In a homogeneous mass, [...] nothing could give birth to the idea of time; duration only begins with a certain variety of effects.
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson (18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a French philosopher who was influential in the tradition of continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century. He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature.
[...] absolute heterogeneity, if it were possible, would also exclude time, whose main characteristic is continuity.
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
The course of time is but the distinction between the wanted and the possessed [...].
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
The future, originally, is what ought to be; it is what I do not have and what I desire or need...
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
[...] succession is an abstract of the motor effort exerted in space, an effort which, having become conscious, is intention.
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
It is movement in space that creates time in human consciousness. Without movement, no time.
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
[...] the frame of a memory is above all a place, which triggers the memory of a date.
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
If the years seem so long in youth and so short in old age, it is [...] because the impressions of youth are vivid, new, and numerous.
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
Time is not a condition, but a simple effect of consciousness; it does not constitute it, it proceeds from it.
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
Time is the abstract formula for the changes of the universe.
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
[The notion of time] is a refined product of human reflection, like the notions of the infinite, of immensity, of universal causality.
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
[...] duration, whose essence is to flow ceaselessly, and to exist, consequently, only for a consciousness and a memory.
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
Pure time has no separate or distinct moments, [...] each of its parts extends and continues into all the others, like the successive shades of the solar spectrum.
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
[...] simultaneity is [...] the link, the point of contact between internal duration, which is real duration, and external time [...].
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
Besides numerical multiplicity there is another, which includes neither precise distinction nor juxtaposition.
1890
Source: Analysis - Guyau. Genesis of the Idea of Time
Consciousness says nothing more than what is happening in the brain; it merely expresses it in another language.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The dogmatic affirmation of psychophysiological parallelism [...] is no longer a scientific rule, it is a metaphysical hypothesis.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
Given a psychological fact, you doubtless determine the concomitant cerebral state. But the reverse is not true, and the same cerebral state could well correspond to very different psychological states.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
...behind perception, which is actual, there are hidden powers and virtualities...
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
For the idealist, there is nothing more in reality than what appears to my consciousness or to consciousness in general.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
Formulated in strictly idealist language, the thesis of parallelism would be summarized [...] in this contradictory proposition: the part is the whole.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The more science deepens the nature of the body [...], the more it reduces [...] each property of that body [...] to the relations it maintains with the rest of matter.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
A relation between two terms is equivalent to one of them.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
One has thus oscillated from idealism to realism and from realism to idealism, but so rapidly that one has believed oneself to be motionless and, as it were, straddling the two systems combined into one.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The idea that the entire world, including living beings, is governed by pure mathematics is but an a priori view of the mind [...].
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The effectively measurable part of the real remains nonetheless limited, and the law, considered as absolute, retains the character of a metaphysical hypothesis.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The presence or absence of a screw may determine whether a machine works or not: does it follow that each part of the screw corresponds to a part of the machine [...]?
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The relation of the cerebral state to representation may well be that of the screw to the machine, that is, of the part to the whole.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The memory will no longer be the object itself [...], it exists only for the person who evokes it, whereas the object is part of a common experience.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
Man can undoubtedly dream or philosophize, but he must first live; [...] our psychological structure [...] stems from the necessity of preserving and developing individual and social life.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
If function can only be understood through structure, one cannot unravel the broad outlines of the structure without an idea of the function.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
We must not, therefore, treat the mind as if it were what it is 'for nothing, for pleasure'.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Humanity has never done without religion. It is therefore likely that [...] religion was the raison d'être of the fabulatory function.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
What would nature have done, after creating intelligent beings, if it had wanted to ward off certain dangers of intellectual activity without compromising the future of intelligence?
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
[...] an essentially intelligent being is naturally superstitious, and [...] only intelligent beings are superstitious.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
The truth is that, if civilization has profoundly modified man, it is by accumulating in the social environment [...] habits and knowledge that society pours into the individual with each new generation.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Let's scratch the surface, erase what comes to us from an education of every moment: we will find deep within ourselves, or nearly so, primitive humanity.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Primitive religion [...] is a precaution against the danger one runs, as soon as one thinks, of thinking only of oneself. It is therefore a defensive reaction of nature against intelligence.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Animals do not know they must die. [...] But man knows he will die.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
[...] religion is a defensive reaction of nature against the representation, by intelligence, of the inevitability of death.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Chance is therefore mechanism behaving as if it had an intention.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Belief therefore essentially means trust; the primary origin is not fear, but an assurance against fear.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Intelligence will at first advise selfishness. It is in this direction that the intelligent being will rush if nothing stops it. But nature is watching.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Placed back in the evolution of life, [instinct and intelligence] appear as two divergent and complementary activities.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Each of us indeed has the immediate feeling, real or illusory, of our own free spontaneity [...].
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
A sensation, by the mere fact of its prolongation, is modified [...]. Here, the same does not remain the same, but is reinforced and enlarged by its whole past.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
While elapsed time constitutes neither a gain nor a loss for a [...] conservative system, it is a gain [...] for the living being, and unquestionably for the conscious being.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
By questioning ourselves scrupulously, we will see that we sometimes weigh motives and deliberate when our resolution is already made.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
[...] by the mere fact that we speak, [...] we fail to completely translate what our soul feels: thought remains incommensurable with language.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
To say that the soul is determined by the influence of any of these feelings is thus to recognize that it determines itself.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
The self touches the external world by its surface [...]. But as we dig below this surface, as the self becomes more itself, its states of consciousness also cease to be juxtaposed in order to interpenetrate [...].
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
Freedom [...] admits of degrees.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
Indeed, it is from the whole soul that the free decision emanates; and the act will be all the freer as the dynamic series to which it is connected tends more to identify with the fundamental self.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
We are free when our acts emanate from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
Our character is still us [...].
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
In a word, if we agree to call any act free that springs from the self, and from the self alone, the act that bears the stamp of our person is truly free [...].
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
It is in solemn circumstances [...] that we choose in spite of what is conventionally called a motive; and this absence of any tangible reason is all the more striking the more profoundly free we are.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
Time is not a line that one can travel over again.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
To say that the same internal causes produce the same effects is to suppose that the same cause can present itself several times on the stage of consciousness.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
One can define the comic by one or more general characteristics [...] that have been encountered in comic effects gathered here and there.
1900
Source: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
The definition will generally be too broad. [...] It will have indicated a necessary condition. I do not believe it can [...] provide the sufficient condition.
1900
Source: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
The proof is that several of these definitions are equally acceptable, even though they do not say the same thing.
1900
Source: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
None of them, to my knowledge, provides the means to construct the defined object, to manufacture the comic.
1900
Source: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
I have looked in comedy, in farce, in the art of the clown, etc., for the processes of manufacturing the comic.
1900
Source: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
The recurrence of the comic is endless, because we love to laugh and any pretext will do.
1900
Source: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
The mechanism of the association of ideas is here of an extreme complication.
1900
Source: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
[One must] grasp the comic, instead of enclosing it in a more or less wide circle.
1900
Source: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
What is needed is an analysis, and one is sure to have perfectly analyzed when one is able to recompose.
1900
Source: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
At the same time as I wanted to determine the processes for manufacturing the laughable, I sought to find what society's intention is when it laughs.
1900
Source: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
For it is very surprising that we laugh, and the usual method of explanation [...] does not shed light on this little mystery.
1900
Source: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
I do not see [...] why 'disharmony' [...] would provoke a specific manifestation such as laughter, while so many other flaws leave the facial muscles impassive.
1900
Source: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
There must be something in the cause of the comic that is slightly detrimental [...] to social life.
1900
Source: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
...since society responds to it with a gesture that has all the appearance of a defensive reaction, a gesture that is slightly frightening.
1900
Source: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
In the effort of attention, the mind is always given in its entirety, but it simplifies or complicates itself according to the level it chooses for its operations.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
A moment comes when memory [...] is so well embedded in present perception that one cannot say where perception ends and where memory begins.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
Past images, reproduced as they are [...], are the images of reverie or dream; what we call acting is precisely to get this memory to contract [...] until it presents only the cutting edge of its blade to experience.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
Essentially discontinuous, since it proceeds by juxtaposed words, speech only marks out from a distance the main stages of the movement of thought.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
Indeed, images will never be anything but things, and thought is a movement.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
To imagine is not to remember. [...] the pure and simple image will only take me back to the past if it is indeed in the past that I have gone to seek it [...].
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
My present is what interests me, what lives for me, and, in short, what provokes me to action, whereas my past is essentially powerless.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
What I call 'my present' encroaches upon both my past and my future.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
My present is, in essence, sensory-motor. This is to say that my present consists in the consciousness I have of my body.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
In the psychological domain, consciousness would not be synonymous with existence but only with real action or immediate effectiveness [...].
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
We perceive, practically, only the past, the pure present being the ungraspable progress of the past gnawing at the future.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
All perception is already memory.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
To live in the pure present [...] is the characteristic of a lower animal: the man who proceeds thus is an impulsive one. But he who lives in the past for the pleasure of living there [...] is hardly better adapted to action: a dreamer.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
The apparent decline of memory, as intelligence develops, is due [...] to the growing organization of memories with actions.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
Habit is to action what generality is to thought.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
Let us rather study the ancients, steep ourselves in their spirit, and try to do [...] what they themselves would do if they lived among us.
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
When one is convinced of the reality of change and has made an effort to grasp it again, everything is simplified.
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
Ordinarily, we look at change, but we do not perceive it. We talk about change, but we do not think about it.
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
To think about change and to see it, there is a whole veil of prejudices to be drawn aside, [...] some created by philosophical speculation, others natural to common sense.
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
If our senses and our consciousness had an unlimited range, [...] we would never have recourse to the faculty of conceiving nor to that of reasoning.
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
Conceiving is a last resort in cases where one cannot perceive, and reasoning is only necessary insofar as one must fill the gaps in perception.
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
A concept is only worth the potential perceptions it represents.
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
However abstract a concept may be, it always has its starting point in a perception. The intellect combines and separates [...] it does not create.
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
Suppose that instead of seeking to rise above our perception of things, we were to plunge into it in order to deepen and broaden it.
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
What does art aim at, if not to make us discover, in nature and in the mind, [...] a host of things that did not explicitly strike our senses and our consciousness?
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
The poet and the novelist [...] would not be understood by us if we did not ourselves experience, at least in an embryonic state, all that they describe to us.
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
Great painters are men to whom we can trace a certain vision of things which has become or will become the vision of all men.
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
The more we are preoccupied with living, the less we are inclined to look, and [...] the necessities of action tend to limit the field of vision.
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
Before we can philosophize, we must live; and life demands that we put on blinders, that we look neither to the right nor to the left, but straight ahead.
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
When [the artist] looks at a thing, he sees it for its own sake, and not for his. He no longer perceives simply in order to act; he perceives for the sake of perceiving — for nothing, for pleasure.
1911
Source: The Perception of Change
Our entire inner life is something like a single sentence begun at the first awakening of consciousness, a sentence strewn with commas, but nowhere cut by full stops.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
Our entire past is there, subconscious — [...] present to us in such a way that our consciousness, to have it revealed, does not need to go outside itself [...].
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
It is the brain that does us the service of keeping our attention fixed on life; and life itself looks forward; it only turns back to the extent that the past can help it to illuminate and prepare for the future.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
To live, for the spirit, is essentially to concentrate on the act to be accomplished.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The role of the brain in the operation of memory: it does not serve to preserve the past, but first to mask it, then to allow what is practically useful to show through.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The mind overflows the brain on all sides, and cerebral activity corresponds to only an infinitesimal part of mental activity.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
If philosophy truly had nothing to answer to these questions of vital interest [...], one might almost say [...] that all of philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
One must choose, in philosophy, between pure reasoning which aims for a definitive result [...] and patient observation which only gives approximate results, capable of being corrected and completed indefinitely.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The time spent on refutation, in philosophy, is generally time wasted. [...] What counts and what remains is the positive truth that one has contributed.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
Behind the objections of some, the mockery of others, there is, invisible and present, a certain metaphysics that is unconscious of itself.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
It is of the essence of the things of the mind not to lend themselves to measurement.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
A consciousness that was merely a duplicate, and that did nothing, would have long since disappeared from the universe, assuming it ever arose there.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
Our destination is to live, to act, and life and action look forward.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The dream is the entire mental life, minus the effort of concentration.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
To sleep is to lose interest. We sleep in the exact measure in which we lose interest.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
There is a serious confusion here, whose causes and effects it would be interesting to explore in depth.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
We continue to see a single system in what has just revealed itself to be an assembly of systems, a multiplicity of different systems.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
The shorter time will be a merely attributed time, unable to be lived, unreal: only real Time [...] will be a time that can be lived.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
The slowing of Time for the supposedly mobile system [...] is merely represented and [...] does not affect real Time.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
Without realizing it, one sometimes substitutes for the supposedly mobile system a multiplicity of distinct systems [...], which one nevertheless continues to treat as a single system.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
If the traveler is shaken, it is because the material points of his body do not maintain invariable positions [...]. They do not, therefore, form a single system.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
The traveler's jolt introduces no asymmetry. [...] it resolves into perfectly reciprocal manifestations involving the invariable systems.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
Science retains and should retain from motion only its visual aspect.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
Anyone who wants to think in terms of Relativity must begin by eliminating the tactile, or by transposing it into the visual.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
One must distinguish [...] between the point of view of perception and that of science.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
Perception embraces [several systems] all at once. But the physicist cannot adopt them all together as a reference system: he necessarily chooses one of them.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
The two systems are interchangeable, and everything that is asserted in [one] about [the other] can be repeated in [the other] about [the one].
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
To contemplate the self in its original purity, psychology should eliminate or correct certain forms that bear the visible mark of the external world.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
If magnitude, outside of you, is never intensive, intensity, within you, is never magnitude.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
What is duration within us? A qualitative multiplicity, with no resemblance to number; an organic development which is nevertheless not a growing quantity.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
To put duration in space is, by a true contradiction, to place succession within simultaneity itself.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
Outside of us, reciprocal externality without succession; within, succession without reciprocal externality.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
Duration, thus restored to its original purity, will appear as a wholly qualitative multiplicity, an absolute heterogeneity of elements which melt into one another.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
In whatever way [...] one considers freedom, one denies it only on the condition of identifying time with space.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
All determinism will therefore be refuted by experience, but any definition of freedom will prove determinism right.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
There would be [...] two different selves, one of which would be like the external projection of the other, its spatial and, so to speak, social representation.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
The moments in which we thus grasp ourselves are rare, and that is why we are rarely free.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
Most of the time, we live outside of ourselves [...] we perceive of our self only its discolored phantom.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
We live for the external world rather than for ourselves; we speak rather than we think; we 'are acted' rather than we act ourselves.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
To act freely is to regain possession of oneself, to place oneself back into pure duration.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
Our psychic states, by detaching themselves from one another, will solidify; [...] and little by little, our consciousness imitating the process by which nervous matter obtains reflex actions, automatism will cover over freedom.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
The problem of freedom is therefore born of a misunderstanding: it has been for the moderns what the sophisms of the school of Elea were for the ancients.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
A posteriori and a priori denote [...] differences in nature or value, but not a chronological anteriority or posteriority.
1900
Source: Note on the psychological origins of our belief in the law of causality
The truth is that the number of cases where we see phenomena succeed one another regularly is very limited.
1900
Source: Note on the psychological origins of our belief in the law of causality
Would not the error of empiricism be [...] to over-intellectualize the general belief in the law of causality, to consider it in its relation to science, and not in its relation to life?
1900
Source: Note on the psychological origins of our belief in the law of causality
It is not the notion of determining causality, but that of free causality, that we draw from the pure and simple observation of ourselves.
1900
Source: Note on the psychological origins of our belief in the law of causality
Before experience, there are the conditions that make experience possible.
1900
Source: Note on the psychological origins of our belief in the law of causality
If the demand for causality is a habit, it is a continuously active habit, like that of breathing, a habit so deeply organized within us [...] that our understanding [...] derives a necessary law from it.
1900
Source: Note on the psychological origins of our belief in the law of causality
In its primitive form, [the causal relation] applies to facts of such a nature that between the cause and the effect our own person is inserted.
1900
Source: Note on the psychological origins of our belief in the law of causality
The acquisition of our belief in the law of causality is one and the same with the progressive coordination of our tactile impressions with our visual impressions.
1900
Source: Note on the psychological origins of our belief in the law of causality
The dynamic relation of cause to effect, the necessary determination of the effect by the cause, are felt and lived [...] by us even before being thought.
1900
Source: Note on the psychological origins of our belief in the law of causality
Our body is, after all, an object like any other.
1900
Source: Note on the psychological origins of our belief in the law of causality
The practical belief [in causality] is a belief common to man and the higher animals, a belief that is lived [...] rather than thought.
1900
Source: Note on the psychological origins of our belief in the law of causality
Little by little, science will empty causality of its dynamic elements. The cause-and-effect relationship will approach [...] the relationship that links two variables to each other [...].
1900
Source: Note on the psychological origins of our belief in the law of causality
Thus one passes, by imperceptible degrees, from the necessity lived by the body to the necessity thought by the mind.
1900
Source: Note on the psychological origins of our belief in the law of causality
The error of empiricism [...] is to position itself [...] halfway between life and science. [...] It is not yet quite science, and it is no longer life.
1900
Source: Note on the psychological origins of our belief in the law of causality
Absolute rest, driven out by the understanding, is restored by the imagination.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
The two hypotheses are equivalent for the mathematician. But the same is not true for the philosopher.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
What is actually given is a reciprocity of displacement.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
The 'reciprocity' of movement is therefore an observable fact. [...] science operates only on measurements [...].
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
Besides the movements we only observe from the outside, there are those we also feel ourselves produce.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
All that science can tell us about the relativity of movement [...] will leave intact the profound feeling we have of carrying out movements [...] for which we are responsible.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
[The metaphysician] must penetrate the interior of things; and the true essence, the profound reality of a movement [...] can never be better revealed to him than when he performs the movement himself.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
Science can and should only retain from reality that which is spread out in space, homogeneous, measurable, and visual.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
Science only clashes with common sense to the extent strictly necessary.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
Once the ether has vanished along with the privileged system and fixed points, there are only relative movements of objects with respect to one another.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
Every appearance must be considered reality until it has been proven to be illusory.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
Bodies [...] are carved from the fabric of nature by a perception whose scissors follow the dotted lines along which action would pass.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
If each body, taken in isolation [...], is largely a being of convention, how could the same not be true of the movement considered to affect that body in isolation?
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
All movement—even our own as perceived from the outside and visualized—is therefore relative.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
We speak, here and there, of movement; but does the word have the same meaning in both cases? Let us say propagation in the first case, and transport in the second.
1922
Source: Duration and Simultaneity
We must not forget that the point of view of critique is entirely different from that of psychology...
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
...it is sufficient [...] that all our sensations end up being localized in space when perception has reached its definitive form.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
The Transcendental Aesthetic makes no difference between the data of the various senses concerning their extension in space.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
By concluding [...] that a duration 'is double itself,' Zeno remained within the logic of his hypothesis.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
The visual perception of distance.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
Visual space and tactile space.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
We must [...] distinguish the thought that lets itself live from the thought that concentrates and makes an effort.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
There are works of the mind that one cannot conceive of being accomplished with ease and facility. Could one, without effort, invent a new machine [...]?
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The ease of recalling a complex memory would be [...] in direct proportion to the tendency of its elements to spread out on the same plane of consciousness.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
If recall is accompanied by an effort, it is because the mind moves from one plane to another.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The improvement of memory [...] is less an increase in retentiveness than a greater skill in subdividing, coordinating, and linking ideas.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The schema is something difficult to define, but of which each of us has the feeling.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The effort of recall consists in converting a schematic representation, whose elements interpenetrate, into an imaged representation whose parts are juxtaposed.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
What is it to recognize a common object if not to know how to use it?
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The truth is that it is memory that makes us see and hear, and that perception by itself would be incapable of evoking the memory that resembles it [...].
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
Interpretation is therefore, in reality, a reconstruction.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
To create imaginatively is to solve a problem. Now, how does one solve a problem otherwise than by first supposing it to be solved?
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
[Invention] consists precisely in converting the schema into an image.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The writer who creates a novel [...] first has in mind something simple and abstract [...] a feeling [...] to be materialized into living characters.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
To work intellectually is to guide the same representation through different planes of consciousness [...] from the schema to the image.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
All mental effort is indeed a tendency towards monoideism. But the unity towards which the mind then moves is not an abstract, dry, and empty unity. It is the unity of a 'guiding idea'.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
I believe that the time spent on refutation in philosophy is generally time wasted. [...] What counts and what endures is the positive truth one has contributed.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The true affirmation replaces the false idea by virtue of its intrinsic strength and proves to be [...] the best of refutations.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
He is attached to his method as a craftsman is to his tools. He loves it for its own sake, regardless of what it yields.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
Modern science is [...] the daughter of mathematics; it was born the day algebra acquired enough strength and flexibility to entwine reality and capture it in the net of its calculations.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
It is of the essence of the things of the mind not to lend themselves to measurement.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
A consciousness that was merely a duplicate, and that did not act, would have long since disappeared from the universe, assuming it had ever arisen there.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The facts, consulted without bias, neither confirm nor even suggest the hypothesis of parallelism [between the cerebral and the mental].
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The brain is an 'organ of pantomime.' [...] Cerebral phenomena are to mental life what the conductor's gestures are to the symphony: they outline its motor articulations [...].
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The brain keeps consciousness fixed on the world in which we live; it is the organ of attention to life.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
To direct our thought towards action [...] that is what our brain is for. But in doing so, it channels, and thereby also limits, the life of the mind.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
Our entire past is there, continually [...]. We [...] must not turn around [...] because our destiny is to live, to act, and life and action look forward.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The role of our body is to screen from consciousness everything that would be of no practical interest to us, everything that does not lend itself to our action.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
Between different consciousnesses, exchanges comparable to the phenomena of endosmosis could be taking place at every moment.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The more we accustom ourselves to this idea of a consciousness that overflows the organism, the more natural we will find it for the soul to survive the body.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
The only reason to believe in the annihilation of consciousness after death is that we see the body disintegrate, and this reason loses its value if the independence of [...] consciousness from the body is [...] an observed fact.
1919
Source: Spiritual Energy
This book affirms the reality of the spirit, the reality of matter, and attempts to determine the relationship between them using a specific example, that of memory.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
Matter, for us, is a set of 'images'. [...] an existence situated halfway between the 'thing' and the 'representation'.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
For common sense, the object exists in itself and, on the other hand, the object is, in itself, picturesque as we perceive it: it is an image, but an image that exists in itself.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
Memory [...] precisely represents the point of intersection between spirit and matter.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
Generally speaking, the psychological state seems to us, in most cases, to extend far beyond the cerebral state.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
The relationship of the mental to the cerebral is not a constant one, any more than it is a simple one.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
My body, an object meant to move objects, is therefore a center of action; it cannot give rise to a representation.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
The objects surrounding my body reflect my body's possible action on them.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
I call matter the aggregate of images, and perception of matter these same images referred to the possible action of a certain determinate image, my body.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
The brain, then, must be nothing other [...] than a kind of central telephone exchange: its role is to 'put through' the call, or to make it wait.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
Perception disposes of space in the exact proportion that action disposes of time.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
There is no perception that is not imbued with memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand and one details of our past experience.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
The reality of matter consists in the totality of its elements and their actions [...]. Our representation of matter is the measure of our possible action on bodies.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
To perceive consciously means to choose, and consciousness consists above all in this practical discernment.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
All pain must therefore consist in an effort, and in a powerless effort.
1896
Source: Matter and Memory
Considered in themselves, deep conscious states have no relation to quantity; they are pure quality; they intermingle in such a way that one cannot say whether they are one or several [...].
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
Thus a second self is formed which covers the first, a self whose existence has distinct moments, whose states are detached from one another and are easily expressed in words.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
It is the same self which perceives distinct states, and which, by then fixing its attention more, will see these states merge into one another like snowflakes in prolonged contact with the hand.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
Thought remains incommensurable with language.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
The self touches the external world by its surface; [...] as we dig below this surface, as the self becomes itself again, so its states of consciousness cease to be juxtaposed to penetrate one another, to merge together [...].
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
To say that the soul is determined under the influence of any one of these feelings is therefore to recognize that it determines itself.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
We are free when our acts emanate from our entire personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which we sometimes find between the work and the artist.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
Our character is still us; and because one has taken pleasure in splitting the person into two parts [...] it would be somewhat childish to conclude that one of the two selves weighs on the other.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
Many live thus, and die without having known true freedom.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
It is the self from below that rises to the surface. It is the outer crust that bursts, yielding to an irresistible push.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
We want to know for what reason we have decided, and we find that we have decided without reason, perhaps even against all reason. But this is precisely, in certain cases, the best of reasons.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
It is in solemn circumstances, when it is a question of the opinion which we shall give of ourselves to others and especially to ourselves, that we choose in spite of what is conventionally called a motive.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
The truth is that the self, by the mere fact of having experienced the first feeling, has already changed somewhat when the second comes on the scene: at every moment of the deliberation, the self is modified [...].
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
The self, infallible in its immediate findings, feels free and declares it; but as soon as it tries to explain its freedom, it no longer perceives itself except by a kind of refraction through space.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
All prediction is in reality a vision.
1889
Source: Time and Free Will
Ordinarily, we look at change, but we do not perceive it. [...] we reason and philosophize as if change did not exist.
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
If our senses and our consciousness had an unlimited range [...] we would never have recourse to the faculty of conceiving. To conceive is a last resort in cases where one cannot perceive.
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
Just as a banknote is only a promise of gold, so a concept is valuable only for the eventual perceptions it represents.
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
There is not, there cannot be one philosophy, as there is one science; there will always be [...] as many different philosophies as there are original thinkers.
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
Suppose that instead of seeking to raise ourselves above our perception of things, we were to plunge into it to deepen and widen it.
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
There are [...] men whose function is precisely to see and to make us see what, naturally, we would not perceive. They are the artists.
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
What is the aim of art, if not to make us discover, in nature and in the mind [...] a multitude of things that did not explicitly strike our senses and our consciousness?
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
The poet is this revealer. But nowhere is the function of the artist as apparent as in [...] painting.
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
We had perceived without truly seeing. It was, for us, a brilliant and vanishing vision, lost in the crowd [...]. The painter has isolated it.
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
The vision we ordinarily have of objects [...] is but a vision that our attachment to reality, our need to live and to act, has led us to narrow and to empty.
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
The more we are preoccupied with living, the less we are inclined to look, and [...] the necessities of action tend to limit the field of vision.
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
Before philosophizing, one must live; and life requires that we put on blinders, that we look neither to the right nor to the left, but straight ahead.
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
Our knowledge [...] is the effect of a dissociation: from the [...] field of our virtual knowledge we have picked out what interests our action on things; we have neglected the rest.
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
Would not the role of philosophy be to lead us to a more complete perception of reality through a certain displacement of our attention?
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
It would be a matter of diverting our attention from the practically interesting side of the universe, to turn it back toward that which [...] is of no use. And this conversion of attention would be philosophy itself.
1934
Source: Thought and the Moving
The man of a single occupation is much like the man of a single book: he cannot talk to you about anything else.
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
Specialization, which makes the scholar sullen, makes science sterile.
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
The universe is vaster than our mind; life is short, education is long, truth is infinite.
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
We must resign ourselves to knowing little if we do not want to be ignorant of everything.
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
One should only descend into a special science after having considered all the others from above, in their general outlines.
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
One does not understand a particular truth when one has not perceived the relationships it may have with others.
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
It is out of a kind of intellectual laziness, and to avoid having to study the rest, that people today confine themselves within the limits of a special science.
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
Facts are the materials of science, not science itself; [...] it begins with the discovery of laws.
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
The mere collector of facts is much like the cook who, instead of a good dish, serves us its ingredients.
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
To pose new problems to a science, to renew its methods, one must rise above it.
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
He who approaches criticism without having prepared himself with extensive studies [...] will fatally be led to neglect substance for form, the idea for the word.
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
Is literature anything other than a geometry without figures, a metaphysics without barbarisms?
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
The whole inferiority of the animal lies there: it is a specialist. It does what it does very well, but it cannot do anything else.
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
We only perfect one of our faculties on the condition that we develop all the others.
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
The best way to succeed is not to aim for success too early, [...] [studies], by developing the whole intelligence, give it enough breadth to contain everything, enough strength to undertake anything.
1882
Source: The Specialty (Henri Bergson)
Intelligence, unless it is that of a subtle utilitarian philosopher, would rather advise selfishness.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Religion is what must fill, in beings endowed with reflection, a potential deficit in the attachment to life.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
It is from a detachment from each particular thing that the attachment to life in general would now be made.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
True mysticism is exceptional. But when it speaks, there is, in the depths of most men, something that imperceptibly echoes it.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
It happens that almost empty formulas, like magic words, can conjure up here and there the spirit capable of filling them.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
In our eyes, the culmination of mysticism is a contact [...] with the creative effort manifested by life. This effort is of God, if it is not God himself.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Complete mysticism would be action, creation, love.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Intellectual health [...] is manifested by a taste for action, the faculty of adapting [...], firmness joined with flexibility, [...] a spirit of simplicity that triumphs over complications, and finally, a superior common sense.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
There are morbid states that are imitations of healthy states: the latter are no less healthy, and the others morbid.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
The love that consumes him is no longer simply the love of a man for God, it is the love of God for all men. Through God, by God, he loves all of humanity with a divine love.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
God is love, and He is an object of love: the whole contribution of mysticism is there.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Divine love is not something of God: it is God himself.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Creation [...] will appear as an undertaking of God to create creators, to unite to Himself beings worthy of His love.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Mystics are unanimous in testifying that God needs us, just as we need God. Why would He need us, if not to love us?
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
If our body is the matter to which our consciousness applies itself, it is coextensive with our consciousness, it includes everything we perceive, it reaches to the stars.
1932
Source: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
France's role in the evolution of modern philosophy is quite clear: France has been the great initiator.
1915
Source: French Philosophy
All of modern philosophy derives from Descartes.
1915
Source: French Philosophy
We would gladly compare the work [of Descartes] to the works of nature, whose analysis will never be finished.
1915
Source: French Philosophy
The philosophy of 'clear and distinct' ideas [...] freed modern thought from the yoke of authority to admit no other mark of truth than evidence.
1915
Source: French Philosophy
It is not without reason that Cartesianism has been seen as a 'philosophy of freedom'.
1915
Source: French Philosophy
Pascal introduced into philosophy a certain way of thinking that is not pure reason, as it corrects with the 'spirit of finesse' what is geometrical in reasoning.
1915
Source: French Philosophy
French philosophy has never had much taste for grand metaphysical constructions [...] it makes no sacrifice to the spirit of system.
1915
Source: French Philosophy
The most powerful influence exerted on the human mind since Descartes [...] is unquestionably that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
1915
Source: French Philosophy
Scientific research, as recommended by Claude Bernard, is a dialogue between man and nature.
1915
Source: French Philosophy
Neither facts nor ideas are [...] constitutive of science: science, always provisional and [...] symbolic, is born from the collaboration of the idea and the fact.
1915
Source: French Philosophy
There is no philosophical idea, however profound or subtle, that cannot and should not be expressed in everyday language.
1915
Source: French Philosophy
The close union of philosophy and science is such a constant fact in France that it could suffice to characterize and define French philosophy.
1915
Source: French Philosophy
Pascal said that the 'geometric spirit' was not enough: the philosopher must add to it the 'spirit of finesse'.
1915
Source: French Philosophy
Human thought, instead of shrinking reality to the dimension of one of its ideas, must expand itself to coincide with an ever vaster portion of reality.
1915
Source: French Philosophy
The need to philosophize is universal: it tends to bring any discussion, even about business, to the level of ideas and principles.
1915
Source: French Philosophy