sleep and We were speaking just now of the recent hypothesis which attributes sleeP to an interruption of the soli- mSto?fnnc- darity among the neurons. Even if which'they we ^° not accept this hypothesis Jresen^0 (which is, however, confirmed by some reality. curious experiments) we must suppose, 228 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, in in deep sleep, at least a functional break in the relation established in the nervous system be tween stimulation and motor reaction. So that dreams would always be the state of a mind of which the attention was not fixed by the sensori-motor equilibrium of the body. And it appears more and more probable that this re laxing of tension in the nervous system is due to the poisoning of its elements by products of their normal activity accumulated in the waking state. Now, in every way dreams imitate insanity. Not only are all the psychological symptoms of madness found in dreams — to such a degree that the comparison of the two states has become a commonplace — but insanity appears also to have its origin in an exhaustion of the brain, which is caused, like normal fatigue, by the accumulation of certain specific poisons in the elements of the nervous system.1 We know that insanity is often a sequel to infectious diseases, and that, moreover, it is possible to reproduce experimentally, by toxic drugs, all the phenomena of madness.2 Is it not likely, therefore, that the loss of mental equilibrium in the insane is simply the result of a disturbance of the sensori-motor relations established in the organism? This 1 This idea has recently been developed by various authors. A systematic account of it will be found in the work of Cowles, The Mechanism of Insanity (American Journal of Insanity, 1890-1891).
1 See, in especial, Moreau de Tours, Du haschisch. Paris, 1845.
CHAF. in MENTAL EQUILIBRIUM 22Q disturbance may be enough to create a sort of psychic vertigo, and so cause memory and atten tion to lose contact with reality. If we read the descriptions given by some mad patients of the beginning of their malady, we find that they often feel a sensation of strangeness, or, as they say, of ' unreality/ as if the things they perceived had for them lost solidity and relief.1 If our analyses are correct, the concrete feeling that we have of present reality consists, in fact, of our consciousness of the actual movements where by our organism is naturally responding to stimu lation; so that where the connecting links be tween sensations and movements are slackened or tangled, the sense of the real grows weaker or disappears.2 There are here, moreover, many distinctions to be made, not only between the various forms of insanity, but also between insanity properly so-called and that division of the personality which recent psychology has so ingeniously com pared with it.8 In these diseases of personality it seems that groups of recollections detach themselves from the central memory and forego their solid arity with the others. But, then, it seldom occurs that the patient does not also display accompany- 1 Ball, Legons sur les maladies mentales. Paris, 1890, p. 608 et seq. — Cf. a curious analysis: Visions, a Personal Narrative, Journal of Mental Science (1896, p. 284).
1 Pierre Janet, Les accidents mentaux. Paris, 1894, p. 292 et seq.
230 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, ni ing scissions of sensibility and of motor activity.1 We cannot help seeing in these latter phenomena the real material substratum of the former. If it be true that our intellectual life rests, as a whole, upon its apex, that is to say upon the sensori-motor functions by which it inserts itself into present reality, intellectual equilibrium will be differently affected as these functions are damaged in one manner or in another. Now, besides the lesions which affect the general vitality of the sensori- motor functions, weakening or destroying what we have called the sense of reality, there are others which reveal themselves in a mechanical, not a dynamical, diminution of these functions, as if certain sensori-motor connexions merely parted company with the rest. If we are right in our hypothesis, memory is ver^ differently affected in the two cases. In the first, no recollection is taken away, but all recollections are less ballasted, less solidly directed towards the real; whence arises a true disturbance of the mental equili brium. In the second, the equilibrium is not destroyed, but it loses something of its com plexity. Recollections retain their normal as pect, but forego a part of their solidarity, because their sensori-motor base, instead of being, so to speak, chemically changed, is mechanically diminished. But neither in the one case nor in the other are memories directly attacked or damaged.
1 Pierre Janet, L'automalisnte psychologique. Paris, 1898, p. 95 et seq.
CHAP, m THE OFFICE OF THE BODY 23!
The idea that the body preserves memories in the mechanical form of cerebral deposits, that the loss or decrease of memory consists in Injuries to the.,, i brain affect the their more or less complete destruction, gations through that the heightening of memory and halwhich memo-..., ries are actual- lucmation consists, on the contrary, in ized, or the...•ensori-motor an excess of their activity, is not, then, equilibrium,.
which condi- borne out either by reasoning or by facts.
tions our,.
•attention The truth is that there is one case, and cannot destroy one only, in which observation would memories. -,.
seem at first to suggest this view: we mean aphasia, or, more generally, the disturb ance of auditory or visual recognition. This is the only case in which the constant seat of the disorder is in a determined convolution of the brain; but it is also precisely the case in which we do not find a mechanical, immediate and final destruction of certain definite recollections, but rather the gradual and functional weakening of the whole of the affected memory. And we have explained how the cerebral lesion may effect this weakening, without the necessity of supposing any sort of provision of memories stored in the brain. What the injury really attacks are the sensory and motor regions corresponding to this class of percep tion, and especially those adjuncts through which they may be set in motion from within; so that memory, finding nothing to catch hold of, ends by becoming practically powerless: now, in psychology, powerlessness means unconsciousness. In all other cases, the lesion observed or supposed, never defi- 232 MATTER AND MEMORY OHAP. in nitely localized, acts by the disturbance which it causes to the whole of the sensori-motor con nexions, either by damaging or by breaking up this mass: whence results a breach or a simplifying of the intellectual equilibrium, and, by ricochet, the disorder or the disjunction of memory. The doctrine which makes of memory an immediate function of the brain — a doctrine which raises insoluble theoretical difficulties — a doctrine the complexity of which defies all imagination, and the results of which are incompatible with the data of introspection — cannot even count upon the sup port of cerebral pathology. All the facts and all the analogies are in favour of a theory which regards the brain as only an intermediary between sensation and movement, which sees in this aggregate of sensations and movements the pointed end of mental life — a point ever pressed forward into the tissue of events, and, attributing thus to the body the sole function of directing memory to wards the real and of binding it to the present, considers memory itself as absolutely independent of matter. In this sense, the brain contributes to the recall of the useful recollection, but still more to the provisional banishment of all the others. We cannot see how memory could settle within matter; but we do clearly understand how — according to the profound saying of a contempor ary philosopher — materiality begets oblivion 1 1 Ravaisson, La philosophic en France au xix? si&cle, 3rd edit., p. 176.
CHAPTER IV THE DELIMITING AND FIXING OF IMAGES. PERCEPTION AND MATTER. SOUL AND BODY.
ONE general conclusion follows from the first three chapters of this book: it is that the body, always turned towards action, has for its mmtanaw essential function to limit, with a view clnlfe Ts~ to action, the life of the spirit. In regard &>en°ofenta~ to representations it is an instrument of fo°waCrdSasne8S choice, and of choice alone. It can neither beget nor cause an intellectual state. Consider perception, to begin with. The body, by the place which at each moment it occupies in the universe, indicates the parts and the aspects of matter on which we can lay hold: our percep tion, which exactly measures our virtual action on things, thus limits itself to the objects which ac tually influence our organs and prepare our move ments. Now let us turn to memory. The function of the body is not to store up recollections, but simply to choose, in order to bring back to distinct consciousness, by the real efficacy thus conferred on it, the useful memory, that which may com plete and illuminate the present situation with a 233 234 MATTER AND MEMORY CHA». iv view to ultimate act ion. It is true that this second choice is much less strictly determined than the first, because our past experience is an individual and no longer a common experience, because we have always many different recollections equally capable of squaring with the same actual situation, and because nature cannot here, as in the case of per ception, have one inflexible rule for delimiting our representations. A certain margin is, therefore, necessarily left in this case to fancy; and though animals scarcely profit by it, bound as they are to material needs, it would seem that the human mind ceaselessly presses with the totality of its memory against the door which the body may half open to it: hence the play of fancy and the work of imagination — so many liberties which the mind takes with nature. It is none the less true that the orientation of our consciousness towards action appears to be the fundamental law of our psychi cal life.
Strictly, we might stop here, for this work was undertaken to define the function of the body in the life of the spirit. But, on the one hand, we have raised by the way a metaphysical problem which we cannot bring ourselves to leave in sus pense; and on the other, our researches, although mainly psychological, have on several occasions given us glimpses, if not of the means of solving the problem, at any rate of the side on which it should be approached.
This problem is no less than that of the union of CHAP, iv THE PROBLEM OF DUALISM 235 soul and body. It comes before us clearly and A true with urgency, because we make a profound psychology, distinction between matter and spirit.
distinguishing between And we cannot regard it as insoluble, spirit and ° matter, yet since we define spirit and matter by suggests the J manner of positive characters, and not by negatheir union. r J tions. It is in very truth within matter that pure perception places us, and it is really into spirit that we penetrate by means of memory. But on the other hand, whilst introspection reveals to us the distinction between matter and spirit, it also bears witness to their union. Either, then, our analyses are vitiated db origine, or they must help us to issue from the difficulties that they raise.
The obscurity of this problem, in all doctrines, is due to the double antithesis which our understanding establishes between the extheSdoubie tended and the unextended on the one ' between quality and quantity on other. It is certain that mind, first ^> stands over against matter as a Swaperceived Pure umty m *ace °^ an essentially universe. divisible multiplicity; and moreover that our perceptions are composed of heterogene ous qualities, whereas the perceived universe seems to resolve itself into homogeneous and cal culable changes. There would thus be inexten- sion and quality on the one hand, extensity and quantity on the other. We have repu diated materialism, which derives the first term 236 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, iv from the second; but neither do we accept idealism, which holds that the second is con structed by the first. We maintain, as against materialism, that perception overflows infi nitely the cerebral state; but we have en deavoured to establish, as against idealism, that matter goes in every direction beyond our representation of it, a representation which the mind has gathered out of it, so to speak, by an intelligent choice. Of these two opposite doctrines, the one attributes to the body and the other to the intellect a true power of creation, the first insisting that our brain begets representation and the second that our understanding designs the plan of nature. And against these two doctrines we invoke the same testimony, that of conscious ness, which shows us our body as one image among others and our understanding as a certain faculty of dissociating, of distinguishing, of oppos ing logically, but not of creating or of construct ing. Thus, willing captives of psychological analysis and consequently of common sense, it would seem that, after having exacerbated the conflicts raised by ordinary dualism, we have closed all the avenues of escape which metaphysic might set open to us.
But, just because we have pushed dualism to an extreme, our analysis has perhaps dissociated its contradictory elements. The theory of pure per ception on the one hand, of pure memory on the other, may thus prepare the way for a reconcili- CHAP, iv THE PROBLEM OF DUALISM 237 ation between the unextended and the extended, between quality and quantity.
To take pure perception first. When we make the cerebral state the beginning of an action, and in no sense the condition of a perception, Bat since pare percep- We place the perceived images of things of things, these outside the image of our body, and share in the ' J ' natore oi _ thus replace perception within the things me idea of themselves. But then, our perception extension. f • being a part of things, things participate in the nature of our perception. Material ex- tensity is not, cannot any longer be, that compo site extensity which is considered in geometry; it indeed resembles rather the undivided exten sion of our own representation. That is to say that the analysis of pure perception allows us to foreshadow in the idea of extension the possible approach to each other of the extended and the unextended.
But our conception of pure memory should lead us, by a parallel road, to attenuate the second And the opposition, that of quality and quantity. ofetseernffiity For we have radically separated pure recollection from the cerebral state in which continues it and renders it efnca- : tb* cious. Memory is, then, in no degree an tension. emanation of matter; on the contrary, matter, as grasped in concrete perception which always occupies a certain duration, is in great part the work of memory. Now where is, pre cisely, the difference between the heterogeneous 238 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, rv qualities which succeed each other in our con crete perception and the homogeneous changes which science puts at the back of these perceptions in space? The first are discontinuous and can not be deduced one from another; the second, on the contrary, lend themselves to calculation. But, in order that they may lend themselves to calculation, there is no need to make them into pure quantities: we might as well say that they are nothing at all. It is enough that their hetero geneity should be, so to speak, sufficiently diluted to become, from our point of view, practically negligible. Now, if every concrete perception, however short we suppose it, is already a synthesis, made by memory, of an infinity of ' pure perceptions ' which succeed each other, must we not think that the heterogeneity of sensible qualities is due to their being contracted in our memory, and the relative homogeneity of objective changes to the slackness of their natural tension? And might not the interval between quantity and quality be lessened by considerations of tension, as the distance be tween the extended and the uriextended is les sened by considerations of extension?
Before entering on this question, let us formu late the general principle of the method we would apply. We have already made use of it hi an earlier work and even, by implication, in the present essay.
That which is commonly called a fact is not CHAP, iv DESCRIPTION OF THE METHOD 239 reality as it appears to immediate intuition, but The method of an adaptation of the real to the interests objects and oi practice and to the exigencies of haveSbeen social life. Pure intuition, external or apMi- internal, is that of an undivided con- tinuity. We break up this continuity reah-ty itself. into eiements laid side by side, which correspond in the one case to distinct words, in the other to independent objects. But, just because we have thus broken the unity of our original intuition, we feel ourselves obliged to establish between the severed terms a bond which can only then be external and superadded. For the living unity, which was one with internal continuity, we substitute the factitious unity of an empty diagram as lifeless as the parts which it holds together. Empiricism and dog matism are, at bottom, agreed in starting from phenomena so reconstructed; they differ only in that dogmatism attaches itself more particularly to the form and empiricism to the matter. Em piricism, feeling indeed, but feeling vaguely, the artificial character of the relations which unite the terms together, holds to the terms and neglects the relations. Its error is not that it sets too high a value on experience, but that it substitutes for true experience, that ex perience which arises from the immediate contact of the mind with its object, an experience which is disarticulated and therefore, most probably, dis figured, — at any rate arranged for the greater 240 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, iv facility of action and of language. Just because this parcelling of the real has been effected in view of the exigencies of practical life, it has not followed the internal lines of the structure of things: for that very reason empiricism cannot satisfy the mind in regard to any of the great problems and, indeed, whenever it becomes fully conscious of its own principle, it refrains from putting them. — Dogmatism discovers and disengages the diffi culties to which empiricism is blind; but it really seeks the solution along the very road that empiricism has marked out. It accepts, at the hands of empiricism, phenomena that are separate and discontinuous, and simply endeavours to effect a synthesis of them which, not having been given by intuition, cannot but be arbitrary. In other words, if metaphysic is only a construction, there are several systems of metaphysic equally plau sible, which consequently refute each other, and the last word must remain with a critical philosophy, which holds all knowledge to be re lative and the ultimate nature of things to be inaccessible to the mind. Such is, in truth, the ordinary course of philosophic thought: we start from what we take to be experience, we attempt various possible arrangements of the fragments which apparently compose it, and when at last we feel bound to acknowledge the fragility of every edifice that we have built, we end by giving up all effort to build. But there is a last enter prise that might be undertaken. It would be to CHAP, iv DESCRIPTION OF THE METHOD 241 seek experience at its source, or rather above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experi ence. The impotence of speculative reason, as Kant has demonstrated it, is perhaps at bottom only the impotence of an intellect enslaved to certain necessities of bodily life, and concerned with a matter which man has had to disorganize for the satisfaction of his wants. Our knowledge of things would thus no longer be relative to the fundamental structure of our mind, but only to its superficial and acquired habits, to the contingent form which it derives from our bodily functions and from our lower needs. The relativity of knowledge may not, then, be definitive. By unmaking that which these needs have made, we may restore to intuition its original purity and so recover contact with the real.
This method presents, in its application, diffi culties which are considerable and ever recurrent, because it demands for the solution of each new problem an entirely new effort. To give up certain habits of thinking, and even of perceiving, is far from easy: yet this is but the negative part of the work to be done; and when it is done, when we have placed ourselves at what we have called the turn of experience, when we have profited by the faint light which, illuminating the passage from the immediate to the useful, marks the dawn of our human experience, there still remains to be recon stituted, with the infinitely small elements which 242 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP. iv we thus perceive of the real curve, the curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind them. In this sense the task of the philosopher, as we understand it, closely resembles that of the mathe matician who determines a function by starting from the differential. The final effort of philo sophical research is a true work of integration.
We have already attempted to apply this method to the problem of consciousness j1 and it appeared to us that the utilitarian work of the mind, in what concerns the perception of our inner life, consisted in a sort of refracting of pure duration into space, a refracting which permits us to separate our psychical states, to reduce them to a more and more impersonal form and to impose names upon them, — in short, to make them enter the cur rent of social life. Empiricism and dogmatism take interior states in this discontinuous cism and form; the first confining itself to the dogmatism alike take states themselves, so that it can see in rc&litv in a discon- the self only a succession of juxtaposed tinnous form, ignoring facts; the other grasping the necessity of a bond, but unable to find this bond anywhere except in a form or in a force, — an exterior form into which the aggregate is inserted, an indetermined and so to speak physical force which assures the cohesion of the elements. Hence the two opposing points of view as to the question 1 Time and Free Will, H. Bergson. Published by Sonnen- schein & Co. Translation of Les donnees immtdiates de la conscience.
CHAP, iv DESCRIPTION OF THE METHOD 243 of freedom: for determinism the act is the result ant of a mechanical composition of the elements; for the adversaries of that doctrine, if they adhered strictly to their principle, the free decision would be an arbitrary fiat, a true creation ex nihilo.— It seemed to us that a third course lay open. This is to replace ourselves in pure duration, of which the flow is continuous and in which we pass insensi bly from one state to another: a continuity which is really lived, but artincally decomposed for the greater convenience of customary knowledge. Then, it seemed to us, we saw the action issue from its antecedents by an evolution sui generis, in such a way that we find in this action the antecedents which explain it, while it yet adds to these some thing entirely new, being an advance upon them such as the fruit is upon the flower. Freedom is not hereby, as has been asserted, reduced to sen sible spontaneity. At most this would be the case in the animal, of which the psychical life is mainly affective. But in man, the thinking being, the free act may be termed a synthesis of feelings and ideas, and the evolution which leads to it a reasonable evolution. The artifice of this method simply consists, in short, in distinguishing the