BERGSON'S THEORY OF THE INTERPENETRATION OF PSYCHIC STATES
It is, says Bergson, characteristic of psychic states that they do not, like material things remain external to one another. They inter-penetrate. Cut up by human intelligence into discrete elements, in their own nature they remain a continuum. States of mind appear successive and external to one another, because age-long association with matter has accustomed men to material modes of thought. Man's intelligence is a by-product of activity. For purposes of action it is the externality of things that matters. The inner connection is relatively unimportant. Men act with precision on matter, because perception cuts up the continuum of matter into bodies, defined bodies no two of which can occupy the same space. Intelligence originating thus by contact with matter naturally prefers mechanical categories. These categories applicable to matter when applied to higher forms of existence mislead. We naturally conceive psychic states as external to one another, and their interpenetration seems an abnormality. At this stage of thought experience is pictured as a line of indefinite length, infinitely divisible, whose divisions correspond to the moments of consciousness. This spatial picture of mind is misleading in many ways, not the least in that it can offer no reasonable theory of the subconscious. Thinkers who materialise mental experience have no room in their theory for the sub-conscious. It is for them bare non-consciousness, a psychic vacuum. When, however, we start from this unique characteristic, that mind possesses, of remaining one and indivisible throughout the greatest appearance of diversity, the sub-conscious falls naturally into the scheme. No part of our experience perishes. It is essentially self-perpetuating memory. The needs of action relegate the greater portion of it to the sub-conscious, but it is there, always linked to our conscious experience, and only awaiting the occasion to emerge into the full light of consciousness. Past penetrates into the present. One portion of our present penetrates into the other portions. Conscious and unconscious, past and present, combine to form one wonderful whole.