conceives time as a form of personal experience. Indeed, the fundamental argument of L’évolution créatrice is based on the fact that change is introspectively known as reality. “We perceive ourselves,” Bergson argues, “and what do we find? … I find that I pass from state to state. I am hot or cold, gay or sad, I work or I do nothing. … Thus, I change unceasingly.[1] … We seek,” he continues, “the precise sense which our consciousness gives to the word ‘exist’ and we find that for a conscious being to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is indefinitely to create oneself. May we,” he asks, “say the same of existence in general?”[2] Bergson’s affirmative answer to this question will later be discussed; at present it concerns us to notice that duration is defined as self-creation, and that the whole of Bergson’s nature-philosophy is erected on the foundation of this conception of change as personal.
Obviously, Bergson’s doctrine of freedom[3] is the direct outgrowth of this view of the self as changing, as forever creating itself. It is needless to argue that in this teaching Bergson is openly personalistic. What he asserts is genuine indeterminism, an “evolution” in which “something absolutely new is added.”[4] “Consciousness,” he says, “is essentially free; it is liberty’s very self (elle est la liberté même);”[5] “to act freely is to re-take possession of oneself.”[6]
(b) The changing, freely developing nature of the self as immediately realized by intuition, or instinct, is sharply contrasted by Bergson with the mechanical nature of the physical world as known to the intellect.[7] In brief, his teaching is the following: We immediately experience both duration—change, movement—and extensity. Extensity is not (as Berkeley taught) exclusively tactile: it is a character of all our sensational experi-
- ↑ L’évolution créatrice, p. 1.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 8.
- ↑ Cf. especially Les données immédiates de la conscience, Chapter III.
- ↑ Matière et Mémoire, Chapter III, p. 205.
- ↑ L’évolution créatrice, Chapter III, p. 293.
- ↑ Les données immédiates de la conscience, Conclusion, p. 178.
- ↑ On the important distinction between instinct and intellect cf. especially L'évolution créatrice, Chapter II.
