On the whole, the history of philosophy supports Bergson’s charge that the human intellect ‘spatializes the universe’; that is to say, that it tends to ignore the fluency, and to analyse the world in terms of static categories.1 Indeed Bergson went further and conceived this tendency as an inherent necessity of the intellect. I do not believe this accusation; but I do hold that ‘spatialization’ is the shortest route to a clear-cut philosophy expressed in reasonably familiar language. Descartes gave an almost perfect example of such a system of thought. The difficulties of Cartesianism with its three clear-cut substances, and with its ‘duration’ and ‘measured time’ well in the background, illustrate the result of the subordination of fluency. This subordination is to be found in the unanalysed longing of the hymn, in Plato’s vision of heavenly perfection, in Aristotle’s logical concepts, and in Descartes’ mathematical mentality.
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The fundamental principles [in Descartes] are so set out as to presuppose independently existing substances with simple location in the community of temporal durations, and in the case of bodies, with simple location in the community of spatial extensions. Those principles lead straight to the theory of a materialistic mechanistic nature, surveyed by cogitating minds. After the close of the seventeenth century science took charge of the materialistic nature, and philosophy took charge of the cogitating minds …
This division of territory between science and philosophy was not a simple business; and in fact it illustrated the weakness of the whole cut and dried presupposition upon which it rested. We are aware of nature as an interplay of bodies, colours, sounds, scents, tastes, touches and other various bodily feelings, displayed as in space in patterns of mutual separation by intervening volumes, and of the individual shape. Also the whole is a flux, changing with the lapse of time. This systematic totality is disclosed to us as one complex of things. But the seventeenth-century dualism cuts straight across it. The objective world of science was confined to mere spatial material with simple location in space and time, and subjected to definite rules as to its locomotion. The subjective world of philosophy annexed the colours, sounds, scents, touches, bodily feelings, as forming the subjective content of the cogitations of the individual mind … There is obviously one fatal weakness to this scheme. The cogitations of mind exhibit themselves as holding up entities, such as colours for instance, before the mind as the termini of contemplation. But in this theory these colours are, after all, merely the furniture of the mind. Accordingly, the mind seems to be confined to its own private world of cogitations. The subject-object conformation of experience in its entirety lies within the mind as one of its private passions. This conclusion from the Cartesian data is the starting point from which Berkeley, Hume, and Kant developed their respective systems … Thus the question as to how any knowledge is obtained of the truly objective world of science becomes a problem of the first magnitude …
The two great preoccupations of modern philosophy now lie clearly before us. The study of mind divides into psychology, or the study of mental functionings as considered in themselves and in their mutual relations, and into epistemology, or the theory of the knowledge of a common objective world. In other words, there is the study of the cogitations, qua passions of the mind, and their study qua leading to an inspection (intuition) of an objective world. This is a very uneasy division, giving rise to a host of perplexities whose consideration has occupied the intervening centuries …
Bergson introduced into philosophy the organic conceptions of physiological science. He has most completely moved away from the static materialism of the seventeenth century … The effect of physiology was to put mind back into nature. The neurologist traces first the effects of stimuli along the bodily nerves, then integration at nerve centres, and finally the rise of a projective reference beyond the body with a resulting motor efficacy in renewed nervous excitement. In biochemistry, the delicate adjustment of the chemical composition of the parts to the preservation of the whole organism is detected. Thus the mental cognition is seen as the reflective experience of a totality, reporting for itself what it is in itself as one unit of occurrence. This unit is the integration of the sum of its partial happenings, but it is not their numerical aggregates. It has its own unity as an event. This total unity, considered as an entity for its own sake, is the prehension into unity of the patterned aspects of the universe of events. Its knowledge of itself arises from its own relevance to the things of which it prehends the aspects. It knows the world as the system of mutual relevance, and thus sees itself as a mirrored in other things. These other things include more especially the various parts of its own body.
It is important to discriminate the bodily pattern, which endures, from the bodily event, which is pervaded by the enduring pattern, and from the parts of the bodily event. The parts of the bodily event are themselves pervaded by their own enduring patterns, which form elements in the bodily pattern. The parts of the body are really portions of the environment of the total bodily event, but so related that their mutual aspects, each in the other, are peculiarly effective in modifying the patterns of either. This arises from the intimate character of the relation of whole to part. Thus the body is a portion of the environment for the part, and the part is a portion of the environment for the body; only they are peculiarly sensitive, each to modifications of the other. The sensitiveness is so arranged that a part adjusts itself to preserve the stability of the pattern of the body. It is a particular example of the favourable environment shielding the organism. The relation of part to whole has the special reciprocity associated with the notion of organism, in which the part is for the whole; but this relation reigns throughout nature and does not start with a special case of the higher organisms …
We can now see the relation of psychology to physiology and to physics. The private psychological field is merely the event, considered from its own standpoint. The unity of this field is the unity of the event. But it is the event as one entity and not the event as a sum of parts. The relations of the parts, to each other and to the whole, are their aspects, each in the other. A body for an external observer is the aggregate of the aspects for him of the body as a whole, and also of the body as a sum of parts. For the external observer the aspects of shape and sense objects are dominant, at least for cognition. But we must also allow for the possibility that we can detect in ourselves direct aspects of the mentalities of higher organisms. The claim that the cognition of alien mentalities must necessarily be by means of indirect inferences from aspects of shape and of sense objects is wholly unwarranted by this philosophy of organism. The fundamental principle is that whatever merges into actuality implants its aspects into every individual event.
Further, even for self-cognition, the aspects of the parts of our own bodies partly take the form of aspects of shape and of sense-objects. But that part of the bodily event in respect to which the cognitive mentality is associated is for itself the unit psychological field. Its ingredients are not referent to the event itself; they are aspects of what lies beyond that event. Thus the self-knowledge inherent in the bodily event is the knowledge of itself as a complex unity, whose ingredients involve all reality beyond itself, restricted under the limitation of its pattern of aspects. Thus we know ourselves as a function of unification of a plurality of things which are other than ourselves.