FACT
Common sense starts out with the assumption that what we know directly
is such things as trees, grass, anger, hope and so on, and that these
things have qualities such as solidity, greenness, unpleasantness and
so on, which are also facts directly known. It is not very difficult to
show that, if we examine the facts which we know directly, we cannot
find in them any such things as trees, grass, or minds, over and above
the various qualities which we say belong to them. I see one colour and
you see another: both of them are colours belonging to the grass but
neither of us can find anything among the facts known to him
corresponding to this grass, regarded as something over and above its
various qualities, to which those qualities are supposed to belong.
This drives common sense back unto its second line of defence where it
takes up the much stronger position of asserting that, while trees,
grass, minds, etc., are not among the facts directly known, their
qualities of solidity, greenness, etc., are. It is usual to add that
these qualities are signs of real trees, grass, etc., which exist
independently but are only known to us through their qualities.
It is much harder to attack this position, but its weakness is best
exposed by considering change as we know it directly, and comparing
this with change as represented in terms of qualities. Change, when
represented in terms of qualities, forms a series in which different
qualities are strung together one after the other by the aid of
temporal relations of before and after. The change perceived when we
look at the spectrum would thus have to be described in terms of a
series of colours, red before orange, orange before yellow, yellow
before green, and so on. We might certainly go into greater detail than
this, distinguishing any number of shades in each of the colours
mentioned, but the description would still have to be given in the same
form, that of a series of different colours, or shades of colour,
strung together by relations of before and after. Now the fact which we
know directly does not change so: it forms a continuous becoming which
is not made up of any number, however great, of fixed stages. When we
want to represent this changing fact in terms of qualities we have to
put together a series of qualities, such as red, orange, etc., and then
say that “the colour” changes from one of these to another. We pretend
that there is “a colour” which is not itself either red or green or
orange or blue, which changes into all these different colours one
after another. It is not very difficult to see that this abstract
colour which is neither red nor orange nor green nor blue is not a fact
but only an abstraction which is convenient for purposes of
description: it is not quite so easy to see that this criticism applies
equally to each of the separate colours, red, orange, etc., and yet a
little attention shows that these also are really nothing but
abstractions. With reference to the whole changing fact which is known
directly through any period the change in respect of colour is clearly
an abstraction. But just as there is no “colour” over and above the
red, the orange, the green, etc., which we say we see, so there is
really no “red,” “orange,” “green,” over and above the changing process
with which we are directly acquainted. Each of these, the red, the
orange, and so on, just like the abstract “colour,” is simply a
fictitious stage in the process of changing which it is convenient to
abstract when we want to describe the process but which does not itself
occur as a distinct part in the actual fact.
Change, as we know it directly, does not go on between fixed points
such as these stages which we abstract, it goes on impartially, as it
were, through the supposed stages just as much as in between them. But
though fixed stages are not needed to enable change to occur, simply as
a fact, they are needed if we are to describe change and explain it in
terms of general laws. Qualities are assumptions required, not in order
that change may take place, but in order that we may describe, explain,
and so control it. Such particular qualities as red and green are
really no more facts directly known than such still more general, and
so more obviously fictitious notions as a colour which is of no
particular shade, or a table, or a mind, apart from its qualities or
states. All these fixed things are alike abstractions required for
explaining facts directly known but not occurring as actual parts of
those facts or stages in their change.
Thus it appears that the common sense world of things and qualities and
events is in the same position, with regard to the actual facts
directly known as scientific hypotheses such as forces, electrons, and
so on, in their various relations: none of these actually form parts of
the fact, all of them are abstractions from the fact itself which are
useful for explaining and so controlling it. Common sense stops short
at things and qualities and events; science carries the abstraction
further, that is all the difference: the aim in both cases is the same,
the practical one of explaining and so controlling facts directly
known. In both cases the method employed is the intellectual method of
abstraction which begins by discriminating within the whole field
directly known in favour of just so much as will enable us to classify
it and ignoring the rest, and then proceeds to confuse even this
selected amount of the actual fact with the abstract classes or other
symbols in terms of which it is explained. We have just seen how the
result, the worlds of common sense or science, differ from the actual
facts in the way in which they change: these worlds of abstractions
represent change as a series of fixed stages united by temporal
relations, while the actual fact forms a continuous process of becoming
which does not contain any such fixed points, as stages in relations.
The more we shake ourselves free from the common sense and scientific
bias towards substituting explanations for actual facts the more
clearly we see that this continuous process of changing is the very
essence of what we know directly, and the more we realize how unlike
such a continuous process is to any series of stages in relation of
succession.
The unsatisfactoriness of such descriptions is no new discovery: the
logical difficulties connected with the attempt to describe change in
terms of series of successive things or events have been familiar since
the time when Zeno invented the famous dilemma of Achilles’ race with
the tortoise. Mathematicians have been in the habit of telling us that
these difficulties depend simply on the fact that we imagine the series
of positions at which Achilles and the tortoise find themselves from
moment to moment as finite: the device of the infinite series, they
say, satisfies all the requirements needed for representing change and
solves all the logical difficulties which arise from it. Bergson’s
difficulties, however, cannot be solved in this way for they are not
based upon the discovery of logical absurdities but upon the
discrepancy between the description and the fact. What he maintains is
that the description of change in terms of an infinite series of stages
leaves out the change altogether. Zeno’s logical dilemma as to how
Achilles could ever catch up with the tortoise provided the tortoise
was given a start, however small, may be countered by the ingenuity of
the mathematicians’ infinite series. Bergson’s difficulty turns on a
question of fact, not of logic, and cannot be so met. He solves the
problem simply by denying that Achilles or the tortoise ever are at
particular points at particular moments. Such a description of change,
he says, leaves out the real changing. And the introduction of the
notion of an infinite series only makes the matter worse. For stages do
not change, and so, if there is to be any change, it must, presumably,
take place in between one stage and the next. But in between any two
stages of an infinite series there are supposed to be an infinite
number of other stages, so that to any given stage there _is_ no next
stage. Change, therefore, cannot take place between one stage and the
next one, there being no next one, and since it is equally impossible
that it should take place at any one of the stages themselves it
follows that an infinite series of stages leaves out change altogether.
Similarly a series of instants before and after one another leaves out
of time just the element of passage, becoming, which is its essence.
The truth, Bergson says, is that with fixed stages, no matter how many
you take, and no matter in what relation you arrange them, you cannot
reproduce the change and time which actually occur as facts directly
known. If Achilles or the tortoise are ever at different places at
different moments then neither of them really moves at all. Change and
time, as represented by abstractions, according to the intellectual
method, consist of stages in relations of succession, but the fact does
not happen by stages and is not held together by relations: if we
compare the representation with the fact we find that they differ
profoundly in their form.
According to Bergson this difference in form is one of the two
essential respects in which abstractions fail to represent facts and in
which, consequently, we are led into error as to the facts if we fail
to distinguish them from the abstractions in terms of which we explain
them, or take for granted that they correspond exactly with our
explanations.
Bergson gives the name “space” to the form which belongs to
abstractions but not to actual facts: abstractions, he says, are
“spatial,” but facts are not. This use of the word “space” is peculiar
and perhaps unfortunate. Even as it is ordinarily used the word “space”
is ambiguous, it may mean either the pure space with which higher
mathematics is concerned, or the public space which contains the common
sense things and objects and their qualities which make up the every
day world, or the private space of sensible perception. When Bergson
speaks of “space,” however, he does not mean either pure or public or
private space, he means an _a priori_ form imposed by intellectual
activity upon its object. This resembles Kant’s use of the word, but
Bergson’s “space” is not, like Kant’s, the _a priori_ form of sense
acquaintance, but of thought, in other words logical form. For Bergson
“spatial” means “logical,” and since so much misunderstanding seems to
have been caused by his using the word “space” in this peculiar sense
we shall perhaps do better in what follows to use the word “logical”
instead.
Now whatever is logical is characterised by consisting of distinct,
mutually exclusive terms in external relations: all schemes, for
instance, and diagrams, such as a series of dots one above the other,
or one below the other, or one behind, or in front of the other, or a
series of instants one after the other, or a series of numbers, or
again any arrangements of things or qualities according to their
relations, such as colours or sounds arranged according to their
resemblance or difference; in all these each dot or instant or number
or colour-shade or note, is quite distinct from all the others, and the
relations which join it to the others and give it its position in the
whole series are external to it in the sense that if you changed its
position or included it in quite another series it would nevertheless
still be just the same dot or instant or number or quality as before.
These two logical characteristics of mutual distinction of terms and
externality of relations certainly do belong to the abstractions
employed in explanations, and we commonly suppose that they belong to
everything else besides. Bergson, however, believes that these logical
characteristics really only belong to abstractions and are not
discovered in facts but are imposed upon them by our intellectual bias,
in the sense that we take it for granted that the facts which we know
directly must have the same form as the abstractions which serve to
explain them.
This habit of taking it for granted that not only our abstractions but
also the actual facts have the logical characteristics of consisting of
mutually exclusive terms joined by external relations is, according to
Bergson, one of the two serious respects in which our intellectual bias
distorts our direct acquaintance with actual fact. He points out, as we
saw, that the facts with which we are acquainted are in constant
process of changing, and that, when we examine carefully what is
actually going on, we discover that this change does not really form a
series of distinct qualities or percepts or states, united by external
relations of time, resemblance, difference, and so on, but a continuous
process which has what we might call a qualitative flavour but in which
distinct qualities, states and so on do not occur.
“Considered in themselves” he says, “profound states of consciousness
have no relation to quantity: they are mingled in such a way that it is
impossible to say whether they are one or many, or indeed to examine
them from that point of view without distorting them.” Now, strictly
speaking, of course, these “states of consciousness” ought not to be
referred to in the plural, it is, in fact, a contradiction to speak of
“states of consciousness” having “no relation to quantity”: a plurality
must always form some quantity. This contradiction is the natural
consequence of attempting to put what is non-logical into words. It
would have been just as bad to have referred to “the state of
consciousness,” in the singular, while at the same time insisting that
it contained resemblance and difference. The fact is that plurality and
unity, like distinct terms and external relations, apply only to
whatever has logical form, and Bergson’s whole point is to deny that
the fact (or facts) directly known have this form, and so that any of
these notions apply to it (or them.)
This, of course, raises difficulties when we try to describe the facts
in words, since words stand for abstractions and carry their logical
implications. All descriptions in words of what is non-logical are
bound to be a mass of contradictions, for, having applied any word it
is necessary immediately to guard against its logical implications by
adding another which contradicts them. Thus we say our experience is of
facts, and must then hastily add that nevertheless they are not plural,
and we must further qualify this statement by adding that neither are
they singular. A description of what is non-logical can only convey its
meaning if we discount all the logical implications of the words which,
for want of a better medium of expression, we are driven to employ. Our
whole intellectual bias urges us towards describing everything that
comes within our experience, even if the description is only for our
own private benefit Unfortunately the language in which these
descriptions have to be expressed is so full of logical implications
that, unless we are constantly on our guard, we are liable to be
carried away by them, and then, at once, we lose contact with the
actual facts.
In order to get round this almost universal tendency to confuse
abstractions with facts Bergson sometimes tries to get us to see the
facts as they actually are by using metaphor instead of description in
terms of abstract general notions. He has been much criticised for this
but there is really a good deal to be said for attempting to convey
facts by substituting metaphors for them rather than by using the
ordinary intellectual method of substituting abstractions reached by
analysis. Those who have criticised the use of metaphor have for the
most part not realized how little removed such description is from the
ordinary intellectual method of analysis. They have supposed that in
analysis we stick to the fact itself, whereas in using metaphor we
substitute for the fact to be described some quite different fact which
is only connected with it by a more or less remote analogy. If
Bergson’s view of the intellectual method is right, however, when we
describe in abstract terms arrived at by analysis we are not sticking
to the facts at all, we are substituting something else for them just
as much as if we were using an out and out metaphor. Qualities and all
abstract general notions are, indeed, nothing but marks of analogies
between a given fact and all the other facts belonging to the same
class: they may mark rather closer analogies than those brought out by
an ordinary metaphor, but on the other hand in a frank metaphor we at
least stick to the concrete, we substitute fact for fact and we are in
no danger of confusing the fact introduced by the metaphor with the
actual fact to which the metaphor applies. In description in terms of
abstract general notions such as common qualities we substitute for
fact something which is not fact at all, we lose touch with the
concrete and, moreover, we are strongly tempted to confuse fact with
abstraction and believe that the implications of the abstraction apply
to the fact, or even that the abstraction is itself a real part of the
fact.
Language plays a most important part in forming our habit of treating
all facts as material for generalisation, and it is largely to the
influence of the words which we use for describing facts that Bergson
attributes our readiness to take it for granted that facts have the
same logical form as abstractions. It is language again which makes it
so difficult to point out that this assumption is mistaken, because,
actually, the form of facts is non-logical, a continuous process and
not a series. The only way to point this out is by describing the
nature of the non-logical facts as contrasted with a logical series,
but the language in which our description of the non-logical facts has
to be conveyed is itself full of logical implications which contradict
the very point we are trying to bring out. Descriptions of non-logical
processes will only be intelligible if we discount the logical
implications inherent in the words employed, but in order to be willing
to discount these implications it is necessary first to be convinced
that there is anything non-logical to which such a description could
apply. And yet how can we be convinced without first understanding the
description? It appears to be a vicious circle, and so it would be if
our knowledge of change as a process really depended upon our
understanding anybody’s description of it. According to Bergson,
however, we all do know such a process directly; in fact, if he is
right, we know nothing else directly at all. The use of description is
not to give us knowledge of the process, that we already have, but only
to remind us of what we really knew all along, but had rather lost
contact with and misinterpreted because of our preoccupation with
describing and explaining it. Bergson’s criticism of our intellectual
methods turns simply upon a question of fact, to be settled by direct
introspection. If, when we have freed ourselves from the preconceptions
created by our normal common sense intellectual point of view, we find
that what we know directly is a non-logical process of becoming, then
we must admit that intellectual thinking is altogether inappropriate
and even mischievous as a method of speculation.
It is one of Bergson’s chief aims to induce us to regain contact with
our direct experience, and it is with this in view that he spends so
much effort in describing what the form of this experience actually is,
and how it compares with the logical form which belongs to
abstractions, that is with what he calls “space.”
The form which belongs to facts but not to abstractions Bergson calls
“duration.” Duration can be described negatively by saying that it is
non-logical, but when we attempt any positive description language
simply breaks down and we can do nothing but contradict ourselves.
Duration does not contain parts united by external relations: it does
not contain parts at all, for parts would constitute fixed stages,
whereas duration changes continuously.
But in order to describe duration at all we have logically only two
alternatives, either to speak of it as a plurality, and that implies
having parts, or else as a unity, and that by implication, excludes
change. Being particularly concerned to emphasise the changing nature
of what we know directly Bergson rejects the latter alternative: short
of simply giving up the attempt to describe it he has then no choice
but to treat this process which he calls duration as a plurality and
this drives him into speaking of it as if it had parts. To correct this
false impression he adds that these parts are united, not, like logical
parts, by external relations, but in quite a new way, by “synthesis.”
“Parts” united by synthesis have not the logical characteristics of
mutual distinction and externality of relations, they interpenetrate
and modify one another. In a series which has duration (such a thing is
a contradiction in terms, but the fault lies with the logical form of
language which, in spite of its unsatisfactoriness we are driven to
employ if we want to describe at all) the “later parts” are not
distinct from the “earlier”: “earlier and” “later” are not mutually
exclusive relations.
Bergson says, then, that the process of duration which we know
directly, if it is to be called a series at all, must be described as a
series whose “parts” interpenetrate, and this is the first important
respect in which non-logical duration differs from a logical series. In
“a series” which is used to describe duration not only are the “parts”
not distinct but “their relations” are not external in the sense,
previously explained, in which logical relations are external to the
terms which they relate. A logical term in a logical series can change
its position or enter into a wholly different series and still remain
the same term. But the terms in a series which has duration (again this
is absurd) are what they are just because of their position in the
whole stream of duration to which they belong: to transfer them from
one position in the series to another would be to alter their whole
flavour which depends upon having had just that particular past and no
other. As illustration we might take the last bar of a tune. By itself,
or following upon other sounds not belonging to the tune, this last bar
would not be itself, its particular quality depends upon coming at the
end of that particular tune. In a process of duration, then, such as
tune, the “later” bars are not related externally to the “earlier” but
depend for their character upon their position in the whole tune. In
actual fact, of course, the tune progresses continuously, and not by
stages, such as distinct notes or bars, but if, for the sake of
description, we speak of it as composed of different bars, we must say
that any bar we choose to distinguish is modified by the whole of the
tune which has gone before it: change its position in the whole stream
of sound to which it belongs and you change its character absolutely.
This means that in change such as this, change, that is, which has
duration, repetition is out of the question. Take a song in which the
last line is sung twice over as a refrain: the notes, we say, are
repeated, but the second time the line occurs the actual effect
produced is different, and that, indeed, is the whole point of a
refrain. This illustrates the second important difference which Bergson
wants to bring out between the forms of change which belong
respectively to non-logical facts and to the logical abstractions by
which we describe them, that is between duration as contrasted with a
logical series of stages. The notes are abstractions assumed to explain
the effect produced, which is the actual fact directly known. The notes
are stages in a logical series of change, but their effects, the actual
fact, changes as a process of duration. From this difference in their
ways of changing there follows an important difference between fact and
abstraction, namely that, while the notes can be repeated over again,
the effect will never be the same as before. This is because the notes,
being abstractions, are not affected by their relations which give them
their position in the logical series which they form, while their
effect, being a changing process, depends for its flavour upon its
position in the whole duration to which it belongs: this flavour grows
out of the whole of what has gone before, and since this whole is
itself always growing by the addition of more and more “later stages,”
the effect which it goes to produce can never be the same twice over.
This is why Bergson calls duration “creative.”
No “two” positions in a creative process of duration can have an
identical past history, every “later” one will have more history, every
“earlier” one less. In a logical series, on the other hand, there is no
reason why the same term should not occur over and over again at
different points in the course of the series, since in a logical series
every term, being distinct from every other and only joined to it by
external relations, is what it is independently of its position.
If Bergson is right therefore in saying that abstractions change as a
logical series while the actual facts change as a creative process of
duration, it follows that, while our descriptions and explanations may
contain repetitions the actual fact to which we intend these
explanations to apply, cannot. This, if true, is a very important
difference between facts and abstractions which common sense entirely
overlooks when it assumes that we are directly acquainted with common
qualities.
We have seen that this assumption is taken for granted in the account
which is ordinarily given (or would be given if people were in the
habit of putting their common sense assumptions into words) of how it
is that facts come to be classified: facts are supposed to fall into
classes because they share common qualities, that is because, in the
changing fact directly known, the same qualities recur over and over
again. There is no doubt that the fact with which we are directly
acquainted can be classified, and it is equally undeniable that this
fact is always changing, but if this change has the form of creative
duration then its classification cannot be based upon the repetition of
qualities at different “stages” in its course. It follows that either
the fact with which we are directly acquainted does not change as a
creative process, or else that we are quite wrong in assuming, as we
ordinarily do, that we actually know qualities directly and that it is
these qualities which form the basis of classification, and hence of
all description and explanation. We have already seen that this
assumption, though at first sight one naturally supposes it to be based
on direct acquaintance, may really depend not on any fact directly
known but on our preoccupation with explanation rather than with mere
knowing.
But if we never really are acquainted with qualities, if qualities are,
as Bergson says, mere abstractions, how come we to be able to make
these abstractions, and why do they apply to actual facts? If
classification is not based on common qualities discovered by analysis
and repeated over and over as actual facts directly known, on what is
it based? We certainly can classify facts and these abstract common
qualities, if abstractions they be, certainly correspond to something
in the facts since they apply to them: what is the foundation in
directly knowu fact which accounts for this correspondence between
abstractions and facts if it is not qualities actually given as part of
the facts? These questions are so very pertinent and at the same time
so difficult to answer satisfactorily that one is tempted to throw over
the view that the changing fact which we know directly forms a creative
duration. This view is impossible to express without self-contradiction
and it does not fit in with our accustomed habits of mind: nevertheless
if we do not simply reject it at once as patently absurd but keep it in
mind for a while and allow ourselves time to get used to it, it grows
steadily more and more convincing: we become less and less able to
evade these difficult questions by accepting the common sense account
of what we know directly as consisting of a series of qualities which
are repeated over and over, and more and more driven to regard it as a
process in creative duration which does not admit of repetitions. There
is no difficulty in seeing, the moment we pay attention, that what we
know directly certainly does change all the time: but if we try to pin
this change down and hold it so as to examine it we find it slipping
through our fingers, and the more we look into the supposed stages,
such as things and qualities and events, by means of which common sense
assumes that this change takes place, the more it becomes apparent that
these stages are all of them mere arbitrary abstractions dragged from
their context in a continuous process, fictitious halting places in a
stream of change which goes on unbroken. Unbiassed attention to the
actual fact cannot fail to convince us that what we know directly
changes as a process and not by a series of stages.
The creativeness of this process is perhaps at first not quite so
obvious, but if we look into the fact once more, with the object of
observing repetitions in it, we realize that we cannot find any. It is
true that you can pick out qualities which at first appear to recur:
you may, for example, see a rose and then a strawberry ice cream, and
you may be inclined to say that here you saw the quality pink twice
over. But you can only say that what you saw was the same both times by
abstracting what we call the colour from the whole context in which it
actually appeared on the two different occasions. In reality the colour
is not known in isolation: it has its place, in the whole changing fact
in a particular context which you may describe in abstract terms as
consisting of the shape and smell and size of the object together with
all the rest of your state of mind at the moment, which were not the
same on the two different occasions, while further this pink colour was
modified on each occasion by its position in the whole changing fact
which may again be described in abstract terms by saying, for instance,
that the pink on the occasion of your seeing the strawberry ice cream,
coming after the pink on the occasion of your seeing the rose, had a
peculiar flavour of “seen before” which was absent on the previous
occasion. Thus although, by isolating “parts” of the whole process of
changing which you know directly, you may bring yourself for a moment
to suppose that you are acquainted with repetitions, when you look at
the whole fact as it actually is, you see that what you know is never
the same twice over, and that your direct experience forms, not a
series of repetitions, but a creative process.
But, once you grant that the fact which you know directly really
changes, there is, according to Bergson, no getting away from the
conclusion that it must form a creative process of duration. For he
thinks that creative duration is the only possible way in which the
transition between past and present, which is the essential feature of
change and time, could be accomplished: all passing from past to
present, all change, therefore, and all time, _must_, he says, form a
creative process of duration. The alternative is to suppose that time
and change form logical series of events in temporal relations of
before and after, but, according to Bergson, this not only leaves out
the transition altogether but is, even as it stands, unintelligible.
The argument is this.
If time and change are real, then, when the present is, the past simply
is not. But it is impossible to see how, in that case, there can be any
relation between past and present, for a relation requires at least two
terms in between which it holds, while in this case there could never
be more than one term, the present, _ipso facto_, abolishing the past.
If, on the other hand, the past is preserved, distinct from the
present, then temporal relations can indeed hold between them, but in
that case there is no real change nor time at all.
This dilemma all follows, of course, from regarding “past” and
“present” as mutually exclusive and distinct, and requiring to be
united by external relations, in short as terms in a logical series:
for Bergson himself this difficulty simply does not arise since he
denies that, within the actual changing fact directly known, there are
any clear cut logical distinctions such as the words “past” and
“present” imply. But when it comes to describing this changing fact
distinct terms have to be employed because there are no others, and
this creates pseudo-problems such as this question of how, assuming
past and present to be distinct, the transition between them ever can
be effected. The real answer is that the transition never is effected
because past and present are, in fact, not distinct.
According to Bergson a very large proportion of the problems over which
philosophers have been accustomed to dispute have really been
pseudo-problems simply arising out of this confusion between facts and
the abstractions by which we describe them. When once we have realized
how they arise these pseudo-problems no longer present any
difficulties; they are in fact no longer problems at all, they melt
away and cease to interest us. If Bergson is right this would go far to
explain the suspicion which, in spite of the prestige of philosophy,
still half unconsciously colours the feeling of the “plain man” for the
“intellectual,” and which even haunts the philosopher himself, in
moments of discouragement, the suspicion that the whole thing is
trivial, a dispute about words of no real importance or dignity. If
Bergson is right this suspicion is, in many cases, all too well
founded: the discussion of pseudo-problems is not worth while. But then
the discussion of pseudo-problems is not real philosophy: the thinker
who allows himself to be entangled in pseudo-problems has lost his way.
In this, however, the “intellectuals” are not the only ones at fault.
“Plain men” are misled by abstractions about facts just as much, only
being less thorough, their mistake has less effect: at the expense of a
little logical looseness their natural sense of fact saves them from
all the absurdities which follow from their false assumptions. For the
“intellectual” there is not this loophole through which the sense of
fact may undo some of the work of false assumptions: the “intellectual”
follows out ruthlessly the implications of his original assumptions and
if these are false his very virtues lead him into greater absurdities
than those committed by “plain men.”
One of the most important tasks of philosophy is to show up the
pseudo-problems so that they may no longer waste our time and we may be
free to pursue the real aim of philosophy which is the reconquest of
the field of virtual knowledge. Getting rid of the pseudo-problems,
however, is no easy task: we may realize, for example, that the
difficulty of seeing how the transition between past and present ever
can be effected is a pseudo-problem because in fact past and present
are not distinct and so no transition between them is needed. But since
we have constantly to be using words which carry the implication of
distinctness we are constantly liable to forget this simple answer when
new problems, though in fact they all spring from this fundamental
discrepancy between facts and the abstractions by which we describe
them, present themselves in some slightly different form.
The notion of duration as consisting of “parts” united by “creative
synthesis” is a device, not for explaining how the transition from past
to present really takes place (this does not need explaining since,
“past” and “present” being mere abstractions, no transition between
them actually takes place at all), but for enabling us to employ the
abstractions “past” and “present” without constantly being taken in by
their logical implications. The notion of “creative synthesis” as what
joins “past” and “present” in a process of duration is an antidote to
the logical implications of these two distinct terms: creative
synthesis, unlike logical relations, is not external to the “parts”
which it joins; “parts” united by creative synthesis are not distinct
and mutually exclusive. Such a notion as this of creative synthesis
contradicts the logical implications contained in the notion of parts.
The notion of “parts” united by “creative synthesis” is really a hybrid
which attempts to combine the two incompatible notions of logical
distinction and duration. The result is self-contradictory and this
contradiction acts as a reminder warning us against confusing the
actual changing fact with the abstractions in terms of which we
describe it and so falling into the mistake of taking it for granted
that this changing fact must form a series of distinct stages or things
or events or qualities, which can be repeated over and over again.
At the same time there is no getting away from the fact that this
changing fact lends itself to classification and that explanations in
terms of abstractions really do apply to it most successfully. We are
therefore faced with the necessity of finding some way of accounting
for this, other than by assuming that the facts which we know directly
consist of qualities which recur over and over again.