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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 XIII: "Sensation of Light"
§36 "Photometric Experiments. We Perceive Different Shades and afterwards Interpret Them as Decreasing Intensities of White Light"
Imagine four candles illuminating a sheet of paper. We blow out the candles one by one. The paper seems to become less intensely lit. It is more accurate to say that a layer of shadow passes over the paper when we blow out a candle. This shadow is no less real than the light. It makes the paper a different shade of white. So it does not cause us to have less of a sensation. (53b.d) "Black has just as much reality for our consciousness as white." (54a) The varying shades of white are like colors of a spectrum. Each are different, but none are greater or lesser than another.
Colors can be lightened and darkened. Regardless of any modification to a color, we only perceive it as qualitatively different, even though we often mistakenly think it is quantitatively different. (54c.d)
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
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