[397] “We will not dwell here upon a point we have dealt with in former works. Let us merely recall that a theory [the theory of contemporary physiological psychology] such as that according to which consciousness is attached to certain neurons, and is thrown off from their work like a phosphorescence, may be accepted by the scientist for the detail of analysis; it is a convenient mode of expression. But it is nothing else. In reality, a living being is a centre of action. It represents a certain sum of contingency entering into the world, that is to say, a certain quantity of possible action—a quantity variable with individuals and especially with species. The nervous system of an animal marks out the flexible lines on which its action will run (although the potential energy is accumulated in the muscles rather than in the nervous system itself); its nervous centres indicate, by their development and their configuration, the more or less extended choice it will have among more or less numerous and complicated actions. Now, since the awakening of consciousness in a living creature is the more complete, the greater the latitude of choice allowed to it and the larger the amount of action bestowed upon it, it is clear that the development of consciousness will appear to be dependent on that of the nervous centres. On the other hand, every state of consciousness being, in one aspect of it, a question put to the motor activity and even the beginning of a reply, there is no psychical event that does not imply the entry into play of the cortical mechanisms. Everything seems, therefore, to happen as if consciousness sprang from the brain, and as if the detail of conscious activity were modelled on that of the cerebral activity. In reality consciousness does not spring from the brain, but brain and consciousness correspond because equally they measure ... the quantity of choice that the living being has at its disposal” (Creative Evolution, pp. 266–7).
[398] “Instead of starting from affection [or ‘sensation’ in the old sense of the haphazard sensation] of which we can say nothing, since there is no reason why it should be what it is rather than anything else, we start from action, that is to say, from our power of effecting changes in things, a faculty attested by consciousness, and towards which all the powers of the organised body are seen to converge. So we place ourselves at once in the midst of extended images [to Bergson as an idealist things are at the same time images or ideas for a consciousness in other things, or in us, or in beings other than ourselves], and in this material universe we perceive centres of indetermination characteristic of life” (Matter and Memory, p. 67).
[399] Cf. the words in the Preface to Matter and Memory: “The whole personality, which, normally narrowed down by action, expands with the unscrewing of the vice in which it has allowed itself to be squeezed,” or the words in the same place about the task of metaphysics being the attempt of the “mind striving to transcend the conditions of useful action.”
[400] We refer elsewhere in this chapter to Bergson’s idea that living beings are “centres of indetermination,” that is to say, creatures who hold their place in nature and that of their species by “persisting in their own being” (the language of Spinoza) by acting and reacting upon some of the many forces of nature that act upon them, and by avoiding the action of other forces and other animals. “They allow to pass through them,” he says, “so to speak, those external influences which are indifferent to them; the others isolated become ‘perceptions’ by their very isolation” (Matter and Memory, pp. 28, 29). We also refer to Bergson’s idea that the life-force has expressed itself along different grades of being (mineral, animal, and so on). Both these ideas are a partial explanation of what we mean by the presence of a spiritual activity in both inanimate and animate nature. So also is Bergson’s idea that the purely mechanical explanation either of nature or of life is but a device of the intellect for the purposes of description. More specifically it is expressed, too, in his idea that “Our representation of matter is the measure of our possible action upon bodies; it results from the discarding of what has no interest for our needs, or more generally for our functions” (Matter and Memory, p. 30), or that “Consciousness” is just this choice of “attaining to” or attending to “certain parts and certain aspects of those parts” of the “material universe” (ibid. p. 31), or that “sense-perception” is an “elementary question to my motor activity.” “The truth is that my nervous system, interposed between the objects which affect my body and those which I can influence, is a mere conductor, transmitting, sending back, or inhibiting movement. This conductor is composed of an enormous number of threads which stretch from the periphery to the centre, and from the centre to the periphery. As many threads pass from the periphery to the centre, so many points of space are there able to make an appeal to my will, and to put, so to speak, an elementary question to my motor activity. Every such question is what is termed a perception” (ibid. 40, 41; italics mine). Or, as he puts it, on p. 313, “No doubt the choice of perception from among images in general is the effect of a discernment which foreshadows spirit.... But to touch the reality of spirit we must place ourselves at the point where an individual consciousness, continuing and retaining the past in a present enriched by it, thus escapes the law of necessity, the law which ordains that the past shall ever follow itself in a present which merely repeats it in another form, and that all things shall ever be flowing away. When we pass from pure perception to memory, we definitely abandon matter for spirit.”
[401] Bergson is always able to detect the relapses even of “mechanism” and of the mechanical philosophy of science into “finalism,” as when he says on p. 72 of his Creative Evolution, “To sum up, if the accidental variations that bring about evolution are insensible variations, some good genius must be appealed to—the genius of the future species—in order to preserve and accumulate these variations, for “selection” will not look after this. If, on the other hand, the accidental variations are sudden, then, for the previous function to go on, or for a new function to take its place, all the changes that have happened together must be complementary. So we have to fall back on the good genius again to obtain the convergence of simultaneous changes, as before to be assured of the continuity of direction of successive variations.”
[402] We must remember that to Bergson evolution has taken place along different lines—those of Automatism (in plant-life), Instinct (in animal life), and Intelligence (in human life and the higher animals), and that along none of those lines are we to fall into the errors either of materialism, or of “Darwinism” (the belief in “accidental variations”), or of the “design-philosophy,” or even of theories like “neo-Lamarckianism” or neo-vitalism. To him all these philosophies are but imperfect and hypothetical attempts to grasp “movement” and “life” which both “transcend finality, if we understand by finality the realisation of an idea conceived or conceivable in advance” (Creative Evolution, p. 236).
[403] “Paleyism” or “Miltonism” are still good names for the thing, I have read in some competent book upon Evolution.
[404] See below, p. 261.
[405] To Bergson concepts are just as hypothetical in the realm of science, as they are to thinkers like Mach and Poincaré, and Professor Ward of Cambridge. See the following, for example, from Matter and Memory (p. 263): “We shall never explain by means of particles, whatever these may be, the simple properties of matter; at most we can thus follow out into corpuscles as artificial as the corpus, the body itself—the actions and reactions of this body with regard to all the others. This is precisely the object of chemistry. It studies bodies rather than matter; and so we understand why it stops at the atom, which is still endowed with the general properties of matter. But the materiality of the atom dissolves more and more under the eyes of the physicist. We have no reason, for instance, for representing the atom to ourselves as a solid, rather than as a liquid or gaseous, nor for picturing the reciprocal action of atoms by shocks rather than in any other way.” Or, the following characteristic passage from the same book (p. 280) in respect of the hypothetical character of the concepts of “pure time” and “pure space”: “Homogeneous space and homogeneous time are then neither properties of things nor essential conditions of our faculty of knowing them; they express, in an abstract form, the double work of solidification and of division, which we effect on the moving continuity of the real in order to obtain there a fulcrum for our action, in order to fix within it starting-points for our operation, in short, to introduce into it real changes. They are the diagrammatic designs of our eventual action upon matter.”
[406] Like his celebrated contemporary Eucken, and like many other thinkers of their time, Bergson is profoundly convinced of the one-sidedness of the so-called scientific culture of our day, and of the error of any and all conceptions of education and of social policy that are based upon it. Although I refer below to the limitations of his view that the intellect is adapted only to matter and to mechanical construction, I append the following quotation as symptomatic of his value as a spiritual teacher in our scientific age: “As regards human intelligence (Creative Evolution, pp. 145–6) it has not been sufficiently noted that mechanical invention has been from the first its essential feature, that even to-day our social life gravitates around the manufacture and use of artificial instruments.... This we hardly realise, because it takes longer to change ourselves than to change our tools.... In thousands of years, when seen from the distance, only the broad lines of our present age will be visible, our wars and our revolutions will count for little, even supposing they are remembered at all, but the steam-engine, and the procession of inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of prehistoric times; it will serve to define an age.”