The Greatest Works of Henri Bergson. Henri Bergson

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СКАЧАТЬ cases where common sense adopts a similar convention. In a word, all psychophysics is condemned by its origin to revolve in a vicious circle, for the theoretical postulate on which it rests condemns it to experimental verification, and it cannot be experimentally verified unless its postulate is first granted. The fact is that there is no point of contact between the unextended and the extended, between quality and quantity. We can interpret the one by the other, set up the one as the equivalent of the other; but sooner or later, at the beginning or at the end, we shall have to recognize the conventional character of this assimilation.

      Psychophysics merely pushes to its extreme consequences the fundamental but natural mistake of regarding sensations as magnitudes.

      In truth, psychophysics merely formulates with precision and pushes to its extreme consequences a conception familiar to common sense. As speech dominates over thought, as external objects, which are common to us all, are more important to us than the subjective states through which each of us passes, we have everything to gain by objectifying these states, by introducing into them, to the largest possible extent, the representation of their external cause. And the more our knowledge increases, the more we perceive the extensive behind the intensive, quantity behind quality, the more also we tend to thrust the former into the latter, and to treat our sensations as magnitudes. Physics, whose particular function it is to calculate the external cause of our internal states, takes the least possible interest in these states themselves: constantly and deliberately it confuses them with their cause. It thus encourages and even exaggerates the mistake which common sense makes on the point. The moment was inevitably bound to come at which science, familiarized with this confusion between quality and quantity, between sensation and stimulus, should seek to measure the one as it measures the other: such was the object of psychophysics. In this bold attempt Fechner was encouraged by his adversaries themselves, by the philosophers who speak of intensive magnitudes while declaring that psychic states cannot be submitted to measurement. For if we grant that one sensation can be stronger than another, and that this inequality is inherent in the sensations themselves, independently of all association of ideas, of all more or less conscious consideration of number and space, it is natural to ask by how much the first sensation exceeds the second, and to set up a quantitative relation between their intensities. Nor is it any use to reply, as the opponents of psychophysics sometimes do, that all measurement implies superposition, and that there is no occasion to seek for a numerical relation between intensities, which are not superposable objects. For it will then be necessary to explain why one sensation is said to be more intense than another, and how the conceptions of greater and smaller can be applied to things which, it has just been acknowledged, do not admit among themselves of the relations of container to contained. If, in order to cut short any question of this kind, we distinguish two kinds of quantity, the one intensive, which admits only of a "more or less," the other extensive, which lends itself to measurement, we are not far from siding with Fechner and the psychophysicists. For, as soon as a thing is acknowledged to be capable of increase and decrease, it seems natural to ask by how much it decreases or by how much it increases. And, because a measurement of this kind does not appear to be possible directly, it does not follow that science cannot successfully accomplish it by some indirect process, either by an integration of infinitely small elements, as Fechner proposes, or by any other roundabout way. Either, then, sensation is pure quality, or, if it is a magnitude, we ought to try to measure it.

      Thus intensity judged (1) in representative states by an estimate of the magnitude of the cause (2) in affective states by multiplicity of psychic phenomena involved.

      To sum up what precedes, we have found the notion of intensity to present itself under a double aspect, according as we study the states of consciousness which represent an external cause, or those which are self-sufficient. In the former case the perception of intensity consists in a certain estimate of the magnitude of the cause means of a certain quality in the effect: it is, as the Scottish philosophers would have said, an acquired perception. In the second case, we give the name of intensity to the larger or smaller number of simple psychic phenomena which we conjecture to be involved in the fundamental state: it is no longer an acquired perception, but a confused perception. In fact, these two meanings of the word usually intermingle, because the simpler phenomena involved in an emotion or an effort are generally representative, and because the majority of representative states, being at the same time affective, themselves include a multiplicity of elementary psychic phenomena. The idea of intensity is thus situated at the junction of two streams, one of which brings us the idea of extensive magnitude from without, while the other brings us from within, in fact from the very depths of consciousness, the image of an inner multiplicity. Now, the point is to determine in what the latter image consists, whether it is the same as that of number, or whether it is quite different from it. In the following chapter we shall no longer consider states of consciousness in isolation from one another, but in their concrete multiplicity, in so far as they unfold themselves in pure duration. And, in the same way as we have asked what would be the intensity of a representative sensation if we did not introduce into it the idea of its cause, we shall now have to inquire what the multiplicity of our inner states becomes, what form duration assumes, when the space in which it unfolds is eliminated. This second question is even more important than the first. For, if the confusion of quality with quantity were confined to each of the phenomena of consciousness taken separately, it would give rise to obscurities, as we have just seen, rather than to problems. But by invading the series of our psychic states, by introducing space into our perception of duration, it corrupts at its very source our feeling of outer and inner change, of movement, and of freedom. Hence the paradoxes of the Eleatics, hence the problem of free will. We shall insist rather on the second point; but instead of seeking to solve the question, we shall show the mistake of those who ask it.

1 Essays, (Library Edition, 1891), Vol. ii, p. 381.

2 The Senses and the Intellect,4th ed., (1894), p. 79.

3 Grundzüge der Physiologischen Psychologie,2nd ed. (1880), Vol. i, p. 375.

4 W. James, Le sentiment de l'effort (Critique philosophique, 1880, Vol. ii,) cf. Principles of Psychology, (1891), Vol. ii, chap, xxvi.

5 Functions of the Brain, 2nd ed. (1886), p. 386.

6 Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik, 1st ed. (1867), pp. 600-601.

7 Le mécanisme de l'attention. Alcan, 1888.

8 The Expression of the Emotions, 1st ed., (1872), p. 74.

9 "What is an Emotion?" Mind,1884, p. 189.

10 Principles of Psychology, 3rd. ed., (1890), Vol. i, p. 482.

11 The Expression of the Emotions, 1st ed., p. 78.

12 L'homme et l'intelligence, p. 36.

13 Ibid. p. 37.

14 Ibid. p. 43.

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