Creative Evolution — Henri Bergson (trans. Arthur Mitchell, 1911)

to sense, which will transmit them, as more or less distinct ideas, to the intelligence. In this sense the negation of dampness is as objective a thing, as purely intellectual, as remote from every pedagogical intention, as affirmation. — But let us look at it more closely: we shall see that the negative proposition, "The ground is not damp," and the affirmative proposition, "The ground is dry," have en- tirely different contents. The second implies that we know the dry, that we have experienced the specific sensations, tactile or visual for example, that are at the base of this idea. The first requires nothing of the sort; it could equally well have been formulated by an intelligent fish, who had never perceived anything but the wet. It would be necessary, it is true, that this fish should have risen to the distinction between the real and the possible, and that he should care to anticipate the error of his fellow-fishes, who doubtless consider as alone possible the condition of wetness in which they actually live. Keep strictly to the terms of the proposition, "The ground is not damp," and you will find that it means two things: (1) that one might believe that the ground is damp, (2) that the dampness is replaced in fact by a certain quality x. This quality is left indeterminate, either because we have no positive knowledge of it, or because it has no actual interest for the person to whom the negation is addressed. To deny, therefore, always consists in presenting in an abridged form a system of two affirmations; the one determinate, which applies to a certain possible; the other indeterminate, referring to the unknown or in- different reality that supplants this possibility. The second affirmation is \'irtually contained in the judgment we apply to the first, a judgment which is negation it- self. And what gives negation its subjective character is precisely this, that in the discovery of a replacement

it takes account only of the replaced, and is not con- cerned with what replaces. The replaced exists only as a conception of the mind. It is necessary, in order to continue to see it, and consequently in order to speak of it, to turn our back on the reality, which flows from the past to the present, advancing from behind. It is this that we do when we deny. We discover the change, or more generally the substitution, as a traveller would see the course of his carriage if he looked out behind, and only knew at each moment the point at which he had ceased to be; he could never determine his actual position except by relation to that which he had just quitted, in- stead of grasping it in itself.

To sum up, for a mind which should follow purely
and simply the thread of experience, there would be no
void, no nought, even relative or partial, no p>ossible
negation. Such a. mind would see facts succeed facts,
states succeed states, things succeed things. What it
would note at each moment would be things existing,
states appearing, events happening. It would live in
the actual, and, if it were capable of judging, it would
never affirm anything except the existence of the present.

Endow this mind with memory, and especially with the desire to dwell on the past; give it the faculty of dissociating and of distinguishing: it wilt no longer only note the present state of the passing reality; it will repre- sent the passing as a change, and therefore as a contrast between what has been and what is. And as there is no essential difference between a past that we remember and a past that we imagine, it will quickly rise to the idea of the "possible" in general.

It will thus be shunted on to the siding of negation.
And especially it will be at the point of representing
a disappearance. But it will not yet have reached it.

To represent that a thing has disappeared, it is not enough to perceive a contrast between the past and the present; it is necessary besides to turn our back on the present, to dwell on the past, and to think the contrast of the past with the present in terms of the past only, without letting the present appear in it.

The idea of annihilation is therefore not a pure idea; it implies that we regret the past or that we conceive it as regrettable, that we have some reason to linger over it. The idea arises when the phenomenon of sutetitition is cut in two by a mind which considers only the first half, because that alone interests it. Suppress all interest, all feeling, and there is nothing left but the reality that flows, together with the knowledge ever renewed that it impresses on us of its present state.

From annihilation to negation, which is a more general operation, there is now only a step, All that is necessary is to represent the contrast of what is, not only with what has been, but also with all that might have been. And we must express this contrast as a function of what might have been, and not of what is; we must affirm the existence of the actual while looking only at the possible. The formula we thus obtain no longer expresses merely a disappointment of the individual; it is made to correct or guard against an error, which is rather supposed to be the error of another. In this sense, negation has a peda- gogical and social character.

Now, once negation is formulated, it presents an aspect symmetrical with that of affirmation; if affirmation affirms an objective reality, it seems that negation must affirm a non-reality equally objective, and, so to say, equally real. In which we are both right and wrong: wrong, because negation cannot be objectified, in so far as it is negative; right, however, in that the negation of a thins

[Ohaf. I

impliee the latent afSrmstion of its replacement by some- thing else, which we systematically leave on one eide. But the negative form of negation benefits by the affirma- tion at the bottom of it. Bestriding the positive solid reality to which it is attached, this phantom objectifies itself. Thus is formed the idea of the void or of a partial nought, a thing being supposed to be replaced, not by another thing, but by a void which it leaves, that is, by the negation of itself. Now, as this operation works on anything whatever, we suppose it performed on each thing in turn, and finally on all things in block. We thus obtain the idea of absolute Nothmg. If now we analyze this idea of Nothing, we find that it is, at bottom, the idea of Everything, together with a movement of the mind that keeiis jumping from one thing to another, refuses to stand Btill, and concentrates all its attention on this refusal by never determining its actual position except by relation to that which it has just left. It ia therefore an idea eminently comprehensive and full, as full and compre- hensive as the idea of AU, to which it is very closely akin.

How then can the idea of Nought be opposed to that of All? Is it not plain that this is to oppose the full to the full, and that the question, "Why does something exist?" is consequently without meaning, a pseudo- problem raised about a pseudo-idea? Yet we must say once more why this phantom of a problem haunts the mind with such obstinacy. In vain do we show that in the idea of an "annihilation of the real" there is only the image of all realities expelling one another endlessly, in a circle; in vain do we add that the idea of non-existence is only that of the expulsion of an imponderable existence, or a "merely possible" existence, by a more substantial ex- istence which would then be the true reality; in vain do we. find in the sui generis form of negation an element which

The Idea Op 'Nothing'

is not intellectiial — negation being the judgment of a judgment, aa admonition given to some one else or to oneself, so that it is absurd to attribute to negation the power of creating ideas of a new kind, viz. ideas without content; — in spite of all, the conviction persists that before things, or at least under things, there is "Nothing." If we seek the reason of this fact, we shall find it precisely in the feeling, in the social and, so to speak, practical element, that gives its specific form to negation. The greatest philosophic difficulties arise, as we have said, from the fact that the forms of human action venture outside of their proper sphere. We are made in order to act as much as, and more than, in order to think — or rather, when we follow the bent of our nature, it is in order to act that we think. It is therefore no wonder that the habits of action give their tone to those of thought, and that our mind always perceives things in the same order in which we are accustomed to picture them when we propose to act on them. Now, it is unquestionable, as we remarked above, that everj- human action has its starting-point in a dissatisfaction, and thereby in a feeling of absence. We should not act if we did not set before ourselves an end, and we seek a thing only because we feel the lack of it. Our action proceeds thus from "nothing" to "something," and its very essence is to embroider "something" on the canvas of "nothing." The truth is that the "nothing" concerned here is the absence not so much of a thing as of a utility. If I bring a visitor into a room that I have not yet furnished, I say to him that "there is nothing in it." Yet I know the room is full of air; but, a3 we do not sit on air, the room truly contains nothing that at this moment, for the visitor and for myself, counts for anything. In a genera! way, human work consists in creating utility; and, as long as

298 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap.

the work is not done, there is "nothing" — nothing that we want. Our life is thus spent in filling voids, which our intellect conceives und er the influence, by no means intellectual, of desire and of regret, under the pressure of vital necessities; and if we mean by void an absence of utility and not of things, we may say, in this quite relative sense, that we are constantly going from the void to the full: such is the direction which our action takes. Our speculation cannot help doing the same; and, naturally, it passes from the relative sense to the absolute sense, since it is exercised on things themselves and not on the utihty they have for us. Thus is implanted in us the idea that reality (ills a void, and that Nothing, conceived as an absence of everything, pre-exists before all things in right, if not in fact. It is this illusion that we have tried to remove by showing that the idea of Nothing, if we try to see in it that of an annihilation of all things, is self- destructive and reduced to a mere word ; and that if, on the contrary, it is truly an idea, then we find in it as much matter as in the idea of All.

This long analysis has been necessary to show that a self-sufficient reality is not -necessarily a reality foreign to duration. U we pass (consciously or unconsciously) through the idea of the nought in order to reach that of being, the being to which we come is a logical or mathe- matical essence, therefore non-temporal. And, conse- quently, a static conception of the real is foreed on us: everything appears ^ven once for all. in eternity. But we must accustom ourselves to think being directly, without making a detour, without first appealing to the phantom of the nought which interposes itself be- tween it and us. We must strive to see in order to see, and no longer to see in order to act. Then the Absolute

Becoming

is revealed very near us and, in a certain measure, in us. It is of psychological and not of mathematical nor logical essence. It lives with us. Like us, but in certain aspects infinitely more concentrated and more gathered up in itself, it endures.

But do we ever think true duration? Here again a direct taking possession is necessary. It ia no use trying to approach duration: we must install ourselves within it straight away. This is what the intellect gener- ally refuses to do, accustomed as it is to think the moving by means of the unmovable.