Matter and memory
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~110,000 words · 525 passages
Cite this work
- APAHenri Bergson. (n.d.). Matter and memory. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/henri-bergson/matter-and-memory
- MLAHenri Bergson. Matter and memory. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/henri-bergson/matter-and-memory.
- ChicagoHenri Bergson. Matter and memory. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/henri-bergson/matter-and-memory.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Bergson's attempt, in 1896, to settle the relation between body and mind by going through one concrete case: memory.
Context and history
The French title is 'Matière et mémoire'. The strategy is shrewd: instead of arguing in the abstract about whether mind is material, Bergson takes the phenomenon where the problem can be touched with a finger, and distinguishes two kinds of memory that are usually run together. One is habit — knowing a lesson by heart, which is a disposition of the body; the other is the recollection of a single dated moment, which is not stored in the brain like a file. Hence his thesis that the brain does not contain memories but selects them for present action. The image of the inverted cone, in which the whole past contracts towards the point of the present, is among the most quoted in modern philosophy.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
In a word, we consider matter before the dissocia tion which idealism and realism have brought INTRODUCTION x about between its existence and its appearance. No doubt it has become difficult to avoid this dissociation now that philosophers have made it. To forget it, however, is what we ask of the reader. If, in the course of this first chapter, objections arise in his mind against any of the views that we put forward, let him ask himself whether these objections do not imply his return to one or the other of the two points of view above which we urge him to rise. Philosophy made a great step forward on the day when Berkeley proved, as against the ' me chanical philosophers,' that the secondary qualities of matter have at least as much reality as the primary qualities. His mistake lay in believing that, for this, it was necessary to place matter within the mind, and make it into a pure idea. Descartes, no doubt, had put matter too far from us when he made it one with geometrical extensity. But, in order to bring it nearer to us, there was no need to go to the point of making it one with our own mind. Because he did go as far as this, Berkeley was unable to account for the success of physics, and, whereas Descartes had set up the mathematical relations between phenomena as their very essence, he was obliged to regard the mathematical order of the universe as a mere accident. So the Kantian criticism became neces sary, to show the reason of this mathematical order and to give back to our physics a solid found ation — a task in which, however, it succeeded