l88 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, m relation to the final act, which, by hypothesis, is not given. Neither have you the right to cut short — were it only by a second — the different states of consciousness through which Paul is going to pass before Peter; for the effects of the same feeling, for example, go on accumulating at every moment of duration, and the sum total of these effects could not be realized all at once un less one knew the importance of the feeling, taken in its totality, in relation to the final act, which is the very thing that is supposed to remain unknown. But if Peter and Paul have experienced the same feelings in the same order, if their minds have the same history, how will you distinguish one from the other? Will it be by the body in which they dwell? They would then always differ in some respect, viz., that at no moment of their history would they have a mental picture of the same body. Will it be by the place which they occupy in time? In that case they would no longer be present at the same events: now, by hypothesis, they have the same past and the same present, having the same experience. You must now make up your mind about it: Peter and Paul are one and the same person, whom you call Peter when he acts and Paul when you recapitulate his history. The more complete you made the sum of the conditions which, when known, would have enabled you to predict Peter's future action, the closer became your grasp of his existence and the nearer you came to living his life over again CHAP, m REAL DURATION AND PREDICTION 189 down to its smallest details: you thus reached the very moment when, the action taking place, there was no longer anything to be foreseen, but only something to be done. Here again any at tempt to reconstruct ideally an act really willed ends in the mere witnessing of the act whilst it is being performed or when it is already done.
Hence it is a question devoid of meaning to ask: Could or could not the act be foreseen, given Hence mean- the sum total of its antecedents? whethert0anaact For there are two ways of assimilating se^n when0"/" these antecedents, the one dynamic the dLtrS" other static. In the first case we shall given. ke ie(j kv imperceptible steps to identify ourselves with the person we are dealing with, to pass through the same series of states, and thus to get back to the very moment at which the act is performed; hence there can no longer be any question of foreseeing it. In the second case, we presuppose the final act by the mere fact of annexing to the qualitative description of the previous states the quantitative appreciation of their importance. Here again the one party is led merely to realize that the act is not yet per formed when it is to be performed, and the other, that when performed it is performed. This, like the previous discussion, leaves the ques tion of freedom exactly where it was to begin with.
By going deeper into this twofold argument, we I go TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, m shall find, at its very root, the two fundamental illusions of the reflective consciousness.
The two lalla-.,...cies involved: The first consists m regarding intensity £tensuyarasnl as a mathematical property of psychic ; states and not, as we said at the beginmaterial ning of this essay, as a special quality, dynamic °Jro- as a particular shade of these variou? states. The second consists in substitut ing for the concrete reality or dynamic progress, which consciousness perceives, the material symbol of this progress when it has already reached its end, that is to say, of the act already accomplished together with the series of its antecedents. Cer tainly, once the final act is completed, I can ascribe to all the antecedents their proper value, and pic ture the interplay of these various elements as a conflict or a composition of forces. But to ask whether, the antecedents being known as well as their value, one could foretell the final act, is to beg the question; it is to forget that we cannot know the value of the antecedents without knowing the final act, which is the very thing that is not yet known; it is to suppose wrongly that the sym bolical diagram which we draw in our own way for representing the action when completed has been drawn by the action itself whilst progressing, and drawn by it in an automatic manner.
Now, in these two illusions themselves a third one is involved, and you will see that the question whether the act could or could not be foreseen always comes back to this: Is time space?
CHAP, m REAL DURATION AND PREDICTION You begin by setting side by side in some ideal space the conscious states which suc- Claiming to r.
foresee an ceed one another in Peter s mind, and comes back you perceive his life as a kindol path to confusing J,,.
time with M O X Y traced out by a moving body M in space. You then blot out in thought the part O X Y of this curve, and you inquire whether, knowing M 0, you would have been able to determine the portion 0 X of the curve which the moving body describes beyond O. Such is, in the main, the question which you put when you M ^Ss*vv^__^^--xxX<^ V sopher Paul, who lives before Peter and has to picture to himself the conditions under which Peter will act. You thus materialize these conditions; you make the time to come into a road already marked out across the plain, which we can contemplate from the top of the mountain, even if we have not traversed it and are never to do so. But, now, you soon notice that the know ledge of the part M O of the curve would not be enough, unless you were shown the position of the points of this line, not only in relation to one another, but also in relation to the points of the whole line M O X Y; which would amount to being given in advance the very elements which have to be determined. So you then alter your hypo thesis; you realize that time does not require to be seen, but to be lived; and hence you conclude that, if your knowledge of the line M O was not a sufficient datum, the reason must have been that you looked at it from the outside instead of identi fying yourself with the point M, which describes not only M O but also the whole curve, and thus making its movement your own. Therefore, you persuade Paul to come and coincide with Peter; and naturally, then, it is the line M O X Y which Paul traces out in space, since, by hypothesis, Peter describes this line. But in no wise do you prove thus that Paul foresaw Peter's action; you only show that Peter acted in the way he did, since Paul became Peter. It is true that you then come back, unwittingly, to your former hypothesis, because you continually confuse the line M O X Y in its tracing with the line M O X Y already traced, that is to say, time with space. After causing Paul to come down and identify himself with Peter as long as was required, you let him go up again and resume his former post of observation. No wonder if he then perceives the line M O X Y complete: he himself has just been completing it. What makes the confusion a natural and almost an unavoidable one is that science seems to point n. to many cases where we do anticipate Confusion * arising from the future. Do we not determine beprediction ol...astronomical forehand the coni unctions of heavenly phenomena.,.. J J bodies, solar and lunar eclipses, in short the greater number of astronomical phenomena? Does not, then, the human intellect embrace in the present moment immense intervals of duration still to come? No doubt it does; but an anticipa- CHAP, in REAL DURATION AND PREDICTION IQ3 tion of this kind has not the slightest resemblance to the anticipation of a voluntary act. Indeed, as we shall see, the reasons which render it possible to foretell an astronomical phenomenon are the very ones which prevent us from determining in advance an act which springs from our free ac tivity. For the future of the material universe, although contemporaneous with the future of a conscious being, has no analogy to it.
In order to put our ringer on this vital difference, let us assume for a moment that some mischievous illustration genius, more powerful still than the dS tSera- mischievous genius con j ured up by DescaT movp£ysi~ cartes> decreed that all the movements ments. Of ^he universe should go twice as fast. There would be no change in astronomical phe nomena, or at any rate in the equations which enable us to foresee them, for in these equations the symbol t does not stand for a duration, but for a relation between two durations, for a certain number of units of time, in short, for a certain number of simultaneities: these simultaneities, these coincidences would still take place in equal number: only the intervals which separate them would have diminished, but these intervals never make their appearance in our calculations. Now these intervals are just duration lived, duration which our consciousness perceives, and our consciousness would soon inform us of a short ening of the day if we had not experienced the usual amount of duration between sunrise and sunset. No doubt it would not measure this shortening, and perhaps it would not even per ceive it immediately as a change of quantity; but it would realize in some way or other a decline in the usual storing up of experience, a change in the progress usually accomplished between sun rise and sunset.
Now, when an astronomer foretells e.g. a lunar eclipse, he merely exercises in his own way the power which we have ascribed to our prophecy such mischievous genius. He decrees that tion. time shall go ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times as fast, and he has a right to do so, since all that he thus changes is the nature of the conscious intervals, and since these intervals, by hypothesis, do not enter into the calculations. Therefore, into a psychological duration of a few seconds he may put several years, even several centuries of astronomical time: that is his pro cedure when he traces in advance the path of a heavenly body or represents it by an equation, What he does is nothing but establishing a series of relations of position between this body and other given bodies, a series of simultaneities and coincidences, a series of numerical relations: as for duration properly so called, it remains out side the calculation and could only be perceived by a consciousness capable of living through the intervals and, in fact, living the intervals them selves, instead of merely perceiving their extremi ties. Indeed it is even conceivable that this CHAP, in REAL DURATION AND PREDICTION IQ5 consciousness could live so slow and lazy a life as to take in the whole path of the heavenly body in a single perception, just as we do when we per ceive the successive positions of a shooting star as one line of fire. Such a consciousness would find itself really in the same conditions in which the astronomer places himself ideally; it would see in the present what the astronomer perceives in the future. In truth, if the latter foresees a future phenomenon, it is only on condition of making it to a certain extent a present pheno menon, or at least of enormously reducing the interval which separates us from it. In short, the time of which we speak in astronomy is a number, and the nature of the units of this number cannot be specified in our calculations; we may therefore assume them to be as small as we please, provided that the same hypothesis is extended to the whole series of operations, and that the successive rela tions of position in space are thus preserved. We shall then be present in imagination at the phe nomenon we wish to foretell; we shall know ex actly at what point in space and after how many units of time this phenomenon takes place; if we then restore to these units their psychical nature, we shall thrust the event again into the future and say that we have foreseen it, when in reality we have seen it.
But these units of time which make up living duration, and which the astronomer can dispose of as he pleases because they give no handle to science, are just what concern the psychologist, in dealing ^or psychology deals with the intervals with states oi themselves and not with their extremconsciousness we cannot ities. Certainly pure consciousness does vary their da- * * ration without no^- perceive time as a sum of units of altering their nature. duration: left to itself, it has no means and even no reason to measure time; but a feeling which lasted only half the number of days, for example, would no longer be the same feeling for it; it would lack thousands of impressions which gradually thickened its substance and altered its colour. True, when we give this feeling a certain name, when we treat it as a thing, we believe that we can diminish its duration by half, for example, and also halve the duration of all the rest of our history: it seems that it would still be the same life, only on a reduced scale. But we forget that states of consciousness are processes, and not things; that if we denote them each by a single word, it is for the convenience of language; that they are alive and therefore constantly chang ing; that, in consequence, it is impossible to cut off a moment from them without making them poorer by the loss of some impression, and thus altering their quality. I quite understand that the orbit of a planet might be perceived all at once or in a very short time, because its successive positions or the results of its movement are the only things that matter, and not the duration of the equal intervals which separate them. But when we have to do with a feeling, it has no precise CHAP, in REAL DURATION AND PREDICTION IQ7 result except its having been felt; and, to estimate this result adequately, it would be necessary to have gone through all the phases of the feeling itself and to have taken up the same duration. Even if this feeling has finally issued in some defi nite action, which might be compared to the definite position of a planet in space, the know ledge of this act will hardly enable us to estimate the influence of the feeling on the whole of a lifestory, and it is this very influence which we want to know. All foreseeing is in reality seeing, and this seeing takes place when we can reduce as much as we please an interval of future time while preserving the relation of its parts to one another, as happens in the case of astronomical predictions. But what does reducing an interval of time mean, except emptying or impoverishing the conscious states which fill it? And does not the very possibility of seeing an astronomical period in miniature thus imply the impossibility of modify ing a psychological series in the same way, since it is only by taking this psychological series as an invariable basis that we shall be able to make an astronomical period vary arbitrarily as regards the unit of duration?
Thus, when we ask whether a future action could have been foreseen, we unwittingly identify that time with which we have to do in Difference be-,...tween past and the exact sciences, and which is reducible future duration in this to a number, with real duration, whose so-called quantity is really a quality, ig8 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, in and which we canaot curtail by an instant without altering the nature of the facts which fill it. No doubt the identification is made easier by the fact that in a large number of cases we are justified in dealing with real duration as with astronomical time. Thus, when we call to mind the past, i.e.
a series of deeds done, we always shorten it, with out however distorting the nature of the event which interests us. The reason is that we know it already; for the psychic state, when it reaches the end of the progress which constitutes its very existence, becomes a thing which one can picture to oneself all at once. Here we find ourselves in the same position as the astronomer, when he takes in at a glance the orbit which a planet will need several years to traverse. In fact, astronomical prediction should be compared with the recollection of the past state of consciousness, not with the anticipation of the future one. But when we have to determine a future state of con sciousness, however superficial it may be, we can no longer view the antecedents in a static condition as things; we must view them in a dynamic condition as processes, since we are concerned with their influence alone. Now their duration is this very influence. Therefore it will no longer do to shorten future duration in order to picture its parts beforehand; one is bound to live this duration whilst it is unfolding. As far as deep-seated psychic states are concerned, there is no perceptible difference between foreseeing, seeing, and acting.
Only one course will remain open to the determinist. He will probably give up asserting the possibility of foreseeing a certain future The determin- r ist argument act or state of consciousness, but will that psychic...-.
phenomena maintain that every act is determined are subject to,..., the law" same by its psychic antecedents, or, in other antecedents,../,, same ^conse- words, that the facts of consciousness, like the phenomena of nature, are sub ject to laws. This way of arguing means, at bottom, that he will leave out the particular features of the concrete psychic states, lest he find himself confronted by phenomena which defy all symbolical representation and therefore all anticipation. The particular nature of these phenomena is thus thrust out of sight, but it is asserted that, being phenomena, they must remain subject to the law of causality. Now, it is argued, this law means that every phenomenon is determined by its conditions, or, in other words, that the same causes produce the same effects. Either, then, the act is inseparably bound to its antecedents, or the principle of causality admits of an incomprehensible exception.
This last form of the determinist argument differs less than might be thought from all the , others which have been examined above.
But as regards inner states To say that the same inner causes will the same an- ', rf tecedents will reproduce the same effects is to asnever recur.
sume that the same cause can ap pear a second time on the stage of conscious ness. Now, if duration is what we say, deep- 2QO TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, in seated psychic states are radically heterogeneous to each other, and it is impossible that any two of them should be quite alike, since they are two different moments of a life-story. While the external object does not bear the mark of the time that has elapsed and thus, in spite of the differ ence of time, the physicist can again encounter identical elementary conditions, duration is some thing real for the consciousness which preserves the trace of it, and we cannot here speak of iden tical conditions, because the same moment does not occur twice. It is no use arguing that, even if there are no two deep-seated psychic states which are altogether alike, yet analysis would resolve these different states into more general and homogeneous elements which might be com pared with each other. This would be to forget that even the simplest psychic elements possess a personality and a life of their own, however superficial they may be; they are in a constant state of becoming, and the same feeling, by the mere fact of being repeated, is a new feeling.
Indeed, we have no reason for calling it by its former name save that it corresponds to the same external cause or projects itself outwardly into similar attitudes: hence it would simply be beg ging the question to deduce from the so-called likeness of two conscious states that the same cause produces the same effect. In short, if the causal relation still holds good in the realm of inner states, it cannot resemble in any way what we call CHAP, in REAL DURATION AND CAUSALITY 2OI causality in nature. For the physicist, the same cause always produces the same effect: for a psychologist who does not let himself be misled by merely apparent analogies, a deep-seated inner cause produces its effect once for all and will never reproduce it. And if it is now asserted that this effect was inseparably bound up with this particular cause, such an assertion will mean one of two things: either that, the antecedents being given, the future action might have been foreseen; or that, the action having once been performed, any other action is seen, under the given conditions, to have been impossible. Now we saw that both these assertions were equally meaningless, and that they also involved a false conception of duration. Nevertheless it will be worth while to dwell on this latter form of the determinist argument, even though it be only to explain from our Analysis of the.. ^ f conception oi point of view the meaning of the two cause, which _...underlies the words determination and causalwhole deter-.,, _.,1,1 minist argu- ity. In vain do we argue that there cannot be any question either of fore seeing a future action in the way that an astro nomical phenomenon is foreseen, or of asserting, when once an action is done, that any other action would have been impossible under the given con ditions. In vain do we add that, even when it takes this form: " The same causes produce the same effects," the principle of universal determina tion loses every shred of meaning in the inner world of conscious states. The determinist will perhaps 2O2 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, in yield to our arguments on each of these three points in particular, will admit that in the psy chical field one cannot ascribe any of these three meanings to the word determination, will probably fail to discover a fourth meaning, and yet will go on repeating that the act is inseparably bound up with its antecedents. We thus find ourselves here confronted by so deep-seated a misapprehen sion and so obstinate a prejudice that we cannot get the better of them without attacking them at their root, which is the principle of causality. By analysing the concept of cause, we shall show the ambiguity which it involves, and, though not aiming at a formal definition of freedom, we shall perhaps get beyond the purely negative idea of it which we have framed up to the present.
We perceive physical phenomena, and these phenomena obey laws. This means: (i) that " regular sue- ceivcd, can occur again in the same cession " does...not apply to shape; (2) that a certain phenomenon nates and P, which appeared after the conditions rove free a, b, c, d, and after these conditions only, will not fail to recur as soon as the same conditions are again present. If the princi ple of causality told us nothing more, as the em piricists claim, we should willingly grant these philosophers that their principle is derived from experience; but it would no longer prove anything against our freedom. For it would then be un derstood that definite antecedents give rise to a CHAP, in REAL DURATION AND CAUSALITY 2O3 definite consequent wherever experience shows us this regular succession; but the question is whether this regularity is found in the domain of consciousness too, and that is the whole pro blem of free will. We grant you for a moment that the principle of causality is nothing but the summing up of the uniform and unconditional successions observed in the past: by what right, then, do you apply it to those deep-seated states of consciousness in which no regular succession has yet been discovered, since the attempt to foresee them ever fails? And how can you base on this principle your argument to prove the determinism of inner states, when, according to you, the determinism of observed facts is the sole source of the principle itself? In truth, when the empiricists make use of the principle of causality to disprove human freedom, they take the word cause in a new meaning, which is the very meaning given to it by common sense.
To assert the regular succession of two pheno mena is, indeed, to recognize that, the first being given, we already catch sight of the second. But this wholly subjective connexion between two ideas is not enough for common sense. It seems to common sense that, if the idea of the second phenomenon is already implied in that of the first, the second phenomenon itself must exist objec tively, in some way or other, within the first pheno menon. And common sense was bound to come to this conclusion, because to distinguish exactly between an objective connexion of phenomena and a subjective association between their ideas presupposes a fairly high degree of philosophical culture. We thus pass imperceptibly from the first meaning to the second, and we picture the causal relation as a kind of prefiguring of the future phenomenon in its present conditions. Now this prefiguring can be understood in two very different ways, and it is just here that the ambiguity begins.
In the first place, mathematics furnishes us with one type of this kind of prefiguring. The causality, as verY movement by which we draw the £j ^f^i circumference of a circle on a sheet of mown P£eniS paper generates all the mathematical ne properties of this figure: in this sense phe- an unlimited number of theorems can O pre_exist within the definition, although they will be spread out in duration for the mathematician who deduces them. It is true that we are here in the realm of pure quantity and that, as geometrical properties can be expressed in the form of equations, it is easy to understand how the original equation, expressing the fundamental property of the figure, is transformed into an unlimited number of new ones, all virtually con tained in the first. On the contrary, physical phenomena, which succeed one another and are perceived by our senses, are distinguished by quality not less than by quantity, so that there would be some difficulty in at once declaring them CHAP, m REAL DURATION AND CAUSALITY 2<>5 equivalent to one another. But, just because they are perceived through our sense-organs, we seem justified in ascribing their qualitative differ ences to the impression which they make on us and in assuming, behind the heterogeneity of our sen sations, a homogeneous physical universe. Thus, we shall strip matter of the concrete qualities with which our senses clothe it, colour, heat, re sistance, even weight, and we shall finally find ourselves confronted with homogeneous extensity, space without body. The only step then remain ing will be to describe figures in space, to make them move according to mathematically formu lated laws, and to explain the apparent qualities of matter by the shape, position, and motion of these geometrical figures. Now, position is given by a system of fixed magnitudes and motion is expressed by a law, i.e. by a constant relation between variable magnitudes; but shape is a mental image, and, however tenuous, however transparent we assume it to be, it still constitutes* in so far as our imagination has, so to speak, the visual perception of it, a concrete and therefore irreducible quality of matter. It will therefore be necessary to make a clean sweep of this image itself and replace it by the abstract formula of the movement which gives rise to the figure. Pic ture then algebraical relations getting entangled in one another, becoming objective by this very entanglement, and producing, by the mere effect of their complexity, concrete, visible, and tangible