We have seen that this assumption is taken for granted in the account which is ordinarily given (or would be given if people were in the habit of putting their common sense assumptions into words) of how it is that facts come to be classified: facts are supposed to fall into classes because they share common qualities, that is because, in the changing fact directly known, the same qualities recur over and over again. There is no doubt that the fact with which we are directly acquainted can be classified, and it is equally undeniable that this fact is always changing, but if this change has the form of creative duration then its classification cannot be based upon the repetition of qualities at different “stages” in its course. It follows that either the fact with which we are directly acquainted does not change as a creative process, or else that we are quite wrong in assuming, as we ordinarily do, that we actually know qualities directly and that it is these qualities which form the basis of classification, and hence of all description and explanation. We have already seen that this assumption, though at first sight one naturally supposes it to be based on direct acquaintance, may really depend not on any fact directly known but on our preoccupation with explanation rather than with mere knowing.
But if we never really are acquainted with qualities, if qualities are, as Bergson says, mere abstractions, how come we to be able to make these abstractions, and why do they apply to actual facts? If classification is not based on common qualities discovered by analysis and repeated over and over as actual facts directly known, on what is it based? We certainly can classify facts and these abstract common qualities, if abstractions they be, certainly correspond to something in the facts since they apply to them: what is the foundation in directly knowu fact which accounts for this correspondence between abstractions and facts if it is not qualities actually given as part of the facts? These questions are so very pertinent and at the same time so difficult to answer satisfactorily that one is tempted to throw over the view that the changing fact which we know directly forms a creative duration. This view is impossible to express without self-contradiction and it does not fit in with our accustomed habits of mind: nevertheless if we do not simply reject it at once as patently absurd but keep it in mind for a while and allow ourselves time to get used to it, it grows steadily more and more convincing: we become less and less able to evade these difficult questions by accepting the common sense account of what we know directly as consisting of a series of qualities which are repeated over and over, and more and more driven to regard it as a process in creative duration which does not admit of repetitions. There is no difficulty in seeing, the moment we pay attention, that what we know directly certainly does change all the time: but if we try to pin this change down and hold it so as to examine it we find it slipping through our fingers, and the more we look into the supposed stages, such as things and qualities and events, by means of which common sense assumes that this change takes place, the more it becomes apparent that these stages are all of them mere arbitrary abstractions dragged from their context in a continuous process, fictitious halting places in a stream of change which goes on unbroken. Unbiassed attention to the actual fact cannot fail to convince us that what we know directly changes as a process and not by a series of stages.
The creativeness of this process is perhaps at first not quite so obvious, but if we look into the fact once more, with the object of observing repetitions in it, we realize that we cannot find any. It is true that you can pick out qualities which at first appear to recur: you may, for example, see a rose and then a strawberry ice cream, and you may be inclined to say that here you saw the quality pink twice over. But you can only say that what you saw was the same both times by abstracting what we call the colour from the whole context in which it actually appeared on the two different occasions. In reality the colour is not known in isolation: it has its place, in the whole changing fact in a particular context which you may describe in abstract terms as consisting of the shape and smell and size of the object together with all the rest of your state of mind at the moment, which were not the same on the two different occasions, while further this pink colour was modified on each occasion by its position in the whole changing fact which may again be described in abstract terms by saying, for instance, that the pink on the occasion of your seeing the strawberry ice cream, coming after the pink on the occasion of your seeing the rose, had a peculiar flavour of “seen before” which was absent on the previous occasion. Thus although, by isolating “parts” of the whole process of changing which you know directly, you may bring yourself for a moment to suppose that you are acquainted with repetitions, when you look at the whole fact as it actually is, you see that what you know is never the same twice over, and that your direct experience forms, not a series of repetitions, but a creative process.
But, once you grant that the fact which you know directly really changes, there is, according to Bergson, no getting away from the conclusion that it must form a creative process of duration. For he thinks that creative duration is the only possible way in which the transition between past and present, which is the essential feature of change and time, could be accomplished: all passing from past to present, all change, therefore, and all time, must, he says, form a creative process of duration. The alternative is to suppose that time and change form logical series of events in temporal relations of before and after, but, according to Bergson, this not only leaves out the transition altogether but is, even as it stands, unintelligible. The argument is this.
If time and change are real, then, when the present is, the past simply is not. But it is impossible to see how, in that case, there can be any relation between past and present, for a relation requires at least two terms in between which it holds, while in this case there could never be more than one term, the present, ipso facto, abolishing the past. If, on the other hand, the past is preserved, distinct from the present, then temporal relations can indeed hold between them, but in that case there is no real change nor time at all.
This dilemma all follows, of course, from regarding “past” and “present” as mutually exclusive and distinct, and requiring to be united by external relations, in short as terms in a logical series: for Bergson himself this difficulty simply does not arise since he denies that, within the actual changing fact directly known, there are any clear cut logical distinctions such as the words “past” and “present” imply. But when it comes to describing this changing fact distinct terms have to be employed because there are no others, and this creates pseudo-problems such as this question of how, assuming past and present to be distinct, the transition between them ever can be effected. The real answer is that the transition never is effected because past and present are, in fact, not distinct.
According to Bergson a very large proportion of the problems over which philosophers have been accustomed to dispute have really been pseudo-problems simply arising out of this confusion between facts and the abstractions by which we describe them. When once we have realized how they arise these pseudo-problems no longer present any difficulties; they are in fact no longer problems at all, they melt away and cease to interest us. If Bergson is right this would go far to explain the suspicion which, in spite of the prestige of philosophy, still half unconsciously colours the feeling of the “plain man” for the “intellectual,” and which even haunts the philosopher himself, in moments of discouragement, the suspicion that the whole thing is trivial, a dispute about words of no real importance or dignity. If Bergson is right this suspicion is, in many cases, all too well founded: the discussion of pseudo-problems is not worth while. But then the discussion of pseudo-problems is not real philosophy: the thinker who allows himself to be entangled in pseudo-problems has lost his way.
In this, however, the “intellectuals” are not the only ones at fault. “Plain men” are misled by abstractions about facts just as much, only being less thorough, their mistake has less effect: at the expense of a little logical looseness their natural sense of fact saves them from all the absurdities which follow from their false assumptions. For the “intellectual” there is not this loophole through which the sense of fact may undo some of the work of false assumptions: the “intellectual” follows out ruthlessly the implications of his original assumptions and if these are false his very virtues lead him into greater absurdities than those committed by “plain men.”
One of the most important tasks of philosophy is to show up the pseudo-problems so that they may no longer waste our time and we may be free to pursue the real aim of philosophy which is the reconquest of the field of virtual knowledge. Getting rid of the pseudo-problems, however, is no easy task: we may realize, for example, that the difficulty of seeing how the transition between past and present ever can be effected is a pseudo-problem because in fact past and present are not distinct and so no transition between them is needed. But since we have constantly to be using words which carry the implication of distinctness we are constantly liable to forget this simple answer when new problems, though in fact they all spring from this fundamental discrepancy between facts and the abstractions by which we describe them, present themselves in some slightly different form.
The notion of duration as consisting of “parts” united by “creative synthesis” is a device, not for explaining how the transition from past to present really takes place (this does not need explaining since, “past” and “present” being mere abstractions, no transition between them actually takes place at all), but for enabling us to employ the abstractions “past” and “present” without constantly being taken in by their logical implications. The notion of “creative synthesis” as what joins “past” and “present” in a process of duration is an antidote to the logical implications of these two distinct terms: creative synthesis, unlike logical relations, is not external to the “parts” which it joins; “parts” united by creative synthesis are not distinct and mutually exclusive. Such a notion as this of creative synthesis contradicts the logical implications contained in the notion of parts. The notion of “parts” united by “creative synthesis” is really a hybrid which attempts to combine the two incompatible notions of logical distinction and duration. The result is self-contradictory and this contradiction acts as a reminder warning us against confusing the actual changing fact with the abstractions in terms of which we describe it and so falling into the mistake of taking it for granted that this changing fact must form a series of distinct stages or things or events or qualities, which can be repeated over and over again.