United States or Ukraine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is language again which makes it so difficult to point out that this assumption is mistaken, because, actually, the form of facts is non-logical, a continuous process and not a series.
Like many of their betters, these two men probably imagined the assigned reasons to be the entire cause of their conversion, making no account of the many reasonable though non-logical motives by which the change was really brought about.
Bergson says, then, that the process of duration which we know directly, if it is to be called a series at all, must be described as a series whose "parts" interpenetrate, and this is the first important respect in which non-logical duration differs from a logical series.
You will understand that I am here using 'demonstration' in the non-logical sense, namely in the sense in which a lecturer demonstrates by the aid of a frog and a microscope the circulation of the blood for an elementary class of medical students. I will call such demonstration 'speculative' demonstration, remembering Hamlet's use of the word 'speculation' when he says,
All descriptions in words of what is non-logical are bound to be a mass of contradictions, for, having applied any word it is necessary immediately to guard against its logical implications by adding another which contradicts them.
If Bergson is right in claiming that the actual fact is non-logical then obviously all attempts to describe it, since they must be expressed in terms of abstractions, will teem with false implications which must be discounted if the description is to convey the meaning intended.
Now, strictly speaking, of course, these "states of consciousness" ought not to be referred to in the plural, it is, in fact, a contradiction to speak of "states of consciousness" having "no relation to quantity": a plurality must always form some quantity. This contradiction is the natural consequence of attempting to put what is non-logical into words.
Perhaps the most important example of non-logical a priori knowledge is knowledge as to ethical value. I am not speaking of judgements as to what is useful or as to what is virtuous, for such judgements do require empirical premisses; I am speaking of judgements as to the intrinsic desirability of things.
Now according to Bergson the red which we know directly is a period of the vibrations of matter contracted by memory so as to produce an actual perceived fact. As matter red does not change, it is absolutely discrete and complex, in a word, logical: as fact it is non-logical and forms a creative process of duration.
The form which belongs to facts but not to abstractions Bergson calls "duration." Duration can be described negatively by saying that it is non-logical, but when we attempt any positive description language simply breaks down and we can do nothing but contradict ourselves.
Word Of The Day