Logic of Bergson's Philosophy (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1917. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... II (1) MATTER AND MEMORY The chiefly significant difference between the arrangement of M. Bergson's assumptions and observations in Time and Free-Will and Matter and Memory is that he accepts the extension of immediate experience as a genuine philosophical fact in the latter work, whereas in Time and Free-Will space is supposed to be present in the immediate illegitimately. M. Bergson's recognition that the immediate is really extended was encouraged, perhaps, by an advance in psychological doctrine in various quarters, but the development of the doctrine itself of Time and Free-Will from the premise that the immediate data of consciousness are unextended, to the demonstration that practise and language and abstract thought involve the confusion of quantity and quality in the sense of an actual mingling or pouring together of matter and mind, brought M. Bergson close to the complete admission that the immediate is extended. Postulating the extension of immediate experience, but retaining the dualistic hypothesis and the theory that genuine knowledge must coincide with the object of knowledge, M. Bergson proceeds to develop a doctrine epistemologically similar to the doctrine of Time and Free-Will. The principal peculiarity of that book lay in its attempt to combine the fact that a discrepancy separates the terms of the science of psychology from psychology's subject-matter, with the theory that knowledge is true of its object in the measure of their resemblance. Now in granting the extension of immediate experience M. Bergson accepts the presence of matter in immediate consciousness and confronts a discrepancy separating the terms of conceptual physics from the immediate material of physical science, parallel to the discrepancy between the terms and subject-matt...