If our critic have his way, we have nothing left us to discuss. Let us invite his attention to a discussable phenomenon of our own designating, and definable in some such way as this: the simultaneous belonging of an experience to an organism and to another material fact, say the sky. The two belongings are distinguished by a sui generis difference of direction or relational “sense,” which unambiguously determines the organism to be the subject of the belonging, the sky the object. We have at least as good a right to call this phenomenon by the name of consciousness, or sensation, as our critic has to name that a sensation which he so defines that its definition is contradicted by the naming.
Now, experience is essentially dynamic, and, for an organism, to be active is to be functionally ordinated or focalized. For example, the eye and other parts may be subservient, in different ways and degrees, to the hand. Then the organism is focalized into an organ of touch, of striking, or whatever it may be. Every other function contributes as accessory to this primary function, in the organism’s present phase.
We have called consciousness the formal aspect of activity, and we mean by “form” applied to activity what we mean elsewhere, determinateness or definableness. Here, in particular, it is that character which depends on resistance or reactivity. Activity without resistance would be without determination; its character or content would have vanished; it would be activity upon nothing, which, like consciousness of nothing, is nothing. So the resistance that factors in activity is not extraneous to the essence of activity, and consciousness and material processes imply each other not only with the same logical necessity but with the same polar oppositeness of mutual relation, as the aspects of relief.
Consciousness is thus the inversion or reciprocal aspect of organic activity, virtual, in distinction from externalized or real, activity. Where attention is focalized, action is most resisted. As action approaches free vent, consciousness of the object of this free activity becomes more and more evanescent. At the limit where action is unresisted, it and consciousness go out, vanish together, in inverse “sense” or directions. Where action approaches “pure” (i. e., unresisted) activity, pure positivity, pure subjectivity, consciousness approaches “pure” (i. e., unreacting) passivity, pure negativity, pure objectivity. And such “pure” action and consciousness are pure nothing, action on nothing, sensation of nothing. The vanishing of the two relations together is, in each case, for lack of one of its terms inverse to the term lacking in the other case.
This mutual symmetry between action and consciousness is an implicate of their identity of denotation and mutual inversion of aspect; and any study of the fluctuations and transitions of consciousness, with its modulations of attention and inhibition, is accordingly a study in inverse, a perfect logical function, of corresponding modifications of organic activity; for in the play of the organic functions we shall find incessant modulations between their focalization and their dispersion, incessant shifting of their mutual rank and of the position of primacy among them, to correspond with the changes between margin and focus that are always going on among the elements of consciousness.
The organism is structurally and functionally centralized in a sensori-motor system, where the afferent activity is opposed by the efferent, in a common focus, or in coincident foci, in which action and reaction give form to each other. Here organic reaction has its inception in a preformation, schema or design, as Bergson says, of the developed activity. An intricate manifold of functions are organized: interest determines the ascendency or primacy of a certain function, while others are subservient, being inhibited or reinforced in varying degrees. The whole complex process has this character of focal, unifying organization, a unity expressed in opposite aspects as the simple form of activity, on the one hand, and as the simple object of perceptive consciousness on the other.
Chapter III
DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM
The fallacy of conceptualism, which, as Bergson conceives it, is to substitute space for time as the form of mental existence, has been discussed in the first chapter of Time and Free Will in the aspect of applying intensive magnitude, and in the second chapter, numerical multiplicity, to psychic facts. It is the same fallacy which is discussed in the third chapter, in the aspect of applying to them the conception of determinate, causal organization. The outcome of the book is thus that the problem of freedom is just the problem of conceptualism, a problem of philosophic method. This book, Time and Free Will, is a manual of instruction for knowing the reality of mental existence; and its object is the practical object of indicating the attitude necessary for that purpose. There are two possible attitudes, that of space and that of time, or that of conception and that of intuition. The conceptual is the attitude taken by philosophy universally, to be sure; which explains the futility of all extant discussions of the “persistent problems of philosophy.” It is clear, for instance, Monsieur Bergson thinks, that this attitude gives rise, in an automatic and inevitable way, to the problem of freedom—that is, that there would be no such problem but for this false cognitive attitude;—and at the same time that by originating in this unhappy way the problem is necessarily a pseudo-problem, cannot be stated without contradiction. For when you regard mental facts in the spatial or conceptual way, the question automatically arises, how are these facts causally related with other spatial facts? It is a contradiction because by “these” facts you mean non-spatial facts, which, in the nature of causation, can not be causally related with spatial facts, but which, the question presupposes, are so related. Such is the real meaning of the traditional problem of freedom. The solution, says Bergson, is to cease thinking spatially of that which is temporal; take the other attitude. Once you have done so, the problem vanishes; the causal relation is by definition a spatial relation, and there are no longer two spatial terms to be related. Such determinism is the associationistic conception of mind as an assemblage of distinct, coexistent elements of which the strongest exerts a preponderant influence on the others. Their organization is a mechanical system, and their operations obey the laws of mechanical causation.