BERGSON'S CONCEPTION OF DURATION 



By Lorena Underbill 



The most recurrent theme in Bergson's works' is his conception 

 of duration. The root of all his views lies in his idea of duration as 

 contrasted with that of mathematical time or time spatially sym- 

 bolized, or taken as the measure of change in organic nature. It 

 was the most prominent idea in his mind when he wrote his Doctor's 

 thesis — Time and Free Will.' This book offers a new theory of the 

 will, namely, that duration is will, and also a new method of philoso- 

 phizing. It proves what has never been proved before: that the 

 will is free, that the duration of the ego is the ultimate truth of exist- 

 ence and needs no further proof than that of immediate experience. 

 Not, to be sure, the experience that is represented to us by the intellect, 

 but the inner experience of feeling and volition, where we see the 

 true nature of duration in constant, never-ending change. It is 

 ever changing and ever new, because it carries the past along with it, 

 as a rolling snowball grows. 



In the first chapter of Time and Free Will, Bergson deals with 

 the intensity of conscious states and says that it is impossible to 

 Conscious "measure" the intensity of states of consciousness, that 

 States Not when we apply magnitudes to feeUngs we proceed on a 

 Quantitative (0}^^ assumption which inevitably leads to a denial of 

 free will. Sensations, feelings, etc., differ in quality but not in 

 quantity. The multiplicity of conscious states is qualitative," and," 

 he proceeds, "we shall no longer consider states of consciousness in 

 isolation from one another, but in their concrete multiplicity in so far 

 as they unfold themselves in duration." This unfolding multiphcity 

 of sensation is duration in the true sense. "We shall now have to 

 inquire what the multiphcity of our inner states becomes, and what 



■ Time and Free Will (English translation by F. L. Pogson), London, 1910; Mailer and Memory (English 

 translation by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer), London, 1911; Creative Evolution (English trans- 

 lation by Arthur Mitchell), New York, 1911. 



■ Published in French in 1889. 



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