Zeno’s argument, therefore, though it does not touch the mathematical account of change, does, prima facie, refute a view of change which is not unlike Bergson’s. How, then, does Bergson meet
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Zeno’s argument? He meets it by denying that the arrow is ever anywhere. After stating Zeno’s argument, he replies: “Yes, if we suppose that the arrow can ever be in a point of its course. Yes, again, if the arrow, which is moving, ever coincides with a position, which is motionless. But the arrow never is in any point of its course.” This reply to Zeno, or a closely similar one concerning Achilles and the Tortoise, occurs in all his three books. Bergson’s view, plainly, is paradoxical; whether it is possible, is a question which demands a discussion of his view of duration. His only argument in its favor is the statement that the mathematical view of change “implies the absurd proposition that movement is made of immobilities.” But the apparent absurdity of this view is merely due to the verbal form in which he has stated it, and vanishes as soon as we realize that motion implies relations. A friendship, for example, is made out of people who are friends, but not out of friendships; a genealogy is made out of men, but not out of genealogies. So a motion is made out of what is moving, but not out of motions. It expresses the fact that a thing may be in different places at different times, and that the places may still be different however near together the times may be. Bergson’s argument against the mathematical view of motion, therefore, reduces itself, in the last analysis, to a mere play upon words. And with this conclusion we may pass on to a criticism of his theory of duration.
Bergson’s theory of duration is bound up with his theory of memory. According to this theory, things remembered survive in memory, and thus interpenetrate present things: past and present are not mutually external, but are mingled in the unity of consciousness. Action, he says, is what constitutes being; but mathematical time is a mere passive receptacle, which does nothing and therefore is nothing. The past, he says, is that which acts no longer, and the present is that which is acting. But in this statement, as indeed throughout his account of duration, Bergson is unconsciously assuming the ordinary mathematical time; without this, his statements are unmeaning. What is meant by saying “the past is essentially that which acts no longer” (his italics), except that the past is that of which the action is past? the words “no longer” are words expressive of the past; to a person who did not have the ordinary notion of the past as something outside the present, these words would have no meaning. Thus his definition is circular. What he says is, in effect, “the past is that of which the
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action is in the past.” As a definition, this cannot be regarded as a happy effort. And the same applies to the present. The present, we are told, is “that which is acting” (his italics). But the word “is” introduces just that idea of the present which was to be defined. The present is that which is acting as opposed to that which was acting or will be acting. That is to say, the present is that whose action is in the present, not in the past or in the future. Again the definition is circular. An earlier passage on the same page will illustrate the fallacy further. “That which constitutes our pure perception,” he says, “is our dawning action. . . . The actuality of our perception thus lies in its activity, in the movements which prolong it, and not in its greater intensity: the past is only idea, the present is ideo-motor.” This passage makes it quite clear that, when Bergson speaks of the past, he does not mean the past, but our present memory of the past. The past when it existed was just as active as the present is now; if Bergson’s account were correct, the present moment ought to be the only one in the whole history of the world containing any activity. In earlier times there were other perceptions, just as active, just as actual in their day, as our present perceptions; the past, in its day, was by no means only idea, but was in its intrinsic character just what the present is now. This real past, however, Bergson simply forgets; what he speaks of is the present idea of the past. The real past does not mingle with the present, since it is not part of it; but that is a very different thing.
The whole of Bergson’s theory of duration and time rests throughout on the elementary confusion between the present occurrence of a recollection and the past occurrence which is recollected. But for the fact that time is so familiar to us, the vicious circle involved in his attempt to deduce the past as what is no longer active would be obvious at once. As it is, what Bergson gives is an account of the difference between perception and recollection–both present facts–and what he believes himself to have given is an account of the difference between the present and the past. As soon as this confusion is realized, his theory of time is seen to be simply a theory which omits time altogether.
The confusion between present remembering and the past event remembered, which seems to be at the bottom of Bergson’s theory of time, is an instance of a more general confusion which, if I am not mistaken, vitiates a great deal of his thought, and indeed a great deal
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of the thought of most modern philosophers–I mean the confusion between an act of knowing and that which is known. In memory, the act of knowing is in the present, whereas what is known is in the past; thus by confusing them the distinction between past and present is blurred.
Throughout Matter and Memory, this confusion between the act of knowing and the object known is indispensable. It is enshrined in the use of the word “image,” which is explained at the very beginning of the book. He there states that, apart from philosophical theories, everything that we know consists of “images,” which indeed constitute the whole universe. He says: “I call matter the aggregate of images, and perception of matter these same images referred to the eventual action of one particular image, my body.” It will be observed that matter and the perception of matter, according to him, consist of the very same things. The brain, he says, is like the rest of the material universe, and is therefore an image if the universe is an image.
Since the brain, which nobody sees, is not, in the ordinary sense, an image, we are not surprised at his saying that an image can be without being perceived; but he explains later on that, as regards images, the difference between being and being consciously perceived is only one of degree. This is perhaps explained by another passage in which he says: “What can be a non-perceived material object, an image not imaged, unless it is a kind of unconscious mental state?” Finally he says: “That every reality has a kinship, an analogy, in short a relation with consciousness–this is what we concede to idealism by the very fact that we term things ‘images.'” Nevertheless he attempts to allay our initial doubt by saying that he is beginning at a point before any of the assumptions of philosophers have been introduced. “We will assume,” he says, “for the moment that we know nothing of theories of matter and theories of spirit, nothing of the discussions as to the reality or ideality of the external world. Here I am in the presence of images.” And in the new Introduction which he wrote for the English edition he says: “By ‘image’ we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing,–an existence placed half-way between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation.'”
The distinction which Bergson has in mind in the above is not, I
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think, the distinction between the imaging as a mental occurrence and the thing imaged as an object. He is thinking of the distinction between the thing as it is and thing as it appears. The distinction between subject and object, between the mind which thinks and remembers and has images on the one hand, and the objects thought about, remembered, or imaged–this distinction, so far as I can see, is wholly absent from his philosophy. Its absence is his real debt to idealism; and a very unfortunate debt it is. In the case of “images,” as we have just seen, it enables him first to speak of images as neutral between mind and matter, then to assert that the brain is an image in spite of
