The case of plural odors and sounds, the case of the line, and an infinity of other cases prove that magnitude is intensive as well as extensive. The contradictory thesis, that of Bergson, reduces, at bottom, to the self-contradiction that consciousness discovers what is no object of consciousness.
* * * * *
In admitting that sensations are comparable in this sense, that two odors, for instance, regarded as of the same kind, can be compared with each other in the same way as either can be compared with a sound or a taste, Bergson evidently means that they can be distinguished as different; and he regards this as implying that sensations are absolutely heterogeneous with each other, absolutely different. This phrase, I am sure, conceals a bald contradiction. It seems to mean a relation, namely difference, in which, however, the terms are absolute, that is not in relation. Difference cannot be so conceived. Difference, I submit, cannot be conceived without that (common to the differing terms) in respect of which they are different. Monsieur Bergson, therefore, in admitting that sensations are comparable in any sense, is still confronted with an element common to all sensations; he has still to eliminate the character of homogeneity from sensation, by virtue of which a purely subjective evaluation of their relative intensities is possible.
The root of the difficulty Monsieur Lévy-Bruhl has shown[105] to be a reific separation of quantity and quality, which are separable in truth only by abstraction of attention. Real existence in absolute homogeneity or space, as Bergson represents the existence of the external world, is as unthinkable as real existence in absolute heterogeneity, which existence is consciousness or life, for Bergson. External things, he says, which do not lapse (“ne durent pas”), seem to us, nevertheless, to lapse like us because to each instant of our lapsing duration a new collective whole of those simultaneities which we call the universe corresponds. “Does this not imply,” writes Lévy-Bruhl, “a preestablished harmony much more difficult to accept than that of Leibniz? Leibniz supposes a purely ideal concord between forces of the same nature. Monsieur Bergson asks us to admit an indefinite series of coincidences, for each instant, between ‘a real duration, whose heterogeneous moments compenetrate,’ and a space which, not lapsing, has no moments at all. Monsieur Bergson really places external reality, which does not lapse, in a sort of eternity. He ingeniously shows that everything in space may be treated as quantity and submitted to mathematics. Now, mathematical verities, expressing only relations between given magnitudes, are abstracted from real lapsing duration. All the laws reduce to analytical formulæ. But then they are, according to the saying of Bossuet, eternal verities, and how shall the real be distinguished from the possible?”
This sundering, in Bergson’s theory of reality, of what rightly is one, is already implied, in his theory of knowledge, in the mutual exclusion of the two cognitive modes, intuition and conception. The predicaments into which philosophy falls in reasoning conceptually (and there is no other reasoning) about the subjective “world,” are due. Bergson thinks, not to faults in the use of logic, but to an essential incongruity between the matter and the logical mode of being conscious of it. But such an essential incongruity between any mode of consciousness and what it is aware of would imply that the modes of consciousness, on the one hand, are parts of consciousness, of which accordingly, you can have one without the other (theoretically if not actually); and, on the other hand, there is the corresponding implication for ontology, that what consciousness is aware of is also composed of two parts, which match, respectively, the parts of consciousness. Divide consciousness into two parts, then divide what it is aware of into two parts; suppose that each of your parts of consciousness suits one, and not the other, of your two parts of what it is aware of—all this is necessary before there can be any possibility of incongruous mismatching between consciousness and being. Therefore uneasiness about this incongruity, the very motive of intuitionism, presupposes first the sharpest conceptual treatment of the subjective “world,” and then the flagrant reification of the resulting abstractions. In other words, the indispensable precondition of dialectical defense of intuitionism is an intellectualism of the “vicious” type.
* * * * *
The first chapter of the Essai having criticized the application of magnitude to consciousness, and found that psychological intensity has nothing quantitative about it, the second chapter proceeds with an analogous criticism of number, and finds that psychological variousness has nothing plural about it. The multiplicity of material objects is number or plurality; the variousness of the facts of mind is nothing of the sort. Numerical multiplicity is distinct and objective, given or thought in space; subjective variousness is indistinct and compenetrating.
The medium of the facts of consciousness being lapsing duration, and not extension, they are never simultaneous in the same consciousness. But then they cannot be counted; to count is to have things together, simultaneously. That, again, is to have them in space. And that, finally, is to have them as objects. Now, the essential nature of psychic facts is to be subjective and not objective. If, therefore, you find yourself counting facts within a consciousness, you are deluded; they cannot be what you take them for; they can only be (spatial) objects, symbols by which you are representing facts that are not objective,—because they are subjective!—and not spatial but temporal.
This statement of the case will satisfy few people as it stands. Professor Bergson is aware of this, and he will grant that such alleged facts of consciousness as you distinguish and count may be set in the medium of time rather than in space, if time, as well as space, is a homogeneous medium; but time so understood, he thinks, turns into space. And time is so understood very generally, without any doubt. When we speak of time, says Bergson, we are usually thinking of space; that is, we are thinking of a homogeneous medium, a medium, therefore, in which psychic states are aligned or juxtaposited, as things are in space, forming a distinct multiplicity.
This is, of course, another aspect of what Bergson regards as the same vice, conceptualism, that is discussed in the first chapter of the Essai. An intensive magnitude is a distinct concept, sharply bounded; all within is the concept, all without, its other. But no psychic fact is sharply bounded; it penetrates the whole consciousness. The whole consciousness is one with it. We work quantitatively with concepts, always, arithmetically and geometrically. But then we work in space, which is enough, says Bergson, to show that intensity applied to a psychic fact is not a magnitude, since psychic facts are not in space. So here, in the second chapter, the elements which one pretends to count and add in time are, in order to be counted and added—in order merely to be distinguished—distinct concepts. Then they are not in time but in space.