In order to get round this almost universal tendency to confuse abstractions with facts Bergson sometimes tries to get us to see the facts as they actually are by using metaphor instead of description in terms of abstract general notions. He has been much criticised for this but there is really a good deal to be said for attempting to convey facts by substituting metaphors for them rather than by using the ordinary intellectual method of substituting abstractions reached by analysis. Those who have criticised the use of metaphor have for the most part not realized how little removed such description is from the ordinary intellectual method of analysis. They have supposed that in analysis we stick to the fact itself, whereas in using metaphor we substitute for the fact to be described some quite different fact which is only connected with it by a more or less remote analogy. If Bergson’s view of the intellectual method is right, however, when we describe in abstract terms arrived at by analysis we are not sticking to the facts at all, we are substituting something else for them just as much as if we were using an out and out metaphor. Qualities and all abstract general notions are, indeed, nothing but marks of analogies between a given fact and all the other facts belonging to the same class: they may mark rather closer analogies than those brought out by an ordinary metaphor, but on the other hand in a frank metaphor we at least stick to the concrete, we substitute fact for fact and we are in no danger of confusing the fact introduced by the metaphor with the actual fact to which the metaphor applies. In description in terms of abstract general notions such as common qualities we substitute for fact something which is not fact at all, we lose touch with the concrete and, moreover, we are strongly tempted to confuse fact with abstraction and believe that the implications of the abstraction apply to the fact, or even that the abstraction is itself a real part of the fact.
Language plays a most important part in forming our habit of treating all facts as material for generalisation, and it is largely to the influence of the words which we use for describing facts that Bergson attributes our readiness to take it for granted that facts have the same logical form as abstractions. It is language again which makes it so difficult to point out that this assumption is mistaken, because, actually, the form of facts is non-logical, a continuous process and not a series. The only way to point this out is by describing the nature of the non-logical facts as contrasted with a logical series, but the language in which our description of the non-logical facts has to be conveyed is itself full of logical implications which contradict the very point we are trying to bring out. Descriptions of non-logical processes will only be intelligible if we discount the logical implications inherent in the words employed, but in order to be willing to discount these implications it is necessary first to be convinced that there is anything non-logical to which such a description could apply. And yet how can we be convinced without first understanding the description? It appears to be a vicious circle, and so it would be if our knowledge of change as a process really depended upon our understanding anybody’s description of it. According to Bergson, however, we all do know such a process directly; in fact, if he is right, we know nothing else directly at all. The use of description is not to give us knowledge of the process, that we already have, but only to remind us of what we really knew all along, but had rather lost contact with and misinterpreted because of our preoccupation with describing and explaining it. Bergson’s criticism of our intellectual methods turns simply upon a question of fact, to be settled by direct introspection. If, when we have freed ourselves from the preconceptions created by our normal common sense intellectual point of view, we find that what we know directly is a non-logical process of becoming, then we must admit that intellectual thinking is altogether inappropriate and even mischievous as a method of speculation.
It is one of Bergson’s chief aims to induce us to regain contact with our direct experience, and it is with this in view that he spends so much effort in describing what the form of this experience actually is, and how it compares with the logical form which belongs to abstractions, that is with what he calls “space.”
The form which belongs to facts but not to abstractions Bergson calls “duration.” Duration can be described negatively by saying that it is non-logical, but when we attempt any positive description language simply breaks down and we can do nothing but contradict ourselves. Duration does not contain parts united by external relations: it does not contain parts at all, for parts would constitute fixed stages, whereas duration changes continuously.
But in order to describe duration at all we have logically only two alternatives, either to speak of it as a plurality, and that implies having parts, or else as a unity, and that by implication, excludes change. Being particularly concerned to emphasise the changing nature of what we know directly Bergson rejects the latter alternative: short of simply giving up the attempt to describe it he has then no choice but to treat this process which he calls duration as a plurality and this drives him into speaking of it as if it had parts. To correct this false impression he adds that these parts are united, not, like logical parts, by external relations, but in quite a new way, by “synthesis.” “Parts” united by synthesis have not the logical characteristics of mutual distinction and externality of relations, they interpenetrate and modify one another. In a series which has duration (such a thing is a contradiction in terms, but the fault lies with the logical form of language which, in spite of its unsatisfactoriness we are driven to employ if we want to describe at all) the “later parts” are not distinct from the “earlier”: “earlier and” “later” are not mutually exclusive relations.
Bergson says, then, that the process of duration which we know directly, if it is to be called a series at all, must be described as a series whose “parts” interpenetrate, and this is the first important respect in which non-logical duration differs from a logical series. In “a series” which is used to describe duration not only are the “parts” not distinct but “their relations” are not external in the sense, previously explained, in which logical relations are external to the terms which they relate. A logical term in a logical series can change its position or enter into a wholly different series and still remain the same term. But the terms in a series which has duration (again this is absurd) are what they are just because of their position in the whole stream of duration to which they belong: to transfer them from one position in the series to another would be to alter their whole flavour which depends upon having had just that particular past and no other. As illustration we might take the last bar of a tune. By itself, or following upon other sounds not belonging to the tune, this last bar would not be itself, its particular quality depends upon coming at the end of that particular tune. In a process of duration, then, such as tune, the “later” bars are not related externally to the “earlier” but depend for their character upon their position in the whole tune. In actual fact, of course, the tune progresses continuously, and not by stages, such as distinct notes or bars, but if, for the sake of description, we speak of it as composed of different bars, we must say that any bar we choose to distinguish is modified by the whole of the tune which has gone before it: change its position in the whole stream of sound to which it belongs and you change its character absolutely.
This means that in change such as this, change, that is, which has duration, repetition is out of the question. Take a song in which the last line is sung twice over as a refrain: the notes, we say, are repeated, but the second time the line occurs the actual effect produced is different, and that, indeed, is the whole point of a refrain. This illustrates the second important difference which Bergson wants to bring out between the forms of change which belong respectively to non-logical facts and to the logical abstractions by which we describe them, that is between duration as contrasted with a logical series of stages. The notes are abstractions assumed to explain the effect produced, which is the actual fact directly known. The notes are stages in a logical series of change, but their effects, the actual fact, changes as a process of duration. From this difference in their ways of changing there follows an important difference between fact and abstraction, namely that, while the notes can be repeated over again, the effect will never be the same as before. This is because the notes, being abstractions, are not affected by their relations which give them their position in the logical series which they form, while their effect, being a changing process, depends for its flavour upon its position in the whole duration to which it belongs: this flavour grows out of the whole of what has gone before, and since this whole is itself always growing by the addition of more and more “later stages,” the effect which it goes to produce can never be the same twice over.
This is why Bergson calls duration “creative.”
No “two” positions in a creative process of duration can have an identical past history, every “later” one will have more history, every “earlier” one less. In a logical series, on the other hand, there is no reason why the same term should not occur over and over again at different points in the course of the series, since in a logical series every term, being distinct from every other and only joined to it by external relations, is what it is independently of its position.
If Bergson is right therefore in saying that abstractions change as a logical series while the actual facts change as a creative process of duration, it follows that, while our descriptions and explanations may contain repetitions the actual fact to which we intend these explanations to apply, cannot. This, if true, is a very important difference between facts and abstractions which common sense entirely overlooks when it assumes that we are directly acquainted with common qualities.