Again it may be said that we combine old concepts into new ones, conceiving thus such realities as the ether, God, souls, or whatnot, of which our sensible life alone would leave us altogether ignorant. This surely is an increase of our knowledge, and may well be called a theoretical achievement. Yet here again Bergson’s criticisms hold good. Much as conception may tell us about such invisible objects, it sheds no ray of light into their interior. The completer, indeed, our definitions of ether-waves, atoms, Gods, or souls become, the less instead of the more intelligible do they appear to us. The learned in such things are consequently beginning more and more to ascribe a solely instrumental value to our concepts of them. Ether and molecules may be like coordinates and averages, only so many crutches by the help of which we practically perform the operation of getting about among our sensible experiences.
We see from these considerations how easily the question of whether the function of concepts is theoretical or practical may grow into a logomachy. It may be better from this point of view to refuse to recognize the alternative as a sharp one. The sole thing that is certain in the midst of it all is that Bergson is absolutely right in contending that the whole life of activity and change is inwardly impenetrable to conceptual treatment, and that it opens itself only to sympathetic apprehension at the hands of immediate feeling. All the whats as well as the thats of reality, relational as well as terminal, are in the end contents of immediate concrete perception. Yet the remoter unperceived arrangements, temporal, spatial, and logical, of these contents, are also something that we need to know as well for the pleasure of the knowing as for the practical help. We may call this need of arrangement a theoretic need or a practical need, according as we choose to lay the emphasis; but Bergson is accurately right when he limits conceptual knowledge to arrangement, and when he insists that arrangement is the mere skirt and skin of the whole of what we ought to know. ↩
Gaston Rageot, Revue Philosophique, vol. LXIV, p. 85 (July, 1907). ↩
I have myself talked in other ways as plausibly as I could, in my Psychology, and talked truly (as I believe) in certain selected cases; but for other cases the natural way invincibly comes back. ↩
Introduction to Hume, 1874, p. 151. ↩
Introduction to Hume, 1874, pp. 16, 21, 36, et passim. ↩
See, inter alia, the chapter on the “Stream of Thought” in my own Psychologies; H. Cornelius, Psychologie, 1897, chaps. I and III; G. H. Luquet, Idées Générales de Psychologie, 1906, passim. ↩
Compare, as to all this, an article by the present writer, entitled “A world of pure experience,” in the Journal of Philosophy, New York, vol. I, pp. 533, 561 (1905). ↩
Green’s attempt to discredit sensations by reminding us of their “dumbness,” in that they do not come already named, as concepts may be said to do, only shows how intellectualism is dominated by verbality. The unnamed appears in Green as synonymous with the unreal. ↩
Philosophy of Reflection, I, 248 ff. ↩
Most of this paragraph is extracted from an address of mine before the American Psychological Association, printed in the Psychological Review, vol. II, p. 105. I take pleasure in the fact that already in 1895 I was so far advanced towards my present Bergsonian position. ↩
The conscious self of the moment, the central self, is probably determined to this privileged position by its functional connection with the body’s imminent or present acts. It is the present acting self. Though the more that surrounds it may be “subconscious” to us, yet if in its “collective capacity” it also exerts an active function, it may be conscious in a wider way, conscious, as it were, over our heads.
On the relations of consciousness to action see Bergson’s Matière et Mémoire, passim, especially chap. I. Compare also the hints in Münsterberg’s Grundzüge der Psychologie, chap. XV; those in my own Principles of Psychology, vol. II, pp. 581–592; and those in W. McDougall’s Physiological Psychology, chap. VII. ↩
Compare Zend-Avesta, 2nd edition, vol. I, pp. 165 ff., 181, 206, 244 ff., etc.; Die Tagesansicht, etc., chap. V, § 6; and chap. XV. ↩
Blondel: Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, June, 1906, p. 241. ↩
Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. II, New York, 1905, with slight verbal revision. ↩
Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. I, No. 20, p. 566. ↩
Appearance and Reality, pp. 152–133. ↩
Technically, it seems classable as a “fallacy of composition.” A duality, predicable of the two wholes, L—M and M—N, is forthwith predicated of one of their parts, M. ↩
I may perhaps refer here to my Principles of Psychology, vol. I, pp. 459 ff. It really seems “weird” to have to argue (as I am forced now to do) for the notion that it is one sheet of paper (with its two surfaces and all that lies between) which is both under my pen and on the table while I write—the “claim” that it is two sheets seems so brazen. Yet I sometimes suspect the absolutists of sincerity! ↩
Here again
