A New Philosophy

Chapter Ii.)

From the preceding observations springs the utilitarian and practical nature of common perception. Let us attempt now to see of what the elaboration which it makes reality undergo consists. This time I am summing up the fourth chapter of "Matter and Memory". First of all, we choose between the images, emphasising the strong, extinguishing the weak, although both have, a priori, the same interest for pure knowledge; we make this choice above all by according preference to impressions of touch, which are the most useful from the practical point of view. This selection determines the parcelling up of matter into independent bodies, and the artificial character of our proceeding is thus made plain. Does not science, indeed, conclude in the same way, showing us--as soon as she frees herself even to a small extent from common-sense--full continuity re-established by "moving strata," and all bodies resolved into stationary waves and knots of intersecting fluxes? Already, then, we shall be nearer pure perception if we cease to consider anything but the perceptible stuff in which numerically distinct percepts are cut. Even there, however, a utilitarian division continues. Our senses are instruments of abstraction, each of them discerning a possible path of action. We may say that corporal life functions in the manner of an absorbing milieu, which determines the disconnected scale of simple qualities by extinguishing most of the perceptible radiations. In short, the scale of sensations, with its numerical aspect, is nothing but the spectrum of our practical activity. Commonly we perceive only averages and wholes, which we contract into distinct "qualities". Let us disengage from this rhythm what is peculiar to ourselves.

Above all, let us strive to disengage ourselves from homogeneous space, this substratum of fixity, this arbitrary scheme of measurement and division, which, to our greater advantage, subtends the natural, qualitative, and undivided extension of images. (We usually represent homogeneous space as previous to the heterogeneous extension of images: as a kind of empty room which we furnish with percepts. We must reverse this order, and conceive, on the contrary, that extension precedes space.) And we shall finally have pure perception in so far as it is accessible to us.

There is no disputing the absolute value of this pure perception. The impotence of speculative reason, as demonstrated by Kant, is perhaps, at bottom, only the impotence of an intelligence in bondage to certain necessities of the corporal life, and exercised upon a matter which it has had to disorganise for the satisfaction of our needs. Our knowledge of things is then no longer relative to the fundamental structure of our mind, but only to its superficial and acquired habits, to the contingent form which it takes on from our corporal functions and our lower needs.

The relativity of knowledge is therefore not final. In unmaking what our needs have made we re-establish intuition in its original purity, and resume contact with reality. ("Matter and Memory", page 203.)

That is how things are really presented. Here we are confronted by the moving continuity of images. Pure perception is complete perception. From it we pass to ordinary perception by diminution, throwing shadows here and there: the reality perceived by common-sense is nothing else actually than universal interaction rendered visible by its very interruption at certain points.

Whence we have this double conclusion already formulated higher up: the relation of perception to matter is that of the part to the whole, and our consciousness is rather limited than relative. It must be stated that primarily we perceive things in themselves, not in us; the subjectivity of our current perception comes from our work of outlining it in the bosom of reality, but the root of pure perception plunges into full objectivity. If, at each point of matter, we were to succeed in possessing the stream of total interaction of which it marks a wave, and if we were to succeed in seeing the multiplicity of these points as a qualitative heterogeneous flux without number or severance, we should coincide with reality itself. It is true that such an ideal, while inaccessible on the one hand, would not succeed on the other without risk to knowledge; in fact, says Mr Bergson, ("Matter and Memory", page 38.) "to perceive all the influences of all the points of all bodies would be to descend to the state of material object."

But a solution of this double difficulty remains possible, a dynamic and approximate solution, which consists in looking for the absolute intuition of matter in such a mobilisation of our perspective faculties that we become capable of following, according to the circumstances, all the paths of virtual perception of which the common anxiety for the practical has made us choose one only, and capable of realising all the infinitely different modes of qualification and discernment.

But we have still to see how this "complete experience" can be practically thought.

IV. Critique of Language.

The perception of reality does not obtain the full value of knowledge, except when once socialised, once made the common property of men, and thereby also tested and verified.

There is one means only of doing that; viz. to analyse it into manageable and portable concepts. By language I mean the product of this conceptualisation. Thus language is necessary; for we must always speak, were it only to utter the impotence of words. Not less necessary is a critique of spontaneous language, of the laws which govern it, of the postulates which it embraces, of the methods which convey its implicit doctrines. Synthetic forms are actually theories already; they effect an adaptation of reality to the demands of practical use. If it is impossible to escape them, it is at least fitting not to employ them except with due knowledge, and when properly warned against the illusion of the false problems which they might arouse.

Let us first of all consider thought in itself, in its concrete life. What are the principal characteristics, the essential steps? We readily say, analysis and synthesis.

Nothing can be known except in contrast, correlation, or negation of another thing; and the act of knowledge, considered in itself, is unification. Thus number appears as a fundamental category, as an absolute condition of intelligibility; some go so far as to regard atomism as a necessary method. But that is inexact. No doubt the use of number and the resulting atomism are imposed by definition, we might say, on the thought which proceeds by conceptual analysis, and then by unifying construction; that is to say, on synthetic thought. But, in greater depth, thought is dynamic continuity and duration. Its essential work does not consist in discerning and afterwards in assembling ready-made elements. Let us see in it rather a kind of creative maturation, and let us attempt to grasp the nature of this causal activity. (H. Bergson, "Intellectual Effort" in the "Philosophical Review", January 1902.)

The act of thought is always a complex play of moving representations, an evolution of life in which incessant inner reactions occur. That is to say, it is movement. But there are several planes of thought, from intuition to language, and we must distinguish between the thought which moves on the surface among terms displayed on a single plane, and the thought with goes deeper and deeper from one plane to another.

We do not think solely by concepts or images; we think, first of all, according to Mr Bergson's expression, by dynamic schemes. What is a dynamic scheme? It is motive rather than representative, inexpressible in itself, but a source of language containing not so much the images or concepts in which it will develop as the indication of the path to be followed in order to obtain them. It is not so much system as movement, progress, genesis; it does not mark the gaze directed upon the various points of one plane of deliberate contemplation so much as an effort to pass through successive planes of thought in a direction leading from intuition to analysis. We might define it by its function of calling up images and concepts, representations which, for one and the same scheme, are neither strictly determined nor anything in particular in themselves, concurrent representations which have in common one and the same logical power.

The representations called up form a body to the scheme, and the relation of the scheme to the concepts and images which it calls up resembles, mutatis mutandis, the relation pointed out by Mr Bergson between an idea and its basis in the brain. In short, it is the very act of creative thought which the dynamic scheme interprets, the act not yet fixed in "results."

Nothing is easier than to illustrate the existence of this scheme. Let us merely remark a few facts of current observation. Recall, for example, the suggestive anxiety we experience when we seek to remember a name; the precise syllables of the name still escape us, but we feel them approaching, and already we possess something of them, since we immediately reject those which do not answer to a certain direction of expectancy; and by endeavouring to secure a more intimate feeling of this direction we suddenly arouse the desired recollection.

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