THE REALITY OF CHANGE
Fundamental in Bergson's philosophy. We are surrounded by changes--we
ourselves change--Belief in change--Simplicity of change--Immobility
is composite and relative--All movement is indivisible. The fallacy of
"states"--Intellect loves the static--Life is dynamic--Change, the very
stuff of life, constitutes reality.
Throughout the history of thought we find that the prevailing
philosophies have always reflected some of the characteristics of their
time. For instance, in those periods when, as historians tell us, the
tendency towards unity, conformity, system, order, and authority was
strong, we find philosophy reflecting these conditions by emphasizing
the unity of the universe; while in those periods in which established
order, system, and authority were disturbed, the philosophy of the
time emphasizes the idea of multiplicity as opposed to the unity of
the universe, laying stress on freedom, creative action, spontaneity of
effort, and the reality of change. There can be little doubt that this
is the chief reason why Bergson's philosophy has found such an amount of
acceptance in a comparatively short period. The response to his thought
may be explained very largely by this, that already his fundamental
ideas existed, although implicit, unexpressed, in the minds of a great
multitude of thoughtful people, to whom the static conceptions of the
universe were inadequate and false.
We must not, on the other hand, overlook the fact that Bergson's
statements have in their turn given an emphasis to all aspects of
thought which take account of the reality of change and which realize
its importance in all spheres. A writer on world politics very aptly
reminds us that "life is change, and a League of Peace that aimed at
preserving peace by forbidding change would be a tyranny as oppressive
as any Napoleonic dictatorship. These problems called for periodic
change. The peril of our future is that, while the need for change
is instinctively grasped by some peoples as the fundamental fact of
world-politics, to perceive it costs others a difficult effort of
thought." [Footnote: H. N. Brailsford on Peace and Change, Chap. 3 of
his Book A League of Nations.] However difficult it may be for some
individuals and for some nations to grasp it, the great fact is
there--the reality of change is undeniable.
Bergson himself would give to his philosophy the title, The Philosophy
of Change, and this for a very good reason, for the principle of
Change and an insistence on its reality lies at the root of his
thought.[Footnote: He suggested this as a sub-title to Dr. H. Wildon
Carr for his little work Henri Bergson (People's Books). Dr. Wildon
Carr's later and larger work bears this as its full title.] "We know
that everything changes," we find him saying in his London lectures,
"but it is mere words. From the earliest times recorded in the history
of philosophy, philosophers have never stopped saying that everything
changes; but, when the moment came for the practical application of this
proposition, they acted as if they believed that at the bottom of things
there is immobility and invariability. The greatest difficulties of
philosophy are due to not taking account of the fact that Change and
Movement are universal. It is not enough to say that everything changes
and moves--we must believe it." [Footnote: Second of the four lectures on
La Nature de l'Ame delivered at London University, Oct. 21, 1911. From
report in The Times for Oct. 23, 1911, p. 4.] In order to think Change
and to see it, a whole mass of prejudices must be swept aside--some
artificial, the products of speculative philosophy, and others the
natural product of common-sense. We tend to regard immobility as a
more simple affair than movement. But what we call immobility is really
composite and is merely relative, being a relation between movements.
If, for example, there are two trains running in the same direction on
parallel lines at exactly the same speed, opposite one another, then the
passengers in each train, when observing the other train, will regard
the trains as motionless. So, generally, immobility is only apparent,
Change is real. We tend to be misled by language; we speak, for
instance, of 'the state of things'; but what we call a state is the
appearance which a change assumes in the eyes of a being who, himself,
changes according to an identical or analogous rhythm. "Take, for
example," says Bergson, "a summer day. We are stretched on the grass, we
look around us--everything is at rest--there is absolute immobility--no
change. But the grass is growing, the leaves of the trees are developing
or decaying--we ourselves are growing older all the time. That which
seems rest, simplicity itself, is but a composite of our ageing with the
changes which takes place in the grass, in the leaves, in all that is
around us. Change, then, is simple, while 'the state of things' as
we call it, is composite. Every stable state is the result of the
co-existence between that change and the change of the person who
perceives it." [Footnote: La Nature de l'Ame, lecture 2.]
It is an axiom in the philosophy of Bergson that all change or
movement is indivisible. He asserts this expressly in Matter and
Memory,[Footnote: Matter and Memory, p. 246 ff. (Fr. p. 207 ff).] and
again in the second lecture on The Perception of Change he deals with
the indivisibility of movement somewhat fully, submitting it to a
careful analysis, from which the following quotation is an extract--"My
hand is at the point A. I move it to the point B, traversing the
interval AB. I say that this movement from A to B is a simple
thing--each of us has the sensation of this, direct and immediate.
Doubtless, while we carry our hand over from A to B, we say to ourselves
that we could stop it at an intermediate point, but then that would no
longer be the same movement. There would then be two movements, with an
interval of rest. Neither from within, by the muscular sense, nor from
without, by sight, should we have the same perception. If we leave our
movement from A to B such as it is, we feel it undivided, and we must
declare it indivisible. It is true that when I look at my hand, going
from A to B, traversing the interval AB, I say to myself 'the interval
AB can be divided into as many parts as I wish, therefore the movement
from A to B can be divided into as many parts as I like, since this
movement covers this interval,' or, again, 'At each moment of its
passing, the moving object passes over a certain point, therefore we
can distinguish in the movement as many stopping-places as we
wish--therefore the movement is infinitely divisible.' But let us
reflect on this for a minute. How can the movement possibly coincide
with the space which it traverses? How can the moving coincide with the
motionless? How can the object which moves be said to 'be' at any point
in its path? It passes over, or, in other words, it could 'be' there. It
would 'be' there if it stopped there, but, if it stopped there, it is no
longer the same movement with which we are dealing. It is always at one
bound that a trajectory is traversed when, on its course, there is no
stoppage. The bound may last a few seconds, or it may last for weeks,
months, or years, but it is unique and cannot be decomposed. Only, when
once the passage has been made, as the path is in space, and space is
infinitely divisible, we picture to ourselves the movement itself as
infinitely divisible. We like to imagine it thus, because, in a movement
it is not the change of position which interests us, it is the positions
themselves which the moving object has left, which it will take up,
which it might assume if it were to stop in its course. We have need
of immobility, and the more we succeed in presenting to ourselves the
movement as coinciding with the space which it traverses, the better we
think we understand it. Really, there is no true immobility, if we
imply by that, an absence of movement." [Footnote: Translated from La
Perception du Changement, pp. 19-20.] This immobility of which we have
need for the purposes of action and of practical life, we erect into an
absolute reality. It is of course convenient to our sense of sight to
lay hold of objects in this way; as pioneer of the sense of touch,
it prepares our action on the external world. But, although for all
practical purposes we require the notion of immobility as part of our
mental equipment, it does not at all help us to grasp reality. Then we
habitually regard movement as something superadded to the motionless.
This is quite legitimate in the world of affairs; but when we bring this
habit into the world of speculation, we misconceive reality, we create
lightheartedly insoluble problems, and close our eyes to what is most
alive in the real world. For us movement is one position, then another
position, and so on indefinitely. It is true that we say there must
be something else, viz., the actual passing across the interval which
separates those positions. But such a conception of Change is quite
false. All true change or movement is indivisible. We, by constructing
fictitious states and trying to compose movement out of them, endeavour
to make a process coincide with a thing--a movement with an immobility.
This is the way to arrive at dilemmas, antinomies, and blind-alleys of
thought. The puzzles of Zeno about "Achilles and the Tortoise" and "The
Moving Arrow" are classical examples of the error involved in treating
movement as divisible.[Footnote: Bergson in Matter and Memory examines
Zeno's four puzzles: "The Dichotomy," "Achilles and the Tortoise," "The
Arrow" and "The Stadium."] If movement is not everything, it is nothing,
and if we postulate, to begin with, that the motionless is real, then
we shall be incapable of grasping reality. The philosophies of Plato, of
Aristotle, and of Plotinus were developed from the thesis that there
is more in the immutable than in the moving, and that it is by way of
diminution that we pass from the stable to the unstable.
The main reason why it is such a difficult matter for us to grasp
the reality of continuous change is owing to the limitations of our
intellectual nature. "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." [Footnote: Creative
Evolution, p. 313 (Fr. p. 321).] Intellect is always trying to carve out
for itself stable forms because it is primarily fitted for action, and
"is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life" and
grasp Change.[Footnote: Creative Evolution, p. 174 (Fr. p. 179).]
Our intellect loves the solid and the static, but life itself is not
static--it is dynamic. We might say that the intellect takes views
across the ever-moving scene, snapshots of reality. It acts like the
camera of the cinematograph operator, which is capable only of producing
photographs, successive and static, in a series upon a ribbon. To grasp
reality, we have to do what the cinematograph does with the film--that
is, introduce or rather, re-introduce movement.[Footnote: Creative
Evolution, pp. 320-324 (Fr. pp. 328-332).] The stiff photograph is an
abstraction bereft of movement, so, too, our intellectual views of the
world and of our own nature are static instead of being dynamic. Human
life is not made up of childhood, adolescence, manhood, and old age as
"states," although we tend to speak of it in this way. Life is not a
thing, nor the state of a thing--it is a continuous movement or change.
The soul itself is a movement, not an entity. In the physical world,
light, when examined, proves itself to be a movement. Even physical
science, bound, as it would seem, to assert the fixity and rigidity of
matter, is now of the opinion that matter is not the solid thing we are
apt to think it. The experiments of Kelvin and Lodge and the
discovery of radium, have brought forward a new theory of matter; the
old-fashioned base, the atom, is now regarded as being essentially
movement; matter is as wonderful and mysterious in its character
as spirit. Further we must note that the researches of Einstein,
culminating in the formulation of his general Theory of Relativity and
his special Theory of Gravitation, which are arousing such interest at
the present time, threaten very seriously the older static views of
the universe and seem to frustrate any efforts to find and denote any
stability therein.[Footnote: Consult on this Dr. Einstein's own work of
which the translation by R. W. Lawson is just published: Relativity: The
Special and the General Theory. Methuen, 1920.] In the light of
these discoveries, Bergson's views on the reality of Change seem less
paradoxical than they might formerly have appeared. The reality of
Change is, for Bergson, absolute, and on this, as a fundamental point,
he constructs his thought. In conjunction with his study of Memory, it
leads up to his discussions of Real Time (la duree), of Freedom, and
of Creative Evolution. We must then, at the outset of any study of
Bergson's philosophy, obtain a grasp of this universal 'becoming'--a
vision of the reality of Change. Then we shall realize that Change is
substantial, that it constitutes the very stuff of life. "There are
changes, but there are not things that change; change does not need a
support. There are movements, but there are not, necessarily, constant
objects which are moved; movement does not imply something that is
movable." [Footnote: Translated from La Perception du Changement, Lecture
2, p. 24.]
To emphasize and to illustrate this point, so fundamental in his
thought, Bergson turns to music. "Let us listen," he says, "to a melody,
letting ourselves be swayed by it; do we not have the clear perception
of a movement which is not attached to any mobility--of a change devoid
of anything which changes? The change is self-sufficient, it is the
thing itself. It avails nothing to say that it takes time, for it is
indivisible; if the melody were to stop sooner, it would not be any
longer the same volume of sound, but another, equally indivisible.
Doubtless we have a tendency to divide it and to represent it to
ourselves as a linking together of distinct notes instead of the
uninterrupted continuity of the melody. But why? Simply because our
auditive perception has assumed the habit of saturating itself with
visual images. We hear the melody across the vision which the conductor
of the orchestra can have of it in looking at his score. We represent
to ourselves notes linked on to notes on an imaginary sheet of paper.
We think of a keyboard on which one plays, of the bow of a violin which
comes and goes, of the musicians, each one of whom plays his part in
conjunction with the others. Let us abstract these spatial images; there
remains pure change, self-sufficing, in no way attached to a 'thing'
which changes." [Footnote: Translated from La Perception du Changement,
pp. 24-25.]
We must conceive reality as a continual flux, then immobility will
seem a superficial abstraction hypostatized into states, concepts, and
substances, and the old difficulties raised by the ancients, in regard
to the problem of Change, will vanish, along with the problems attached
to the notion of "substance" in modern thought, because there is nothing
substantial but Change. Apart from Change there is no reality. We shall
see that all is movement, that we ourselves are movement--part of an
elan, a poussee formidable, which carries with it all things and all
creatures, and that in this eternity--not of immutability but of
life and Change--"we live and move and have our being." [Footnote: La
Perception du Changement, concluding paragraph, p. 37.]