The Misuse of Mind

by Karin Stephen

Once the relations of qualities have been observed and formulated, however, we need no longer attend to any part of the fact at all. Instead of the actual qualities we now take symbols, words, for example, or letters, or other signs, and with these symbols we make for ourselves diagrams of the relations in which we have observed that the qualities which they represent have stood to each other. Thus we might use the words “lightning before thunder” or first an L and then a T, to express the fact that in a storm we usually observe the quality of flashing before the quality of rumbling. Such laws do not actually reveal new facts to us, they can only tell us, provided we actually know a fact belonging to a given class, to what other class facts which we shall know bye and bye will belong. Thus, once we have classified facts as belonging to two classes, daylight and darkness, and have observed the invariable alternation of facts belonging to these classes, then, whenever we know directly facts which can be classed as daylight, we can predict, according to our law of the alternation of the two classes, that bye and bye these facts will give place to others which can be classed as darkness and that bye and bye these in their turn will be replaced by facts which can again be classed as daylight. The practical value of being able to make even such elementary predictions as these is obviously enormous, and this value increases as applied science, which is built up simply by the formulation of more and more comprehensive general laws of this type, widens the field of facts which can be explained. Once the laws are known, moreover, we are able to say to what class the facts must have belonged which preceded a fact of any given class just as easily as we can say to what class the facts which are to follow it will belong. Thus, given a fact which can be classed as daylight, we can infer, by means of the law of the alternation of the classes daylight and darkness, not only that facts which can be classed as darkness will follow bye and bye, but also that facts of that class must have gone before. In this way we can explain the causes of all classifiable facts equally with their effects and so bridge over the gaps in our direct knowledge by creating a unified plan of the interrelations of all the classes to which facts can belong. By means of this plan we can explain any fact (that is classify its causes and effects), provided we can fit it into one or other of the known classes. This again is of enormous practical use because, when we know to what class present facts must belong if they are to be followed by the class of facts which we want, or not to be followed by those which we do not want, we can arrange our present facts accordingly.

Bergson would not think of denying that this intellectual method, in which facts are used as material for abstraction, is of the utmost practical use for explaining facts and so enabling us to control them. He suggests, however, that our preoccupation with these useful abstractions, classes and their relations, misleads us as to the facts themselves. What actually takes place, he thinks, is a kind of substitution of the explanation for the fact which was to be explained, analogous with what happens when a child at a party, or a guest at dinner, is misled about his actual sensations, only this substitution of which Bergson speaks, being habitual, is much harder to see through. Explanation, as we have seen, consists in constructing a plan or map in terms of such abstractions as classes and their relations, or sometimes, when the abstraction has been carried a step further, in terms simply of words or symbols, by means of which we represent the causal relations between such of the actual directly known facts as can be classified. This plan is more comprehensive and complete than the actual facts which we know directly in the ordinary course of things, for which it stands, and it enables us to explain these facts in terms of the classes of causes from which they follow, and the classes of effects which they produce. No explanation, of course, can actually acquaint us directly with the real antecedent or consequent facts themselves: it can only tell us to what classes these facts must belong. The terms of the plan by which we explain the facts, the classes, for instance, daylight and darkness, and their relation of alternation, or the words or symbols which stand for classes and relations are not themselves facts but abstractions. We cannot think in terms of actual facts: the intellectual activity by which we formulate general laws can only work among abstractions, and in order to explain a fact we are obliged to substitute for it either a class or word or other symbol. All description and explanation of facts consists in substitutions of this kind. The explanation applies provided the abstraction is based on fact, that is, provided it is possible to fit the fact to which the explanation is intended to apply into the class employed to explain it: the general law, for instance, about the alternation of the classes daylight and darkness will explain any facts which can be fitted into one or other of these classes, or again general laws about dogs, such as “dogs lick” will apply to whatever fact belongs at once to all the simpler classes, “warm,” “rough,” “of a certain size, and smell,” out of which the class “dog” is constructed. The general law itself, however, does not consist of such facts but of abstractions substituted for the facts themselves. Such substitution is extremely useful and perfectly legitimate so long as we keep firm hold of the fact as well, and are quite clear about what is fact and what only symbol. The danger is, however, that, being preoccupied with describing and explaining and having used abstractions so successfully for these purposes, we may come to lose our sense of fact altogether and fail to distinguish between actual facts and the symbols which we use to explain them.

This, indeed, is just what Bergson thinks really does happen. No doubt an intelligent physicist is perfectly aware that the vibrations and wave lengths and electrons and forces by which he explains the changes that take place in the material world are fictions, and does not confuse them with the actual facts in which his actual knowledge of the material world consists. But it is much more doubtful whether he distinguishes between these actual facts and the common sense material objects, such as lumps of lead, pieces of wood, and so on, which he probably believes he knows directly but which are really only abstractions derived from the facts in order to explain them just as much as his own vibrations and wave lengths. When a scientist frames a hypothesis he employs the intellectual method of substitution with full consciousness of what he is about; he recognises that its terms are abstractions and not facts. But the intellectual method of explaining by substituting general abstractions for particular facts is not confined to science. All description and explanation, from the first uncritical assumptions of common sense right up to the latest scientific hypothesis employs the intellectual method of substituting abstractions for actual facts. The common sense world of things, events, qualities, minds, feelings, and so on, in which we all pass our every day lives is an early and somewhat crude attempt to describe the continually changing fact which each of us experiences directly, but it is perhaps more misleading than the later elaborate constructions of chemistry, physics, biology or physchology in that things and qualities are more easily mistaken for facts than more obviously hypothetical assumptions. Bergson points out that the various things of which this common sense world consists, solid tables, green grass, anger, hope, etc., are not facts: these things, he insists, are only abstractions. They are convenient for enabling us to describe and explain the actual facts which each of us experiences directly, and they are based upon these facts in the sense of being abstracted from them. The objection to them is that we are too much inclined to take it for granted that these things and qualities and events actually are facts themselves, and in so doing to lose sight of the real facts altogether. In support of his view that things having qualities in successive relations are mere abstractions Bergson points out that whenever we stop to examine what it actually is that we know directly we can see at once that this fact does not consist of things and qualities at all: things and qualities are clearly marked off one from another,; they change as a series of distinct terms, but in what we know directly there are no clear cut distinctions and so no series. The assumption which we usually make that the facts must consist of such things as events and qualities and material objects is not based upon the evidence of direct knowledge: we make the assumption that the facts must be of this kind simply because they can be explained in these terms.

It is true that there is some correspondence between the actual facts and the common sense world of solid tables and so on, and we usually jump to the conclusion that this correspondence would not be possible unless the facts had common qualities. There is no denying that facts can be classified and it seems only natural to take it for granted that whatever can be classified must share some quality with whatever belongs to the same class, that, indeed, it is just on account of all sharing the same common quality that facts can be classified as being all of the same kind. Thus common sense takes it for granted that all facts which can be classified as red, and so explained by all the general laws which we know about the relation of red things to other things, must share a common quality of redness. It seems only natural to make this assumption because we are so used to making it, but if we stop to examine the facts which we know directly we discover that they do not bear it out, and we are gradually driven to the conclusion that it is quite unwarranted. It is only bit by bit, as we gradually accustom ourselves to doubting what we have been accustomed to take for granted, that we realize how ill this assumption fits the facts.

CHAPTER II
FACT

Common sense starts out with the assumption that what we know directly is such things as trees, grass, anger, hope and so on, and that these things have qualities such as solidity, greenness, unpleasantness and so on, which are also facts directly known. It is not very difficult to show that, if we examine the facts which we know directly, we cannot find in them any such things as trees, grass, or minds, over and above the various qualities which we say belong to them. I see one colour and you see another: both of them are colours belonging to the grass but neither of us can find anything among the facts known to him corresponding to this grass, regarded as something over and above its various qualities, to which those qualities are supposed to belong.

This drives common sense back unto its second line of defence where it takes up the much stronger position of asserting that, while trees, grass, minds, etc., are not among the facts directly known, their qualities of solidity, greenness, etc., are. It is usual to add that these qualities are signs of real trees, grass, etc., which exist independently but are only known to us through their qualities.

It is much harder to attack this position, but its weakness is best exposed by considering change as we know it directly, and comparing this with change as represented in terms of qualities. Change, when represented in terms of qualities, forms a series in which different qualities are strung together one after the other by the aid of temporal relations of before and after. The change perceived when we look at the spectrum would thus have to be described in terms of a series of colours, red before orange, orange before yellow, yellow before green, and so on. We might certainly go into greater detail than this, distinguishing any number of shades in each of the colours mentioned, but the description would still have to be given in the same form, that of a series of different colours, or shades of colour, strung together by relations of before and after. Now the fact which we know directly does not change so: it forms a continuous becoming which is not made up of any number, however great, of fixed stages. When we want to represent this changing fact in terms of qualities we have to put together a series of qualities, such as red, orange, etc., and then say that “the colour” changes from one of these to another. We pretend that there is “a colour” which is not itself either red or green or orange or blue, which changes into all these different colours one after another. It is not very difficult to see that this abstract colour which is neither red nor orange nor green nor blue is not a fact but only an abstraction which is convenient for purposes of description: it is not quite so easy to see that this criticism applies equally to each of the separate colours, red, orange, etc., and yet a little attention shows that these also are really nothing but abstractions. With reference to the whole changing fact which is known directly through any period the change in respect of colour is clearly an abstraction. But just as there is no “colour” over and above the red, the orange, the green, etc., which we say we see, so there is really no “red,” “orange,” “green,” over and above the changing process with which we are directly acquainted. Each of these, the red, the orange, and so on, just like the abstract “colour,” is simply a fictitious stage in the process of changing which it is convenient to abstract when we want to describe the process but which does not itself occur as a distinct part in the actual fact.

Change, as we know it directly, does not go on between fixed points such as these stages which we abstract, it goes on impartially, as it were, through the supposed stages just as much as in between them. But though fixed stages are not needed to enable change to occur, simply as a fact, they are needed if we are to describe change and explain it in terms of general laws. Qualities are assumptions required, not in order that change may take place, but in order that we may describe, explain, and so control it. Such particular qualities as red and green are really no more facts directly known than such still more general, and so more obviously fictitious notions as a colour which is of no particular shade, or a table, or a mind, apart from its qualities or states. All these fixed things are alike abstractions required for explaining facts directly known but not occurring as actual parts of those facts or stages in their change.

Thus it appears that the common sense world of things and qualities and events is in the same position, with regard to the actual facts directly known as scientific hypotheses such as forces, electrons, and so on, in their various relations: none of these actually form parts of the fact, all of them are abstractions from the fact itself which are useful for explaining and so controlling it. Common sense stops short at things and qualities and events; science carries the abstraction further, that is all the difference: the aim in both cases is the same, the practical one of explaining and so controlling facts directly known. In both cases the method employed is the intellectual method of abstraction which begins by discriminating within the whole field directly known in favour of just so much as will enable us to classify it and ignoring the rest, and then proceeds to confuse even this selected amount of the actual fact with the abstract classes or other symbols in terms of which it is explained. We have just seen how the result, the worlds of common sense or science, differ from the actual facts in the way in which they change: these worlds of abstractions represent change as a series of fixed stages united by temporal relations, while the actual fact forms a continuous process of becoming which does not contain any such fixed points, as stages in relations.