ence.[1] But we are active willing beings; and for our practical purposes, for the sake of making better use of the sense-complex which we directly perceive, we arrest (by attention) the flux of this sensational experience; we create discontinuity in this originally continuous, sensational complex. After this fashion, individual selves, Bergson teaches, constitute and distinguish first their own bodies, then other organic bodies (which they regard as sources of their own nourishment), and finally inorganic bodies. And after thus creating, for practical purposes, discrete, spatial things, they speculatively interest themselves in artificially dividing and subdividing these discontinuous units. Hence arises the discontinuous, measurable space of physicist and mathematician and, at an even farther remove from experienced reality, mathematical time.
It is thus perfectly evident that Bergson regards the human body, all other external objects, mathematical space, and measurable time as the constructions of individual selves. “Our needs,” he says, “are thus so many lighted torches which directed toward the sense-continuum outline upon it distinct objects. These needs can be satisfied only by distinguishing a body within
- ↑ Matiére et Mémoire, Chapter IV, pp. 237–242 ff. Les données immédiates de la conscience, chapter II., pp. 73–74. It is curious that Bergson does not realize that this admission of a qualitative space-consciousness destroys his cherished antithesis between space and time. The truth is not, as Bergson states it, that space is quantitative, homogeneous, and measurable, whereas time is qualitative, heterogeneous, and incapable of being measured or divided. Rather time and space alike may be regarded either qualitatively or quantitatively. On the one hand, there is spatial as well as temporal quality (as Bergson here admits). On the other hand, time as well as space may be abstractly, artificially and mathematically regarded. Bergson’s assertion that time, thus conceived, is really space is a mischievous metaphor utterly overlooking the qualitative aspect of space.
A second difficulty in Bergson’s doctrine is perhaps over-emphasized by Professor A. O. Lovejoy (“The Problem of Time in Recent French Philosophy,” II, Philosophical Review, 1912, XXI, pp. 323, 327 ff.). According to Lovejoy, Bergson combines with his teaching of the heterogeneity and the succession in time the denial of its ‘internal plurality.’ I am, however, inclined to think that Bergson is mainly interested, in the passages quoted by Lovejoy, in contrasting the consciousness of distinct, intellectually separated and measured moments from the consciousness of the changing self—in a word, that he intends to deny temporal plurality only in the associationist’s conception of it. Yet, as Lovejoy shows, there is undoubted difficulty in reconciling Bergson’s diverse statements.
