2o6 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, in reality, — you will be merely drawing the conse quences of the principle of causality, understood in the sense of an actual prefiguring of the future in the present. The scientists of our time do not seem, indeed, to have carried abstraction so far, except perhaps Lord Kelvin. This acute and pro found physicist assumed that space is filled with! a homogeneous and incompressible fluid in which vortices move, thus producing the properties of matter: these vortices are the constituent ele ments of bodies; the atom thus becomes a move ment, and physical phenomena are reduced to regular movements taking place within an incom pressible fluid. But, if you will notice that this fluid is perfectly homogeneous, that between its parts there is neither an empty interval which separates them nor any difference whatever by which they can be distinguished, you will see that all movement taking place within this fluid is really equivalent to absolute immobility, since before, during, and after the movement nothing changes and nothing has changed in the whole.
The movement which is here spoken of is thus not a movement which actually takes place, but only a movement which is pictured mentally: it is a relation between relations. It is implicitly sup posed, though perhaps not actually realized, that motion has something to do with consciousness, that in space there are only simultaneities, and that the business of the physicist is to provide us with the means of calculating these relations of simultaneity for any moment of our duration. Nowhere has mechanism been carried further than in this system, since the very shape of the ultimate elements of matter is here reduced to a movement. But the Cartesian physics already anticipated this interpretation; for if matter is nothing, as Descartes claimed, but homogeneous extensity, the movements of the parts of this extensity can be conceived through the abstract law which governs them or through an algebraical equation between variable magnitudes, but can not be represented under the concrete form of an image. And it would not be difficult to prove that the more the progress of mechanical explana tions enables us to develop this conception of causality and therefore to relieve the atom of the weight of its sensible qualities, the more the con crete existence of the phenomena of nature tends to vanish into algebraical smoke.
Thus understood, the relation of causality is a necessary relation in the sense that it will indeit thus leads finitely approach the relation of identity, as a curve approaches its asymptote. "St The principle of identity is the absolute Star? to "pre- ^aw °* our consciousness I it asserts - tnat what is thought is thought at the ration. moment when we think it: and what gives this principle its absolute necessity is that it does not bind the future to the present, but only the present to the present: it expresses the unshakable confidence that consciousness feels in itself, so long as, faithful to its duty, it confines itself to declaring the apparent present state of the mind. But the principle of causality, in so far as it is supposed to bind the future to the pre sent, could never take the form of a necessary principle; for the successive moments of real time are not bound up with one another, and no effort of logic will succeed in proving that what has been will be or will continue to be, that the same antecedents will always give rise to identical consequents. Descartes understood this so well that he attributed the regularity of the physical world and the continuation of the same effects to the constantly renewed grace of Providence; he built up, as it were, an instantaneous physics, intended for a universe the whole duration of which might as well be confined to the present moment. And Spinoza maintained that the inde finite series of phenomena, which takes for us the form of a succession in time, was equivalent, in the absolute, to the divine unity: he thus assumed, on the one hand, that the relation of apparent causality between phenomena melted away into a relation of identity in the absolute, and, on the other, that the indefinite duration of things was all contained in a single moment, which is eternity. In short, whether we study Cartesian physics, Spinozistic metaphysics, or the scientific theories of our own time, we shall find everywhere the same anxiety to establish a relation of logical necessity between cause and effect, and we shall see that CHAP, in REAL DURATION AND CAUSALITY 20Q this anxiety shows itself in a tendency to trans form relations of succession into relations of inherence, to do away with active duration, and to substitute for apparent causality a fundamental identity.
Now, if the development of the notion of causality, understood in the sense of necessary The necessary connexion, leads to the Spinozistic or Cartesian conception of nature, inversely,;nb°unt" au* relation of necessary determination established between successive pheno mena may be supposed to arise from our perceiving, in a confused form, some mathe matical mechanism behind their heterogeneity. We do not claim that common sense has any intuition of the kinetic theories of matter, still less perhaps of a Spinozistic mechanism; but it will be seen that the more the effect seems neces sarily bound up with the cause, the more we tend to put it in the cause itself, as a mathematical consequence in its principle, and thus to cancel the effect of duration. That under the influence of the same external conditions I do not behave to-day as I behaved yesterday is not at all sur prising, because I change, because I endure. But things considered apart from our perception do not seem to endure; and the more thoroughly we examine this idea, the more absurd it seems to us to suppose that the same cause should not produce to-day the effect which it produced yesterday. We certainly feel, it is true, that although things do not 2IO TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, in endure as we do ourselves, nevertheless there must be some reason why phenomena are seen to succeed one another instead of being set out all at once.
And this is why the notion of causality, although it gets indefinitely near that of identity, will never seem to us to coincide with it, unless we conceive clearly the idea of a mathematical mechanism or unless some subtle metaphysics removes our very legitimate scruples on the point. It is no less obvious that our belief in the necessary determina tion of phenomena by one another becomes stronger in proportion as we are more inclined to regard duration as a subjective form of our con sciousness. In other words, the more we tend to set up the causal relation as a relation of necessary determination, the more we assert thereby that things do not endure like ourselves. This amounts to saying that the more we strengthen the prin ciple of causality, the more we emphasize the difference between a physical series and a psychical one. Whence, finally, it would result (however para doxical the opinion may seem) that the assump tion of a relation of mathematical inherence be tween external phenomena ought to bring with it, as a natural or at least as a plausible consequence, the belief in human free will. But this last conse quence will not concern us for the moment: we are merely trying here to trace out the first mean ing of the word causality, and we think we have shown that the prefiguring of the future in the present is easily conceived under a mathematical form, thanks to a certain conception of duration which, without seeming to be so, is fairly familiar to common sense.
But there is a prefiguring of another kind, still more familiar to our mind, because immediate prefiguring, as consciousness gives us the type of it. Sf rUtSeSt We S°> m fact> through successive states nof^reauz!11" °^ consciousness, and although the later SeSoanotfl0in- was no* contained in the earlier, we had IS6 Jeter-" before us at the time a more or less conmination. fused idea of it. The actual realization of this idea, however, did not appear as certain but merely as possible. Yet, between the idea and the action, some hardly perceptible intermediate processes come in, the whole mass of which takes for us a form sui generis, which is called the feeling of effort. And from the idea to the effort, from the effort to the act, the progress has been so continuous that we cannot say where the idea and the effort end, and where the act begins. Hence we see that in a certain sense we may still say here that the future was prefigured in the present; but it must be added that this prefiguring is very imperfect, since the future action of which we have the present idea is conceived as realizable but not as realized, and since, even when we plan the effort necessary to accomplish it, we feel that there is still time to stop. If, then, we decide to picture the causal relation in this second form, we can assert a priori that there will no longer be a relation of necessary determination between the cause and the effect, for the effect will no longer be given in the cause. It will be there only in the state of pure possibility and as a vague idea which perhaps will not be followed by the corresponding action. But we shall not be surprised that this approximation is enough for common sense if we think of the readiness with which children and primitive people accept the idea of a whimsical Nature, in which caprice plays a part no less important than necessity. Nay, this way of conceiving causality will be more easily understood by the general run of people, since it does not demand any effort of abstraction and only implies a certain analogy between the outer and the inner world, between the succession of objective pheno mena and that of our subjective states.
In truth, this second way of conceiving the rela tion of cause to effect is more natural than the first IMS second m that it immediately satisfies the need ZSSSKL of a mental image- If we look for the fneL!£"ziedS phenomenon B within the phenomenon to Spinoza. ^, which regularly precedes it, the reason is that the habit of associating the two images ends in giving us the idea of the second pheno menon wrapped up, as it were, in that of the first. It is natural, then, that we should push this objectification to its furthest limit and that we should make the phenomenon A itself into a psychic state, in which the phenomenon B is supposed to be contained as a very vague idea. We simply suppose, thereby, that the objective connexion CHAP, iii REAL DURATION AND CAUSALITY 213 of the two phenomena resembles the subjective association which suggested the idea of it to us.
The qualities of things are thus set up as actual states, somewhat analogous to those of our own self; the material universe is credited with a vague personality which is diffused through space and which, although not exactly endowed with a con scious will, is led on from one state to another by an inner impulse, a kind of effort. Such was ancient hylozoism, a half-hearted and even con tradictory hypothesis, which left matter its extensity although attributing to it real conscious states, and which spread the qualities of matter through out extensity while treating these qualities as inner i.e. simple states. It was reserved for Leibniz to do away with this contradiction and to show that, if the succession of external qualities or phenomena is understood as the succession of our own ideas, these qualities must be regarded as simple states or perceptions, and the matter which supports them as an unextended monad, analogous to our soul. But, if such be the case, the successive states of matter cannot be per ceived from the outside any more than our own psychic states; the hypothesis of pre-established harmony must be introduced in order to explain how these inner states are representative of one another. Thus, with our second conception of the relation of causality we reach Leibniz, as with the first we reached Spinoza. And in both cases we merely push to their extreme limit or formulate with greater precision two half-hearted and con fused ideas of common sense.
Now it is obvious that the relation of causality, understood in this second way, does not involve it does not in- ^ne necessary determination of the effect deter-" ^Y *ne cause- History indeed proves it. We see faa.t ancient hylozoism, the first outcome of this conception of causality, explained the regular succession of causes and effects by a real deus ex machina: sometimes it was a Necessity external to things and hovering over them, some times an inner Reason acting by rules somewhat similar to those which govern our own conduct. Nor do the perceptions of Leibniz's monad neces sitate one another; God has to regulate their order in advance. In fact, Leibniz's determinism does not spring from his conception of the monad, but from the fact that he builds up the universe with monads only. Having denied all mechanical influence of substances on one another, he had to explain how it happens that their states corre spond. Hence a determinism which arises from the necessity of positing a pre-established harmony, and not at all from the dynamic conception of the relation of causality. But let us leave history aside. Consciousness itself testifies that the abstract idea of force is that of indeter minate effort, that of an effort which has not yet issued in an act and in which the act is still only at the stage of an idea. In other words, the dynamic conception of the causal CHAP, m REAL DURATION AND CAUSALITY 215 relation ascribes to things a duration absolutely like our own, whatever may be the nature of this duration; to picture in this way the relation of cause to effect is to assume that the future is not more closely bound up with the present in the external world than it is in our own inner life.
It follows from this twofold analysis that the principle of causality involves two contradictory conceptions of duration, two mutually Each o! these < '.
contradictory exclusive ways of prefiguring the future interpretations. Jf °...of causality in the present, bometimes all phenoand duration,.,,.,.., by itself mena, physical or psychical, are pictured freedom; as enduring in the same way, and theretaken to-...,,...
gather they fore in the way that we do: in this case the future will exist in the present only as an idea, and the passing from the present to the future will take the form of an effort which does not always lead to the realization of the idea conceived. Sometimes, on the other hand, dura tion is regarded as the characteristic form of con scious states; in this case, things are no longer supposed to endure as we do, and a mathematical pre-existence of their future in their present is admitted. Now, each of these two hypotheses, when taken by itself, safeguards human freedom; for the first would lead to the result that even the phenomena of nature were contingent, and the second, by attributing the necessary determina tion of physical phenomena to the fact that things do not endure as we do, invites us to regard the self which is subject to duration 2i6 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, in as a free force. Therefore, every clear con ception of causality, where we know our own meaning, leads to the idea of human freedom as a natural consequence. Unfortunately, the habit has grown up of taking the principle of caus ality in both senses at the same time, because the one is more flattering to our imagination and the other is more favourable to mathematical reason ing. Sometimes we think particularly of the regular succession of physical phenomena and of the kind of inner effort by which one becomes another; sometimes we fix our mind on the absolute regularity of these phenomena, and from the idea of regularity we pass by imperceptible steps to that of mathematical necessity, which excludes duration understood in the first way. And we do not see any harm in letting these two concep tions blend into one another, and in assigning greater importance to the one or the other accord ing as we are more or less concerned with the interests of science. But to apply the principle of causality, in this ambiguous form, to the suc cession of conscious states, is uselessly and wan tonly to run into inextricable difficulties. The idea of force, which really excludes that of neces sary determination, has got into the habit, so to speak, of amalgamating with that of necessity, in consequence of the very use which we make of the principle of causality in nature. On the one hand, we know force only through the witness of consciousness, and consciousness does not assert, does not even understand, the absolute determina tion, now, of actions that are still to come: that is all that experience teaches us, and if we hold by experience we should say that we feel ourselves free, that we perceive force, rightly or wrongly, as a free spontaneity. But, on the other hand, this idea of force, carried over into nature, travel ling there side by side with the idea of necessity, has got corrupted before it returns from the jour ney. It returns impregnated with the idea of necessity: and in the light of the role which we have made it play in the external world, we'regard force as determining with strict necessity the effects which flow from it. Here again the mistake made by consciousness arises from the fact that it looks at the self, not directly, but by a kind of refraction through the forms which it has lent to external perception, and which the latter does not give back without having left its mark on them. A compromise, as it were, has been brought about between the idea of force and that of necessary determination. The wholly mechanical deter mination of two external phenomena by one another now assumes in our eyes the same form as the dynamic relation of our exertion of force to the act which springs from it: but, in return, this latter relation takes the form of a mathematical derivation, the human action being supposed to issue mechanically, and therefore necessarily, from the force which produces it. There is no doubt that this mingling of two different and 2l8 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP. HI almost opposite ideas offers advantages to com mon sense, since it enables us to picture in the same way, and denote by one and the same word, both the relation which exists between two mo ments of our life and that which binds together the successive moments of the external world. We have seen that, though our deepest conscious states exclude numerical multiplicity, yet we break them up into parts external to one another; that though the elements of concrete duration permeate one another, duration expressing itself in extensity exhibits moments as distinct as the bodies scattered in space. Is it surprising, then, that between the moments of our life, when it has been, so to speak, objectified, we set up a relation analogous to the objective relation of causality, and that an exchange, which again may be com pared to the phenomenon of endosmosis, takes place between the dynamic idea of free effort and the mathematical concept of necessary deter mination?
But the sundering of these two ideas is an accom plished fact in the natural sciences. The physicist Though united mav speak of forces, and even picture thought!athe their mode of action by analogy with an eSt i2dne- inner effort, but he will never introduce SSondetarre tms hypothesis into a scientific explanabyPtPhyPsiSi tion. Even those who, with Faraday, replace the extended atoms by dynamic points, will treat the centres of force and the lines of force mathematically, without troubling about CHAP, m REAL DURATION AND CAUSALITY force itself considered as an activity or an effort. It thus comes to be understood that the relation of external causality is purely mathematical, and has no resemblance to the relation between psy chical force and the act which springs from it.
It is now time to add that the relation of inner causality is purely dynamic, and has no analogy They should with *ne relation of two external phetoo1?? apart" nomena which condition one another.
psychology. ^OT, as the latter are capable of recurring in a homogeneous space, their relation can be expressed in terms of a law, whereas deep-seated psychic states occur once in consciousness and will never occur again. A careful analysis of the psychological phenomenon led us to this con clusion in the beginning: the study of the notions of causality and duration, viewed in themselves, has merely confirmed it.
We can now formulate our conception of freedom. Freedom is the relation of the concrete self to the act which it performs. This but indefln- relation is indefinable, lust because we nhlo are free. For we can analyse a thing, but not a process; we can break up extensity, but not duration. Or, if we persist in analysing it, we unconsciously transform the process into a thing and duration into extensity. By the very fact of breaking up concrete time we set out its moments in homogeneous space; in place of the doing we put the already done; and, as we have begun by, so to speak, stereotyping the activity of the self, we see spontaneity settle down into inertia and freedom into necessity. Thus, any positive definition of freedom will ensure the victory of determinism.
Shall we define the free act by saying of this act, when it is once done, that it might have been left undone? But this assertion, as also its opposite, implies the idea of an absolute equivalence between concrete duration and its spatial symbol: and as soon as we admit this equivalence, we are led on, by the very development of the formula which we have just set forth, to the most rigid deter minism.
Shall we define the free act as " that which could not be foreseen, even when all the conditions were known in advance? " But to conceive all the conditions as given, is, when dealing with concrete duration, to place oneself at the very moment at which the act is being performed. Or else it is admitted that the matter of psychic duration can be pictured symbolically in advance, which amounts, as we said, to treating time as a homogeneous medium, and to reasserting in new words the absolute equivalence of duration with its symbol. A closer study of this second definition of freedom will thus bring us once more to determinism.
Shall we finally define the free act by saying that it is not necessarily determined by its cause? But either these words lose their meaning or we understand by them that the same inner causes will not always call forth the same effects. We admit, CHAP, m REAL DURATION AND CAUSALITY 221 then, that the psychic antecedents of a free act can be repeated, that freedom is displayed in a duration whose moments resemble one another, and that time is a homogeneous medium, like space. We shall thus be brought back to the idea of an equivalence between duration and its spatial symbol; and by pressing the definition of freedom which we have laid down, we shall once more get determinism out of it.
To sum up; every demand for explanation in regard to freedom comes back, without our suspecting it, to the following question: " Can time be adequately represented by space? " To which we answer: Yes, if you are dealing with time flown; No, if you speak of time flowing. Now, the free act takes place in time which is flowing and not in time which has already flown. Freedom is therefore a fact, and among the facts which we observe there is none clearer. All the difficulties of the problem, and the problem itself, arise from the desire to endow duration with the same attributes as extensity, to interpret a suc cession by a simultaneity, and to express the idea of freedom in a language into which it is obviously untranslatable.
To sum up the foregoing discussion, we shall put aside for the present Kant's terminology and also his doctrine, to which we shall return later, and we shall take the point of ceive things view of common sense. Modern psyformsbor- chology seems to us particularly conrowed from,,.
our own con- cerned to prove that we perceive things through the medium of certain forms, borrowed from our own constitution. This tend ency has become more and more marked since Kant: while the German philosopher drew a sharp line of separation between time and space, the extensive and the intensive, and, as we should say to-day, consciousness and external percep tion, the empirical school, carrying analysis still further, tries to reconstruct the extensive out of the intensive, space out of duration, and exter nality out of inner states. Physics, moreover, comes in to complete the work of psychology in this respect: it shows that, if we wish to forecast phenomena, we must make a clean sweep of the impression which they produce on consciousness and treat sensations as signs of reality, not as reality itself.
It seemed to us that there was good reason to set ourselves the opposite problem and to ask But are not whether the most obvious states of the the leif^r-1 eg° itself, which we believe that we directly, are not mostly perceived through the medium of certain world p forms borrowed from the external world, which thus gives us back what we have lent it. A priori it seems fairly probable that this is what happens. For, assuming that the forms alluded to, into which we fit matter, come entirely from the mind, it seems difficult to apply them con stantly to objects without the latter soon leaving a mark on them: by then using these forms to gain a knowledge of our own person we run the risk of mistaking for the colouring of the self the reflection of the frame in which we place it, i.e. the external world. But one can go further still and assert that forms applicable to things cannot be entirely our own work, that they must result from a compromise between matter and mind, that if we give much to matter we probably receive something from it, and that thus, when we try to grasp ourselves after an excursion into the external world, we no longer have our hands free.
Now just as, in order to ascertain the real relations of physical phenomena to one another, we abstract whatever obviously clashes with the intensity, them in our way oi perceiving and duration and,.,,/.
voluntary de- thinking, so, in order to view the self termination of..,...•,-,,, psychic states, in its original purity, psychology ought we must elim-,.,. £ mate the idea to eliminate or correct certain forms which bear the obvious mark of the external world. What are these forms? When isolated from one another and regarded as so many distinct units, psychic states seem to be more or less intense. Next, looked at in their multipli city, they unfold in time and constitute duration. Finally, in their relations to one another, and in so far as a certain unity is preserved throughout their multiplicity, they seem to determine one another. Intensity, duration, voluntary determination, these are the three ideas which had to be clarified by ridding them of all that they owe to the intru sion of the sensible world and, in a word, to the obsession of the idea of space.