[4] See Psychology and Psychotherapy by Dr. William Brown.
Evidence of this kind does not, of course, prove that literally nothing is ever lost but it goes far towards upsetting the ordinary view that it is the rule for past experience to be annihilated and the exception for fragments here and there to be preserved in memory. The evidence which has so far been collected and which is rapidly accumulating at least seems to justify us in reversing this rule and saying rather that to be preserved is the rule for experience and to be lost would be the exception, if indeed any experience ever really is lost at all.
This way of regarding the field of memory is further supported by such evidence as has been collected with regard to the influence of past experience in dreams, phobias and various forms of insanity, but in these cases, of course, it is only isolated past experiences here and there whose activity can be observed, and so, while helping to upset the most natural assumption that whatever cannot be recalled by ordinary efforts of memory may be assumed to have been destroyed, they do not lend very much support to the wider view put forward by Bergson, that no experience, however trivial, is ever destroyed but that all of it is included in the field out of which memory makes its practical selection.
Taking all the evidence with regard to the preservation of past experience which is at present available, then, it is safe to say that, while it cannot, in the nature of things, absolutely prove Bergson’s theory of knowledge, it in no way conflicts with it and even supports it, positively in the sense that the theory does fit the facts well enough to explain them (though it goes further than the actual facts and makes assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved by an appeal to them) and negatively in the sense that what we now know about memory actually conflicts with the “natural” view that past experience which we are unable to recall has been destroyed, which is commonly appealed to to show the absurdity of the rival theory put forward by Bergson.
On the assumption which Bergson makes of a much wider field of direct knowledge than that which contains what we are accustomed to regard as the actual facts which we know directly, Bergson’s problem becomes how to account for these facts being so much less than the whole field which we might have expected to have known. The answer, according to him, is to be found in our practical need of being prepared in advance for what is to come, at whatever sacrifice of direct knowledge of past and present facts. For practical purposes it is essential to use present and past facts as signs of what is coming so that we may be ready for it. To this end it is far more important to know the general laws according to which facts occur than to experience the facts themselves in their fullness. Our intellectual habits which prompt us to set to work at once in every unfamiliar situation to analyse and classify it fit us for discovering these laws: in so far as we are intellectual we incline to regard facts mainly as material for arriving at descriptions which themselves form the material out of which, by a further intellectual effort, explanations are framed in terms of general laws, which we need to know if we are to be ready for what is going to happen. Now these laws are general laws applying to whole classes of facts of one kind, or another. Facts, therefore, only form material for discovering laws in so far as they can be classified into kinds.
The first step in classifying a fact is called analysis and consists in discovering common qualities which the fact possesses. According to Bergson the discovery of common qualities in a fact consists simply in learning to overlook everything in that fact except the respects in which it can be said to be of the same kind, and so to belong to the same class, as other facts. Far from adding to our direct knowledge, as common sense supposes, he holds that analysis consists in shutting our eyes to the individuality of facts in order to dwell only upon what they have in common with one another. Starting, then, from the wider field of knowledge which he assumes Bergson explains how we reach the limited facts, which are all that we ordinarily know, by saying that these facts are arrived at by selection out of this much wider field. It is not the disinterested love of knowledge that determines how much we shall actually attend to: our selection from the whole field of what facts we will attend to is determined by the pressing need of being prepared in advance for the facts which are to come. We attend only to so much of the whole of what is, in some sense, directly known to us as will be useful for framing the general laws which enable us to prepare in advance for what is coming. This practical utility explains why analysis and classification seem to us to be the obvious way of dealing with what we know.
The work of abstraction by which, treating the facts directly known as so much material for framing explanations, we pass from these actual facts to the general laws which explain them, falls into four stages, and at each stage, according to Bergson, as we go further and further from the original fact directly known, the two vices of the intellectual method, limitation and distortion of the actual fact, become more and more apparent.
Starting from the fact directly known, the first thing, as we have seen, is to learn to distinguish common qualities which it shares in common with some, but not all, other facts; the next thing is to classify it by fitting it into the further groups to which these various qualities entitle it to belong. The moment a quality has been distinguished in a fact that fact has been fitted into a class, the class which consists of all the facts in which that quality can be distinguished. Thus, in our original illustration, when you first distinguished warmth, etc., you were beginning to fit your fact into classes: when you perceived warmth you fitted it into the class of warm objects, and it was the same with the other qualities of roughness, size and smell. This fitting of facts into classes according to the common qualities distinguished in them might be called a preliminary classification, but we shall use the term analysis for this preliminary grouping of facts according to their qualities, keeping the term classification for the next step, which you took when you realized “this is a dog,” which consists in the discovery not of mere disconnected qualities but of “real things.” Just as every quality, such as “warm” or “hairy” or “sweet” or “cold” is a class of actual facts, so every “real thing” such as “a dog” or “an ice cream” is a class of qualities. Thus a quality is once, and a “real thing” is twice, removed from actual fact, and the more energetically we pursue the intellectual work of abstraction the further we get from the fact itself from which we began. The point of grouping facts into classes, whether by analysing them into qualities or classifying them into “real things,” is that we can then apply to the particular fact all that we know to be true in general of whatever belongs to these various classes: in a word, once we have fitted a fact into a class we can apply to it all the general laws which are known to apply to that class.
Common sense, as we saw, tells us that when we distinguish qualities in any given fact we obtain fuller knowledge than was given in the mere unanalysed fact, and this knowledge is supposed to become fuller still when we go on to classify these qualities into “real things.” Bergson, on the contrary, says that common qualities are arrived at by leaving out much of the fact originally known, while each successive stage in the process of abstraction by which we explain facts, though it enables us to apply more and more general laws, yet leaves out more and more of the actual fact itself. Analysis begins this whittling away of the actual fact by confining our attention to qualities which do not exhaust the whole content of the actual fact. At this preliminary stage, however, though we concentrate our attention on the quality, we still remain aware of the whole fact in which the quality has its setting. Classification carries the work of limitation a stage further. “Things” are a stage further removed from actual fact than qualities are since, while qualities are classes of facts, “things” are only classes of qualities. For classification into “things” therefore only the qualities in a fact will be of any use, and so, when we have reached the stage of classification, we need no longer burden our attention with the actual facts themselves in their entirety, we need pay attention only to the qualities which distinguish one group from another, For the purpose of classification into “things” the quality can stand for the whole fact: thus, as Bergson points out, we begin to lose contact with the whole fact originally known, since all the rest of it except the respects in which it can be analysed will henceforth tend to be ignored.
The third stage in explaining facts in terms of general laws is called induction and consists in observing and formulating the relations of “things.” “Things” are related to each other through their qualities. Qualities do not give us the whole fact, because, when we have distinguished qualities, we are inclined to concentrate our attention on the quality at the expense of the rest of the fact; nevertheless while we attend to actual qualities we have not lost contact with fact altogether. Induction, which consists in framing general laws of the relations of “things,” though it does not involve attention to the whole fact, does at least demand attention to qualities, and so, while we are occupied with induction, we do still keep touch with fact to some extent.