The one way, then, of getting the true nature of will truly comprehended which is doomed to necessary failure, is to write a psychological treatise on the subject. For, since will has no such determinate character as intellect finds in it or gives to it, a treatise conveying the true nature of will would have to be unintelligible! Now, see in will, as Leibniz[101] and Schopenhauer, as well as Bergson, have seen in it, the whole of life and of reality, and you see how it is Bergson’s tychism that constitutes the specific motive for his anti-intellectualism, and how this so-called method forms, in his philosophy, the supreme doctrine which is the objective of all his discourse.
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Bergson’s critique of intellectualism proceeds by applying to traditional metaphysics and epistemology his purely qualitative criterion of reality. Whether science, the product of intelligence, is physical, biological, or psychological, it is knowledge-about, and not acquaintance-with; its object is relation, and not reality; its objective is action, and not vision; its organ is intelligence, not instinct. But the object of philosophy is reality; its objective is vision; its organ instinct. The timeless, intellectual way in which science knows about, but never knows, is not the way of true philosophy. The philosopher, to know reality, must achieve a vital, sympathetic concurrence with its flow. To be known, reality must be lived, not thought. In Creative Evolution Bergson traces the genesis of instinct and intelligence to a primitive tendency, effort or spring of life (the élan vital) whose path bifurcates indefinitely in the course of its evolution. These elementary tendencies, instinct and intelligence, having issued from the same primitive tendency, are both present, at least in rudiment, in all forms of life; and it is the presence, though in a suppressed state, of instinct in man that must save philosophy from the cognitive emptiness of science, and give it a hold on the living fulness of reality.
In Time and Free Will the theory of “real duration,” which is a synonym for intuition, and for life, and for reality, and is the foundation of the Bergsonian philosophy, is enunciated, and in the light of it intellect is shown to falsify the nature of consciousness in applying to conscious states such categories as magnitude, plurality, causation. Each of these categories, in its traditional application, is a quantifying and a spatializing of consciousness. The intensity of a conscious state is nothing but the state itself; the state is pure quality or heterogeneity, incapable of measure and degree. The variousness of conscious states has no analogy with plurality. Plurality is simultaneity and juxtaposition; but conscious states prolong each other in an interpenetrating flow. Finally, the organization of conscious states is nothing like the traditional systematic “coördination” of associationistic psychology. It does not lend itself to laws and principles. It cannot be adequately expressed by words, nor artificially reconstructed by a juxtaposition of simple states, for it is always an absolutely new and original phase of our duration, and is itself a simple thing.
The first chapter of Time and Free Will consists of analyses of all sorts of psychological states, in order to justify the above thesis concerning intensity. They are masterly analyses, and their interest for psychology is great. So far as Bergson’s object is concerned, of showing how intellect falsifies the nature of consciousness in conceiving of sensations as more or less intense, what the chapter proves is no more than that whenever a conscious state varies—which every conscious state does continuously—it varies qualitatively. Which hardly needed to be proved. For the argument does not show that, along with the qualitative change, a quantitative change may not occur; that is, it does not exclude the proposition which Bergson is trying to refute, namely that there is something in the nature of a conscious state that is capable of increasing and decreasing.[102]
In saying that conscious states are pure quality, Bergson means that when one compares a sensation, for instance, with another which is regarded as of the same “kind,” but of greater or less intensity, both the sameness of kind and the difference of magnitude are illusions of intellect, due to attributing the category of magnitude, or quantity, to that whose nature admits of no such determination. A so-called more intense odor, say, it is mere nonsense to call same in any sense with another, supposed to be less intense. The two are distinguishable, that is all; they are not comparable, properly speaking. They are comparable in just the sense, and in no other (it would seem, from Bergson’s treatment of the subject, although the statement is not his, explicitly) that either of the odors can be compared with a sound or a taste. The difference is not one of degree; it is what Bergson calls absolute.
But what, then, exactly, according to Bergson, do we mean when we compare psychic states as more or less intense? In simple states, he says, magnitude of cause is associated, by a thousand experiences, with a certain quality or shade of effect in consciousness, and the former is attributed to the latter. The quantitative scale rubs off color, so to speak, by the operation of association, from the material cause to the psychic effect. In complex states intensity means the amount of our inner life which the state in question colors with its own quality. A passion is deep and intense in the fact that the same objects no longer produce the same impression. In this statement of the case of complex states it will be seen that Bergson fails to avoid attributing quantity to the inner life of consciousness, since the intensity of complex states is measured, by him, by a quantitative standard, the amount of that inner life colored or affected by the quality in question.
The attempt is equally hopeless whether the state in question be simple or complex. Bergson attempts, but fails,[103] to prove that magnitude is a character peculiar to space, and that homogeneity and space are two names for the same conception. Two odors, two sounds are more than one, however; and that homogeneity in them by virtue of which they are more, and two, is not space. Bergson would object that number itself, the twoness of the odors or sounds, is indeed a spatial attribute falsely imputed to them. They are not plural, in themselves; it is conceptualization that accounts for the plurality imputed to them. One evolves continuously, in the flow of consciousness, out of the other. It would be a sufficient answer that such a doctrine contradicts itself in every breath by the terms necessary to any utterance of it,—such terms as sounds, they, them, one, the other—all imputing to the objects of discussion the plurality which it tries to deny. And to fall back on the disabilities of language, due to its being the work of intellect, is only to declare one’s philosophy ineffable. But not only ineffable—unthinkable. Yes, Bergson would admit, unthinkable in the narrow sense of conceptual thought, but not unknowable to immediate intuition. The final rejoinder, I think, is that immediacy is a vanishing-point, a limiting conception of the relation between subject and object, a phase of consciousness in which to use the mathematical analogy, the “coefficient” of consciousness vanishes into zero. We return later in this essay to the amplifying of this point.[104] In brief, if there is no distinction between subject and object, there is no object (as, likewise, no subject, of course); hence, no truth; and Bergson could not have made these ineffable discoveries about the sounds and odors, for he could not have discovered themselves.
It is clear enough that nothing needs to occupy space, in order to be a magnitude. A line, which occupies no space, is even a spatial magnitude, nevertheless. That it is spatial, Bergson would say, is just the fact that it is homogeneous. But is homogeneity the only character of a line, and is its spatiality therefore necessarily the same thing as its homogeneity? Evidently a line has a quale perfectly distinct from its homogeneity, and essential to its linear nature; that quale is its direction. If an interval of time, then, or a mental state, seems not to be spatial, this does not compel us to deny that there is any homogeneity about it: if the interval or the state of mind lacks the determination—the character of direction—which is indispensable to a line and to spatiality as such, this lack determines these objects of thought as non-spatial without the slightest detriment to their homogeneity. But all the evidence of homogeneity in space applies equally to homogeneity in time and consciousness. The evidence is their additiveness: all seem to present numerically distinct cases and quantitative differences. No logical ground has been indicated, for discrimination, in the validity of this seeming, as a warrant for the homogeneity of space and not of time and consciousness. Time and consciousness are homogeneous by the same warrant as space and matter.
I think it is not irrelevant to Bergson’s theory of the associative transfer of quantity in the stimulus to the sensation, to observe that, in the stimulus, there is kind as well as amount. If the shade or quality of the sensation corresponds to the degree of the cause, is there no further determination of the sensation distinctively correlative with the kind of the cause? Such correlate seems indispensable to Bergson’s, as to any, reactive conception of sensation, but, in Bergson’s theory of intensity, it seems to be preempted for correlation with the aspect of quantity in the stimulus.