The unsophisticated view is that in sensible perception we become acquainted with things which exist whether we perceive them or not, and these things, taken all together, are commonly called the material world. According to Bergson’s theory also sensible perception is direct acquaintance with matter. The unsophisticated view holds further, however, that this material world with which sensible perception acquaints us is the common sense world of solid tables, green grass, anger and other such states and things and qualities, but we have already seen that this common sense world is really itself only one among the various attempts which science and common sense are continually making to explain the facts in terms of abstractions. The worlds of electrons, vibrations, forces, and so on, constructed by physics, are other attempts to do the same thing and the common sense world of “real” things and qualities has no more claim to actual existence than have any of these scientific hypotheses. Berg-son’s matter is not identified with any one of these constructions, it is that in the facts which they are all attempts to explain in terms of abstractions, the element in the facts upon which abstractions are based and which makes facts classifiable and so explicable.
The words by which we describe and explain the material element in the facts in terms of series of distinct stages or events in external relations would leave out change if their implications were followed out consistently, but it is only a few “intellectuals” who have ever been able to bring themselves to follow out this implication to the bitter end and accept the conclusion, however absurd. Since it is obvious that the facts do change the usual way of getting round the difficulty is to say that some of these stages are “past” and some “present,” and then, not clearly realizing that the explanations we construct are not really facts at all, to take it for granted that a transition between past and present, though there is no room for it in the logical form of the explanation, yet somehow manages actually to take place. Bergson agrees that change does actually take place but not as a transition between abstractions such as “past” and “present.” We think that “past” and “present” must be real facts because we do not realize clearly how these notions have been arrived at. Once we have grasped the idea that these notions, and indeed all clear concepts, are only abstractions, we see that it is not necessary to suppose that these abstractions really change at all. Between the abstractions “the past” and “the present” there is no transition, and it is the same with events and things and qualities: all these, being nothing but convenient fictions, stand outside the stream of actual fact which is what really changes and endures.
Matter, then, is the name which Bergson gives to that element in the fact upon which the purely logical form appropriate to abstractions is based. The actual facts are not purely logical but neither are they completely interpenetrated since they lend themselves to classification: they tend to logical form on the one hand and to complete inter-penetration on the other without going the whole way in either direction. What Bergson does in the description of the facts which he offers is to isolate each of these tendencies making them into two separate distinct abstractions, one called matter and the other mind. Isolated, what in the actual fact was blended becomes incompatible. Matter and mind, the clear cut abstractions, are mutually contradictory and it becomes at once a pseudo-problem to see how they ever could combine to constitute the actual fact.
The matter which Bergson talks about, being what would be left of the facts if memory were abstracted, has no past: it simply is in the present moment. If there is any memory which can retain previous moments then this memory may compare these previous moments with the present moment and call them the past of matter, but in itself, apart from memory, (and so isolated in a way in which this tendency in the actual fact never could be isolated) matter has no past.
Noticing how very different the actual facts which we know directly are from any of the material worlds by which we explain them, each of which lays claim to being “the reality with which sensible perception acquaints us,” some philosophers have put forward the view that in sensible perception we become acquainted, not with matter itself, but with signs which stand for a material world which exists altogether outside perception. This view Bergson rejects. He says that in sensible perception we are not acquainted with mere signs but, in so far as there is any matter at all, what we know in sensible perception is that matter itself. The facts which we know directly are matter itself and would be nothing but matter if they were instantaneous. For Bergson, however, an instantaneous fact is out of the question: every fact contains more than the mere matter presented at the moment of perception. Facts are distinguished from matter by lasting through a period of duration, this is what makes the difference between the actual fact and any of the material worlds in terms of which we describe them: matter, is, as we have said, only an abstraction of one element or tendency in the changing fact which is the sole reality: memory is the complementary abstraction. Apart from the actual fact neither matter nor memory have independent existence. This is where Berg-son disagrees with the philosophers who regard the facts as signs of an independent material world, or as phenomena which misrepresent some “thing” in “itself” which is what really exists but which is not known directly but only inferred from the phenomena. For Bergson it is the fact directly known that really exists, and matter and memory, solid tables, green grass, electrons, forces, the absolute, and all the other abstract ideas by which we explain it are misrepresentations of it, not it of them.
Even Bergson, however, does not get away from the distinction between appearance and reality. The fact is for him the reality, the abstraction the appearance. But then the fact which is the reality is not the fact which we ordinarily suppose ourselves to know, the little fragment which constitutes “our experience at the present moment.” This is itself an abstraction from the vastly wider fact of our virtual knowledge, and it is this wider field of knowledge which is the reality. Abstraction involves falsification and so the little fragment of fact to which our attention is usually confined is not, as it stands, reality: it is appearance. We should only know reality as it is if we could replace this fragment in its proper context in the whole field of virtual knowledge (or reality) where it belongs. What we should then know would not be appearance but reality itself. It is at this knowledge, according to Bergson, that philosophy aims. Philosophy is a reversal of our ordinary intellectual habits: ordinarily thought progresses from abstraction to abstraction steadily getting further from concrete facts: according to Bergson the task of philosophy should be to put abstractions back again into their context so as to obtain the fullest possible knowledge of actual fact.
In order to describe and explain this fact, however, we have to make use of abstractions. Bergson describes the fact known directly by sensible perception as a contraction of a period of the duration of matter in which the “past” states of matter are preserved along with the “present” and form a single whole with it. It is memory which makes this difference between matter and the actual facts by preserving “past” matter and combining it with “the present.” A single perceived fact, however, does not contain memories as distinct from present material: the distinction between “past” and “present” does not hold inside facts whose duration forms a creative whole and not a logical series. Of course it is incorrect to describe facts as “containing past and present matter,” but, as we have often pointed out, misleading though their logical implications are, we are obliged to replace facts by abstractions when we want to describe them.
An example may perhaps convey what is meant by saying that a fact is a contraction of a period of the duration of matter. Consider red, bearing in mind that, when we are speaking of the fact actually perceived when we see red we must discount the logical implications of our words. Science says that red, the material, is composed of immensely rapid vibrations of ether: red, the fact, we know as a simple colour. Bergson accepts the scientific abstractions in terms of which to describe matter, making the reservation that, if we are to talk of matter as composed of vibrations, we must not say that these vibrations last through a period of time or change by themselves, apart from any memory which retains and so preserves the “past” vibrations. If matter is to be thought of at all as existing apart from any memory it must be thought of as consisting of a single vibration in a perpetual present with no past. We might alter the description and say that this present moment of matter should be thought of as being perpetually destroyed and recreated.
Now according to Bergson the red which we know directly is a period of the vibrations of matter contracted by memory so as to produce an actual perceived fact. As matter red does not change, it is absolutely discrete and complex, in a word, logical: as fact it is non-logical and forms a creative process of duration. The difference between matter and the actual fact is made by the mental act which holds matter as it were in tension through a period of duration, when a fact is produced, but which would have had to be absent if there had been no fact but simply present matter. Bergson calls this act memory: memory, he says, turns matter into fact by preserving its past along with its present. Without memory there would be no duration and so no change and no time. Matter, apart from memory would have no duration and it is just in this that it is distinguished from actual fact.
It is, however, of course, only by making abstractions that we can say what things would be like if something were taken away which actually is not taken away. Matter never really does exist without memory nor memory without its content, matter: the actual fact can only be described as a combination of the two elements, but this description must not lead us into supposing that the abstractions, matter and memory, actually have independent existence apart from the fact which they explain. Only the actual fact exists and it is not really made up of two elements, matter and memory, but only described in terms of these two abstractions.