United States or Switzerland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Bergson's life has been the quiet and uneventful one of a French professor, the chief landmarks in it being the publication of his three principal works, first, in 1889, the Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience, then Matiere et Memoire in 1896, and L'Evolution creatrice in 1907.
It is at this point that Bergson offers us some help in the solution of the problem, by his Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience, better described by its English title Time and Free Will.
He was engaged on his Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience. This essay, which, in its English translation, bears the more definite and descriptive title, Time and Free Will, was submitted, along with a short Latin Thesis on Aristotle, for the degree of Docteur-es-Lettres, to which he was admitted by the University of Paris in 1889.
Already, in 1886, Professor James Ward wrote: 'In time, conceived as physical, there is no trace of intensity; in time, as psychically experienced, duration is primarily an intensive magnitude. And in 1889 Professor Bergson, in his Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience, gave us exquisite descriptions of time as we really experience it, of 'duration strictly speaking', which 'does not possess moments that are identical or exterior to each other'. Thus all our real soul life, in proportion to its depth, moves in Partial Simultaneity; and it apprehends, requires and rests, at its deepest, in an overflowingly rich Pure Simultaneity.
His first large work, Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience, or, to give it its better title, in English, Time and Free Will, appeared in 1889. Our ordinary conception of Time, that which comes to us from the physical sciences, is, Bergson maintains, a false one. It is false because so far from being temporal in character, it is spatial.
Word Of The Day