According to a dictum of Ravaisson, of which Mr Bergson makes use, the explanation must be sought in the body: "it is materiality which causes forgetfulness in us."
There are, in fact, several planes of memory, from "pure recollection" not yet interpreted in distinct images down to the same recollection actualised in embryo sensations and movements begun; and we descend from the one to the other, from the life of simple "dream" to the life of practical "drama," along "dynamic schemes." The last of these planes is the body; a simple instrument of action, a bundle of motive habits, a group of mechanisms which mind has set up to act. How does it operate in the work of memory? The task of the brain is every moment to thrust back into unconsciousness all that part of our past which is not at the time useful. Minute study of facts shows that the brain is employed in choosing from the past, in diminishing, simplifying, and extracting from it all that can contribute to present experience; but it is not concerned to preserve it. In short, the brain can only explain absences, not presences. That is why the analysis of memory illustrates the reality of mind, and its independence relative to matter. Thus is determined the relation of soul to body, the penetrating point which it inserts and drives into the plane of action. "Mind borrows from matter perceptions from which it derives its nourishment, and gives them back to it in the form of movement, on which it has impressed its liberty." ("Matter and Memory", page 279.)
This, then, is how the cycle of research closes, by returning to the initial problem, the problem of perception. In the two opposing systems by which attempts have been made to solve it, Mr Bergson discovers a common postulate, resulting in a common impotence. From the idealistic point of view we do not succeed in explaining how a world is expressed externally, nor from the realistic point of view how an ego is expressed internally. And this double failure comes again from the underlying hypothesis, according to which the duality of the subject and object is conceived as primitive, radical, and static. Our duty is diametrically opposed. We have to consider this duality as gradually elaborated, and the problem concerning it must be first stated, and then solved as a function of time rather than of space. Our representation begins by being impersonal, and it is only later that it adopts our body as centre. We emerge gradually from universal reality, and our realising roots are always sunk in it. But this reality in itself is already consciousness, and the first moment of perception always puts us back into the initial state previous to the separation of the subject and object. It is by the work of life, and by action, that this separation is effected, created, accentuated, and fixed. And the common mistake of realism and idealism is to believe it effected in advance, whereas it is relatively second to perception.
Hence comes the absolute value of immediate intuition. For from what source could an irreducible relativity be produced in it? It would be absurd to make it depend on the constitution of our brain, since our brain itself, so far as it is a group of images, is only a part of the universe, presenting the same characteristics as the whole; and in so far as it is a group of mechanisms become habits, is only a result of the initial action of life, of original perceptive discernment. And, on the other hand, no less absurd would be the fear that the subject can ever be excluded or eliminated from its own knowledge, since, in reality, the subject, like the object, is in perception, not perception in the subject—at least not primitively. So that it is by a trick of speech that the theses of fundamental relativity take root: they vanish when we return to immediacy; that is to say, when we present problems as they ought to be presented, in terms which do not suppose any conceptual analysis yet accomplished.
VI. The Problem of Evolution: Life and Matter.
After the problem of consciousness Mr Bergson was bound to approach that of evolution, for psychological liberty is only truly conceivable if it begins in some measure with the first pulsation of corporal life. "Either sensation has no raison d'etre or it is a beginning of liberty"; that is what the "Essay on the Immediate Data" (Page 25.) already told us.
It was easy then to foresee the necessity of a general theoretical frame in which our duration might take a position which would render it more intelligible by removing its appearance of singular exception.
Thus in 1901, I wrote ("Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", May 1901) with regard to the new philosophy considered as a philosophy of becoming: "It has been prepared by contemporary evolution, which is investigates and perfects, sifting it from its ore of materialism, and turning it into genuine metaphysics. Is not this the philosophy suited to the century of history? Perhaps it indicates that a period has arrived in which mathematics, losing its role as the regulating science, is about to give place to biology." This is the programme carried out, in what an original manner we are well aware, by the doctrine of Creative Evolution.
When we examine ancient knowledge, one characteristic of it is at once visible. It studies little but certain privileged moments of changing reality, certain stable forms, certain states of equilibrium. Ancient geometry, for example, is almost always limited to the static consideration of figures already traced. Modern science is quite different. Has not the greatest progress which it has realised in the mathematical order really been the invention of infinitesimal analysis; that is to say, an effort to substitute the process for the resultant, to follow the moving generation of phenomena and magnitudes in its continuity, to place oneself along becoming at any moment whatsoever, or rather, by degrees at all successive moments? This fundamental tendency, coupled with the development of biological research, was bound to incline it towards a doctrine of evolution; and hence the success of Spencer.