Bergson's Doctrine of Intuition; The Donnellan Lectures for 1921 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 edition. Excerpt: ...Bergsonian freedom is not a possession to be enjoyed, but an infinite enterprise. 1 T. F., p. 95 ff. - Ibid., p. 128. The enterprise takes shape as the task of self-creation. This is Bergson's most complete and perhaps finest expression of his intuition of freedom. Free acts are those that create personality. The creation of free personality would seem to be the proximate purpose of the evolution of life on this planet.1 CHAPTER' III MIND AND BODY Matiere et Mimoire is the title of Bergson's second important work. The purpose of the book is "to define the role of the body in the life of the mind." 1 The book was published in 1896, about six years after Les Donnies immediates. The author tells us that during that six-years' interval he set himself to find out what physiology and pathology teach for fact as to the relation between the physical and the moral.2 The problem of mind and body took shape for him as the problem of perception.8 He saw that mind is most accessible in the form of memory, and that memory becomes embodied in and through the senses. He made a minute study of the literature of aphasia. Aphasia furnishes most instructive types of abnormalities of memory; and it seems to be essentially a dislocation of word memory; and in the memory of words, their sight and sound, we find, so Bergson thinks, the vast problem of mind and body focussed to a point. The problem of perception seems at first glance remote from that of mind and body. So much so that perhaps I owe you an apology for announcing 1 M. M., p. 198. Le Roy, Une Philosophic Nouvelle, p. 9. M. M., Avant-propos, p. vi. 62 one subject and, apparently, lecturing on another. We all want to know how mind stands with respect to body; for that problem bears directly on...