[101] Possibly this representation of Leibniz’s thought requires a word of explanation. Leibniz expresses the nature of reality in terms of force, on one hand, and of consciousness on the other. The monad or elemental reality is a unit of perception and also a unit of force. It is a living unit; as in Bergsonism, reality is life, though life in Leibniz’s philosophy is ultimately plural instead of a simple impetus. It is true that will is not a characteristic Leibnizian term, but existence is always, I think, conceived by him very clearly as conation. The self-realization of the monad is at the same time an intensification of its perceptiveness and of its dynamic. Cf. the following passages from Rogers’ Student’s History of Philosophy, pp. 307–8: “Leibniz was led by various motives to substitute, for extension, power of resistance, as the essential quality of matter.... But when, instead of extension, we characterize matter as force, a means of connection [between matter and mind] is opened up. For force has its analogue in the conscious life; corresponding to the activity of matter is conscious activity or will. Indeed, are there any positive terms in which we can describe the nature of force, unless we conceive it as identical with that conscious activity which we know directly in ourselves?” This activity, then, “Is at bottom, when we interpret it, a spiritual or perceptual activity.” In short, it is will.
Leibniz is properly regarded as the first modern spiritualist. Leibnizian matter is real, if you like, but then it is continuous, and of essentially identical nature, with spirit. Matter is spirit in a low stage of development. Bergson has no such clear and unambiguous conception of matter as this, when you consider the whole or his doctrine; but there are passages in Bergson which might almost have been written by Leibniz himself. For instance: ... “if, in fact, the humblest function of spirit is to bind together the successive moments of the duration of things, if it is by this that it comes into contact with matter and by this also that it is first of all distinguished from matter, we can conceive an infinite number of degrees between matter and fully developed spirit—a spirit capable of action which is not only undetermined, but also reasonable and reflective.” (Matter and Memory, pp. 295–6.)
[102] There is a good discussion of this point in an article reviewing the Essai, by L. Levy-Bruhl, in the Revue Philosophique, Vol. XXIX (1890), pp. 513–538.
[103] Cf. below, pp. 57, 58.
[104] Pages 72, 73, 97. Professor Perry’s analysis of the conception of immediacy (Present Philosophical Tendencies, Chapter X) has a result that is similar in principle to the above.
[105] Op. cit., p. 525.
[106] Time and Free Will, pp. 118–119.
[107] But Bergson apparently does not see that even the word “interpenetrate” falls to express anything radically different in temporal “multiplicity” from a certain character of spatial multiplicity. Cf. pp. 62, 101. In this, as in all its argument, intuitionism arguing is inevitably intuitionism contradicting itself. It is ineffable philosophy (see Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. IV, p. 123.)
[108] The living ego is a fact-in-the-accomplishing. You cannot really discourse about it! If psychology ever seems to manage this (and if this present book of Bergson’s seems to manage it), the ego discoursed about is, in that fact, proven to be not the concrete and living ego at all, but the impersonal and objective one.
[109] The attitude, that is, of intuition, which we have called the temporal attitude. The terms “spatial,” “logical,” “conceptual,” applied here so often to the word “thought,” are epithets of thought generally. There is no thought, in any meaning of the word more specific than “consciousness,” that is not logical, conceptual and spatial in this Bergsonian sense.