According to the mechanical law of causation, the same causes always produce the same effects. But, in the region of psychic states, this law is neither true nor false, but meaningless; for in this region there is no “always:” there is only “once.” A repeated feeling is a radically different feeling. It retains the same name only because it corresponds to the same external cause, or is outwardly expressed by analogous signs. It was just said that the ego is not the same in any two moments of its history. It is modified incessantly by the accumulation of its past. One’s character at any moment, is the condensation of one’s past. Duration acts as a cause; but this temporal or psychological causation has no more analogy with what is called causation in nature than temporal variousness has with number, or intensity with magnitude. A causality which is necessary connection is, at bottom, identity; the effect is an expression of the cause, as mathematical functions are expressions of each other. But no psychic state has this virtual identity with, or mathematical reducibility to, any other with which it would thus be in the “necessary” kind of causal relation. Such effect is not given in the cause, but is absolutely new.
Time that has passed is an objective thing, and is representable by space; time passing is a subjective process, and is not representable. The free act is the actual passing of time; time in its passing is the very stuff of the existence of freedom. Analyze an act, and you make it a thing. Then its spontaneity is altered into inertia, its freedom into necessity. Hence any definition of freedom makes it determinism. But, though the analysis of the act and the definition of freedom are illusory undertakings, the fundamental fact of freedom remains unassailable by any argument.
* * * * *
Bergson’s way of vindicating freedom is thus to find no case against it. Of the positive sort, the only, and sufficient proof is appeal to consciousness. Freedom is an immediate datum of consciousness.
This is confusing to anyone who cannot follow Bergson in his view that subject and object, in actual intuitive consciousness, are indistinguishable, identical. And this fusion of the poles of consciousness while the nature of consciousness not merely suffers nothing but even attains its apogee thereby, needs more justification than Bergson has given it. Freedom is a datum of consciousness; but, as undetermined, it must, on Bergson’s principles, be consciousness itself—which, indeed, is plainly enough the teaching intended. Freedom is consciousness, then, purely subjective. In what sense is it a datum of consciousness? If it is a datum, is it not an object, of consciousness? It seems a case where, in order to see, you musn’t look, lest looking make what is purely subjective an object! This is hardly the case of the fovea and the faint star, where looking loses your object; for here, looking rather produces it where no object belongs, or—perhaps one should say—transforms it. Your look, says Gustave Belot,[134] congeals and immobilizes it, denatures it like the Gorgon’s stare! It is knowable, says Bergson, only by being lived. It is a feeling we have. But the trouble is that, to be known as undetermined, as freedom, to be even a feeling we have, it is back upon our hands as a datum, as an object.
Before I comment in my own way on the Bergsonian view of freedom, I wish to call to the attention of English readers the keen reaction of this French critic of Bergson. Belot objects to the modest-seeming statement that freedom is a feeling we have. Neither psychology, he thinks, nor common sense, approves.[135] They establish, on the contrary, a sensible difference between freedom, whatever it may be, and the feeling we have of it—any feeling we can possibly have. Our feeling of freedom is much less variable than our freedom. “We agree not to attribute a veritable practical freedom to the dreaming man, to the somnambulist, to the man affected with some mental disease. Yet the man who, in dream, sees himself act, sees himself free in his action; the somnambulist equally feels himself free and attributes to himself, in his dream, a responsibility that we decline to put upon him, and which he will reject, himself, when he wakes[136] ... The furious madman must ordinarily feel himself free in the accomplishment of a murder for which a tribunal will not consent to punish him. The fact is, it suffices, in order that we should feel ourselves free, that our acts should be in harmony with our ideas and our feelings. Now, that may very well be, in the cases of the dreamer, the somnambulist, the madman.... They would therefore feel themselves free. But they are not free; for they only act from an incomplete consciousness; and a great number of elements of their normal ego, which would permit the revision, the correction, the inhibition, are lacking.” A glimmering of the fact of one’s madness is a token of the only residuum there is of freedom. “It is to conserve some freedom, to perceive that one no longer is master of oneself.”
Bergson is alive to all this—sometimes, as when he says that the freedom of a free action is its entirety, its expression of the total personality. But Belot is quite justified in charging him with forgetting it, for only by forgetting it could he conceive of freedom as an immediate datum of consciousness. It is, indeed, far from the case that our freedom is nothing but the feeling we have of it, or that it is proportional to this feeling. What is so altered by the determinist habit of mind, by the conceptual attitude toward will, is not at all one’s feeling of freedom, but only one’s interpretation of it. An immediate, spontaneous feeling, being prior to theory and analysis, is safe from any influence from them. In the most incorrigible determinist, consciousness of the wish, other things equal, is exactly the same as in the most incorruptible indeterminist.
Precise determination of will is not only not contrary to freedom but is indispensable to it. Minimizing the value of motive in activity is loss, not gain, to freedom. The motive is what connects our act to our whole personality, and makes it ours. Without this connection, we are not free; its interruption is a limitation, not the condition, of freedom. And indeed freedom is so limited by the mass of our unreflecting impulses. Bergson is right in saying that we are rarely free. But therefore he is wrong in saying that freedom is the mere spontaneity of the ego.
In a certain passage[137] Bergson describes freedom in a way which seems almost explicitly to deny the doctrine that it is the entirety of will. Here it is a revolution of one part of the self against the rest, far from emanating from the total self. And such revolution, just so far as it is purely spontaneous, or arbitrary, is irresponsible instead of free. Just so far, on the other hand, as it is not arbitrary, it is determined. In fact, however, appearance of arbitrariness argues nothing about determination except that one is ignorant about it.
In showing the absurdity of all argumentation for or against the determination of a future voluntary act by present conditions, the considerations offered by Bergson are almost perfect proof of such determination. The reason we cannot think another’s thought without disfiguring it is just that the conditions of the thought, and so of the act, are not all reunited. The act, then, is supposed to depend on these conditions. Now, an absolute present is a fiction; each moment of the true duration of consciousness is a commencement and an achievement. Determination is nothing but that intimate connection of events which prevents us from isolating an absolute present. The case of Peter and Paul then, proves only that foresight could not be adequate to determination, not that determination is absent. The inability of even the author of an act to foresee it is no criterion of its freedom. Any free acts of our own that we do foresee, we foresee as connected with our present state, as ours, in fact; it is that which makes their freedom, but that supposes also their determination. This foresight, it may be said, is always insufficient and imperfect. So much the worse for freedom, not the better. It is thereby limited, not made. There are, indeed, always events outside of us that baffle our calculations, as well as unconscious tendencies, unperceived forces within us, indistinctly developing beneath the reflective and clear-seeing ego (Bergson calls this the superficial, Belot the higher ego) which suddenly break out, rout it and upset it. Such civil war is anything but freedom.