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I am of the opinion that an entirely new light would illuminate many psychological and psycho-physiological questions if we recognised that distinct … - Henri Bergson
" "I am of the opinion that an entirely new light would illuminate many psychological and psycho-physiological questions if we recognised that distinct perception is merely cut, for the purposes of practical existence, out of a wider canvas. In psychology and elsewhere, we like to go from the part to the whole, and our customary system of explanation consists in reconstructing ideally our mental life with simple elements, then in supposing that the combination of these elements has really produced our mental life. If things happened this way, our perception would as a matter of fact be inextensible; it would consist of the assembling of certain specific materials, in a given quantity, and we should never find anything more in it than what had been put there in the first place. But the facts, taken as they are, without any mental reservation about providing a mechanical explanation of the mind, suggest an entirely different interpretation. They show us, in normal psychological life, a constant effort of the mind to limit its horizon, to turn away from what it has a material interest in not seeing. Before philosophizing one must live; and life demands that we put on blinders, that we look neither to the right, nor to the left nor behind us, but straight ahead in the direction we have to go. Our knowledge, far from being made up of a gradual association of simple elements, is the effect of a sudden dissociation: from the immensely vast field of our virtual knowledge, we have selected, in order to make it into actual knowledge, everything which concerns our action upon things; we have neglected the rest.
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About Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson (18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a major French philosopher, influential in the first half of the 20th century. He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Henri-Louis Bergson
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H. Bergson
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Henry Bergson
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Henri Louis Bergson
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Berxon
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Additional quotes by Henri Bergson
My initiation into the true philosophical method began the moment I threw overboard verbal solutions, having found in the inner life an important field of experiment. After that, all progress was an enlarging of this field. It is an inclination natural to the human mind to extend a conclusion logically, to apply it to other objects without actually having enlarged the circle of its investigations, but it is one to which we must never yield. But that is what philosophy does quite ingenuously when it is pure dialectic, that is, when it attempts to construct a metaphysics with the rudimentary knowledge one finds stored up in language. It continues to do so when it sets up certain facts as “general principles” applicable to all things outside those facts. All my philosophical activity was a protestation against this way of philosophizing. I thus had to put aside important questions, which I could easily have made a show of answering by extending to them the results of my preceding works. I shall answer certain of these questions only if I am granted time and strength to solve them in themselves, for themselves. If not, grateful to my method for having given me what I believe to be the precise solution of a certain number of problems, finding that as far as I am concerned, I cannot get more out of it, I shall be content to stop where I am.
"psychical life is neither unity nor multiplicity, that it transcends both the mechanical and the intellectual, mechanism and finalism having meaning only where there is "distinct multiplicity," "spatiality," and consequently assemblage of pre-existing parts: "real duration" signifies both undivided continuity and creation."
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La sensatez consiste en saber recordar, de acuerdo, pero también y sobre todo en saber olvidar. La sensatez es el esfuerzo de una mente que se adapta y readapta sin cesar, cambiando de idea cuando cambia de objeto. Es una movilidad de la inteligencia que se ajusta con exactitud a la movilidad de las cosas. Es la moviente continuidad de nuestra atención a la vida.
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