The more subtle and plausible case for psychological determinism Bergson shows to be no more tenable than that offered for the physical. It is due to adherence to the vicious Association-psychology, which is a psychology without a self. To say the self is determined by motive will not suffice, for in a sense it is true, in another sense it is not, and we must be careful of our words. If we say the self acts in accordance with the strongest motive, well and good, but how do we know it is the strongest? Only because it has prevailed—that is, only because the self acted upon it, which is totally different from claiming that the self was determined by it externally. To say the self is determined by certain tives is to say it is self-determined. The essential thing in all this is the vitality of the self.
The whole difficulty, Bergson points out, arises from the fact that all attempts to demonstrate freedom tend only to strengthen the artificial case for determinism, because freedom is only characteristic of a self _in action_. He is here in line on this point with Renouvier and Boutroux, although the reasons he gives for it go beyond in psychological penetration those assigned by these thinkers. When our action is over, says Bergson, it seems plausible to argue a case for determinism because of our spatial conception of time and the relationships of events in time. We have a habit of thinking in terms of space, by mathematical time, not in real time or _la durée_ as Bergson calls it, the time in which the living soul acts.
Bergson thus makes room in the universe for a freedom of the human will, a creative activity, and thus delivers us from the bonds of necessity and fatalism in which the physical sciences and the associationist psychology would bind us. We perceive ourselves as centres of indetermination, creative spirits. We must guard our freedom, for it is an essential attribute of spirit. In so far as we tend to become dominated by matter, which acts upon us in habit and convention, we lose our freedom. It is not absolute, and many never achieve it, for their personality never shines forth at all: they live their lives in habit and routine, victims of automatism. We have, however, Bergson urges, great power of creation. He stresses, as did Guyau, the Conception of Life, as free, expanding, and in several respects his view of freedom is closer to that of Guyau than to that of Boutroux, in spite of the latter’s contingency. There is no finalism admitted by Bergson, for he sees in any teleology only “a reversed mechanism.”