A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson by Edouard Louis Emmanuel Julien Le Roy
page 60 of 162 (37%)
page 60 of 162 (37%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
must shake off familiar representations! Common-sense cannot think in
terms of movement. It forges a static conception of it, and destroys it by arresting it under pretext of seeing it better. To define movement as a series of positions, with a generating law, with a time-table or correspondence sheet between places and times, is surely a ready-made presentation. Are we not confusing the trajectory and its performance, the points traversed and the traversing of the points, the result of the genesis of the result; in short, the quantitative distance over which the flight extends, and the qualitative flight which puts this distance behind it? In this way the very mobility which is the essence of movement vanishes. There is the same common mistake about time. Analytic and synthetic thought can see in time only a string of coincidences, each of them instantaneous, a logical series of relations. It imagines the whole of it to be a graduated slide-rule, in which the luminous point called the present is the geometrical index. Thus it gives form to time in space, "a kind of fourth dimension," ("Essay on the Immediate Data".) or at least it reduces it to nothing more than an abstract scheme of succession, "a stream without bottom or sides, flowing without determinable strength, in an indefinable direction." ("Introduction to Metaphysics".) It requires time to be homogeneous, and every homogeneous medium is space, "for as homogeneity consists here in the absence of any quality, it is not clear how two forms of homogeneity could be distinguished one from the other." ("Essay on the Immediate Data", page 74.) Quite different appears real duration, the duration which is lived. It is pure heterogeneity. It contains a thousand different degrees of tension or relaxation, and its rhythm varies without end. The magic silence of calm nights or the wild disorder of a tempest, the still joy of ecstasy or the |
|