A New Philosophy

by Edouard Le Roy

For it is in duration that we are free, not in spatialised time, as all determinist conceptions suppose in contradiction.

I shall not go back to the proofs of this thesis; they were condensed some way back after the third chapter of the "Essay on the Immediate Data". But I will borrow from Mr Bergson himself a few complementary explanations, in order, as far as possible, to forestall any misunderstanding. "The word liberty," he says, "has for me a sense intermediate between those which we assign as a rule to the two terms liberty and free-will. On one hand, I believe that liberty consists in being entirely oneself, in acting in conformity with oneself; it is then, to a certain degree, the 'moral liberty' of philosophers, the independence of the person with regard to everything other than itself. But that is not quite this liberty, since the independence I am describing has not always a moral character. Further, it does not consist in depending on oneself as an effect depends on the cause which of necessity determines it. In this, I should come back to the sense of 'free-will.' And yet I do not accept this sense completely either, since free-will, in the usual meaning of the term, implies the equal possibility of two contraries, and on my theory we cannot formulate, or even conceive in this case the thesis of the equal possibility of the two contraries, without falling into grave error about the nature of time. I might say then, that the object of my thesis, on this particular point, has been precisely to find a position intermediate between 'moral liberty' and 'free-will.' Liberty, such as I understand it, is situated between these two terms, but not at equal distances from both. If I were obliged to blend it with one of the two, I should select 'free-will.'" ("Report of the French Philosophical Society", philosophical vocabulary, article "Liberty".)

After all, when we place ourselves in the perspective of homogeneous time; that is to say, when we substitute for the real and profound ego its image refracted through space, the act necessarily appears either as the resultant of a mechanical composition of elements, or as an incomprehensible creation ex nihilo.

"We have supposed that there is a third course to pursue; that is, to place ourselves back in pure duration...Then we seemed to see action arise from its antecedents by an evolution sui generis, in such a way that we discover in this action the antecedents which explain it, while at the same time it adds something absolutely new to them, being an advance upon them as the fruit upon the flower. Liberty is in no way reduced thereby, as has been said, to obvious spontaneity. At most this would be the case in the animal world, where the psychological life is principally that of the affections. But in the case of man, a thinking being, the free act can be called a synthesis of feelings and ideas, and the evolution which leads to it a reasonable evolution." ("Matter and Memory", page 205.)

Finally, in a most important letter, ("Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 26th February 1903.) Mr Bergson becomes a little more precise still. We must certainly not confuse the affirmation of liberty with the negation of physical determinism; "for there is more in this affirmation than in this negation." All the same, liberty supposes a certain contingence. It is "psychological causality itself," which must not be represented after the model of physical causality.

In opposition to the latter, it implies that between two moments of a conscious being there is not an equivalence admitting of deduction, that in the transition from one to the other there is a genuine creation. Without doubt the free act is not without explanatory reasons.

"But these reasons have determined us only at the moment when they have become determining; that is, at the moment when the act was virtually accomplished, and the creation of which I speak is entirely contained in the progress by which these reasons have become determining." It is true that all this implies a certain independence of mental life in relation to the mechanism of matter; and that is why Mr Bergson was obliged to set himself the problem of the relations between body and mind.

We know that the solution of this problem is the principal object of "Matter and Memory". The thesis of psycho-physiological parallelism is there peremptorily refuted.

The method which Mr Bergson has followed to do so will be found set out by himself in a communication to the French Philosophical Society, which it is important to study as introduction. ("Report" of meeting, 2nd May 1901.) The paralogism included in the very enunciation of the parallelist thesis is explained in a memoire presented to the Geneva International Philosophical Congress in 1904. ("Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", November 1904.) But the actual proof is made by the analysis of the memoire which fills chapters ii. and iii. of the work cited above. (An extremely suggestive resume of these theses will be found in the second lecture on "The Perception of Change".) It is there established, by the most positive arguments, (Instead of brutally connecting the two extremes of matter and mind, one regarded in its highest action, the other in its most rudimentary mechanism, thus dooming to certain failure any attempt to explain their actual union, Mr Bergson studies their living contact at the point of intersection marked by the phenomena of perception and memory: he compares the higher point of matter—the brain—and the lower point of mind—certain recollections—and it is between these two neighbouring points that he notes a difference, by a method no longer dialectic but experimental.) that all our past is self-preserved in us, that this preservation only makes one with the musical character of duration, with the indivisible nature of change, but that one part only is conscious of it, the part concerned with action, to which present conceptions supply a body of actuality.

What we call our present must be conceived neither as a mathematical point nor as a segment with precise limits: it is the moment of our history brought out by our attention to life, and nothing, in strict justice, would prevent it from extending to the whole of this history. It is not recollection then, but forgetfulness which demands explanation.