GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

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because of the intellect 1
! incorrigible habit of cutting up
the reality with which it deals into link bits. When the
reality which is an individual personality is divided into
bits, each part of it appears to be causally dependent upon
all the other parts, each event in it to be the necessary
result of every other event, each phase of the character
which the personality assumes to be the product of all the
past phases, and each action in which it expresses itself
to be determined by all the motives and desires which are
playing upon it at the moment of action.
But this view, Bergson insists, is only true of the part,
the event, the phase, and the action when they are con*
sidcrcd in isolation. Now an action considered in isolation
is an abstraction and a false abstraction from the action
which in real life occurred. The abstracting has been done
by the intellect which insists on regarding our personality
as being made up of states of consciousness which persist
unchanged until they are replaced by other states, and of
actions in which the separate states of consciousness express
themselves. Having made this abstraction, the intellect then
proceeds to reason about the actions so abstracted, as if
they were isolated and self-contained events springing from
and entirely conditioned by the states of which they are
the expressions.
But, Bergson insists, the life of the individual is not to
be regarded as a succession of changing states; the life of
the individual is a continuous and indivisible flow, and it
is precisely when it is taken as such that it is seen to be
free and undetermined. Divide die individual's life into
parts, consider the individual's actions separately, and you
will find that each part and each action is determined by
its predecessors. But what is true of the parts is not true
of die personality as a whole. It is the nature of life to be
creative, and the individual taken as a whole is necessarily
creative by virtue of the fact that he is alive. But if his
life is creative, and creative in each moment of it, it is
clear that it is never completely determined by what
went before. If it were so determined, it would only