the human mind is so constructed that it cannot begin to understand the new until it has done everything in its power to relate it to the old. - Henri Bergson

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the human mind is so constructed that it cannot begin to understand the new until it has done everything in its power to relate it to the old.

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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 H. Bergson Henry Bergson Henri Louis Bergson Berxon
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Additional quotes by Henri Bergson

L’homme est faber avant d’être sapiens.
(…) Seule l’intuition va au cœur du réel et permet de connaître le temps véritable qu’est la durée intérieure. C’est « la connaissance directe de l’esprit par l’esprit » au-delà de la médiation du langage incapable de saisir le « moi fondamental ».

The role of the body was thus to reproduce in action the life of the mind, to emphasize its motor articulations as the orchestra conductor does for a musical score; the brain did not have thinking as its function but that of hindering the thought from becoming lost in dream; it was the organ of attention to life. Such was the conclusion to which I was led by the specially detailed study of normal and pathological facts, more generally through external observation. But only then did I become aware of the fact that inward experience in the pure state, in giving us a “substance” whose very essence is to endure and consequently continually to prolong into the present an indestructible past, would have relieved me from seeking, and would even have forbidden me to seek, where memories are preserved. They preserve themselves, as we admit, for example, when we pronounce a word. In order to pronounce it we have to remember the first half of it while we are articulating the second. But no one will think that the first has been immediately deposited in a drawer, cerebral or otherwise, so that consciousness may come for it a moment later. But if that is the case for the first half of the word, it will be the same for the preceding word, which is an integral part of it as far as sound and meaning are concerned; it will be the same from the beginning of the sentence, and the preceding sentence, and the whole discourse that we could have made very long, indefinitely long had we wished. Now, our whole life, from the time of our first awakening to consciousness, is something like this indefinitely prolonged discourse. Its duration is substantial, indivisible insofar as it is pure duration.

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