[47] I borrow this quotation from Renouvier, Le Personnellisme, p. 263.
[48] Matière et Mémoire, p. 3. The author has returned to this point more at length in a communication to the Congrès de Philosophie de Génève, in 1904. See Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, Nov. 1904, communication from H. Bergson entitled "Le Paralogisme psycho-physiologique." Here is a passage from this article which expresses the same idea: "To say that the image of the surrounding world issues from this image (from the cerebral movement), or that it expresses itself by this image, or that it arises as soon as this image is suggested, or that one gives it to one's self by giving one's self this image, would be to contradict one's self; since these two images, the outer world and the intra-cerebral movement, have been supposed to be of the same nature, and the second image is, by the hypothesis, an infinitesimal part of the field of representation, while the first fills the whole of it."
[49] Matière et Mémoire, p. 31
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
A few convinced materialists and parallelists, to whom I have read the above criticisms on their systems, have found no answer to them; my criticisms have appeared to them just, but nevertheless they have continued to abide by their own systems, probably because they were bound to have one. We do not destroy an erroneous idea when we do not replace it by another.
This has decided me to set forth some personal views which, provisionally, and for want of better, might be substituted for the old doctrines. Before doing this, I hasten to explain their character, and to state openly that they are only hypotheses.
I know that metaphysicians rarely make avowals of this kind. They present their systems as a well-connected whole, and they set forth its different parts, even the boldest of them, in the same dogmatic tone, and without warning that we ought to attach very unequal degrees of confidence to these various parts. This is a deplorable method, and to it is perhaps due the kind of disdain that observers and experimentalists feel for metaphysics—a disdain often without justification, for all is not false, and everything is not hypothetical, in metaphysics. There are in it demonstrations, analyses, and criticisms, especially the last, which appear to me as exact and as certain as an observation or experiment. The mistake lies in mixing up together in a statement, without distinction, the certain with the probable, and the probable with the possible.