts which can again be classed as daylight.
The practical value of being able to make even such elementary
predictions as these is obviously enormous, and this value increases as
applied science, which is built up simply by the formulation of more
and more comprehensive general laws of this type, widens the field of
facts which can be explained. Once the laws are known, moreover, we are
able to say to what class the facts must have belonged which preceded a
fact of any given class just as easily as we can say to what class the
facts which are to follow it will belong. Thus, given a fact which can
be classed as daylight, we can infer, by means of the law of the
alternation of the classes daylight and darkness, not only that facts
which can be classed as darkness will follow bye and bye, but also that
facts of that class must have gone before. In this way we can explain
the causes of all classifiable facts equally with their effects and so
bridge over the gaps in our direct knowledge by creating a unified plan
of the interrelations of all the classes to which facts can belong. By
means of this plan we can explain any fact (that is classify its causes
and effects), provided we can fit it into one or other of the known
classes. This again is of enormous practical use because, when we know
to what class present facts must belong if they are to be followed by
the class of facts which we want, or not to be followed by those which
we do not want, we can arrange our present facts accordingly.
Bergson would not think of denying that this intellectual method, in
which facts are used as material for abstraction, is of the utmost
practical use for explaining facts and so enabling us to control them.
He suggests, however, that our preoccupation with these useful
abstractions, classes and their relations, misleads us as to the facts
themselves. What actually takes place, he thinks, is a kind of
substitution of the explanation for the fact which was to be explained,
analogous with what happens when a child at a party, or a guest at
dinner, is misled about his actual sensations, only this substitution
of which Bergson speaks, being habitual, is much harder to see through.
Explanation, as we have seen, consists in constructing a plan or map in
terms of such abstractions as classes and their relations, or
sometimes, when the abstraction has been carried a step further, in
terms simply of words or symbols, by means of which we represent the
causal relations between such of the actual directly known facts as can
be classified. This plan is more comprehensive and complete than the
actual facts which we know directly in the ordinary course of things,
for which it stands, and it enables us to explain these facts in terms
of the classes of causes from which they follow, and the classes of
effects which they produce. No explanation, of course, can actually
acquaint us directly with the real antecedent or consequent facts
themselves: it can only tell us to what classes these facts must
belong. The terms of the plan by which we explain the facts, the
classes, for instance, daylight and darkness, and their relation of
alternation, or the words or symbols which stand for classes and
relations are not themselves facts but abstractions. We cannot think in
terms of actual facts: the intellectual activity by which we formulate
general laws can only work among abstractions, and in order to explain
a fact we are obliged to substitute for it either a class or word or
other symbol. All description and explanation of facts consists in
substitutions of this kind. The explanation applies provided the
abstraction is based on fact, that is, provided it is possible to fit
the fact to which the explanation is intended to apply into the class
employed to explain it: the general law, for instance, about the
alternation of the classes daylight and darkness will explain any facts
which can be fitted into one or other of these classes, or again
general laws about dogs, such as “dogs lick” will apply to whatever
fact belongs at once to all the simpler classes, “warm,” “rough,” “of a
certain size, and smell,” out of which the class “dog” is constructed.
The general law itself, however, does not consist of such facts but of
abstractions substituted for the facts themselves. Such substitution is
extremely useful and perfectly legitimate so long as we keep firm hold
of the fact as well, and are quite clear about what is fact and what
only symbol. The danger is, however, that, being preoccupied with
describing and explaining and having used abstractions so successfully
for these purposes, we may come to lose our sense of fact altogether
and fail to distinguish between actual facts and the symbols which we
use to explain them.
This, indeed, is just what Bergson thinks really does happen. No doubt
an intelligent physicist is perfectly aware that the vibrations and
wave lengths and electrons and forces by which he explains the changes
that take place in the material world are fictions, and does not
confuse them with the actual facts in which his actual knowledge of the
material world consists. But it is much more doubtful whether he
distinguishes between these actual facts and the common sense material
objects, such as lumps of lead, pieces of wood, and so on, which he
probably believes he knows directly but which are really only
abstractions derived from the facts in order to explain them just as
much as his own vibrations and wave lengths. When a scientist frames a
hypothesis he employs the intellectual method of substitution with full
consciousness of what he is about; he recognises that its terms are
abstractions and not facts. But the intellectual method of explaining
by substituting general abstractions for particular facts is not
confined to science. All description and explanation, from the first
uncritical assumptions of common sense right up to the latest
scientific hypothesis employs the intellectual method of substituting
abstractions for actual facts. The common sense world of things,
events, qualities, minds, feelings, and so on, in which we all pass our
every day lives is an early and somewhat crude attempt to describe the
continually changing fact which each of us experiences directly, but it
is perhaps more misleading than the later elaborate constructions of
chemistry, physics, biology or physchology in that things and qualities
are more easily mistaken for facts than more obviously hypothetical
assumptions. Bergson points out that the various things of which this
common sense world consists, solid tables, green grass, anger, hope,
etc., are not facts: these things, he insists, are only abstractions.
They are convenient for enabling us to describe and explain the actual
facts which each of us experiences directly, and they are based upon
these facts in the sense of being abstracted from them. The objection
to them is that we are too much inclined to take it for granted that
these things and qualities and events actually are facts themselves,
and in so doing to lose sight of the real facts altogether. In support
of his view that things having qualities in successive relations are
mere abstractions Bergson points out that whenever we stop to examine
what it actually is that we know directly we can see at once that this
fact does not consist of things and qualities at all: things and
qualities are clearly marked off one from another,; they change as a
series of distinct terms, but in what we know directly there are no
clear cut distinctions and so no series. The assumption which we
usually make that the facts must consist of such things as events and
qualities and material objects is not based upon the evidence of direct
knowledge: we make the assumption that the facts must be of this kind
simply because they can be explained in these terms.
It is true that there is some correspondence between the actual facts
and the common sense world of solid tables and so on, and we usually
jump to the conclusion that this correspondence would not be possible
unless the facts had common qualities. There is no denying that facts
can be classified and it seems only natural to take it for granted that
whatever can be classified must share some quality with whatever
belongs to the same class, that, indeed, it is just on account of all
sharing the same common quality that facts can be classified as being
all of the same kind. Thus common sense takes it for granted that all
facts which can be classified as red, and so explained by all the
general laws which we know about the relation of red things to other
things, must share a common quality of redness. It seems only natural
to make this assumption because we are so used to making it, but if we
stop to examine the facts which we know directly we discover that they
do not bear it out, and we are gradually driven to the conclusion that
it is quite unwarranted. It is only bit by bit, as we gradually
accustom ourselves to doubting what we have been accustomed to take for
granted, that we realize how ill this assumption fits the facts.