“The intellect,” Bergson says, “always behaves as if it were fascinated by the contemplation of inert matter. It is life looking outward, putting itself outside itself, adopting the ways of unorganized nature in principle, in order to direct them in fact.” If we may be allowed to add another image to the many by which Bergson’s philosophy is
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illustrated, we may say that the universe is a vast funicular railway, in which life is the train that goes up, and matter is the train that goes down. The intellect consists in watching the descending train as it passes the ascending train in which we are. The obviously nobler faculty which concentrates its attention on our own train is instinct or intuition. It is possible to leap from one train to the other; this happens when we become the victims of automatic habit, and is the essence of the comic. Or we can divide ourselves into parts, one part going up and one down; then only the part going down is comic. But intellect is not itself a descending motion, it is merely an observation of the descending motion by the ascending motion.
Intellect, which separates things, is, according to Bergson, a kind of dream; it is not active, as all our life ought to be, but purely contemplative. When we dream, he says, our self is scattered, our past is broken into fragments, things which really interpenetrate each other are seen as separate solid units: the extra-spatial degrades itself into spatiality, which is nothing but separateness. Thus all intellect, since it separates, tends to geometry; and logic, which deals with concepts that lie wholly outside each other, is really an outcome of geometry, following the direction of materiality. Both deduction and induction require spatial intuition behind them; “the movement at the end of which is spatiality lays down along its course the faculty of induction, as well as that of deduction, in fact, intellectuality entire.” It creates them in mind, and also the order in things which the intellect finds there. Thus logic and mathematics do not represent a positive spiritual effort, but a mere somnambulism, in which the will is suspended, and the mind is no longer active. Incapacity for mathematics is therefore a sign of grace–fortunately a very common one.
As intellect is connected with space, so instinct or intuition is connected with time. It is one of the noteworthy features of Bergson’s philosophy that, unlike most writers, he regards time and space as profoundly dissimilar. Space, the characteristic of matter, arises from a dissection of the flux which is really illusory, useful, up to a certain point, in practice, but utterly misleading in theory. Time, on the contrary, is the essential characteristic of life or mind. “Wherever anything lives,” he says, “there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.” But the time here spoken of is not mathematical time, the homogeneous assemblage of mutually external in-
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stants. Mathematical time, according to Bergson, is really a form of space; the time which is of the essence of life is what he calls duration. This conception of duration is fundamental in his philosophy; it appears already in his earliest book Time and Free Will, and it is necessary to understand it if we are to have any comprehension of his system. It is, however, a very difficult conception. I do not fully understand it myself, and therefore I cannot hope to explain it with all the lucidity which it doubtless deserves.
“Pure duration,” we are told, “is the form which our conscious states assume when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.” It forms the past and the present into one organic whole, where there is mutual penetration, succession without distinction. “Within our ego, there is succession without mutual externality; outside the ego, in pure space, there is mutual externality without succession.”
“Questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union, should be put in terms of time rather than of space.” In the duration in which we see ourselves acting, there are dissociated elements; but in the duration in which we act, our states melt into each other. Pure duration is what is most removed from externality and least penetrated with externality, a duration in which the past is big with a present absolutely new. But then our will is strained to the utmost; we have to gather up the past which is slipping away, and thrust it whole and undivided into the present. At such moments we truly possess ourselves, but such moments are rare. Duration is the very stuff of reality, which is perpetual becoming, never something made.
It is above all in memory that duration exhibits itself, for in memory the past survives in the present. Thus the theory of memory becomes of great importance in Bergson’s philosophy. Matter and Memory is concerned to show the relation of mind and matter, of which both are affirmed to be real, by an analysis of memory, which is “just the intersection of mind and matter.”
There are, he says, two radically different things, both of which are commonly called memory; the distinction between these two is much emphasised by Bergson. “The past survives,” he says, “under two distinct forms: first, in motor mechanisms; secondly, in independent recollections.” For example, a man is said to remember a
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poem if he can repeat it by heart, that is to say, if he has acquired a certain habit or mechanism enabling him to repeat a former action. But he might, at least theoretically, be able to repeat the poem without any recollection of the previous occasions on which he has read it; thus there is no consciousness of past events involved in this sort of memory. The second sort, which alone really deserves to be called memory, is exhibited in recollections of separate occasions when he has read the poem, each unique and with a date. Here, he thinks, there can be no question of habit, since each event only occurred once, and had to make its impression immediately. It is suggested that in some way everything that has happened to us is remembered, but as a rule, only what is useful comes into consciousness. Apparent failures of memory, it is argued, are not really failures of the mental part of memory, but of the motor mechanism for bringing memory into action. This view is supported by a discussion of brain physiology and the facts of amnesia, from which it is held to result that true memory is not a function of the brain. The past must be acted by matter, imagined by mind. Memory is not an emanation of matter; indeed the contrary would be nearer the truth if we mean matter as grasped in concrete perception, which always occupies a certain duration.
“Memory must be, in principle, a power absolutely independent of matter. If, then, spirit is a reality, it is here, in the phenomena of memory, that we may come into touch with it experimentally.”
At the opposite end from pure memory Bergson places pure perception, in regard to which he adopts an ultra-realist position. “In pure perception,” he says, “we are actually placed outside ourselves, we touch the reality of the object in an immediate intuition.” So completely does he identify perception with its object that he almost refuses to call it mental at all. “Pure perception,” he says, “which is the lowest degree of mind–mind without memory–is really part of matter, as we understand matter.” Pure perception is constituted by dawning action, its actuality lies in its activity. It is in this way that the brain becomes relevant to perception, for the brain is not an instrument of action. The function of the brain is to limit our mental life to what is practically useful. But for the brain, one gathers, everything would be perceived, but in fact we only perceive what interests us. “The body, always turned towards action, has for its essential
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function to limit, with a view to action, the life of the spirit.” It is, in fact, an instrument of choice.
We must now return to the subject of instinct or intuition, as opposed to intellect. It was necessary first to give some account of duration and memory, since Bergson’s theories of duration and memory are presupposed in this account of intuition. In man, as he now exists, intuition is the fringe or penumbra of intellect: it has been thrust out of the centre by being less useful in action than intellect, but it has deeper uses which make it desirable to bring it back into greater prominence. Bergson wishes to make intellect “turn inwards on itself, and awaken the potentialities of intuition which still slumber within it.” The relation between instinct and intellect is compared to that between sight
