Books: The Misuse of Mind
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Karin Stephen >> The Misuse of Mind
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Bergson begins just the other way up. He starts from the idea of a
whole field of direct knowledge vastly more extended than the actual
facts of which we are normally aware as making up our direct
experience. He calls this whole field of knowledge "virtual
knowledge." This field of virtual knowledge contains the whole of the
actions and reactions of matter in which our body has its part at any
moment, the multitude of stimulations which actually assail the senses
but which we normally disregard, together with all the responses by
which our bodies adjust themselves to these stimulations, and, in
addition, the whole of our past. For Bergson the problem is to
explain, not how we increase our direct knowledge, but how we limit
it: not how we remember, but how we forget. "Our knowledge," he says,
"far from being built up by a gradual combination of simple elements,
is the result of a sharp dissociation. From the infinitely vast field
of our virtual knowledge we have selected, to turn into actual
knowledge, whatever concerns our action upon things; the rest we have
neglected. The brain appears to have been constructed on purpose for
this work of selection. It is easy enough to show that this is so in
the case of memory. Our past, as we shall show in the next lecture, is
necessarily preserved, automatically. It survives in its entirety. But
it is to our practical interest to put it aside, or at any rate only
to accept just so much of it as can more or less usefully throw 'light
on the present situation and complete it. The brain enables us to make
this selection: it materialises the useful memories and keeps those
which would be of no use below the threshold of consciousness. The
same thing may be said of perception: perception is the servant of
action and out of the whole of reality it isolates only what interests
us; it shows us not so much the things themselves as what we can make
of them. In advance it classifies them, in advance it arranges them;
we barely look at the object, it is enough for us to know to what
category it belongs."[6]*
* La Perception du Changement, pages 12 and 13. 27
According to Bergson the facts which we actually know directly in the
ordinary course are discriminated out of a very much wider field which
we must also be said in a sense to know directly though most of it
lies outside the clear focus of attention. This whole field of virtual
knowledge is regarded as standing to the actual facts to which we
usually devote our attention, much as, for instance, the whole
situation of stumbling upon something in a dark room stood to the
single quality of roughness: in both cases there is a central point in
the full focus of attention which we are apt to look upon as the fact
directly known, but this central point is really surrounded by a
vastly wider context and this too is known in some sense though it is
commonly ignored.
For all philosophies, whether they be Bergson's or the view of common
sense or any other, the actual facts which require to be explained are
the same, and, though any positive assertion as to what these facts
are may be hotly disputed, it will probably be admitted that as we
ordinarily know them they consist in some direct experience,
undeniable as far as it goes. The point at issue between Bergson and
common sense is, precisely, how far it does go. Both sides would admit
that, in this fact directly known, what is in the full focus of
attention at any given moment is very limited; on the other hand both
would admit that this fully focussed fact is set in a context, or
fringe, with no clearly defined limits which also goes to make up the
whole fact directly known though we do not usually pay much attention
to it. The fact directly known being given the problem is to find out
what it is and how it comes to be known. What is actually given and
needs to be accounted for is the fact clearly focussed, with its less
clearly defined fringe: Bergson's sweeping assumption of the existence
of a further vast field of virtual knowledge in order to account for
it, does, at first sight, seem arbitrary and unwarranted and in. need
of considerable justification before it can be accepted. For him the
problem then becomes, not to account for our knowing as much as we do,
but to see why it is that we do not know a great deal more: why our
actual knowledge does not cover the whole field of our virtual
knowledge. Common sense, on, the other hand, sets out from the
assumption of ignorance, absence of awareness, as being, as it were,
natural and not needing any accounting for, and so it regards the
problem as being to explain why any experience ever occurs at all. The
assumption of ignorance as being the natural thing seems at first
sight to need no justification, but this may well be due merely to our
having grown accustomed to the common sense point of view. When one
begins to question this assumption it begins to appear just as
arbitrary as the contrary standpoint adopted by Bergson. The actual
facts are neither ignorance nor full knowledge and in accounting for
them it is really just as arbitrary to assume one of these two
extremes as the other. The truth appears to be that in order to
account for the facts one must make some assumptions, and these, not
being facts actually given, are bound to be more or less arbitrary.
They seem more or less "natural" according as we are more or less
accustomed to the idea of them, but they are really justified only
according to the success with which they account for the actual facts.
This idea of putting the problem of knowledge in terms exactly the
reverse of those in which it seems "natural" to put it was originally
suggested to Bergson by his study of the important work on amnesia
carried out by Charcot and his pupils, and also by such evidence as
was to be had at the time when he wrote on the curious memory
phenomena revealed by the use of hypnotism and by cases of spontaneous
dissociation. It is impossible to prove experimentally that no
experience is ever destroyed but it is becoming more and more firmly
established that enormous numbers of past experiences, which are
inaccessible to ordinary memory and which therefore it would seem
"natural" to suppose destroyed, can, if the right methods are
employed, be revived even with amazing fullness of detail.
In recent years since Bergson's books were first published, great
strides have been made in the experimental investigation of the whole
subject of memory, and the evidence thus obtained, far from upsetting
the theory of memory suggested to him by the less extensive evidence
which was available at the time when he wrote, lends it striking
support.
It appears to be accepted by doctors who use hypnotism in
psychotherapy that under hypnotism many patients can perfectly well be
taken back in memory to any period of their lives which the doctor
chooses to ask for, and can be made not only to remember vaguely a few
incidents which occurred at the time but actually to re-live the whole
period in the fullest possible detail, feeling over again with
hallucinatory vividness all the emotions experienced at the time.
This re-living of past experience can, with some patients, be made to
go on indefinitely, through the whole day, if the doctor has time to
attend to it, every little incident being faithfully recalled though
the actual event may have taken place 20 or 30 years previously. And
this happens not simply in the case of some very striking event or
great crisis which the patient has been through, indeed it is just the
striking events that are often hardest to recover. Some doctors, in
order to get at the crisis, have found it useful occasionally to put
patients back through one birthday after another right back even as
early as their second year, to see at what point in their lives some
particular nervous symptom first appeared, and each successive
birthday is lived through again in the utmost detail.[7]*
* See Psychology and Psychotherapy by Dr. William Brown.
Evidence of this kind does not, of course, prove that literally
nothing is ever lost but it goes far towards upsetting the ordinary
view that it is the rule for past experience to be annihilated and the
exception for fragments here and there to be preserved in memory. The
evidence which has so far been collected and which is rapidly
accumulating at least seems to justify us in reversing this rule and
saying rather that to be preserved is the rule for experience and to
be lost would be the exception, if indeed any experience ever really
is lost at all.
This way of regarding the field of memory is further supported by such
evidence as has been collected with regard to the influence of past
experience in dreams, phobias and various forms of insanity, but in
these cases, of course, it is only isolated past experiences here and
there whose activity can be observed, and so, while helping to upset
the most natural assumption that whatever cannot be recalled by
ordinary efforts of memory may be assumed to have been destroyed, they
do not lend very much support to the wider view put forward by
Bergson, that no experience, however trivial, is ever destroyed but
that all of it is included in the field out of which memory makes its
practical selection.
Taking all the evidence with regard to the preservation of past
experience which is at present available, then, it is safe to say
that, while it cannot, in the nature of things, absolutely prove
Bergson's theory of knowledge, it in no way conflicts with it and even
supports it, positively in the sense that the theory does fit the
facts well enough to explain them (though it goes further than the
actual facts and makes assumptions which can neither be proved nor
disproved by an appeal to them) and negatively in the sense that what
we now know about memory actually conflicts with the "natural" view
that past experience which we are unable to recall has been destroyed,
which is commonly appealed to to show the absurdity of the rival
theory put forward by Bergson.
On the assumption which Bergson makes of a much wider field of direct
knowledge than that which contains what we are accustomed to regard as
the actual facts which we know directly, Bergson's problem becomes how
to account for these facts being so much less than the whole field
which we might have expected to have known. The answer, according to
him, is to be found in our practical need of being prepared in advance
for what is to come, at whatever sacrifice of direct knowledge of past
and present facts. For practical purposes it is essential to use
present and past facts as signs of what is coming so that we may be
ready for it. To this end it is far more important to know the general
laws according to which facts occur than to experience the facts
themselves in their fullness. Our intellectual habits which prompt us
to set to work at once in every unfamiliar situation to analyse and
classify it fit us for discovering these laws: in so far as we are
intellectual we incline to regard facts mainly as material for
arriving at descriptions which themselves form the material out of
which, by a further intellectual effort, explanations are framed in
terms of general laws, which we need to know if we are to be ready for
what is going to happen. Now these laws are general laws applying to
whole classes of facts of one kind, or another. Facts, therefore, only
form material for discovering laws in so far as they can be classified
into kinds.
The first step in classifying a fact is called analysis and consists
in discovering common qualities which the fact possesses. According to
Bergson the discovery of common qualities in a fact consists simply in
learning to overlook everything in that fact except the respects in
which it can be said to be of the same kind, and so to belong to the
same class, as other facts. Far from adding to our direct knowledge,
as common sense supposes, he holds that analysis consists in shutting
our eyes to the individuality of facts in order to dwell only upon
what they have in common with one another. Starting, then, from the
wider field of knowledge which he assumes Bergson explains how we
reach the limited facts, which are all that we ordinarily know, by
saying that these facts are arrived at by selection out of this much
wider field. It is not the disinterested love of knowledge that
determines how much we shall actually attend to: our selection from
the whole field of what facts we will attend to is determined by the
pressing need of being prepared in advance for the facts which are to
come. We attend only to so much of the whole of what is, in some
sense, directly known to us as will be useful for framing the general
laws which enable us to prepare in advance for what is coming. This
practical utility explains why analysis and classification seem to us
to be the obvious way of dealing with what we know.
The work of abstraction by which, treating the facts directly known as
so much material for framing explanations, we pass from these actual
facts to the general laws which explain them, falls into four stages,
and at each stage, according to Bergson, as we go further and further
from the original fact directly known, the two vices of the
intellectual method, limitation and distortion of the actual fact,
become more and more apparent.
Starting from the fact directly known, the first thing, as we have
seen, is to learn to distinguish common qualities which it shares in
common with some, but not all, other facts; the next thing is to
classify it by fitting it into the further groups to which these
various qualities entitle it to belong. The moment a quality has been
distinguished in a fact that fact has been fitted into a class, the
class which consists of all the facts in which that quality can be
distinguished. Thus, in our original illustration, when you first
distinguished warmth, etc., you were beginning to fit your fact into
classes: when you perceived warmth you fitted it into the class of
warm objects, and it was the same with the other qualities of
roughness, size and smell. This fitting of facts into classes
according to the common qualities distinguished in them might be
called a preliminary classification, but we shall use the term
analysis for this preliminary grouping of facts according to their
qualities, keeping the term classification for the next step, which
you took when you realized "this is a dog," which consists in the
discovery not of mere disconnected qualities but of "real things."
Just as every quality, such as "warm" or "hairy" or "sweet" or "cold"
is a class of actual facts, so every "real thing" such as "a dog" or
"an ice cream" is a class of qualities. Thus a quality is once, and a
"real thing" is twice, removed from actual fact, and the more
energetically we pursue the intellectual work of abstraction the
further we get from the fact itself from which we began. The point of
grouping facts into classes, whether by analysing them into qualities
or classifying them into "real things," is that we can then apply to
the particular fact all that we know to be true in general of whatever
belongs to these various classes: in a word, once we have fitted a
fact into a class we can apply to it all the general laws which are
known to apply to that class.
Common sense, as we saw, tells us that when we distinguish qualities
in any given fact we obtain fuller knowledge than was given in the
mere unanalysed fact, and this knowledge is supposed to become fuller
still when we go on to classify these qualities into "real things."
Bergson, on the contrary, says that common qualities are arrived at by
leaving out much of the fact originally known, while each successive
stage in the process of abstraction by which we explain facts, though
it enables us to apply more and more general laws, yet leaves out more
and more of the actual fact itself. Analysis begins this whittling
away of the actual fact by confining our attention to qualities which
do not exhaust the whole content of the actual fact. At this
preliminary stage, however, though we concentrate our attention on the
quality, we still remain aware of the whole fact in which the quality
has its setting. Classification carries the work of limitation a stage
further. "Things" are a stage further removed from actual fact than
qualities are since, while qualities are classes of facts, "things"
are only classes of qualities. For classification into "things"
therefore only the qualities in a fact will be of any use, and so,
when we have reached the stage of classification, we need no longer
burden our attention with the actual facts themselves in their
entirety, we need pay attention only to the qualities which
distinguish one group from another, For the purpose of classification
into "things" the quality can stand for the whole fact: thus, as
Bergson points out, we begin to lose contact with the whole fact
originally known, since all the rest of it except the respects in
which it can be analysed will henceforth tend to be ignored.
The third stage in explaining facts in terms of general laws is called
induction and consists in observing and formulating the relations of
"things." "Things" are related to each other through their qualities.
Qualities do not give us the whole fact, because, when we have
distinguished qualities, we are inclined to concentrate our attention
on the quality at the expense of the rest of the fact; nevertheless
while we attend to actual qualities we have not lost contact with fact
altogether. Induction, which consists in framing general laws of the
relations of "things," though it does not involve attention to the
whole fact, does at least demand attention to qualities, and so, while
we are occupied with induction, we do still keep touch with fact to
some extent.
Once the relations of qualities have been observed and formulated,
however, we need no longer attend to any part of the fact at all.
Instead of the actual qualities we now take symbols, words, for
example, or letters, or other signs, and with these symbols we make
for ourselves diagrams of the relations in which we have observed that
the qualities which they represent have stood to each other. Thus we
might use the words "lightning before thunder" or first an L and then
a T, to express the fact that in a storm we usually observe the
quality of flashing before the quality of rumbling. Such laws do not
actually reveal new facts to us, they can only tell us, provided we
actually know a fact belonging to a given class, to what other class
facts which we shall know bye and bye will belong. Thus, once we have
classified facts as belonging to two classes, daylight and darkness,
and have observed the invariable alternation of facts belonging to
these classes, then, whenever we know directly facts which can be
classed as daylight, we can predict, according to our law of the
alternation of the two classes, that bye and bye these facts will give
place to others which can be classed as darkness and that bye and bye
these in their turn will be replaced by facts which can again be
classed as daylight. The practical value of being able to make even
such elementary predictions as these is obviously enormous, and this
value increases as applied science, which is built up simply by the
formulation of more and more comprehensive general laws of this type,
widens the field of facts which can be explained. Once the laws are
known, moreover, we are able to say to what class the facts must have
belonged which preceded a fact of any given class just as easily as we
can say to what class the facts which are to follow it will belong.
Thus, given a fact which can be classed as daylight, we can infer, by
means of the law of the alternation of the classes daylight and
darkness, not only that facts which can be classed as darkness will
follow bye and bye, but also that facts of that class must have gone
before. In this way we can explain the causes of all classifiable
facts equally with their effects and so bridge over the gaps in our
direct knowledge by creating a unified plan of the interrelations of
all the classes to which facts can belong. By means of this plan we
can explain any fact (that is classify its causes and effects),
provided we can fit it into one or other of the known classes. This
again is of enormous practical use because, when we know to what class
present facts must belong if they are to be followed by the class of
facts which we want, or not to be followed by those which we do not
want, we can arrange our present facts accordingly.
Bergson would not think of denying that this intellectual method, in
which facts are used as material for abstraction, is of the utmost
practical use for explaining facts and so enabling us to control them.
He suggests, however, that our preoccupation with these useful
abstractions, classes and their relations, misleads us as to the facts
themselves. What actually takes place, he thinks, is a kind of
substitution of the explanation for the fact which was to be
explained, analogous with what happens when a child at a party, or a
guest at dinner, is misled about his actual sensations, only this
substitution of which Bergson speaks, being habitual, is much harder
to see through. Explanation, as we have seen, consists in constructing
a plan or map in terms of such abstractions as classes and their
relations, or sometimes, when the abstraction has been carried a step
further, in terms simply of words or symbols, by means of which we
represent the causal relations between such of the actual directly
known facts as can be classified. This plan is more comprehensive and
complete than the actual facts which we know directly in the ordinary
course of things, for which it stands, and it enables us to explain
these facts in terms of the classes of causes from which they follow,
and the classes of effects which they produce. No explanation, of
course, can actually acquaint us directly with the real antecedent or
consequent facts themselves: it can only tell us to what classes these
facts must belong. The terms of the plan by which we explain the
facts, the classes, for instance, daylight and darkness, and their
relation of alternation, or the words or symbols which stand for
classes and relations are not themselves facts but abstractions. We
cannot think in terms of actual facts: the intellectual activity by
which we formulate general laws can only work among abstractions, and
in order to explain a fact we are obliged to substitute for it either
a class or word or other symbol. All description and explanation of
facts consists in substitutions of this kind. The explanation applies
provided the abstraction is based on fact, that is, provided it is
possible to fit the fact to which the explanation is intended to apply
into the class employed to explain it: the general law, for instance,
about the alternation of the classes daylight and darkness will
explain any facts which can be fitted into one or other of these
classes, or again general laws about dogs, such as "dogs lick" will
apply to whatever fact belongs at once to all the simpler classes,
"warm," "rough," "of a certain size, and smell," out of which the
class "dog" is constructed. The general law itself, however, does not
consist of such facts but of abstractions substituted for the facts
themselves. Such substitution is extremely useful and perfectly
legitimate so long as we keep firm hold of the fact as well, and are
quite clear about what is fact and what only symbol. The danger is,
however, that, being preoccupied with describing and explaining and
having used abstractions so successfully for these purposes, we may
come to lose our sense of fact altogether and fail to distinguish
between actual facts and the symbols which we use to explain them.
This, indeed, is just what Bergson thinks really does happen. No doubt
an intelligent physicist is perfectly aware that the vibrations and
wave lengths and electrons and forces by which he explains the changes
that take place in the material world are fictions, and does not
confuse them with the actual facts in which his actual knowledge of
the material world consists. But it is much more doubtful whether he
distinguishes between these actual facts and the common sense material
objects, such as lumps of lead, pieces of wood, and so on, which he
probably believes he knows directly but which are really only
abstractions derived from the facts in order to explain them just as
much as his own vibrations and wave lengths. When a scientist frames a
hypothesis he employs the intellectual method of substitution with
full consciousness of what he is about; he recognises that its terms
are abstractions and not facts. But the intellectual method of
explaining by substituting general abstractions for particular facts
is not confined to science. All description and explanation, from the
first uncritical assumptions of common sense right up to the latest
scientific hypothesis employs the intellectual method of substituting
abstractions for actual facts. The common sense world of things,
events, qualities, minds, feelings, and so on, in which we all pass
our every day lives is an early and somewhat crude attempt to describe
the continually changing fact which each of us experiences directly,
but it is perhaps more misleading than the later elaborate
constructions of chemistry, physics, biology or physchology in that
things and qualities are more easily mistaken for facts than more
obviously hypothetical assumptions. Bergson points out that the
various things of which this common sense world consists, solid
tables, green grass, anger, hope, etc., are not facts: these things,
he insists, are only abstractions. They are convenient for enabling us
to describe and explain the actual facts which each of us experiences
directly, and they are based upon these facts in the sense of being
abstracted from them. The objection to them is that we are too much
inclined to take it for granted that these things and qualities and
events actually are facts themselves, and in so doing to lose sight of
the real facts altogether. In support of his view that things having
qualities in successive relations are mere abstractions Bergson points
out that whenever we stop to examine what it actually is that we know
directly we can see at once that this fact does not consist of things
and qualities at all: things and qualities are clearly marked off one
from another,; they change as a series of distinct terms, but in what
we know directly there are no clear cut distinctions and so no series.
The assumption which we usually make that the facts must consist of
such things as events and qualities and material objects is not based
upon the evidence of direct knowledge: we make the assumption that the
facts must be of this kind simply because they can be explained in
these terms.
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