Bergson, Time and Free Will, Chapter 2, §61 "The Empiricists Really Agree with Kant..."

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

Bergson, Time and Free Will

Chapter II, "The Multiplicity of Conscious States," "The Idea of Duration"

Part XVII: Space and Homogeneity

§61 "The Empiricists Really Agree with Kant, for Extensity Cannot Result from Synthesis of Unextended Sensations without an Act of the Mind"

Previously we saw how Kant considered space as an a priori condition that causes us to always intuit objects as being spatial, even though the objects in themselves do not exist in space. Bergson explains now that psychologists have held this position since Kant's time.

If a psychologist holds that that something like the intuition of spatiality is native to our minds, then they are nativist. So the ideas of nativist Johann Müller originate in Kant's thinking. But also Lotze, Bain, and Wundt are concerned with the way our sensations are situated in space. So they too have been influenced by Kantianism as well. And like Kant, they regard sensations as non-extensive. Their theories conclude that we form our notion of space by means of sensations. And these sensations are unextended and simply qualitative: "extensity is supposed to result from their synthesis, as water from the combination of two gases." (93c)

So we have sensations of spatial objects, but Kant separates space from these objects themselves. Empiricists are not like the nativists. Empiricists do not believe we have any such a priori intuitions as the pure intuition of space. They think that firstly we have impressions of objects. These impressions form combinations in our mind. Out of these relations we derive such properties of the objects as spatiality. [See the section on the relations of ideas in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature.] So we have impressions of two objects, then we represent them both together in a spatial relation. In this way, we obtain spatiality not from the sensations, but from their co-existences. (94a) Bergson notes that this still involves the 'active intervention of the mind." Sensations are inextensive and always remain that way. Things do not obtain extensive features until our minds distribute the unextended sensations into spatial places. This mental act is something like Kant's a priori form of sensibility. (94d)

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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.

Available online at:

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