Time and Free Will: an Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness

CHAPTER I. The Intensity of Psychic States

THE INTENSITY OF PSYCHIC STATES

Quantitative differences applicable to magnitudes but not to intensities, 1-4; Attempt to estimate intensities by objective causes or atomic movements, 4-7; Different kinds of intensities, 7; Deep-seated psychic states: desire, 8, hope, 9, joy and sorrow, 10; Aesthetic feelings, 11-18: grace, 12, beauty, 14-18, music, poetry, art, 15-18; Moral feelings, pity, 19; Conscious states involving physical symptoms, 20: muscular effort, 21-26, attention and muscular tension, 27-28; Violent emotions, 29-31: rage, 29, fear, 30; Affective sensations, 32-39: pleasure and pain, 33-39, disgust, 36; Representative sensations, 39-60: and external causes, 42, sensation of sound, 43, intensity, pitch and muscular effort, 45-6, sensations of heat and cold, 46-7, sensations of pressure and weight, 47-50, sensation of light, 50-60, photometric experiments, 52-60, Delbœuf's experiments, 56-60; Psychophysics, 60-72: Weber and Fechner, 61-65, Delbœuf, 67-70, the mistake of regarding sensations as magnitudes, 70-72; Intensity in (1) representative, (2) affective states, intensity and multiplicity, 72-74.

pp.1-74

CHAPTER II. The Multiplicity of Conscious States

THE MULTIPLICITY OF CONSCIOUS STATES

THE IDEA OF DURATION

Number and its units, 75-77, number and accompanying intuition of space, 78-85; Two kinds of multiplicity, of material objects and conscious states, 85-87, impenetrability of matter, 88-89, homogeneous time and pure duration, 90-91; Space and its contents, 92, empirical theories of space, 93-94, intuition of empty homogeneous medium peculiar to man, 95-97, time as homogeneous medium reducible to space, 98-99; Duration, succession and space, 100-104, pure duration, 105-106; Is duration measurable? 107-110; Is motion measurable? 111-112; Paradox of the Eleatics, 113-115; Duration and simultaneity, 115-116; Velocity and simultaneity, 117-119; Space alone homogeneous, duration and succession belong to conscious mind, 120-121; Two kinds of multiplicity, qualitative and quantitative, 121-123, superficial psychic states invested with discontinuity of their external causes, 124-126, these eliminated, real duration is felt as a quality, 127-128; The two aspects of the self, on the surface well-defined conscious states, deeper down states which interpenetrate and form organic whole, 129-139, solidifying influence of language on sensation, 129-132, analysis distorts the feelings, 132-134, deeper conscious states forming a part of ourselves, 134-136; Problems soluble only by recourse to the concrete and living self, 137-139.

pp. 75-139

CHAPTER III. The Organization of Conscious States

THE ORGANIZATION OF CONSCIOUS STATES

FREE WILL

Dynamism and mechanism, 140-142; Two kinds of determinism, 142; Physical determinism, 143-155: and molecular theory of matter, 143, and conservation of energy, 144, if conservation universal, physiological and nervous phenomena necessitated, but perhaps not conscious states, 145-148, but is principle of conversation universal? 149, it may not apply to living beings and conscious states, 150-154, idea of its universality depends on confusion between concrete duration and abstract time, 154-155; Psychological determinism, 155-163: implies associationist conception of mind, 155-158, this involves defective conception of self, 159-163; The free act: freedom as expressing the fundamental self, 165-170; Real duration and contingency, 172-182: could our act have been different? 172-175, geometrical representation of process of coming to a decision, 175-178, the fallacies to which it leads determinists and libertarians, 179-183; Real duration and prediction, 183-198: conditions of Paul's prediction of Peter's action (1) being Peter (2) knowing already his final act, 184-189, the three fallacies involved, 190-192, astronomical prediction depends on hypothetical acceleration of movements, 193-195, duration cannot be thus accelerated, 196-198; Real duration and causality, 199-221: the law "same antecedents, same consequents," 199-201, causality as regular succession, 202-203, causality as prefiguring: two kinds (1) prefiguring as mathematical pre-existence; implies non-duration, but we endure and therefore may be free, 204-210, (2) prefiguring as having idea of future act to be realized by effort; does not involve determinism, 211-214, determinism results from confusing these two senses, 215-218; Freedom real but indefinable, 219-221.

pp.140-221

CONCLUSION

States of self perceived through forms borrowed from external world, 223; Intensity as quality, 225; Duration as qualitative multiplicity, 226; No duration in the external world, 227; Extensity and duration must be separated, 229; Only the fundamental self free, 231; Kant's mistaken idea of time as homogeneous, 232, hence he put the self which is free outside both space and time, 233; Duration is heterogeneous, relation of psychic state to act is unique, and act is free, 235-240.

pp. 222-240

INDEX

CHAPTER I. The Intensity of Psychic States

THE INTENSITY OF PSYCHIC STATES

It is usually admitted that states of consciousness, sensations, feelings, passions, efforts, are capable of growth and diminution; we are even told that a sensation can be said to be twice, thrice, four times as intense as another sensation of the same kind. This latter thesis, which is maintained by psychophysicists, we shall examine later; but even the opponents of psychophysics do not see any harm in speaking of one sensation as being more intense than another, of one effort as being greater than another, and in thus setting up differences of quantity between purely internal states. Common sense, moreover, has not the slightest hesitation in giving its verdict on this point; people say they are more or less warm, or more or less sad, and this distinction of more and less, even when it is carried over to the region of subjective facts and unextended objects, surprises nobody. But this involves a very obscure point and a much more important problem than is usually supposed.

When we assert that one number is greater than another number or one body greater than another body, we know very well what we mean.

For in both cases we allude to unequal spaces, as shall be shown in detail a little further on, and we call that space the greater which contains the other. But how can a more intense sensation contain one of less intensity? Shall we say that the first implies the second, that we reach the sensation of higher intensity only on condition of having first passed through the less intense stages of the same sensation, and that in a certain sense we are concerned, here also, with the relation of container to contained? This conception of intensive magnitude seems, indeed, to be that of common sense, but we cannot advance it as a philosophical explanation without becoming involved in a vicious circle. For it is beyond doubt that, in the natural series of numbers, the later number exceeds the earlier, but the very possibility of arranging the numbers in ascending order arises from their having to each other relations of container and contained, so that we feel ourselves able to explain precisely in what sense one is greater than the other. The question, then, is how we succeed in forming a series of this kind with intensities, which cannot be superposed on each other, and by what sign we recognize that the members of this series increase, for example, instead of diminishing: but this always comes back to the inquiry, why an intensity can be assimilated to a magnitude.

It is only to evade the difficulty to distinguish, as is usually done, between two species of quantity, the first extensive and measurable, the second intensive and not admitting of measure, but of which it can nevertheless be said that it is greater or less than another intensity. For it is recognized thereby that there is something common to these two forms of magnitude, since they are both termed magnitudes and declared to be equally capable of increase and diminution. But, from the point of view of magnitude, what can there be in common between the extensive and the intensive, the extended and the unextended? If, in the first case, we call that which contains the other the greater quantity, why go on speaking of quantity and magnitude when there is no longer a container or a contained? If a quantity can increase and diminish, if we perceive in it, so to speak, the less inside the more, is not such a quantity on this very account divisible, and thereby extended? Is it not then a contradiction to speak of an inextensive quantity? But yet common sense agrees with the philosophers in setting up a pure intensity as a magnitude, just as if it were something extended. And not only do we use the same word, but whether we think of a greater intensity or a greater extensity, we experience in both cases an analogous impression; the terms "greater" and "less" call up in both cases the same idea. If we now ask ourselves in what does this idea consist, our consciousness still offers us the image of a container and a contained. We picture to ourselves, for example, a greater intensity of effort as a greater length of thread rolled up, or as a spring which, in unwinding, will occupy a greater space. In the idea of intensity, and even in the word which expresses it, we shall find the image of a present contraction and consequently a future expansion, the image of something virtually extended, and, if we may say so, of a compressed space. We are thus led to believe that we translate the intensive into the extensive, and that we compare two intensities, or at least express the comparison, by the confused intuition of a relation between two extensities. But it is just the nature of this operation which it is difficult to determine.

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