CONTINUITY OF BERGSON S THOUGHT 151 



to tell his story and not by scanning his verses and counting his vowels 

 and consonants. 



The soul is the enduring thing. As long as we are really living 

 as men naturally live, striving, aspiring, accomplishing, inventing, 

 adventuring, the soul is everything, but in moments of fatigue and 

 detension matter becomes real, and conduct determined, and intellect 

 and the laws of nature usurp the place of life. 



I. Time and Free-Will 

 Can Conscious Slates Be Measured Scientifically? 



In his Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Bergson first 

 deals with his great conception of the intensity of conscious states. 

 He takes the most uncompromising attitude toward those who speak 

 of measuring the intensity of conscious states. Toward the end of 

 the first chapter, he shows that the Weber-Fechner law of psycho- 

 physics is based entirely upon a misconception of the true nature of 

 intensity; and that not only those who support the law, in any form, 

 but also even those who oppose it, yet continue to speak of magni- 

 tudes as applicable to feelings, are proceeding on a false assumption, 

 which, however it may be approved by common-sense, and by science 

 (especially Physics), must inevitably lead to wrong metaphysical 

 conclusions (especially to a denial of free-will). This question as to 

 the applicability of the concept of quantity to conscious states — 

 feelings, sensations, affections — seems to Bergson to be the root of 

 the problem of free-will. If we once admit that sensations are measur- 

 able, the whole argument for freedom is abandoned. Sensations 

 differ in quality, but the idea that they differ in quantity always 

 arises from reading the cause of the sensation into the effect, the 

 sensation itself. 



In the second chapter, he proceeds to speak of the multiplicity of 

 our sensations. He finds that the multiplicity of conscious states is 

 wholly qualitative. Discrete multiplicity is quantitative, but this is 

 precisely because it depends upon the intuition of space: the multi- 

 plicity of sensation itself is purely qualitative, and measurement is 

 not predicable of this any more than of simple feelings. 



