Bergson, Time and Free Will, Chapter 1, §13 "Conscious States Connected with External Causes or Involving Physical Symptoms"

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 V: "Muscular Effort"

§13 "Conscious States Connected with External Causes or Involving Physical Symptoms"

Previously Bergson considered purely psychic states without physiological correlates or external causes. These states are rare, because physical symptoms accompany almost all emotions, and they play a role in how we estimate the feeling's intensity. (19-20)

Sensations always have external causes. There is a relation between the sensation's intensity and the magnitude of its cause, but it is not at all a one-to-one correspondence. (20b)

Sometimes it seems that the internal psychic intensities spread outward into the body "as if intensity were being developed (développait) into extensity." Bergson will proceed to analyse such bodily intensities. (20c)

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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