Henri Bergson Quotes

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.

Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.

The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. —Henri Bergson

Time is invention and nothing else.

Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.

Europe is overpopulated, the world will soon be in the same condition, and if the self-reproduction of man is not rationalized... we shall have war.

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Hoshino looked up, mouth half open, and gazed at her face. “What’s that?” “Henri Bergson,” she replied, licking the semen from the tip of his penis. [...] “I can’t think of anything special, but could you quote some more of that philosophy stuff? I don’t know why, but it might keep me from coming so quick. Otherwise I’ll lose it pretty fast.

The Eyes See Only What The Mind Is Prepared To Comprehend.

Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.

There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life.

Henri Bergson thought the principal function of the brain was to filter out most of reality so that we could focus on the tasks of earthly life,” he said. “When the filter is weakened by a powerful drug, what we see is not delusion but the truth.

You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers.” Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion. (Partly for this reason Richards believes that psychedelics should be part of a divinity student’s education.) And third, that consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains. On this question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it. “If you wanted to find the blonde who delivered the news last night,” Richards offered by way of an analogy, “you wouldn’t look for her in the TV set.” The television set is, like the human brain, necessary but not sufficient.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

Disorder is simply the order we are not looking for.

Pour un être conscient, exister consiste à changer, changer à se mûrir, se mûrir à se créer indéfiniment soi-même.

The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful...

the human mind is so constructed that it cannot begin to understand the new until it has done everything in its power to relate it to the old.

...Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.

Henri Bergson said: "To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly." (p. 165)

When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view.

No two moments are identical in a conscious being

[Duration is] the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former state.

But, then, I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, which does not change every moment, since there is no consciousness without memory, and no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments. It is this which constitutes duration. Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinct form the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more profoundly, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavier load we drag behind us as we grow older. Without this survival of the past into the present there would be no duration, but only instantaneity.

That diversion of life towards mechanism is the real cause of laughter

What philosophy has lacked most of all is precision.

اللامبالاة هي بيئة الهزل الطبيعية

شاهدو الحياة كمتفرج لامبالٍ : الكثير من المآسي تتحول إلى كوميديا

The world that our senses and our consciousness habitually acquaint us with is now nothing more than the shadow of itself; and it is cold like death.

L'humanité gémit, à demi écrasée sous le poids des progrès qu'elle a faits. Elle ne sait pas assez que son avenir dépend d'elle.

all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.

On this question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it. “If you wanted to find the blonde who delivered the news last night,” Richards offered by way of an analogy, “you wouldn’t look for her in the TV set.” The television set is, like the human brain, necessary but not sufficient.

We seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.

Sans doute une chute est toujours une chute, mais autre chose est de se laisser choir dans un puits parce qu’on regardait n’importe où ailleurs, autre chose y tomber parce qu’on visait une étoile. C’est bien une étoile que Don Quichotte contemplait.

What makes hope such an intense pleasure is the fact that the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible. Even if the most coveted of these becomes realized, it will be necessary to give up the others, and we shall have lost a great deal. The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.

For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating one’s self endlessly.

Materiality begets oblivion.

Avouons notre ignorance, mais ne nous résignons pas à la croire définitive.

Social thought is unable not to keep its original structure.

Darwin’s theory of evolution pointed to the conclusion that flux (or becoming), not being, is the essence of reality. Though

Religion is a defensive reaction of nature against the dissolvent power of intelligence.

To think intuitively is to think in duration. Intelligence starts ordinarily from the immobile, and reconstructs movement as best it can with immobilities in juxtaposition. Intuition starts from movement, posits it, or rather perceives it as reality itself, and sees in immobility only an abstract moment, a snapshot taken by our mind, of a mobility. Intelligence ordinarily concerns itself with things, meaning by that, with the static, and makes of change an accident which is supposedly superadded. For intuition the essential is change: as for the thing, as intelligence understands it, it is a cutting which has been made out of the becoming and set up by our mind as a substitute for the whole. Thought ordinarily pictures to itself the new as a new arrangement of pre-existing elements; nothing is ever lost of it, nothing is ever created. Intuition, bound up to a duration which is growth, perceives in it an uninterrupted continuity of unforeseeable novelty; it sees, it knows that the mind draws from itself more than it has, that spirituality consists in just that, and that reality, impregnated with spirit, is creation.

His books stood neatly along the glassed-in shelves of four vaultlike oak bookcases: the collected Shakespeare, Jefferson’s essays, Thoreau, Paine, Rousseau, Crevecoeur, Locke, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Dickens, Tolstoy. Henri Bergson, William James, Darwin, Buffon, Lyell, Charles Lamb, Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Chesterton. Swift, Pope, Defoe, Stevenson, Saint Augustine, Aristotle, Virgil, Plutarch. Plato, Sophocles, Homer, Dryden, Coleridge, Shelley, Shaw. A History of Washington State, A History of the Olympic Peninsula, A History of Island County, Gardens and Gardening, Scientific Agriculture, The Care and Cultivation of Fruit Trees and Ornamental

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Hoshino looked up, mouth half open, and gazed at her face. “What’s that?” “Henri Bergson,” she replied, licking the semen from the tip of his penis. “Mame mo memelay.

Nous ne voyons pas les choses mêmes ; nous nous bornons, le plus souvent, à lire des étiquettes collées sur elles.

The Eye Sees Only What The Mind Is Prepared To Comprehend.

All the pieces have been arranged with a view to the best possible funk

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought

Il suffit que nous bouchions nos oreilles au son de la musique, dans un salon où l'on danse, pour que les danseurs nous paraissent aussitôt ridicules. Combien d'actions humaines résisteraient à une épreuve de ce genre?

usually when we speak of time we think of the measurement of duration, and not of duration itself. But this duration which science eliminates, and which is so difficult to conceive and express, is what one feels and lives.

Art, understood along these terms, is not yet about an object, about a form, or a content. It is still on its way, in its manner of becoming. It is intuition, in the Bergsonian sense. As Henri Bergson defines it, intuition is the art—the manner—in which the very conditions of experience are felt. Beyond the state (and the status quo), across the force of the actual, intuition touches on the decisive turn within experience in the making that activates a difference within time’s durational folds: intuition activates the proposition at the heart of the as yet unthought.

Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter.

psychical life is neither unity nor multiplicity, that it transcends both the mechanical and the intellectual, mechanism and finalism having meaning only where there is "distinct multiplicity," "spatiality," and consequently assemblage of pre-existing parts: "real duration" signifies both undivided continuity and creation.

It will be said that this enlarging is impossible. How can one ask the eyes of the body, or those of the mind, to see more than they see? Our attention can increase precision, clarify and intensify; it cannot bring forth in the field of perception what was not there in the first place. That’s the objection.—It is refuted in my opinion by experience. For hundreds of years, in fact, there have been men whose function has been precisely to see and to make us see what we do not naturally perceive. They are the artists.

Our intelligence is the prolongation of our senses. Before we speculate we must live, and life demands that we make use of matter, either with our organs, which are natural tools, or with tools, properly so-called, which are artificial organs. Long before there was a philosophy and a science, the role of the intelligence was already that of manufacturing instruments and guiding the action of our body on surrounding bodies. Science has pushed this labor of the intelligence much further, but has not changed its direction.

...we shall not dwell for the present on the effort to delve down to the depths of our being. If possible at all, it is exceptional: and it is on the surface, at the point where it inserts itself into the close-woven tissue of other exteriorised personalities, that our ego generally finds its point of attachment; its solidity lies in this solidarity.

Donde hay felicidad, hay creación. Cuanto más rica es la creación, más profunda es la felicidad

In reality, life is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines.

You can predict an eclipse a thousand years hence, but you cannot predict what will happen when you pull a bulldog’s tail!

[...] le cerveau ne détermine pas la pensée ; et par conséquent la pensée, en grande partie du moins, est indépendante du cerveau.

Might not certain vices have the same relation to character that the rigidity of a fixed idea as to intellect? Whether as a moral kink or a crooked twist given to the will, vice has often the appearance of a curvature for the soul. Doubtless there are vices into which the soul plunges deeply with all its pregnant potency, which it rejuvenates and drags along with it into a moving circle of reincarnations. Those are tragic vices. But the vice capable of making us comic is, on the contrary, that which is brought from without, like a ready-made frame into which we are to step. It lends us its own rigidity instead of borrowing from us our flexibility. We do not render it more complicated; on the contrary, it simplifies us. Here, as we shall see later in the concluding section of this study, lies the essential difference between comedy and drama. A drama, even when portraying passions or vices that bear a name, so completely incorporates them that the person is forgotten, their general characteristics effaced, and we no longer think of them at all, but rather of the person in whom they are assimilated; hence, the title of a drama can seldom be anything else than a proper noun. On the other hand, many comedies have a common noun as their title: L'Avare, Le Joueur etc.

But this metaphysics, like this science, has enfolded its deeper life in a rich tissue of symbols, forgetting something that, while science needs symbols for its analytical development, the main object of metaphysics is to do away with symbols.

Plus la science approfondit la nature du corps dans la direction de sa "réalité", plus elle réduit déjà chaque propriété de ce corps, et par conséquent son existence même, aux relations qu'il entretient avec le reste de la matière capable de l'influencer.

121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces 122. Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography 123. Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 124. John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry 125. Alfred North Whitehead – An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas 126. George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places 127. Vladimir Lenin – The State and Revo

Long before being artists, we are artisans; and all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives on likeness and repetition, like the natural geometry which serves as its fulcrum. Fabrication works on models which it sets out to reproduce; and even when it invents, it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a new arrangement of elements already known. Its principle is that “we must have like to produce like.” In short, the strict application of the principle of finality, like that of the principle of mechanical causality, leads to the conclusion that “all is given.” Both principles say the same thing in their respective languages, because they respond to the same need.

My initiation into the true philosophical method began the moment I threw overboard verbal solutions, having found in the inner life an important field of experiment. After that, all progress was an enlarging of this field. It is an inclination natural to the human mind to extend a conclusion logically, to apply it to other objects without actually having enlarged the circle of its investigations, but it is one to which we must never yield. But that is what philosophy does quite ingenuously when it is pure dialectic, that is, when it attempts to construct a metaphysics with the rudimentary knowledge one finds stored up in language. It continues to do so when it sets up certain facts as “general principles” applicable to all things outside those facts. All my philosophical activity was a protestation against this way of philosophizing. I thus had to put aside important questions, which I could easily have made a show of answering by extending to them the results of my preceding works. I shall answer certain of these questions only if I am granted time and strength to solve them in themselves, for themselves. If not, grateful to my method for having given me what I believe to be the precise solution of a certain number of problems, finding that as far as I am concerned, I cannot get more out of it, I shall be content to stop where I am.

By the sole fact of being accomplished, reality casts its shadow behind it into the indefinitely distant past: it thus seems to have been pre-existent to its own realization, in the form of a possible. From this results an error which vitiates our conception of the past; from this arises our claim to anticipate the future on every occasion

At least Tsar Alexander III understood that the game now being played was for the highest stakes. When Giers asked him, '...what would we gain by helping the french destroy Germany?' he replied: 'what we would gain would be that Germany, as such, would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be'.

Matter and mind have this in common, that certain superficial agitations of matter are expressed in our minds, superficially, in the form of sensations; and on the other hand, the mind, in order to act upon the body, must descend little by little toward matter and become spatialized. It follows that the intelligence, although turned toward external things, can still be exerted on things internal, provided that it does not claim to plunge too deeply.

One currently and perhaps imprudently calls “reason” this conservative logic which governs thought in common; conversation greatly resembles conservation. It is there that it is at home. And there it exercises a legitimate authority. Theoretically, in fact, conversation should bear only upon things of the social life. And the essential object of society is to insert a certain fixity into universal mobility. Societies are just so many islands consolidated here and there in the ocean of becoming.

I am of the opinion that an entirely new light would illuminate many psychological and psycho-physiological questions if we recognised that distinct perception is merely cut, for the purposes of practical existence, out of a wider canvas. In psychology and elsewhere, we like to go from the part to the whole, and our customary system of explanation consists in reconstructing ideally our mental life with simple elements, then in supposing that the combination of these elements has really produced our mental life. If things happened this way, our perception would as a matter of fact be inextensible; it would consist of the assembling of certain specific materials, in a given quantity, and we should never find anything more in it than what had been put there in the first place. But the facts, taken as they are, without any mental reservation about providing a mechanical explanation of the mind, suggest an entirely different interpretation. They show us, in normal psychological life, a constant effort of the mind to limit its horizon, to turn away from what it has a material interest in not seeing. Before philosophizing one must live; and life demands that we put on blinders, that we look neither to the right, nor to the left nor behind us, but straight ahead in the direction we have to go. Our knowledge, far from being made up of a gradual association of simple elements, is the effect of a sudden dissociation: from the immensely vast field of our virtual knowledge, we have selected, in order to make it into actual knowledge, everything which concerns our action upon things; we have neglected the rest.

Notre rire est toujours le rire d'un groupe. Il vous est peut-être arrivé, en wagon ou à une table d'hôte, d'entendre des voyageurs se raconter des histoires qui devaient être comiques pour eux puisqu'ils riaient de bon cœur. Vous auriez ri comme eux si vous eussiez été de leur société. Mais n'en étant pas, vous n'aviez aucune envie de rire. Un homme, à qui l'on demandait pourquoi il ne pleurait pas à un sermon où tout le monde versait des larmes, répondit : "Je ne suis pas de la paroisse". Ce que cet homme pensait des larmes serait bien plus vrai du rire.

Eliot's own reflections on the primitive mind as a model for nondualistic thinking and on the nature and consequences of different modes of consciousness were informed by an excellent education in the social sciences and philosophy. As a prelude to our guided tour of the text of The Waste Land, we now turn to a brief survey of some of his intellectual preoccupations in the decade before he wrote it, preoccupations which in our view are enormously helpful in understanding the form of the poem. Eliot entered Harvard as a freshman in 1906 and finished his doctoral dissertation in 1916, with one of the academic years spent at the Sorbonne and one at Oxford. At Harvard and Oxford, he had as teachers some of modern philosophy's most distinguished individuals, including George Santayana, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Joachim; and while at the Sorbonne, he attended the lectures of Henri Bergson, a philosophic star in Paris in 1910-11. Under the supervision of Royce, Eliot wrote his dissertation on the epistemology of F. H. Bradley, a major voice in the late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century crisis in philosophy. Eliot extended this period of concentration on philosophical problems by devoting much of his time between 1915 and the early twenties to book reviewing. His education and early book reviewing occurred during the period of epistemological disorientation described in our first chapter, the period of "betweenness" described by Heidegger and Ortega y Gasset, the period of the revolt against dualism described by Lovejoy. 2 Eliot's personal awareness of the contemporary epistemological crisis was intensified by the fact that while he was writing his dissertation on Bradley he and his new wife were actually living with Bertrand Russell. Russell as the representative of neorealism and Bradley as the representative of neoidealism were perhaps the leading expositors of opposite responses to the crisis discussed in our first chapter. Eliot's situation was extraordinary. He was a close student of both Bradley and Russell; he had studied with Bradley's friend and disciple Harold Joachim and with Russell himself. And in 1915-16, while writing a dissertation explaining and in general defending Bradley against Russell, Eliot found himself face to face with Russell across the breakfast table. Moreover, as the husband of a fragile wife to whom both men (each in his own way) were devoted, Eliot must have found life to be a kaleidoscope of brilliant and fluctuating patterns.

The stating and solving of the problem are here very close to being equivalent; the truly great problems are set forth only when they are solved. But many little problems are in the same position. I open an elementary treatise on philosophy. One of the first chapters deals with pleasure and pain. There the student is asked a question such as this: “Is pleasure happiness, or not?” But first one must know if pleasure and happiness are genera corresponding to a natural division of things into sections. Strictly speaking the phrase could signify simply: “Given the ordinary meaning of the terms pleasure and happiness should one say that happiness consists in a succession of pleasures?” It is then a question of vocabulary that is being raised; it can be solved only by finding out how the words “pleasure” and “happiness” have been used by the writers who have best handled the language. One will moreover have done a useful piece of work; one will have more accurately defined two ordinary terms, that is, two social habitudes. But if one claims to be doing more, to be grasping realities and not to be re-examining conventions, why should one expect terms, which are perhaps artificial (whether they are or not is not yet known since the object has not been studied), to state a problem which concerns the very nature of things?

Mūsų laisvė pačiais ją įtvirtinančiais veiksmais sukuria tolydžio stiprėjančius įpročius, kurie ją pasmaugia, jeigu jos neatnaujina nuolatinės pastangos: jos tyko automatizmas. Pati gyviausia mintis sustabarėja ją išreiškiančioje formuluotėje. Žodis atsigręžia prieš idėją. Raidė nužudo dvasią. Ir netgi liepsningiausias mūsų entuziazmas, pasireiškiantis išoriniu veiksmu, kartais taip natūraliai pavirsta šaltu savanaudišku išskaičiavimu arba išpuikimu, vienas taip lengvai įgija kito formą, jog mes galėtume juos supainioti vieną su kitu, galėtume abejoti savo pačių nuoširdumu, neigti gerumą ir meilę, jei nežinotume, kad miręs dar kurį laiką išsaugo gyvojo bruožus.

Yaşama tüm ciddiliğini bizim özgürlüğümüz kazandırır. Olgunlaştırdığımız duygular, içimizde gizlediğimiz tutkular, karar verip uyguladığımız eylemler; kısacası, bizden gelen, tümüyle bizim olan şeyler. İşte yaşama kimi zaman dramatik, genellikle de ciddi bir hava veren bunlardır. Bütün bunları komedyaya dönüştürmek için ne gereklidir. O görünürdeki özgürlüğümüzün altında iplerden oluşan bir düzeneğin yattığını ve bizlerin, ozanın dediği gibi, şu ölümlü dünyada, ...İpleri yazgının elinde Zavallı kuklalar olduğumuzu düşünmek gereklidir. Öyleyse düş gücünün bu basit imgeyi çağrıştırarak komiğe kadar götürmeyeceği hiçbir gerçek, ciddi, hatta dramatik sahne yoktur. Önü bu kadar geniş bir alana açık olan bir oyun da yoktur.

The intuition we refer to then bears above all upon internal duration. It grasps a succession which is not juxtaposition, a growth from within, the uninterrupted prolongation of the past into a present which is already blending into the future. It is the direct vision of the mind by the mind,—nothing intervening, no refraction through the prism, one of whose facets is space and another, language. Instead of states contiguous to states, which become words in juxtaposition to words, we have here the indivisible and therefore substantial continuity of the flow of the inner life. Intuition, then, signifies first of all consciousness, but immediate consciousness, a vision which is scarcely distinguishable from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence.—

Il n'y a pas de comique en dehors de ce qui est proprement humain. Un paysage pourra être beau, gracieux, sublime, insignifiant ou laid ; il ne sera jamais risible. On rira d'un animal, mais parce qu'on aura surpris chez lui une attitude d'homme ou une expression humaine. On rira d'un chapeau; mais ce qu'on raille alors, ce n'est pas le morceau de feutre ou de paille, c'est la forme que les hommes lui ont donnée, c'est le caprice humain dont il a pris le moule. Comment un fait aussi important, dans sa simplicité, n'a-t-il pas fixé davantage l'attention des philosophes? Plusieurs ont défini l'homme "un animal qui sait rire". Ils auraient aussi bien pu le définir un animal qui fait rire, car si quelque autre animal y parvient, ou quelque objet inanimé, c'est par une ressemblance avec l'homme, par la marque que l'homme y imprime ou par l'usage que l'homme en fait.

Memory, imagination, conception and perception, generalization in short, are not there “for nothing, for pleasure.” It really seems, to listen to certain theorists, that the mind fell from heaven with a subdivision into psychological functions whose existence simply needs to be recognized: because these functions are such, they will no doubt be used in such a manner. I believe on the contrary that it is because they are useful, because they are necessary to life, that they are what they are: one must refer to the fundamental exigencies of life to explain their presence and to justify it if need be, I mean in order to know if the ordinary subdivision into such or such faculties is artificial or natural, and if in consequence we should maintain it or modify it. All our observations on the mechanism of function will be warped if we have badly cut it out of the continuity of the psychological tissue.

Intelligence starts ordinarily from the immobile, and reconstructs movement as best it can with immobilities in juxtaposition. Intuition starts from movement, posits it, or rather perceives it as reality itself, and sees in immobility only an abstract moment, a snapshot taken by our mind, of a mobility. Intelligence ordinarily concerns itself with things, meaning by that, with the static, and makes of change an accident which is supposedly superadded. For intuition the essential is change: as for the thing, as intelligence understands it, it is a cutting which has been made out of the becoming and set up by our mind as a substitute for the whole. Thought ordinarily pictures to itself the new as a new arrangement of pre-existing elements; nothing is ever lost for it, nothing is ever created. Intuition, bound up to a duration which is growth, perceives in it an uninterrupted continuity of unforeseeable novelty; it sees, it knows that the mind draws from itself more than it has, that spirituality consists in just that, and that reality, impregnated with spirit, is creation. The habitual labor of thought is easy and can be prolonged at will. Intuition is arduous and cannot last.

The general intelligence which is the faculty of arranging concepts “reasonably” and handling words suitably, must therefore aid in the social life just as intelligence in the narrower sense of the word, which is the mathematical function of the mind, presides over the knowledge of matter. It is the first of these we have in mind when we say of a man that he is intelligent. By that we mean that he has the ability and the facility for combining the ordinary concepts and for drawing probable conclusions from them. One can hardly take issue with him on that account, as long as he confines himself to things of every-day life, for which the concepts were made. But one would hardly admit of a man who was merely intelligent undertaking to speak with authority on scientific questions seeing that the intellect, made precise in science, becomes a mathematical, physical and biological attitude of mind, and substitutes for words more appropriate signs. All the more should one forbid him to meddle in philosophy when the questions raised are no longer in the domain of the intelligence alone. But no, it is agreed that the intelligent man is on this point a competent man. Against this I protest most vigorously. I hold the intelligence in high esteem, but I have a very mediocre opinion of the “intelligent man,” whose cleverness consists in talking about all things with a show of truth.

All analysis is thus a translation, a development into symbols, a representation taken from successive points of view from which are noted a corresponding number of contacts between the new object under consideration and others believed to be already known. In its eternally unsatisfied desire to embrace the object around which it is condemned to turn, analysis multiplies endlessly the points of view in order to complete the ever incomplete representation, varies interminably the symbols with the hope of perfecting the always imperfect translation. It is analysis ad infinitum. But intuition, if it is possible, is a simple act. This being granted, it would be easy to see that for positive science analysis is its habitual function. It works above all with symbols. Even the most concrete of the sciences of nature, the sciences of life, confine themselves to the visible form of living beings, their organs, their anatomical elements. They compare these forms with one another, reduce the more complex to the more simple, in fact they study the functioning of life in what is, so to speak, its visual symbol. If there exists a means of possessing a reality absolutely, instead of knowing it relatively, of placing oneself within it instead of adopting points of view toward it, of having the intuition of it instead of making the analysis of it, in short, of grasping it over and above all expression, translation or symbolical representation, metaphysics is that very means. Metaphysics is therefore the science which claims to dispense with symbols.

The more we turn toward this creative will, the more the doubts which trouble the sane and normal man seem to us abnormal and morbid. Take for example the doubter who closes a window, then returns to verify its closing, then verifies his verification, and so forth. If we ask him what his motives are he will answer that he might have opened the window each time he tried to close it more securely. And if he is a philosopher he will transpose intellectually the hesitation of his conduct into this question: “How can one be sure, definitively sure, that one has done what one intended to do?” But the truth is that his power of action is defective, and therein lies the evil from which he suffers: he had only partial will to accomplish the act, and that is why the accomplished act leaves him only partial certitude. Now can we solve the problem this man sets himself? Obviously not, but neither do we set the problem; therein lies our superiority. At first glance I might think there is more in him than in me because we both shut the window and he, in addition, raises a philosophical question while I do not. But the question which in his case is superadded to the task accomplished represents in reality only something negative; it is not something more, but something less; it is a deficit of the will. Such is exactly the effect certain “great problems” produce in us when we set ourselves again in the direction of generating thought. They recede toward zero as fast as we approach this generating thought, as they fill only that space between it and us. Thus we discover the illusion of him who thinks he is doing more by raising these problems than by not raising them. One might just as well think that there is more in a half-consumed bottle than in a full one, because the latter contains only wine, while in the former there is wine and emptiness in addition.

Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. Memory, as we have tried to prove, is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of the past upon the past goes on without relaxation. In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or further the action now being prepared—in short, only that which can give useful work. At the most, a few superfluous recollections may succeed in smuggling themselves through the half-open door. These memories, messengers from the unconscious, remind us of what we are dragging behind us unawares. But, even though we may have no distinct idea of it, we feel vaguely that our past remains present to us. What are we, in fact, what is ourcharacter, if not the condensation of the history that we have lived from our birth—nay, even before our birth, since we bring with us prenatal dispositions? Doubtless we think with only a small part of our past, but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will and act. Our past, then, as a whole, is made manifest to us in its impulse; it is felt in the form of tendency, although a small part of it only is known in the form of idea.

We say “universe” and the word makes us think of a possible unification of things. One can be a spiritualist, a materialist, a pantheist, just as one can be indifferent to philosophy and satisfied with common sense: the fact remains that one always conceives of one or several simple principles by which the whole of material and moral things might be explained. This is because our intelligence loves simplicity. It seeks to reduce effort, and insists that nature was arranged in such a way as to demand of us, in order to be thought, the least possible labor. It therefore provides itself with the exact minimum of elements and principles with which to recompose the indefinite series of objects and events. But if instead of reconstructing things ideally for the greater satisfaction of our reason we confine ourselves purely and simply to what is given us by experience, we should think and express ourselves in quite another way. While our intelligence with its habits of economy imagines effects as strictly proportioned to their causes, nature, in its extravagance, puts into the cause much more than is required to produce the effect. While our motto is Exactly what is necessary, nature’s motto is More than is necessary,—too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything. Reality, as James sees it, is redundant and superabundant. Between this reality and the one constructed by the philosophers, I believe he would have established the same relation as between the life we live every day and the life which actors portray in the evening on the stage. On the stage, each actor says and does only what has to be said and done; the scenes are clear-cut; the play has a beginning, a middle and an end; and everything is worked out as economically as possible with a view to an ending which will be happy or tragic. But in life, a multitude of useless things are said, many superfluous gestures made, there are no sharply-drawn situations; nothing happens as simply or as completely or as nicely as we should like; the scenes overlap; things neither begin nor end; there is no perfectly satisfying ending, nor absolutely decisive gesture, none of those telling words which give us pause: all the effects are spoiled. Such is human life.

El presente sólo se forma del pasado, y lo que se encuentra en el efecto estaba ya en la causa.

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. —Henry Bergson

1919, race riots broke out in Chicago and a dock workers’ strike hit New York; the eight-hour workday was instituted nationally; President Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize and presided over the first meeting of the League of Nations in Paris; the Red Army took Omsk, Kharkov, and the Crimea; Mussolini founded the Italian fascist movement; Paderewski became Premier of Poland. Henri Bergson, Karl Barth, Ernst Cassirer, Havelock Ellis, Karl Jaspers, John Maynard Keynes, Rudolf Steiner—indelible figures—were all active in their various spheres. Short-wave radio made its earliest appearance, there was progress in sound for movies, and Einstein’s theory of relativity was borne out by astrophysical experiments. Walter

Existir es cambiar; cambiar es madurar, y madurar es seguir creándose a uno mismo sin fin. HENRI BERGSON, Evolución creadora

La via che percorriamo nel tempo è cosparsa dei frammenti di tutto ciò che cominciavamo ad essere, di tutto ciò che avremmo potuto diventare.

Certo filósofo contemporâneo, emérito argumentador, a quem se observou que os seus raciocínios irrepreensivelmente deduzidos eram contrariados pela experiência, encerrou a discussão com esta singela observação: "A experiência está errada." A idéia de regulamentar administrativamente a vida é mais difundida do que se pensa; é natural a seu modo, embora acabemos de obtê-la mediante um processo de recomposição. Poderíamos dizer que ela nos oferece a própria quintessência do pedantismo, o qual não passa, no fundo, da arte pretendendo superpor-se à natureza.

But since the time of Leibnitz, it is hard to find philosophers who stress relatedness in any way. There is Henri Bergson, and before him the romantics, and Marx with his talk of the brotherhood of revolution, and Martin Buber with his I and Thou, but by and large modern philosophy is about aloneness. We are forlorn, abandoned.

O maior inimigo do riso é a emoção.

O cômico é inconsciente. Como se utilizasse ao inverso o anel de Giges, ele se torna invisível a si mesmo ao tornar-se visível a todos. (...) Se Harpagon nos visse rir de sua avareza, não digo que se corrigisse, mas no-la exibiria menos, ou então no-la mostraria de outro modo. Podemos concluir desde já que nesse sentido sobretudo é que o riso "castiga os costumes". Obriga-nos a cuidar imediatamente de parecer o que deveríamos ser, o que um dia acabaremos por ser verdadeiramente.

Contudo, a sociedade exige algo mais ainda. Não basta viver; importa viver bem. Agora o que ela tem a temer é que cada um de nós, satisfeito em atentar para o que respeita ao essencial da vida, se deixe ir quanto ao mais pelo automatismo fácil dos hábitos adquiridos. O que também deve recear é que os membros de que ela se compõe, em vez de terem por alvo um equilíbrio cada vez mais delicado de vontades a inserir-se cada vez com maior exatidão umas nas outras, se contentem com o respeitar as condições fundamentais desse equilíbrio: um acordo prévio entre as pessoas não lhe basta, mas a sociedade há de querer um esforço constante de adaptação recíproca. Toda rigidez do caráter, do espírito e mesmo do corpo, será, pois, suspeita à sociedade, por constituir indício possível de uma atividade que adormece, e também de uma atividade que se isola, tendendo a se afastar do centro comum em torno do qual a sociedade gravita; em suma, indício de uma excentricidade.

A arte do caricaturista consiste em captar esse movimento às vezes imperceptível, e em torná-lo visível a todos os olhos mediante ampliação dele. Ele faz com que os seus modelos careteiem como se fossem ao extremo de sua careta. Ele adivinha, sob as harmonias superficiais da forma, as revoltas profundas da matéria. Efetua desproporções e deformações que poderiam existir na natureza se ela pudesse ter vontade, mas que não puderam concretizar-se, reprimidas que foram por uma força melhor. A caricatura, que tem algo de diabólico, ressalta o demônio que venceu o anjo.

Pelo temor que o riso inspira, reprime as excentricidades, mantém constantemente despertas e em contato mútuo certas atividades de ordem acessória que correriam o risco de isolar-se e adormecer; suaviza, enfim, tudo o que puder restar de rigidez mecânica na superfície do corpo social.