At first sight it appears paradoxical and absurd to maintain that our efforts to analyse, classify and explain the facts tend rather to limit than to extend our knowledge, and furthermore distort even such facts as we still remain acquainted with. Common sense has no doubt that, far from limiting and distorting our knowledge, explanation is the only possible way in which we can get beyond the little scraps of fact which are all that we can ever know directly.
If the views of common sense on this question were formulated, which, for the most part, they are not, they would be something like this. Until we begin to think the facts which we know directly are all muddled together and confused: first of all it is necessary to sort them by picking out qualities from the general confusion in which they are at first concealed. It is possible that during this process, which is what is called analysis, we may be obliged, at first, to overlook some of what we already know in a vague sort of way, but this insignificant loss is compensated by the clarity of what remains, and is, in any case, only temporary. For as the analysis proceeds we gradually replace the whole of the original mere muddle by clear and definite things and qualities. At first we may be able to distinguish only a few qualities here and there, and our preoccupation with these may possibly lead us, for a time, to pay insufficient attention to the rest of the muddle which we know directly but have not yet succeeded in analysing. But when the analysis is completed the distinct things and qualities which we shall then know will contain all that we originally knew, and more besides, since the analysis will have revealed much that was originally concealed or only implicit in the original unanalysed fact. If, for instance, you look at a very modern painting, at first what you are directly aware of may be little more than a confused sight: bye and bye, as you go on looking, you will be able to distinguish colours and shapes, one by one objects may be recognised until finally you may be able to see the whole picture at a glance as composed of four or five different colours arranged in definite shapes and positions. You may even be able to make out that it represents a human figure, or a landscape. Common sense would tell you that if your analysis is complete these colours and shapes will exhaust the whole of what you originally knew and moreover that in the course of it much will have been discovered which originally you could hardly be said to have known at all, so that analysis, far from limiting your direct knowledge, will have added to it considerably. Starting, then, originally, from a very meagre stock of direct knowledge, analysis, according to the common sense view, by discovering more and more qualities, builds up for us more and more direct knowledge.
Bergson begins just the other way up. He starts from the idea of a whole field of direct knowledge vastly more extended than the actual facts of which we are normally aware as making up our direct experience. He calls this whole field of knowledge “virtual knowledge.” This field of virtual knowledge contains the whole of the actions and reactions of matter in which our body has its part at any moment, the multitude of stimulations which actually assail the senses but which we normally disregard, together with all the responses by which our bodies adjust themselves to these stimulations, and, in addition, the whole of our past. For Bergson the problem is to explain, not how we increase our direct knowledge, but how we limit it: not how we remember, but how we forget. “Our knowledge,” he says, “far from being built up by a gradual combination of simple elements, is the result of a sharp dissociation. From the infinitely vast field of our virtual knowledge we have selected, to turn into actual knowledge, whatever concerns our action upon things; the rest we have neglected. The brain appears to have been constructed on purpose for this work of selection. It is easy enough to show that this is so in the case of memory. Our past, as we shall show in the next lecture, is necessarily preserved, automatically. It survives in its entirety. But it is to our practical interest to put it aside, or at any rate only to accept just so much of it as can more or less usefully throw light on the present situation and complete it. The brain enables us to make this selection: it materialises the useful memories and keeps those which would be of no use below the threshold of consciousness. The same thing may be said of perception: perception is the servant of action and out of the whole of reality it isolates only what interests us; it shows us not so much the things themselves as what we can make of them. In advance it classifies them, in advance it arranges them; we barely look at the object, it is enough for us to know to what category it belongs.”[[3]]
[3] La Perception du Changement, pages 12 and 13. 27
According to Bergson the facts which we actually know directly in the ordinary course are discriminated out of a very much wider field which we must also be said in a sense to know directly though most of it lies outside the clear focus of attention. This whole field of virtual knowledge is regarded as standing to the actual facts to which we usually devote our attention, much as, for instance, the whole situation of stumbling upon something in a dark room stood to the single quality of roughness: in both cases there is a central point in the full focus of attention which we are apt to look upon as the fact directly known, but this central point is really surrounded by a vastly wider context and this too is known in some sense though it is commonly ignored.
For all philosophies, whether they be Bergson’s or the view of common sense or any other, the actual facts which require to be explained are the same, and, though any positive assertion as to what these facts are may be hotly disputed, it will probably be admitted that as we ordinarily know them they consist in some direct experience, undeniable as far as it goes. The point at issue between Bergson and common sense is, precisely, how far it does go. Both sides would admit that, in this fact directly known, what is in the full focus of attention at any given moment is very limited; on the other hand both would admit that this fully focussed fact is set in a context, or fringe, with no clearly defined limits which also goes to make up the whole fact directly known though we do not usually pay much attention to it. The fact directly known being given the problem is to find out what it is and how it comes to be known. What is actually given and needs to be accounted for is the fact clearly focussed, with its less clearly defined fringe: Bergson’s sweeping assumption of the existence of a further vast field of virtual knowledge in order to account for it, does, at first sight, seem arbitrary and unwarranted and in. need of considerable justification before it can be accepted. For him the problem then becomes, not to account for our knowing as much as we do, but to see why it is that we do not know a great deal more: why our actual knowledge does not cover the whole field of our virtual knowledge. Common sense, on, the other hand, sets out from the assumption of ignorance, absence of awareness, as being, as it were, natural and not needing any accounting for, and so it regards the problem as being to explain why any experience ever occurs at all. The assumption of ignorance as being the natural thing seems at first sight to need no justification, but this may well be due merely to our having grown accustomed to the common sense point of view. When one begins to question this assumption it begins to appear just as arbitrary as the contrary standpoint adopted by Bergson. The actual facts are neither ignorance nor full knowledge and in accounting for them it is really just as arbitrary to assume one of these two extremes as the other. The truth appears to be that in order to account for the facts one must make some assumptions, and these, not being facts actually given, are bound to be more or less arbitrary. They seem more or less “natural” according as we are more or less accustomed to the idea of them, but they are really justified only according to the success with which they account for the actual facts.
This idea of putting the problem of knowledge in terms exactly the reverse of those in which it seems “natural” to put it was originally suggested to Bergson by his study of the important work on amnesia carried out by Charcot and his pupils, and also by such evidence as was to be had at the time when he wrote on the curious memory phenomena revealed by the use of hypnotism and by cases of spontaneous dissociation. It is impossible to prove experimentally that no experience is ever destroyed but it is becoming more and more firmly established that enormous numbers of past experiences, which are inaccessible to ordinary memory and which therefore it would seem “natural” to suppose destroyed, can, if the right methods are employed, be revived even with amazing fullness of detail.
In recent years since Bergson’s books were first published, great strides have been made in the experimental investigation of the whole subject of memory, and the evidence thus obtained, far from upsetting the theory of memory suggested to him by the less extensive evidence which was available at the time when he wrote, lends it striking support.
It appears to be accepted by doctors who use hypnotism in psychotherapy that under hypnotism many patients can perfectly well be taken back in memory to any period of their lives which the doctor chooses to ask for, and can be made not only to remember vaguely a few incidents which occurred at the time but actually to re-live the whole period in the fullest possible detail, feeling over again with hallucinatory vividness all the emotions experienced at the time.
This re-living of past experience can, with some patients, be made to go on indefinitely, through the whole day, if the doctor has time to attend to it, every little incident being faithfully recalled though the actual event may have taken place 20 or 30 years previously. And this happens not simply in the case of some very striking event or great crisis which the patient has been through, indeed it is just the striking events that are often hardest to recover. Some doctors, in order to get at the crisis, have found it useful occasionally to put patients back through one birthday after another right back even as early as their second year, to see at what point in their lives some particular nervous symptom first appeared, and each successive birthday is lived through again in the utmost detail.[[4]]