Bergson, Time and Free Will, Chapter 1, §19 "The Intermediate States. Attention and Its Relation to Muscular Contraction"

by Corry Shores
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[The following is summary; my commentary is in brackets.]

Bergson, Time and Free Will

(Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience)

Chapter I, "The Intensity of Psychic States"

Part VI: " Attention and Tension"

§19 "The Intermediate States. Attention and Its Relation to Muscular Contraction"

When we pay attention to something, there is no doubt mental activity involved. So attention seems to not be purely physiological. Yet, do we not notice a sensation in our contracting scalp when we focus our attention? or the inward pressure on our skull when struggling to remember something? Ribot notes that when we mentally attend to something, face muscles pull our eyebrows together, wrinkle our brow, and sometimes even open our mouth and protrude our lips. (27-28a)

So we know there are always physiological movements involved when we pay attention to something. However it also seems that there is a purely immaterial effort involved as well. We seem to mentally exert ourselves so to focus on one idea and to exclude the others that try to intrude. Bergson claims that nonetheless through further analysis we will always find that this sensation extends through our body and changes qualitatively. (28b.c)

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Images from the pages summarized above, in the English Translation [click on the image for an enlargement]:

Images from the pages summarized above, in the original French [click on the image for an enlargement]:

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Transl. F. L. Pogson, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001).

Available online at:

http://www.archive.org/details/timeandfreewill00pogsgoog

French text from:

Bergson, Henri. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Originally published Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1888.

http://www.archive.org/details/essaisurlesdonn00berguoft