How One Becomes
What One Is

HENRI BERGSON

Spontaneous memory is immediately perfect; time can add nothing to its image without denaturing it; it will conserve its place and its date for memory.

On the contrary, a memory which has been learned (souvenir apprise) will escape time (sorter du temps) as soon as the lesson is learned; it will become more and more impersonal, more and more a stranger to our past life.

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

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

What makes hope such an intense pleasure is the fact that the future, which we dispose off to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible. Even if the most coveted of these becomes realised, it will be necessary to give up the others, and we shall have lost a great deal.

The imagination of the dreamer, isolated from the external world, reproduces with simple images, and parodies in its own way, the work that is ongoing on ideas, in the deepest regions of intellectual life.

Art engages us to feel with it;  it engages our feelings through an experience of qualities.  What we might mistake for a growing intensity of esthetic pleasure is actually an experience of a variety of feelings. 

Each, already announced by the one that precedes it, becomes visible and definitively eclipses the previous.  one: "What we experience, then, is change: differences in kind, and the passage from one qualitative state to another. 

Art activity becomes nothing but a means for expressing the beautiful, while the essence of the beautiful remains mysterious.  Art, however, does not operate like a physical cause.  It addresses us.  It invites us into a relation of sympathy.  We feel-with the poet, dancer, or musician by entering into The rhythms of his or her art. 

Art, then, suggests feelings to us;  it does not cause them.

The image memory,

then, is staged as a kind of Pure Memory that only actually operates in relation to perception, which includes a certain memory of the body. The mechanism of interaction between perception and memory (and, it is a two-way street, between memory and perception) is recognition, the concrete act by which we grasp the past again in the present.

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

In concrete perception, memory functions in two important ways. First, it interweaves the past into the present, such that memory is practically inseparable from perception. Second, it gathers to a multiple moments of duration and contracts them into a single intuition.

To experience duration, he writes, “One must want to dream: il faut vouloir réver.” Dream is also linked to the activity of the artist, and will be identified with instinct as opposed to intelligence in Creative Evolution. Sometimes it is associated with mental alienation or madness.  

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

On the stage, each actor says and does only what has to be said and done; the scenes are clear-cut; the play has a beginning, a middle and an end; and everything is worked out as economically as possible with a view to an ending which will be happy or tragic. But in life, a multitude of useless things are said, many superfluous gestures made, there are no sharply-drawn situations.

Intuition, then, signifies first of all consciousness, but immediate consciousness, a vision which is scarcely distinguishable from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence.

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

We can give things whatever names we choose and I see no great objection, I repeat, to knowledge of the mind by the mind still being called intelligence, if one insists. But then it will be necessary to specify that there are two intellectual functions, the one the inverse of the other, for mind thinks mind only in climbing back up the slope of habits acquired in contact with matter, and these habits are what one currently calls intellectual tendencies.

Above all, having attributed to his thought the power of embracing everything, he is obliged to imagine all things in terms of thought; of his aspirations, his desires, his enthusiasms he cannot ask enlightenment in a world in which everything accessible to him has been first considered by him as translatable into pure ideas. 

I say intelligence, I do not say thought, I do not say mind. Alongside of intelligence there is in effect the immediate perception by each of us of his own activity and of the conditions in which it is exercised.

Call it what you will; it is the feeling we have of being creators of our intentions, of our decisions, of our acts, and by that, of our habits, our characters, ourselves.

I take a first step, then a second, and so on: finally, after a certain number of steps, I take a last one by which I skip ahead of the tortoise. I thus accomplish a series of indivisible acts. My course is the series of these acts. You can distinguish its parts by the number of steps it involves. But you have not the right to disarticulate it according to another law, or to suppose it articulated in another way. 

This precludes any interpretation of the memory of images as just a version of the memory lodged in the body. It thus establishes the radical independence of Pure Memory that Bergson will go on to elaborate. It can therefore activate a certain number of past images, as well as give back the echo (or reflection) of the image it has just received through sense perception. There is no real limit to this multiplicity. 

How can we say that time is space? This step of the argument is important. Bergson holds that any homogeneous-milieu should be considered as space-even time.

Symbolic representation of the event has taken the place of the event itself.

And ultimately, once again, time has been confused with space. Bergson's position is radical. Freedom is something we can't talk about at all! We certainly cannot explain it through concepts. The moment we try to explain freedom-we eradicate it. This is because an absolute difference exists between immediate experience, which just happens, and experiences reconstructed in thought (reflective experience). The latter is represented through a spatial figure where direction is reversible; the former occurs in real duration, where time flows in only one direction.

The moment we try to explain freedom-we eradicate it. This is because an absolute difference exists between immediate experience, which just happens, and experiences reconstructed in thought (reflective experience).

The latter is represented through a spatial figure where direction is reversible; the former occurs in real duration, where time flows in only one direction.

Our knowledge, far from being made up of a gradual association of simple elements, is the effect of a sudden dissociation: from the immensely vast field of our virtual knowledge, we have selected, in order to make it into actual knowledge, everything which concerns our action upon things; we have neglected the rest.

The intuition we refer to then bears above all upon internal duration. It grasps a succession which is not juxtaposition, a growth from within, the uninterrupted prolongation of the past into a present which is already blending into the future.

• Sensation is the beginning of freedom (Essai). 

• Time is a form of energy (Essai). 

• The past: is a reality (Essai). 

• My perception is outside my body (Matter and Memory).

• Perception is nothing but an occasion for remembering (Matter and Memory). 

• The same feeling, by the very fact of being repeated, is a new feeling (Essai). 

• Memory does not consist in a regression from the present to the past, but, on the contrary, in a progress from the past to the present (Matter and Memory). 

• Questions relative to the subject and the object should be thought as a function of time rather than space (Matter and Memory). 

• Nothing is less than the present (Matter and Memory). 

• Movement is quality, not quantity (Essai).  We only perceive the past (Matter and Memory). 

• The only effect produced by feeling is the fact of having been felt (Matter and Memory). 

• Time is invention or it is nothing at all (Essai).