What now is M. Bergson's
solution? That no articulated world, either material or psychical,
exists at all, but only a tendency or enduring effort to evolve images
of both sorts; or rather to evolve images which in their finer texture
and vibration are images of matter, but which grouped and
foreshortened in various ways are images of minds. The idea of nature
and the idea of consciousness are two apperceptions or syntheses of
the same stuff of experience. The two worlds thus become substantially
identical, continuous, and superposable; each can merge insensibly
into the other. "To perceive all the influences of all the points of
all bodies would be to sink to the condition of a material object."[4]
To perceive some of these influences, by having created organs that
shut out the others, is to be a mind.
[Footnote 4: _Matiere et Memoire_, p. 38.]
This solution is obtained by substituting, as usual, the ideas of
things for the things themselves and cheating the honest man who was
talking about objects by answering him as if he were talking about
himself. Certainly, if we could limit ourselves to feeling life flow
and the whole world vibrate, we should not raise the question debated
between realists and idealists; but not to raise a question is one
thing and to have solved it is another.
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