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Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson's doctoral thesis was published in France in 1889, and much later translated into English (1910) under the title Time and Free Will. It contained basic ideas that Bergson developed further in Matter and Memory (1896), The Creative Mind(1903-1923), of course Creative Evolution (1907), Mind Energy (1911), all based on Bergson's dualistic contrast between mechanism and dynamism, between deterministic physical laws of nature and the actions of living things and conscious minds, especially his idea of duration durée.
Creative Evolution was a great influence on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's idea that evolution is purposeful and directed toward an end state he called the noosphere.
Where Immanuel Kant imagined a noumenal realm beyond the phenomenal (and deterministic) realm of Newtonian space and time, Bergson imagined a new kind of time that makes room for free will.
Despite the 1905 four-dimensional picture of Einstein and Minkowski in which space and time describe events with similar intervals between "points," Bergson says that time does not have the same homogeneous character as space. It may flow unevenly. In particular, whereas "time flown" (viz., the past) has a fixed and determined character, "time flowing" (into the future) is unpredictable, has multiple alternative possibilities, and is the source of human freedom and the creativity of evolution.
Bergson says correctly that because our our actions are "determined" by our motives, this does not mean necessitated or pre-determined.
...every demand for explanation in regard to freedom comes back, without our suspecting it, to the following question: "Can time be adequately represented by space?" To which we answer: Yes, if you are dealing with time flown; No, if you speak of time flowing. Now, the free act takes place in time which is flowing and not in time which has already flown. Freedom is therefore a fact, and among the facts which we observe there is none clearer. All the difficulties of the problem, and the problem itself, arise from the desire to endow duration with the same attributes as extensity, to interpret a succession by a simultaneity, and to express the idea of freedom in a language into which it is obviously untranslatable.
The simplest psychic states do in fact occur as accessories to well-defined physical phenomena, and the greater number of sensations seem to be bound up with definite molecular movements. no longer hesitates to hold that the drama enacted in the theatre of consciousness is a literal and even slavish translation of some scenes performed by the molecules and atoms of organized matter. The physical determinism which is reached in this way is nothing but psychological determinism, seeking to verify itself and fix its own outlines by an appeal to the sciences of nature.Bergson attacks the idea that the "reversibility" of physical systems can be applied to living things. Reversibility was popular in the late nineteenth century as a criticism of the second law of thermodynamics, especially the derivation of this law from statistical mechanics by Ludwig Boltzmann. The laws of Newtonian mechanics are time reversible. Atoms and molecules have no memory of their past. Living systems learn from their memory of different past actions chosen in similar circumstances. (Cf., Ernst Mayr.) Let us also note that the law of the conservation of energy can only be intelligibly applied to a system of which the points, after moving, can return to their former positions. This return is at least conceived of as possible, and it is supposed that under these conditions nothing would be changed in the original state of the system as a whole or of its elements...Here duration certainly seems to act like a cause, and the idea of putting things back in their place at the end of a certain time involves a kind of absurdity, since such a turning backwards has never been accomplished in the case of a living being...The same does not here remain the same, but is reinforced and swollen by the whole of its past, while the material point, as mechanics understands it, remains in an eternal present, the past is a reality perhaps for living bodies, and certainly for conscious beings. While past time is neither a gain nor a loss for a system assumed to be conservative, it may be a gain for the living being, and it is indisputably one for the conscious being. Such being the case, is there not much to be said for the hypothesis of a conscious force or free will, which, subject to the action of time and storing up duration, may thereby escape the law of the conservation of energy [i.e., reversibility]? Jacques Monod on Bergson.
Excerpts from Time and Free Will:
An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
CHAPTER III
THE ORGANIZATION OF CONSCIOUS STATES
FREE WILL
It is easy to see why the question of free will brings into conflict these two rival systems of nature, mechanism and dynamism.
Mechanism,
dynamism, and free will
Dynamism starts from the idea of voluntary activity, given by consciousness, and comes to represent inertia by gradually emptying this idea: it has thus no difficulty in conceiving free force on the one hand and matter governed by laws on the other. Mechanism follows the opposite course. It assumes that the materials which it synthesizes are governed by necessary laws, and although it reaches richer and richer combinations, which are more and more difficult to foresee, and to all appearance more and more contingent, yet it never gets out of the narrow circle of necessity within which it at first shut itself up.
A thorough examination of these two conceptions of nature will show that they involve two very different hypotheses
For dynamism facts more real than laws; mechanism reverses this attitude. The idea of spontaneity simpler than inertia.
as to the relations between laws and the facts which they govern. As he looks higher and
higher, the believer in dynamism thinks that he perceives facts which more and more elude the grasp of laws : he thus sets up the fact as the absolute reality, and the law as the more or less symbolical expression of this reality. Mechanism, on the contrary, discovers within the particular fact a certain number of laws of which the fact is thus made to be the meeting point, and nothing else: on this hypothesis it is the law which becomes the genuine reality. Now, if it is asked why the one party assigns a higher reality to the fact and the other to the law, it will be found that mechanism and dynamism take the word simplicity in two very different senses. For the first, any principle is simple of which the effects can be foreseen and even calculated: thus, by the very definition, the notion of inertia becomes simpler than that of freedom, the homogeneous simpler than the heterogeneous, the abstract simpler than the concrete. But dynamism is not anxious so much to arrange the notions in the most convenient order as to find out their real relationship: often, in fact, the so-called simple notion — that which the believer in mechanism regards as primitive — has been obtained by the blending together of several richer notions which seem to be derived from it, and which have more or less neutralized one another in this very process of blending, just as darkness may be produced by the interference of two lights. Regarded from this new point of view, the idea of spontaneity is indisputably simpler than that of inertia, since the second can be understood and defined only by means of the first, while the first is self-sufficient. For each of us has the immediate knowledge (be it thought true or fallacious) of his free spontaneity, without the notion of inertia having anything to do with this knowledge. But, if we wish to define the inertia of matter, we must say that it cannot move or stop of its own accord, that every body perseveres in the state of rest or motion so long as it is not acted upon by any force : and in both cases we are unavoidably carried back to the idea of activity. It is therefore natural that, a priori, we should reach two opposite conceptions of human activity, according to the way in which we understand the relation between the concrete and the abstract, the simple and the complex, facts and laws.
A posteriori, however, definite facts are appealed to against freedom, some physical, others psychological.
Determinsm: (1) physical (2) psychological. FOrmer reducible to latter, which itself rests on inaccurate conception of multiplicity of conscious states or duration.
Sometimes it is asserted that
our actions are necessitated by our
feelings, our ideas, and the whole preceding series of our conscious states;
sometimes freedom is denounced as being
incompatible with the fundamental properties of matter, and in particular with
the principle of the conservation of energy. Hence two kinds of determinism, two apparently different empirical proofs of universal necessity. We shall show that the second of these two forms is reducible to the first, and that all determinism, even physical determinism, involves a psychological hypothesis: we shall then prove
that psychological determinism itself, and the refutations which are given of it, rest on an inaccurate conception of the multiplicity of conscious states, or rather of duration. Thus, in the light of the principles worked out in the foregoing chapter, we shall see a self emerge whose activity cannot be compared to that of any other force.
Physical determinism, in its latest form, is
closely bound up with mechanical or rather kinetic
theories of matter.
Physical determinism stated in the language of the molecular theory of matter.
The universe is
pictured as a heap of matter which the
imagination resolves into molecules and
atoms. These particles are supposed to
carry out unceasingly movements of every kind,
sometimes of vibration, sometimes of translation;
and physical phenomena, chemical action, the
qualities of matter which our senses perceive, heat,
sound, electricity, perhaps even attraction, are
thought to be reducible objectively to these
elementary movements. The matter which goes
to make up organized bodies being subject to the
same laws, we find in the nervous system, for
example, only molecules and atoms which are in
motion and attract and repel one another. Now
if all bodies, organized or unorganized, thus act
and react on one another in their ultimate parts,
it is obvious that the molecular state of the brain
at a given moment will be modified by the shocks
which the nervous system receives from the surrounding matter, so that the sensations, feelings and ideas which succeed one another in us can be defined as mechanical resultants, obtained by the compounding of shocks received from without with the previous movements of the atoms of the nervous substance. But the opposite phenomenon may occur; and the molecular movements which go on in the nervous system, if compounded with one another or with others, will often give as resultant a reaction of our organism on its environment: hence the reflex movements, hence also the so-called free and voluntary actions. As, moreover, the principle of the conservation of energy has been assumed to admit of no exception, there is not an atom, either in the nervous system or in the whole of the universe, whose position is not determined by the sum of the mechanical actions which the other atoms exert upon it.
This is Laplace's demon
And the mathematician who knew the position of the molecules or atoms of a human organism at a given moment, as well as the position and motion of all the atoms in the universe capable of influencing it, could calculate with unfailing certainty the past, present and future actions of the person to whom this organism belongs, just as one predicts an astronomical phenomenon.
We shall not raise any difficulty about recognizing that this conception of physiological phenomena in general,
If principle of conservation of energy is universal, physiological and nervous phenomena are necessitated, but perhaps not conscious states.
and nervous phenomena in particular, is a very natural deduction from the law of the conservation of energy. Certainly, the atomic theory of matter is still at the hypothetical stage, and the purely kinetic explanations
of physical facts lose more than they gain by being too closely bound up with it. We must observe, however, that, even if we leave aside the atomic theory as well as any other hypothesis as to the nature of the ultimate elements of matter, the necessitating of physiological facts by their antecedents follows from the theorem of the conservation of energy, as soon as we extend this theorem to all processes going on in all living bodies. For to admit the universality of this theorem is to assume, at bottom, that the material points of
which the universe is composed are subject solely to forces of attraction and repulsion, arising from these points themselves and possessing intensities which depend only on their distances: hence the relative position of these material points at a given moment — whatever be their nature — would be strictly determined by relation to what it was at the preceding moment. Let us then assume for
a moment that this last hypothesis is true : we propose to show, in the first place, that it does not involve the absolute determination of our conscious states by one another, and then that the very universality of the principle of the conservation of energy cannot be admitted except in virtue of some psychological hypothesis.
Even if we assumed that the position, the direction and the velocity of each atom of cerebral
matter are determined at every moment
of time,
To prove conscious states determined, we should have to show a necessary connexion between them and cerebral states. No such connexion.
it would not at all follow that our
psychic life is subject to the same necessity. For we should first have to prove
that a strictly determined psychic state
corresponds to a definite cerebral state,
and the proof of this is still to be given. As a rule
we do not think of demanding it, because we
know that a definite vibration of the tympanum,
a definite stimulation of the auditory nerve, gives
a definite note on the scale, and because the
parallelism of the physical and psychical series
has been proved in a fairly large number of cases.
But then, nobody has ever contended that we were
free, under given conditions, to hear any note or
perceive any colour we liked. Sensations of this
kind, like many other psychic states, are obviously bound up with certain determining conditions, and it is just for this reason that it has been
possible to imagine or discover beneath them a
system of movements which obey our abstract
mechanics. In short, wherever we succeed in
giving a mechanical explanation, we observe a
fairly strict parallelism between the physiological
and the psychological series, and we need not be
surprised at it, since explanations of this kind will
assuredly not be met with except where the two
series exhibit parallel terms. But to extend this parallelism to the series themselves in their totality is to settle a priori the problem of freedom. Certainly this may be done, and some of the greatest thinkers have set the example; but then, as we said at first, it was not for reasons of a physical order that they asserted the strict correspondence between states of consciousness and modes of extension. Leibniz ascribed it to a pre-established harmony, and would never have admitted that a motion could give rise to a perception as a cause produces an effect. Spinoza said that the modes of thought and the modes of extension correspond with but never influence one another: they only express in two different languages the same eternal truth. But the theories of physical determinism which are rife at the present day are far from displaying the same clearness, the same geometrical rigour. They point to molecular movements taking place in the brain: consciousness is supposed to arise out of these at times in some mysterious way, or rather to follow their track like the phosphorescent line which results from the rubbing of a match. Or yet again we are to think of an invisible musician playing behind the scenes while the actor strikes a keyboard the notes of which yield no sound: consciousness must be supposed to come from an unknown region and to be superimposed on the molecular vibrations, just as the melody is on the rhythmical movements of the actor. But, whatever image we fall back upon, we do not prove and we never shall prove by any reasoning that the psychic fact is fatally determined by the molecular movement. For in a movement we may find the reason of another movement, but not the reason of a conscious state: only observation can prove that the latter accompanies the former. Now the unvarying conjunction of the two terms has not been verified by experience except in a very limited number of cases and with regard to facts which all confess to be almost independent of the will. But it is easy to understand why physical determinism extends this conjunction to all possible cases.
Consciousness indeed informs us that the majority of our actions can be explained by motives.
Physical determinism, when assumed to be universal, postulates psychological determinism.
But it does not appear that determination here means necessity, since common
sense believes in free will. The determinist, however, led astray by a conception of duration and causality which we shall
criticise a little later, holds that the determination of conscious states by one another is absolute.
This is the origin of associationist determinism,
an hypothesis in support of which the testimony
of consciousness is appealed to, but which cannot,
in the beginning, lay claim to scientific rigour. It
seems natural that this, so to speak, approximate
determinism, this determinism of quality, should
seek support from the same mechanism that
underlies the phenomena of nature the latter
would thus convey to the former its own
geometrical character, and the transaction would
be to the advantage both of psychological
determinism, which would emerge from it in a
stricter form, and of physical mechanism, which
would then spread over everything. A fortunate
circumstance favours this alliance. The simplest
psychic states do in fact occur as accessories
to well-defined physical phenomena, and the
greater number of sensations seem to be bound
up with definite molecular movements. This
mere beginning of an experimental proof is
quite enough for the man who, for psychological
reasons, is already convinced that our conscious
states are the necessary outcome of the circumstances under which they happen. Henceforth
he no longer hesitates to hold that the drama
enacted in the theatre of consciousness is a literal
and even slavish translation of some scenes performed by the molecules and atoms of organized
matter. The physical determinism which is
reached in this way is nothing but psychological
determinism, seeking to verify itself and fix its
own outlines by an appeal to the sciences of nature.
But we must own that the amount of freedom
which is left to us after strictly complying with the
principle of the conservation of energy is rather limited. For, even if this law
does not exert a necessitating influence
over the course of our ideas, it will at least
determine our movements. Our inner life will still depend upon ourselves up to a certain point; but, to an outside observer, there will be nothing to distinguish our activity from absolute automatism. We are thus led to inquire whether the very extension of the principle of the conservation of energy to all the bodies in nature does not itself involve some psychological theory, and whether the scientist who did not possess a priori any prejudice against human freedom would think of setting up this principle as a universal law.
We must not overrate the part played by the
principle of the conservation of energy in the history of the natural sciences.
It implies that the system can return to the original state. Neglects duration, hence inapplicable to living beings and conscious states.
In its
present form it marks a certain phase
in the evolution of certain sciences; but
it has not been the governing factor in
this evolution and we should be wrong
in making it the indispensable postulate
of all scientific research. Certainly,
every mathematical operation which we carry out
on a given quantity implies the permanence of this
quantity throughout the course of the operation,
in whatever way we may split it up. In other
words, what is given is given, what is not given is not
given, and in whatever order we add up the same
terms we shall get the same result. Science will
for ever remain subject to this law, which is nothing
but the law of non-contradiction; but this law
does not involve any special hypothesis as to the
nature of what we ought to take as given, or what
constant. No doubt it informs us that something cannot come from nothing; but experience alone will tell us which aspects or functions of reality must count for something, and which for nothing, from the point of view of positive science. In short, in order to foresee the state of a determinate system at a determinate moment, it is absolutely necessary that something should persist as a constant quantity throughout a series of combinations; but it belongs to experience to decide as to the nature of this something, and especially to let us know whether it is found in all possible systems, whether, in other words, all possible systems lend themselves to our calculations. It is not certain that all the physicists before Leibniz believed, like Descartes, in the conservation of a fixed quantity of motion in the universe: were their discoveries less valuable on this account - or their researches less successful? Even when Leibniz had substituted for this principle that of the conservation of vis viva, it was not possible to regard the law as quite general, since it admitted of an obvious exception in the case of the direct impact of two inelastic bodies. Thus science has done for a very long time without a universal conservative principle. In its present form, and since the development of the mechanical theory of heat, the principle of the conservation of energy certainly seems to apply to the whole range of physico-chemical phenomena. But no one can tell whether the study of physiological phenomena in general, and of nervous phenomena in particular, will not reveal to us, besides the vis viva or kinetic energy of which Leibniz spoke, and the potential energy which was a later and necessary adjunct, some new kind of energy which may differ from the other two by rebelling against calculation. Physical science would not thereby lose any of its exactitude or geometrical rigour, as has lately been asserted: only it would be realized that conservative systems are not the only systems possible, and even, perhaps, that in the whole of concrete reality each of these systems plays the same part as the chemist's atom in bodies and their combinations. Let us note that the most radical of mechanical theories is that which makes consciousness an epiphenomenon which, in given circumstances, may supervene on certain molecular movements. But, if molecular movement can create sensation out of a zero of consciousness, why should not consciousness in its turn create movement either out of a zero of kinetic and potential energy, or by making use of this energy in its own way? Let us also note that the law of the conservation of energy can only be intelligibly applied to a system of which the points, after moving, can return to their former positions. This return is at least conceived of as possible, and it is supposed that under these conditions nothing would be changed in the original state of the system as a whole or of its elements.
As for Hegel, for Bergson time matters. The world has a history and an arrow of time - the growth of information
In short, time cannot bite into it; and the instinctive,
though vague, belief of mankind in the conservation of a fixed quantity of matter, a fixed quantity of energy, perhaps has its root in the very fact that inert matter does not seem to endure or to preserve any trace of past time. But this is not the case in the realm of life. Here duration certainly seems to act like a cause, and the idea of putting things back in their place at the end of a certain time involves a kind of absurdity, since such a turning backwards has never been accomplished in the case of a living being. But let us admit that the absurdity is a mere appearance, and that the impossibility for living beings to come back to the past is simply owing to the fact that the physico-chemical phenomena which take place in living bodies, being infinitely complex, have no chance of ever occurring again all at the same time: at least it will be granted to us that the hypothesis of a turning backwards is almost meaningless in the sphere of conscious states. A sensation, by the mere fact of being prolonged, is altered to the point of becoming unbearable. The same does not here remain the same, but is reinforced and swollen by the whole of its past, while the material point, as mechanics understands it, remains in an eternal present, the past is a reality perhaps for living bodies, and certainly for conscious beings. While past time is neither a gain nor a loss for a system assumed to be conservative, it may be a gain for the living being, and it is indisputably one for the conscious being. Such being the case, is there not much to be said for the hypothesis of a conscious force or free will, which, subject to the action of time and storing up duration, may thereby escape the law of the conservation of energy?
In truth, it is not a wish to meet the requirements
of positive science, but rather a psychological
mistake which has caused this abstract
principle of mechanics to be set up as a
universal law.
The idea of the universality of conservation depends on confusion between concrete duration and abstract time.
As we are not accustomed
to observe ourselves directly, but perceive ourselves through forms borrowed
from the external world, we are led to believe that
real duration, the duration lived by consciousness,
is the same as the duration which glides over the
inert atoms without penetrating and altering
them. Hence it is that we do not see any absurdity in putting things back in their place after a
lapse of time, in supposing the same motives
acting afresh on the same persons, and in concluding that these causes would again produce the
same effect. That such an hypothesis has no real
meaning is what we shall prove later on. For the
present let us simply show that, if once we enter
upon this path, we are of course led to set up
the principle of the conservation of energy as a
universal law. For we have thereby got rid of
just that difference between the outer and the inner
world which a close examination shows to be the
main one: we have identified true duration with
apparent duration. After this it would be absurd
to consider time, even our time, as a cause of gain or loss, as a concrete reality, or a force in its own way. Thus, while we ought only to say (if we kept aloof from all presuppositions concerning free will) that the law of the conservation of energy governs physical phenomena and may, one day, be extended to all phenomena if psychological facts also prove favourable to it, we go far beyond this, and, under the influence of a metaphysical prepossession, we lay down the principle of the conservation of energy as a law which should govern all phenomena whatever, or must be supposed to do so until psychological facts have actually spoken against it. Science, properly so called, has therefore nothing to do with all this. We are simply confronted with a confusion between concrete duration and abstract time, two very different things. In a word, the so-called physical determinism is reducible at bottom to a psychological determinism, and it is this latter doctrine, as we hinted at first, that we have to examine...
We can now formulate our conception of freedom. Freedom is the relation of the concrete self to the act which it performs. This relation is indefinable, just because we are free. For we can analyse a thing, but not a process; we can break up extensity, but not duration. Or, if we persist in analysing it, we unconsciously transform the process into a thing and duration into extensity. By the very fact of breaking up concrete time we set out its moments in homogeneous space in place of the doing we put the already done; and, as we have begun by, so to speak, stereotyping the activity of the self, we see spontaneity settle down into inertia and freedom into necessity. Thus, any positive definition of freedom will ensure the victory of determinism. Shall we define the free act by saying of this act, when it is once done, that it might have been left undone? But this assertion, as also its opposite, implies the idea of an absolute equivalence between concrete duration and its spatial symbol: and as soon as we admit this equivalence, we are led on, by the very development of the formula which we have just set forth, to the most rigid determinism. Shall we define the free act as "that which could not be foreseen, even when all the conditions were known in advance ?" But to conceive all the conditions as given, is, when dealing with concrete duration, to place oneself at the very moment at which the act is being performed. Or else it is admitted that the matter of psychic duration can be pictured symbolically in advance, which amounts, as we said, to treating time as a homogeneous medium, and to reasserting in new words the absolute equivalence of duration with its symbol. A closer study of this second definition of freedom will thus bring us once more to determinism. Shall we finally define the free act by saying that it is not necessarily determined by its cause? But either these words lose their meaning or we understand by them that the same inner causes will not always call forth the same effects. We admit, then, that the psychic antecedents of a free act can be repeated, that freedom is displayed in a duration whose moments resemble one another, and that time is a homogeneous medium, like space. We shall thus be brought back to the idea of an equivalence between duration and its spatial symbol; and by pressing the definition of freedom which we have laid down, we shall once more get determinism out of it. To sum up; every demand for explanation in regard to freedom comes back, without our suspecting it, to the following question: "Can time be adequately represented by space?" To which we answer: Yes, if you are dealing with time flown; No, if you speak of time flowing. Now, the free act takes place in time which is flowing and not in time which has already flown. Freedom is therefore a fact, and among the facts which we observe there is none clearer. All the difficulties of the problem, and the problem itself, arise from the desire to endow duration with the same attributes as extensity, to interpret a succession by a simultaneity, and to express the idea of freedom in a language into which it is obviously untranslatable.
Bergson on John Stuart Mill
"To be conscious of free will," says Stuart Mill, " must mean to be conscious, before I have
decided, that I am able to decide either
way."1
Determinist and libertarian doctrines of "possible acts."
This is really the way in which
the defenders of free will understand it;
and they assert that when we perform an action
freely, some other action would have been "equally
possible." On this point they appeal to the testimony of consciousness, which shows us, beyond
the act itself, the power of deciding in favour of
the opposite course. Inversely, determinism claims
that, given certain antecedents, only one resultant
action was possible. "When we think of our-
selves hypothetically," Stuart Mill goes on, "as
having acted otherwise than we did, we always
suppose a difference in the antecedents. We picture ourselves as having known something that
we did not know, or not known something that
we did know." 2 And, faithful to his principle,
the English philosopher assigns consciousness the
role of informing us about what is, not about what
might be. We shall not insist for the moment on
this last point: we reserve the question in what
sense the ego perceives itself as a determining
cause. But beside this psychological question
there is another, belonging rather to metaphysics,
which the determinists and their opponents solve
a priori along opposite lines.
This is the question of alternative possibilities
The argument of
the former implies that there is only one possible act corresponding to given antecedents: the believers in free will assume, on the other hand, that the same series could issue in several different acts, equally possible. It is on this question of the equal possibility of two contrary actions or volitions that we shall first dwell: perhaps we shall thus gather some indication as to the nature of the operation by which the will makes its choice.
...let us assume for a moment that some mischievous genius, more powerful still than the mischievous genius conjured up by Descartes, decreed that all the movements of the universe should go twice as fast. There would be no change in astronomical phenomena, or at any rate in the equations which enable us to foresee them, for in these equations the symbol t does not stand for a duration, but for a relation between two durations, for a certain number of units of time, in short, for a certain number of simultaneities: these simultaneities, these coincidences would still take place in equal number: only the intervals which separate them would have diminished, but these intervals never make their appearance in our calculations. Now these intervals are just duration lived, duration which our consciousness perceives, and our consciousness would soon inform us of a shortening of the day if we had not experienced the usual amount of duration between sunrise and sunset. No doubt it would not measure this shortening, and perhaps it would not even perceive it immediately as a change of quantity ; but it would realize in some way or other a decline in the usual storing up of experience, a change in the progress usually accomplished between sunrise and sunset. Now, when an astronomer foretells e.g. a lunar eclipse, he merely exercises in his own way the power which we have ascribed to our mischievous genius. He decrees that time shall go ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times as fast, and he has a right to do so, since all that he thus changes is the nature of the conscious intervals, and since these intervals, by hypothesis, do not enter into the calculations. Therefore, into a psychological duration of a few seconds he may put several years, even several centuries of astronomical time: that is his procedure when he traces in advance the path of a heavenly body or represents it by an equation. What he does is nothing but establishing a series of relations of position between this body and other given bodies, a series of simultaneities and coincidences, a series of numerical relations: as for duration properly so called, it remains outside the calculation and could only be perceived by a consciousness capable of living through the intervals and, in fact, living the intervals themselves, instead of merely perceiving their extremities. Indeed it is even conceivable that this consciousness could live so slow and lazy a life as to take in the whole path of the heavenly body in a single perception, just as we do when we perceive the successive positions of a shooting star as one line of fire. Such a consciousness would find itself really in the same conditions in which the astronomer places himself ideally; it would see in the present what the astronomer perceives in the future. In truth, if the latter foresees a future phenomenon, it is only on condition of making it to a certain extent a present phenomenon, or at least of enormously reducing the interval which separates us from it. In short, the time of which we speak in astronomy is a number, and the nature of the units of this number cannot be specified in our calculations; we may therefore assume them to be as small as we please, provided that the same hypothesis is extended to the whole series of operations, and that the successive relations of position in space are thus preserved. We shall then be present in imagination at the phenomenon we wish to foretell; we shall know exactly at what point in space and after how many units of time this phenomenon takes place; if we then restore to these units their psychical nature, we shall thrust the event again into the future and say that we have foreseen it, when in reality we have seen it. For Teachers
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